Anti-Nihilism, Tenacity, & Sonic the Hedgehog
Don’t walk, run with me.
By: Justin Sczesny
Editor’s Note: When I started this project, I was honored and thrilled by how many people immediately had an idea for what they wanted to write about, but I have to say, this was the most unique pitch I received. Sonic the Hedgehog as an anti-nihilist hero? But writer Justin Sczesny not only argues brilliantly for the lessons the game imparts to a child, but also for the tenacity of the human heart, going all the way back to a development team. I hope you enjoy this essay as much as I do: I think we all need an infusion of hope these days.
Sonic and the Black Knight
There’s a moment roughly seventy percent through Sonic and the Black Knight when the evil is defeated. A dark King Arthur, corrupted by the immortal spell of a cursed scabbard (stay with me here) is slain, Sonic and friends celebrate, credits roll. After the credits finish, Sonic’s ally, Merlina (yes, that’s her name) takes the scabbard, and throws herself into the immortal magic, spreading the energy across all of Camelot, encompassing the countryside in the spell. This companion, who throughout the journey has been expressing anxieties about the impermeant nature of life and legacy, reveals this was her goal the entire time: a kingdom that will never die, life that doesn’t end.
Sonic wasn’t having it.
Our true villain is revealed, the final act begins.
It was 2009, I was 10, and this was so cool.
Typical shonen shenanigans ensue: the power of friendship overcomes, Sonic gains a (frankly, ludicrous) super form in the form of a gold suit of armor, and evil is struck down. It’s what happens next that has pinned itself in my mind since I saw it over fifteen years ago.
Merlina, distraught and defeated, is approached by Sonic, who says:
“Merlina… Every world has its end. I know that’s kinda sad, but… That’s why we gotta live life to the fullest in the time we have.
At least, that’s what I figure.”
It’s important that I impress upon you that Sonic and the Black Knight is not a good game. The mission design is pretty simple, Sonic is locked on-rails, and the motion controls are, in a word, broken. These are not controversial opinions; while the story and soundtrack are often cited as series highs, the game was maligned both critically and commercially.
But, if you have forgotten, I was 10. And this was the moment that I had hitched onto the character for good.
I would not call the game a guilty pleasure though. Being 10, I really didn’t care about most of that stuff. The missions were simple but easy to wrap my head around, the whole game was on-rails but that was less for me to focus on, the motion controls were terrible, but I figured it out (except wall jumping, it always felt like I was doing that on accident). What stuck with me, and what I look back on, is the mark the single line of dialogue has left on me.
Children’s media has a unique role in the landscape of literature. It has true power to shape and mold the outlook and minds of the kids interacting with it, and I feel Sonic was and is truly capable of tapping into something unique.
What makes the conflict between Merlina and Sonic so interesting is the writing focuses on the philosophical divide rather than any sort of physical threat or danger. The concept of Merlina’s plan doesn’t ring as evil to a child; I was just told in science class that the sun would explode in several billion years! And I cried! The conflict was confusing to me as a kid. Sonic himself, also never proclaims to have the higher moral ground in the clash, at one point saying “I just gotta do what I gotta do” because this isn’t about abstract concepts like good and evil, right or wrong; it’s about Sonic’s personal beliefs, and he won’t stand by.
Sonic is against Nihilism because Sonic is, frankly and unsubtlety, too cool for it. He is far too busy living in the now and doing what he wants to do to be motivated by existential anxieties. In Sonic Adventure from 1998, Sonic’s main theme, “It Doesn’t Matter” opens with the lyrics “Well, I don’t show off, don’t criticize/I’m just livin’ by my own feelings/And I won’t give in, won’t compromise/I just only have a steadfast heart of gold.” It’s not that Sonic believes in meaning, Sonic creates meaning in his life through the goodness he enacts in the world.
This is made explicit in the text of the games as well. In Sonic Unleashed, an ancient evil named Dark Gaia has split the planet in segments and at night Sonic transforms into what is unironically called “The Werehog.” Throughout the game, two things have been happening: Sonic has been traveling with (what I’ll affectionately call) an amnesiac lil guy named Chip, and at night Dark Gaia’s influence has been possessing people at night, turning them into nihilistic hedonists who either succumb to despair or cause havoc under the stress of the world’s end. Sonic, besides turning into a silly God of War clone, is the same adventure loving free spirit he is in the daytime; while he’s not as speedy as he is in the daytime and his voice is a little deeper, he is fundamentally unchanged.
