Sonic the Hedgehog was a hero of the highest order in the early ’90s back before the furry subculture that would eventually curse the franchise with a permanent aura of creepiness was still in the first stages of having their sexual awakening horribly distorted. And the pinnacle of Sonic’s 2D adventures is, hands down, Sonic 2 for the Genesis. The title refined and added to mechanics from the first game without suffering from the bloat and blatant money grabbing that would tarnish Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles.
But there’s always been something in Sonic 2 that’s really bothered me: Sky Chase Zone.
The old manuals for Sonic maintained that Dr. Robotnik (back in the days before Dr. Eggman when Sega Japan gave Sega of America more leeway with translations) had enslaved all of the cute fuzzy animals on Sonic’s island and it was up to the player to save said cute fuzzy animals by jumping on their robotic exoskeletal prisons with extreme prejudice. Normally this would result in a happy little animation of an innocent forest creature scampering offscreen, but not so with Sky Chase Zone.
The level finds Sonic taking to the skies atop a biplane piloted by Tails in a rare autoscrolling level in a series that had otherwise been happy to let players explore at their own pace. But the thing that really changed the tone of the game in Sky Chase Zone was the indiscriminate murder Sonic committed in his quest to exact revenge on Dr. Robotnik.
You see, any animals that were “freed” from their flying mechanical confines hopped happily out of their robotic exoskeletons an promptly plummeted happily to their death. Observe:
A happy little animal freed from slavery?
Gravity reasserts itself.
Going... Going...
Gone.
I can only imagine the horror on the faces of all the little woodland creatures gathered on the ground to watch Sonic’s final assault as they saw their friends and family splattered on the ground in a messy mammalian rain of blood.
And in Sonic’s final dick move he blows up a massive space station in the upper atmosphere of his planet. Do you know what happens when something really big blows up in a planet’s atmosphere and transfers the kinetic energy of its demise to said atmosphere? Basically it does the same amount of damage as the object would have had it come plummeting to the ground, leading to massive destruction and die-offs.
That’s right. Sonic the Hedgehog, friend of animals and the environment, just singlehandedly did more damage to his world’s biosphere than Robotnik could ever hope to with his massive polluting cities and robotic armies.
Those animals aren’t looking on in sadness at the potential death of their hero. They’re looking on in horror after watching their friends raining down from the sky and turned into squishy red pulp, with a mass extinction event serving as the finale to Sonic’s aerial dance of death.
