My first living memory was the day I got a Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). That was the moment where my brain ignited with a dopamine high I’ve been chasing ever since. A world of possibilities opened up before me blast-processed in all their 16-bit glory. Sonic moved fast. His worlds seemed more organic — rather than the left-to-right of most platformers, vertical speedy exploration was emphasized, there were loops, color-cycling world elements, brightly colored backdrops populated by mechanized wildlife. You could find alternate routes, hidden alcoves, and several ways to skin a cat in every level. It was wondrous, imaginative stuff.

Now I’m old, like anyone who counts Sonic the Hedgehog as one of their first games. And that the franchise, as a multimedia entity, continuously picks away at those first two games, is probably a disservice both to the concept of continuing to develop meaningful Sonic videogames and also the material reality that though the first games were sure fast, they didn’t have the genre-fluidity of the competition and as platformers, they kinda suck at floaty, slow-falling platforming, while every other part is fast.

Almost immediately after the peak of Sonicmania, the fast hedgehog suffered growing pains and his cultural cache slowed right down. After Sonic CD, the potentialities of this particular brand of platforming felt… well-explored.

You see, dear Gamer, Sonic emerged as a proportionate response to a moment in iterative hardware development. We had the foundations of genre and now they needed to move faster, show more color, expand their dimensions, and show off that Sega’s hardware does what Nintendon’t (market itself based on edgy Western ‘90s MTV and magazine culture, primarily).

When Sega then had to expand the dimensions of Sonic, the center didn’t hold. It took a few attempts to really shore up a 3D model that properly translated the appeals of those original games. By the time this happened, these games arrived later than the competition’s 3D successes, and with more narrow definitions of what Sonic could be as an expression of mechanical values.

The series that existed as a showpiece of hard-coded speed had the hardest time moving forward when the hardware moved beyond its original intention. The 3D iterations funneled the action down very narrow pathways. An iteration called Sonic X-Treme was cancelled for the Sega Saturn and the first Sega Dreamcast game, Sonic Adventure (1999) was a tech demo with a thrilling whale chase along a boardwalk and then a messy construction of hub worlds and bad contextual design.

So, the next effort came down to the wire. Sega had one more shot to cultivate a good Sonic game on their final piece of hardware. Sonic Adventure 2 (2001) arrived with the ten year anniversary of the franchise. Ten long years after Sonic the Hedgehog, and the franchise was floating in uncertainty, was there anything there to even outlast Sega’s hardware efforts?

Sonic Adventure 2 is basically fine. It diverts the franchise’s focus down more narrow paths but finally figures out how to do speed in 3D spaces. Ridiculously, it tries to branch out into new storylines and a polarity story that is half Hero and Evil characters.

Enter Shadow the Hedgehog. Sonic’s Dark World Version. Hot Topic Sonic. An alternate character to create a more dynamic tension than the tired Sonic vs. Eggman plotlines. Finally, a foe that matches Sonic’s singular trait, being a cringy, edgy mascot — no, his speed.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is… a celebration of Sonic Adventure 2?! That’s a god damn ridiculous thing for a Sonic movie to be in 2025. Nostalgia has moved forward, though, and so the Sonic movies have entered the awkward and final growing pains of the Dreamcast era.

Shadow is reprised by Keanu Reeves which means that the series most grating character is now simply likable. Shadow’s inclusion does provide a more focused dual-story that allows Sonic the Hedgehog 3 to have a compatible structure with the story it’s telling.

The bar is exceedingly low. The last two movies — Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) adapt the character without too much reverence for his games. The first movie famously featured an early version of Sonic who was uniformly rejected by the fanbase and redesigned as a blandly lanky husk of a character. The second movie balanced the design out and had sidekicks to balance out the flat take on the main character.

What held both movies together was Jim Carrey’s turn as Dr. Robotnik. After the second movie, Carrey said he was retiring from movies unless a script written in gold ink was delivered by angels. He returned to acting for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in his most perverse and sexually confusing performance of his career. It’s really fun stuff. A movie isn’t the sum of a few fun moments but judges only on Jim Carrey’s screen time, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a clear value proposition.

Because the third entry is more squarely based on an actual videogame, it draws much more from these elements and its fiction and general approach is more drawn from videogamey appeal than the last two dead-on-arrival mascot movies.

Sonic Adventure 2 is not a great game but that makes it an interesting starting place. Borrowing that messy game’s fiction and even its ridiculous songs, makes Sonic the Hedgehog 3 more tolerable as empty-headed fun for kids who don’t know better and didn’t play the good Sonic games anyway. There is now proportionately more bad Sonic media released than good, so it’s no wonder nostalgia has become this hard to capture. The well has long been dry. But if we can go back to these weird moments of franchise spotlights and really develop something weird — like Jim Carrey’s constantly escalating performance — then what’s it all for? You gotta go fast.

5/10