If Sonic just ran, Unleashed would be three hours long

By now you should have read our review of Sonic Unleashed, a title that Sega has been calling a game of two halves. Indeed it is, but not just because it’s split between running and brawling, but because it’s also split between amazing and terrible.

One of the problems with recent Sonic games is their lack of purity. Sonic Team seems incapable of just allowing Sonic to do his thing without cramming in Werehog brawling or terrible faux-RPG hub worlds. One Sega member was asked about this, and he gave an interesting answer.

“I was like, come on, everybody just wants Sonic running, like, what’s up with the werehog?”, explains David Clayman of IGN, detailing how he took Sega to task at TGS. “And he was like, well, here’s the deal … he runs at this miles per hour, kilometers per hour, and he laid out all of the statistics on how fast this hedgehog goes, and he was like, ‘In order to make a game where Sonic is running and everybody enjoys the whole thing we’d have to design this many miles of level, and it was some ungodly number’. And he’s like, ‘And that would be like maybe a three-hour game’.”

Certainly an interesting reason, and one with a kind of twisted logic to it. Indeed, the speed runs of Sonic Unleashed are only five to ten minutes long, and with so much work put into those ten minutes, I can see how it would be difficult to extend it. However, I don’t think broken platforming sections, forced NPC interaction and unresponsive Prince of Persia-style acrobatics are the answer, really.  

Stay tuned to Destructoid for our own Q&A with Sonic Unleashed producer Yoshihisa Hashimoto!