~ Estimated Reading Time: 5 min ~
Never played through this the "real way", I had even doubted the hype....buuuuut...I am very happy to see that a game I bounced off as a teenager has turned out to be perfectly appeal to the current me.
SEGA in the particular era of the early 90s is having a transparent dialogue on how to move their mastery of the arcade structure to home consoles. In many ways, Sonic 1 is not different from an arcade experience: with limited continues, and game overs existing as encouragement to improve each replay. A baseline difficulty almost sure to require consistency for the average person to make their way through. But one thing that must necessarily change in a post-cabinet world is reward. Your high-score won't end up at 13th place surrounded by other real people; how can we find something more satisfying than what we had? And the answer the series came up with was Endings: if you play well enough (or perform enough arbitrary mini-games, if we want to be mean), you get rewarded with a better outcome to the story. You have to fight harder if you want to truly win.
CD has chosen to move its jurisdiction for what counts as "playing well" to something less vacuous. Sonic 1 crit often has to break down that the game (and maybe the series at large, tbh) isn't about Speed as some automatic gift, but instead a power that you have to earn through consistent engagement. So CD, in order to emphasize that, has been neatly broken down into these almost miniature puzzle-like structures. Its artificial obstacle courses almost always provide a linear way to gain speed off them, that you can carry with you to get to another Place & Time. Failing the initial gauntlet will always force you to start improvising further. If you really want to go to the Past that bad, while faced with a path you're uncertain of the trajectory of - afraid you'll lose it to bumping into some wall you didn't remember the exact placement of - you gotta believe in yourself (yourself) (yourselffff).
And it didn't take long for that all to click with me, soaking in its whole atmosphere in awe. It is an intensely and beautifully physics-y game for 1993. Lit with a best-in-the-medium soundtrack that carries both poppiness and vastness, often letting you hear its digitized echoes. It manages to perfectly knit together the feeling that a pinball machine could be deep and vast and far beyond your own eyes. But I can sympathize with my past self, I guess.
For as beautiful as Sonic already controls, he is at odds with his environments. Someone in a voice call I attended complained about how Sonic is all about moving on the X axis, but you spend so much time moving up and down awkwardly on the Y in CD's pinball machine-like maps. It's unnatural - like refined metals jutting out of the forest soil.
But, at heart is Sonic a game made to be speedran. And when you begin to peel back the curtains on the average speedrunner's experience - I don't think any of it looks "natural". Retreading your footsteps every time you miss that trick you're practicing; tons of restarting, save stating, fidgeting and fussing in order to fully understand your surroundings. Until you get that final lined up shot, it's busywork. And if you choose to ignore all the busywork, it is often loose - even aimless. You ever get to those 4-way teleporters in a Sonic Mania's Chemical Plant, and think to yourself "i have absolutely no idea which one of these is the fastest path"? Meanwhile, CD's journey towards the Past Flags and Generators had me moving with a scrutiny I simply wouldn't have if I hadn't taken my time. Moving omni-directionally, finding new paths with each backtrack, and eventually moving on after finding my goals led to me feeling a familiarity with its level design in a way no other Sonic game has instructed of me.
The result was that it reinforced not just its own unique ways of being played, but those of the traditional Sonic outings. It shines as quite a timeless choice that CD has not one, but two distinct playstyles that can net you a 'Good Ending'. Going the 7 Chaos Emeralds route actually goes much more smoothly when the prior exploration has hardened your awareness of where each enemy is, making those 50 ring minimums a congruent result of the sum of my play. Maybe that unnatural approach is the most natural we've ever gotten; like dandelions managing to grow in the cracks of a Casino's carpeted flooring.
(Last thing, just to get some confusion out there: Sonic CD has a few versions out.. as someone who experienced the game through the 2011 port, it's a bit jarring to play both the Sega CD original or any mod, and realize how it was changed. I simply don't recommend the vanilla 2011 port right now, as it nearly doubles the time needed to time travel - this breaks the level design's coherency in presenting little makeshift time travel puzzles, and often forces you to keep up the speed after that. Certainly makes it harder to see the vision.. As for mods, I dislike Miracle Edition's reinterpretations of time travel mechanics, and was oddly unable to get Restored Version to run on my computer. So, the OG CD version is the best recommendation I've got, but I'm sure the mod-scene will continue to change - keep an eye out)
I also just...love the theming, love Sonic, where the identity of the series is at and so much more. There is something innately playful to the process of playing as Sonic the Hedgehog: I think the mixture of joyous whimsy and snarkiness that his design is comprised of stays true to the gameplay itself. Rocking around pinball machines with inquisitiveness has a naturalistic humour to it. In a game most explicitly about that initial pitch of the franchise's world - the on-setting intertwinement of technology and nature - I think there is something so eternally cool about Sonic making it look easy to liberate the world. Stomping on enemies leaves huge flowers planted into the soil where they once stood. Sometimes you combo three guys, and plant a forest.