Still with me?
Further into the game Chip regains his memories and is actually the counter of Dark Gaia, Light Gaia. Sonic, understandably, assumes that this means Chip is the reason that Sonic has been largely unaffected by the influence of Dark Gaia. Chip tells him this isn’t true; Sonic is simply incorruptible. Chip tries to leave and tells Sonic that there’s no reason for him to burden Sonic with his responsibilities. Sonic then imparts more knowledge on Chip and by extension, 10-year-old me:
“Do I need a reason to want to help out a friend?”
Even 26-year-old me can’t help but crack a smile typing that out. In the absence of an external reason, Sonic decides that his connection with Chip is enough. He helps not because he’s needed, or out of any obligation, or from the burden of a higher power, but simply because it’s his wish to. In a kid’s game! As a youngin’ myself at the time, I found this incredibly impactful, and to this day I look back on it as another piece in the scaffold of my philosophies and outlook. Sure, at the end of the day it’s just a talking blue hedgehog and his friends saving the world, but at such an impressionable time in my life and hearing these ideas spoken in such a frank and open matter really helped my young mind latch onto them.
As I mentioned previously, Sonic and the Black Knight was not a well-received game, it was the cap to an ascending sequence of high-profile failures from 2005 through 2009. Unleashed was the only bright spot in this quality drought, but even that game was marred by the previously mentioned God of War clone which was clunky and completely shattered any sense of momentum the game would ever start to build muster up. What followed this era is what has been dubbed by fans as “the irony era,” an era of the Sonic brand where it just seemed to be genuinely embarrassed of itself.
And maybe some humility was warranted. I don’t think there’s a clearer modern-day example of jumping the shark than having a human woman kiss Sonic the Hedgehog back to life after he had been bloodlessly impaled through the chest by a demonic character unsubtlety named “Mephelis.” More than that, most of the games were either poorly thought-out concepts or blatantly unfinished and broken. Point is, the goodwill was gone, Sonic the Hedgehog, the brand, the IP, the series conceptualized to go toe-to-toe with Super Mario, was a laughingstock.
And so, the reins got pulled tight. The next major release, Sonic Colors, was a largely inoffensive and competent platformer with its sights set much lower than the high drama of the series’ recent output. Shedding the rapidly expanding cast of characters for a Saturday-morning-cartoon set up of just Sonic & Tails trying to stop the nefarious Dr. Eggman once again, this time from building a theme park using the life-force of a race of aliens called “Wisps.”
This was, on some level, appreciated by those who had grown exhausted by the convoluted direction the series had been trending in. Going back to the series roots to tell a story of Sonic saving little critters from the creep of industry was the kind of reset that many believed the series needed. Drop the gimmicks, drop the pretension: just go fast and save the animals, that’s all. And it was fun! It was fun and fine and seen as a kind of “righting of the ship” moment. The tone was extremely immature, overstuffed with unfunny puns and groan-worthy quips.
But again! Maybe this was needed, it felt that no-one working on the Sonic games knew what Sonic was even supposed to be at this point. Lost somewhere between an aversion to risk and history of bad decisions, the franchise soldiered on managing to annoy detractors with its continued existence and alienate fans with its continuously baffling choices.
There was a cartoon show/attempted reboot, Sonic Boom, where the comedy is rooted in poking fun at the state of the series with its own unfinished mess of a spin-off game. There was Sonic Lost World, which trades the high speed, almost race car-like pace of the previous three games for a Super Mario Galaxy clone, with an odd focus on cylindrical level design and a frustrating narrative. There was the Twitter page (I’m not calling it X, you’ll have to kill me first) which almost exclusively derided and lamp-shaded the declining quality of the series, most of which was pretty funny, but again, there’s this air of embarrassment even shame at times to it.
Sonic The Hedgehog was having an existential crisis of its own.
Sonic Forces, released in 2017, is a bad game with little to no redeeming qualities. The levels are more-or-less straight lines that autopilot you to their goal points in somewhere around forty seconds on average. The story pretends to have things like “stakes” and “cohesive tone” while being an unequivocal low-point. The controls are terrible and the whole package amounts to little over two hours of game, short enough to complete in its entirety and return it within digital storefront Steam’s return time limit (I’m not one to equate length with quality, but I mean come on). The music is OK, but coming from a series with a pedigree in soundtracks like this one leaves it in pretty poor standing. The game gestures at Sonic’s extended cast, attempting to tell a “weighty” story about “war” and stuff but it can never commit; we’re told Sonic’s been capture and tortured for six months straight, but when we rescue him right after this information is told to us, he’s his usual post-irony self: quippy, unaffected, and entirely too detached from his current predicament. It’s just all off.
