The appeal of Uncharted is seeing incredible stuff happen to (and around) characters you care about. It’s getting flipped upside down as a freighter capsizes and floods with seawater. It’s brawling atop a train as it speeds its way through the snow-capped Himalayas. It’s falling into the Rub’ al Khali Desert then getting lost among its picturesque dunes. The series is built on these moments of wonder, strung like pearls on a necklace alongside character development.
But what if I told you… Sonic is, too?
Spectacle And Characters Drive Sonic And Uncharted
Sonic and Uncharted both take characters we love and insert them into spectacular moments. As I said, it’s the core appeal of Uncharted. Whether you’re fleeing a burning mansion, scuba diving a wrecked ship, or meeting a cute elephant, the games are all about placing characters you care about in a bombastic (or just plain pretty) situation. When the moment is death-defying, we care all the more because a character we’ve become invested in is in mortal danger. When the moment is smaller stakes (like that elephant) we care because it brings the characters together for a moment of beauty.
Sonic does the same thing, and has since the beginning. When you run so fast that the camera struggles to keep up, that’s spectacle. When you see the city lights twinkling in the background of Casino Night Zone, that’s spectacle. When Sonic CD opened with Sonic sprinting along the grassy hills so fast that he was only visible from the wind he stirred up in his wake, then ran up a giant chain to reach the Death Egg? That was a grade A spectacle.
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Incredible Scenery And Iconic Images
The 3D games don’t tend to play as well as the 2D games, but they make up for it by bringing the spectacle to another dimension. We see Sonic running through the last leg of the City Escape level as a massive truck plows through cars behind him, or running down a track as killer whales breach the water in the background, or grinding along rails with the expanse of outer space stretching out on every side. Likewise, Shadow sprints into a tunnel that materializes out of the ether around him, or stands atop the red bridge at the start of Radical Highway with stars twinkling in the night sky in the background. These games all offer up evocative images during and on either side of their most iconic levels.
Sega‘s platformers are also character-focused stories, like Uncharted. It just so happens that, where Uncharted is taking inspiration from American action-adventures like Indiana Jones, Sonic is taking inspiration from shonen manga and anime. It might sound ridiculous to call Sonic a character-focused series, but as a kid who grew up on the Sonic Adventure and Advance games, with a hefty dose of the Archie Comics, I can say that the relationship between Sonic and his friends was a huge draw for me and thousands of others.
I was invested in Sonic’s rivalry with Shadow, his friendship with Tails, and his (comic-exclusive) romance with Sally Acorn. I wasn’t just there to go fast. I was there to see these characters inhabiting a fascinating world that the games could gesture at in two-dimensions, build out in the 3D games, and explore on a deeper level in the comics.
Uncharted is a better written series, and the games have a much higher batting average than Sonic. There’s no ‘Uncharted cycle’, after all. But, when a Sonic game hits for me, like Shadow Generations recently did, it’s because it’s delivering on characters and spectacle, the same things I look for each time Nathan Drake or Chloe Frazer set off on another adventure.
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