I hadn’t even been born when this game came out, so it’s safe to say that I missed the golden age of Sonic. Even so, I found the increasing popularity of the “Sonic was never good” sentiment to be surprising, given the series’ prominent place in video game history. The root of this attitude was easy to perceive at the start of the game though, with how weird it feels compared to other platformers. Sonic needs to accelerate for a few seconds before he reaches a comfortable running speed, the maps feel oddly empty, and difficult platforming challenges are unusually scarce for a game that calls itself a platformer. These benchmarks can make it seem like fancy technology was the only reason for its success, but you have to realize that it wasn’t just the tech that was different back in 1991, it was perspective. Nowadays, we tend to think of Mario’s four-step process of introducing and combining mechanics on a per-level basis as the gold standard, but this wasn’t always the case. Sonic instead focuses on pacing that unfolds across an entire group of levels, which isn’t any less valid of an approach. The first stage may be focused on a single mechanic, so the second could ease off the player and introduce unrelated traversal gimmicks, for the third to then combine the two. It makes sense why individual stages would feel barren or erratically paced in comparison to Mario levels, when they aren’t intended to be analyzed in the same sort of contextual vacuum. Sitting down to play Sonic in a long session and paying attention to the ways stages flow into each other, build on each other’s ideas, and cathartically reward players with bursts of speed after sections of careful play, reveals how intelligently designed Sonic actually is. It may feel a little weird at the start, but weird can be a good thing, and if any series needs you to trust in that maxim, god knows it’s Sonic.