Speaking of the Gaias, young players may have little idea that the name is hardly made up for video games. Thus the game posits a balance between good and evil, and a cycle of destruction and rebirth-ideas that have a lot in common with Eastern mysticism. For millennia, Dark Gaia has broken the planet apart, and Light Gaia has subsequently restored it. Later we learn that Chip, who’s lost his memory, is actually a much more significant being known as Light Gaia, whose presence keeps Dark Gaia in check. For example, Sonic encounters a monk-like mystic named Gregorios who says, “What is the shrine? It is a sacred place, famous among travelers.” Later, a kindhearted researcher named Professor Pickle describes teachings in what seems to be this world’s holy book: “According to the Gaia Manuscripts, ” he says, “Dark Gaia is empowered at night.” The narrative in Sonic Unleashed suggests a magical underpinning to the world, even if it’s never spelled out. What the game’s rating doesn’t hint at is its problematic, spiritually driven landscape. Still, cinematic cutscenes do feature more realistic-and intense-confrontations between Sonic and Eggman. When Sonic the Werehog bops a baddie with his paw enough times, for example, the foe simply vanishes in puff of zippy blue and red sparkles. Frankly, I didn’t see any in the game’s extremely sanitized combat. Sonic Unleashed earned an E10+ rating from the ESRB for “animated blood and fantasy violence.” Not that there’s much of the former. The result is a gameplaying experience that oscillates between lighting fast and snail slow as Sonic explores what seems like an endless number of numbingly similar subterranean mazes.īut that’s hardly the game’s biggest fault. Sonic Unleashed can’t decide whether it wants to be a straightforward platformer or a third-person adventure game. Some fans may enjoy the game’s juxtapositions, but I didn’t. These generally mindless foes are easily-and bloodlessly-dispatched by Sonic’s repertoire of melee attacks (which grows throughout the game). (Apparently it’s always night underground.) In the process, he’s greeted by a variety of unfriendly guardians, from blob-like “nightmares,” to large flying wasps, to witches. Once the entrance is unlocked, Sonic plumbs the depths of these temples in werehog form. Gamers locate the shrine in each city by participating in simplistic role-playing elements that involve local citizenry. Re-securing all seven plates thwarts Eggman’s dark ambitions and imprisons Dark Gaia once more. That action, in turn, heals the corresponding continental plate and reintegrates it with the planet. Each city they visit has a hidden shrine which gives access to Gaia temples where Sonic recharges his Chaos Emeralds. To corral Dark Gaia and repair the fractured planet, Sonic (along with his friends Chip and Tails) must travel to the seven different continents. When the sun sets, however, the nature of the game is altered every bit as much as Sonic’s character. When the sun is out, Sonic zips wildly through arcade-like challenges that find him grabbing power-up rings and battling bosses in frenetic 2-D and 3-D levels.
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Technically, Sonic Unleashed is a platform game. The release of Dark Gaia affects Sonic in a most peculiar way: At night he morphs into Sonic the Werehog, a fanged and clawed beastie with a completely different set of powers-though his historically affable personality remains intact. Eggman hopes to harness Dark Gaia to power his … wait for it … new theme park: Eggmanland.īut something is different this time around. Once fired, the laser fractures the crust of a vaguely Earth-like planet into seven fragments-and unleashes Dark Gaia, an evil energy-being who’s been trapped in the planet’s core. (Mwuuhhaaaa hhaaa hhaaaaa … MWWUUHUU hhaaa hhaaa!) Actually, dastardly is hardly strong enough to describe a villain who at the outset of the game lures Sonic into a trap and misappropriates his seven Chaos Emeralds to power an orbiting über-destructo-beam. This time around, SEGA’s hyperkinetic, neon-blue hedgehog once more confronts his dastardly nemesis, the maniacal and mustachioed malcontent known as Dr.
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(Wikipedia’s list of Sonic titles runs a whopping seven pages! I had to get special permission from our IT department to print it out.) So if it’s seemed to you that SEGA’s most recognizable character is getting a bit long in the tooth, well, you don’t know how right you actually are.
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It’s only the hundredth-and-something entry in the franchise in the last 17 years. Sonic Unleashed is the 658th Sonic title from SEGA since the franchise’s inception way back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth (c.