Top 10 Best Ways to 'Fix' Sonic ’06

Complicating Sonic ’06‘s many issues is its extremely convoluted – and, for a Sonic the Hedgehog game, unnecessarily complex – storyline, as seen in the inclusion of Blaze the Cat and her vaguely defined relationship with new character Silver the Hedgehog. Previously debuting in Sonic Rush, Blaze is established as coming from a parallel version of Earth (or whatever Sonic’s world is actually called); however, Sonic ’06 retroactively has Blaze come from the far future Silver hails from (with both already knowing each other) – this plotline needs to be clarified/mitigated via heavy rewriting.

9. Streamline the Timeline(s)

Somewhat overlapping with the section above, the game’s messily told story is further troubled by its central implementation of time travel (which, as even objectively better productions have shown us, can cause a lot of damage to narratives that can’t coherently portray it). To address this dilemma, additional rewrites should be applied to Sonic ’06 to (hopefully) adjust and simplify its needlessly confusing timeline(s), with “San Dimas Time” and/or other similar tropes being used to set “rules.”

8. Let Eggman Look Like Eggman

Another then-controversial (if not outright bizarre) element of Sonic ’06 was the decision to redesign series antagonist Dr. Eggman with an unnervingly more photorealistic and normally proportioned appearance. Even though this was ostensibly done to have him match the other, realistically modeled humans seen in the game’s main location (which can be a neat artistic contrast like in Super Mario Odyssey), I think it’s better to retain Eggman’s Adventure design to make him look less off-putting.

7. Mephiles the Dark…& Otherworldly

New antagonist Mephiles the Dark – actually one half of an even more powerful extradimensional entity named Solaris – presents himself as a very verbose, Machiavellian chatterbox filling the role of a highly malevolent and corruptive “Satanic” influence. While I understand that his talkativeness was intended to highlight his intelligence in comparison to the Iblis – his completely mindless other half – I think it would make Mephiles way more eerie and inscrutable to only have him speak when taking on other forms besides his default “crystal” design (and even then, only speaking with others’ voices).

6. Redefine What the “Trigger” Is

As alluded to above, it’s revealed through the story that Mephiles the Dark is trying to reunite with the Iblis (an apocalyptically powerful but animalistic fire monster) to reemerge as the god-like being Solaris. It eventually turns out that the so-called “Iblis Trigger” was Princess Elise crying over Sonic’s “death” at the hands of Mephiles, unleashing the Iblis sealed within her to prevent Solaris’ return; I understand what they were going for (in simple, fairytale-esque logic), but I think it’d make more sense to have the “trigger” be redefined as crushing despair rather than just immense sadness.

5. Make the Main Hubs Fun & Interesting

Yet another missed opportunity regarding Sonic ’06‘s extremely rushed (and effectively incomplete) production was the chance to expand on the returning “hub” areas previously featured in the first Sonic Adventure game. Even though I’m not calling for anything revolutionary or super-complex (since the game’s already fairly cluttered on its own), I’d still like to see some more effort put into ’06‘s three main hubs: with additional secret areas, levels, and NPCs to discover, as well as other fun interactable objects and hidden collectibles (similar to the central hub seen in Shadow Generations).

4. Age Elise Down, Drop the “Romance”

In a move to scrub the notorious “romantic” subtext between Sonic the Hedgehog and the human character Princess Elise, I suggest aging her down by a few/several years (somewhere closer to the age she’s shown in the flashbacks to her childhood, with a new look matching recent-ish promotional artwork). This might not only put Elise’s relationship with Sonic in a more innocent “protector and protectee” light but could also tie into the time travel plot by having her (original) older self appear later on to revive Sonic (through prayer or some latent power this time, and not a kiss – just…no).

3. Stop Being So Serious

Despite this entry somewhat contradicting two of my other suggestions (namely, making Mephiles more overtly demonic and having the “Iblis Trigger” be a much harsher threshold), I still think Sonic ’06 is unnecessarily serious in places to an almost ludicrous degree. And while I don’t mind darker or sadder elements in media for younger audiences, even I admit that they probably could’ve dialed it back a bit: for example, instead of Silver explicitly wanting to kill Sonic to prevent a bad future, maybe (to keep his naive “do-gooder” personality intact) have him just want to apprehend Sonic.

2. Completely Rework the Physics

While this would most certainly be a Herculean – perhaps even Sisyphean – task, Sonic ’06‘s legendarily buggy and poorly handled in-game physics would need to be completely reworked and recalibrated to greatly improve and maintain proper gameplay functionality. Luckily, this is already being addressed in a third-party capacity via the Project ’06 initiative: spearheaded by an Argentine programmer named “ChaosX,” this project is intended to unofficially remake the entirety of the original game for Microsoft Windows, as supplemented by a greatly overhauled physics engine.

1. Take Time to Optimize the Game

Perhaps the single-most important lesson that should’ve been learned from Sonic ’06 (and not repeated to varying degrees) is to allow needed development time to properly address potentially disastrous graphical and mechanical issues. Maybe in a different time, and in a different place, the hypothetical creation of an official remake of ’06 would be unburdened by an unrealistic “Christmas Rush” deadline (and all subsequent technical shortcomings) like its infamously troubled predecessor.