So, here we are again, at the bottom of the totem pole: a joke.
Even the Sonic writers knew, as this tweet proves— eventually, they trolled themselves.
This is the scene that Sonic Frontiers enters on in 2022, the longest gap between mainline games in the series. A lot was riding on this, more than people were aware of at the time of release.
Critically the game is given passing marks across the board, its buggy and in some places unfinished (have you noticed a pattern?), but unlike previous games those critiques have been leveled at, it’s all counterbalanced for the game being full of honest-to-God passion. The game breaks in a bold new direction for the series, going for a wide open world approach with smaller, more streamlined levels inside. The music is universally praised, with a soundtrack that bounces from ambient electronica to EDM/house, and finally anthemic and cathartic metal. There’s vision here, it may be rough around the edges (the render-distance is pretty terrible, some level geometry isn’t visible until its right in front of you which is rough for a game about looking in the distance for things to do), but there’s vision.
The narrative is up to the task here too. The plot is pretty simple: an extra-dimensional entity has trapped Sonic’s friends and he has to save them, but the narrative has actual themes; something this series has been lacking for roughly a decade to this point. The anti-nihilistic tone is back in full force, with Sonic’s friends grappling with what their lives mean when Sonic isn’t with them. Amy, a character once created for the sole purpose of giving Sonic a doating damsel in distress to save, wonders if focusing her attention on Sonic has closed her off from different kinds of love and experiences in her life, Knuckles struggles with his responsibility as a guardian for the Master Emerald against his desire to see world, and Tails struggles with the role of non-linear progress in self improvement and whether or not his reliance on Sonic has let him regress in ways he thought he out grew.
By the end of the story, all of Sonic’s friends come to the conclusion that they must find out who they are on their own and go their separate ways, vowing to meet again as very different people.
Even series antagonist Eggman gets in on this thematic Thunderdome: having created a sentient AI named Sage, Eggman suddenly feels burdened with the responsibility of someone looking up to him with their own thoughts and desires. Sage is the apex of this: I must assume it’s an easy layup from the writer’s point of view: a child-like AI coming to understand the world she inhabits, then having her programming come into direct conflict with Sonic’s goodhearted, devil-may-care nature. Sage must decide for herself how Sonic’s tendency to put himself in harm’s way for the sake of others will affect her, how it will affect the way she views and interacts with the world around her, and by the end of the story she begins making the same self-sacrificial calls that Sonic makes through the story. This is good stuff, folks!
Now, I must confess to you dear reader, I may have buried the lede a bit too deep here. You see, those Italics in the title of this essay are not a mistake nor are they incorrect; because while yes, Sonic the Hedgehog the character is vehemently anti-nihilist, such is also true for Sonic the Hedgehog, the series that refuses to die.
I mentioned that a lot was riding on Sonic Frontiers— that’s because thanks to a developer interview from a few months after the game was released we would learn that Sonic Team, the roughly 60-man development team (eventually 120 by the end of the 5 year dev-cycle), was told by Sega that due to the new direction and scope of the game this was their make or break: “if [the team] fail here, there will be no chance” one developer says of the situation (Serin). Either Frontiers was a hit by all metrics, or things would never recover. Sonic would’ve likely continued in some form, massive franchises don’t usually disappear overnight, but was this to be a tipping point to a tumble further down or an ascent up? No one could say.
“Break it All Through,” voiced by Kellin Quinn, boss fight
This all boils over into a bleak and oppressive environment to make art in but Sonic Frontiers itself reflects light back towards that darkness. I think this is fully intended by the devs themselves. The heavy metal anthems sung/screamed by Kellin Quinn of Sleeping with Sirens fame that score the high-octane boss fights preach resilience against impossible odds. The outro of the track “Break Through it All” goes “I know that we will find our way/We’ll do whatever it will take/And if we never reach the crown/We’ll take the whole thing down!” Is this about Sonic fighting a hundred-foot-tall titan, or the development team knowing what’s riding on this series with no more good will to cash in?
Blurring these divides even further is the credits’ theme for the game, “One Way Dream.” Honestly, I’m tempted to just copy and paste the entire lyric sheet right here, but I’ll control myself a little bit for your sake. Lyrics like the chorus, “Boost your spirit off the ground/I’m a spark that won’t go out/We can go much higher now/Gravity can’t hold us down/We’re only at the beginning of this one way dream,” take a hopeless situation, but show it pressurized and calcified into something that dares to look forward to a future that isn’t promised. The song ending with a declaration: This is a new era, informed by the pitfalls of the past and looking toward the sky above horizon. Again, I’ll ask: is this about Sonic’s friends finding their renewed sense of purpose, or Sonic Team making a promise to those that have stuck with them through the highs and low-lows?
“One Way Dream,” end theme and ethos of the game
To be put in the horribly stressful situation that Sonic Team had been and respond by pouring themselves into the project is nothing short of inspiring to me. It could’ve been a “safe bet” to retreat to the space occupied by Sonic Colors— inoffensive, fun, and fine— it probably would’ve sold well and allowed the team to tread water in the space for a bit longer. But Sonic Team chose to hedge (ha) their bets on bold new direction and honest ambition. How many of us when faced with such existential dread would do the same? Ignore the safety of continued existence to dare and do something uncharted?
Sonic Frontiers was, by all metrics, a massive success. The highest critical ratings the series had seen in a long time followed by being crowned the highest selling game in the series. A fairy tale ending in the horrid world that is the intersection of art and commerce, Sonic Team, much like their namesake hero, created the meaning they wished for themselves.
Recently, they made three movies. Enough ink has been spilled on the quality of film adaptations of video games, so I’ll leave it at this: the first two movies were perfectly fine. Written and directed by Jeff Fowler (who has his own history with the series as CG lead on some of the games), they’re fun family adventure movies with a live action cast and a CGI lead and everyone learns a lesson about family; we’ve seen these movies before, if you catch my drift.
The third movie though, is unique: it’s a Sonic movie.
The plot goes full sci-fi action, largely abandoning the human cast (save for a deliciously delirious Jim Carrey) in favor of an adventure that puts the spotlight on the title character and his new rival, Shadow the Hedgehog.
Beyond being the coolest fucking character ever created in fiction, Shadow also brings weight with him. A character uniquely tragic in his drama and angst, Shadow is not someone who Sonic can just reach through an offer of friendship. You see, Shadow had a friend named Maria, and Maria was his world. One day, Maria is killed in a military raid and from that moment on Shadow decides to burn it all down.
All of it.
Long story short, the climax revolves around a giant space laser that will obliterate the planet below and irradiate anyone that manages to survive. Shadow gravely injures Sonic’s found family, and in a rage, Sonic and Shadow duke it out, clashing across time zones in the blink of an eye and eventually reaching ahead on the moon. This is sick as fuck (I don’t think I need to expand on that, it’s self-evident). Eventually, the two cool down, and Shadow is confused at Sonic showing the capability to step off the edge of such encompassing rage. This rage born of Maria’s loss is all he has, it’s his entire purpose. If he doesn’t have that, what does he have?
The two sit quietly on the moon, Shadow looks at the distant galaxies that make up the starry vista, and says:
“The light shines, even though the star is gone”
Once again, here we are.
Not fighting an evil King Arthur, or Dark elder gods, or even post-capitalism.
But that empty hopelessness that everyone must come to grips with.
I know there are 3,000+ words out of my favor when I say this: I’m not delusional. I understand that at the end of the day, Sonic the Hedgehog is a brand created and propped up by a company leveraging the nostalgic pull this long-standing character has on people like me to take my money. But even in that there’s something invigorating about the way this blue blur and the people who created him made space in the world for him, even at time when it seemed like the world didn’t want him. He’s not just the face of Sega, he’s the fastest thing alive, and he taught me at a young age that life is what you make of it in the time you have, that being there for your friends is not a burden but expected, and that no matter your mistakes it’s never too late to pick yourself back up.
And really, how many corporate mascots can stand for anything at all?
Justin Sczesny is a multidisciplinary artist based in NYC. Justin studied theatre and creative writing at the University of Evansville and graduated in 2021. He is also the founder and frontman of indie rock band Tonic Horse, of which he has been releasing and performing music of steadily since 2018.