The Underappreciated Brilliance of Hyper Sonic

sigh three and sonic knuckles can very easily be played as two separate games and whether or not you play them apart or together when it comes to playing as Sonic there really isn't a whole lot that changes from zone to zone but it's at the merger where the adventure transfers from one game to the other where we see a seemingly small change take place but make no mistake this is the single most important addition to the combined efforts of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles just a little ways into mushroom hill zone sonic will get to a Ledge and look down to find a surprise for the first time he gets the drop on knuckles who is clearly sneaking out of a hidden area what's that little scamp up to if curiosity gets a better view head on in to where the echidna just emerged to discover a giant ring now we've seen plenty of these so far but this one is bursting with all kinds of color what makes this one so special well easy enough to find out you hop in and instead of warping you directly to a special stage you find yourself in an underground cave the music takes on a mystical quality in holy cow that is one big rock this is the Master Emerald it's easy to forget now but back in the day this was a huge surprise and the true turning point in the story that is Sonic 3 & Knuckles and it brings up so many questions why's Knuckles hiding a Johnny Emerald is he planning on proposing girl how could you say no to rock like that the boy is loaded sorry got a little off track these fanfics just write themselves sometimes you know seriously the why is he hiding a giant emerald and why is he trying to nab Sonic's when he has the grand pooh-bah mall in his basement and actually yeah what does this thing mean for the normal Chaos Emeralds there's got to be some relation right well as it turns out there is in the presence of this giant gemstone the Chaos Emeralds which had stolen for you at the start of the adventure and worked so hard to get back through those surreal special stages fly away from Sonic not knocked violently from your person but instead floating freely and someone just watches as these catalysts of chaotic energy synchronized just feet above his head he doesn't make a move to grab him back he's never been here before and he's never seen the Master Emerald but sonic has seen this phenomenon happened one time before at the end of Sonic 1 as the Hedgehog is making his victory lap back in Green Hill Zone he stops and looks down at his gloved hands to see a white glow and the Chaos Emeralds float away from him in the exact same pattern they disappear in a brilliant flesh and sonic looks on completely son the land is not only free from Robotnik's influence but new life has formed as well as indicated with these giant flowers with the help of the Emeralds sonic not only saved the world but left it better than when he first ran through the shuttle loops of this iconic landscape but there were only six emeralds when that happened why did they react that way back then was this the first time Sonic was tapping into their power without realizing it I mean look at his face he clearly didn't expect this to happen he doesn't truly understand the potential power of these things but as the games carry on that changes as we can see what Super Sonic and it all leads us to this moment here in the secret chamber the Chaos Emeralds react just as they did back in Sonic 1 and launch off blasting back down in the flower pedestal surrounding the Master Emerald and forming into larger gems not quite as large as the Master Emerald and also strangely gray and lifeless once control returns to the player they quickly learned they cannot leave this area if they try to exit left or right from the screen the only way out is to have Sonic leap on top of one of these gray slabs and at that point he will be transported away to the second set of special stages once cleared sonic leaves in a flash of light and instead of the standard clear screen we instead return to the mysterious cave slowly painting down to the great out rock as a shimmering ring encases lighting it up with a single peaceful with the presence of the Master Emerald and the efforts of Sonic to finally stabilize these things the name Chaos Emerald no longer applies because said chaos has been quelled and the energy distilled and focused the gems take on their true form the super emerald leaving us to wonder what will happen when all seven are made whole again as we return to mushroom hill we are left with a renewed excitement and curiosity eager to explore every nook and cranny in the zones ahead so we could see what other mysteries we can unlock about these multicolored magical rocks and I cannot begin to tell you how brilliant this edition was you see mushroom hill not only has to act as a starting point to get players used to the controls if they're playing us and K on their own but it also has to serve the secondary function of acting as the halfway point for the complete Sonic 3 & Knuckles experience and as you can imagine the dip in difficulty can be a bit jarring especially if you have been playing Sonic 3 and mastering the game well before sonic Knuckles came out it's likely you already have supersonic you could just blast through all these new zones with no problem they needed to both keep the momentum going and somehow keep players from blasting through the second half of the game and they tackle this in a couple of ways first off they remove the big arm battle in Sonic's story and instead transferred over to knuckles as his is the more challenging adventure and this in turn smooths out some of the challenge in Sonic's story but they also add that little cutscene with Sonic snooping on knuckles telegraphing to the player that something interesting is going on once Sonic relinquishes the emeralds he in turn relinquishes his ability to go super but that's okay because now mushroom hill can get you accommodated to plane without the aid of your golden hair day so yeah mushroom hill is easier than launch base zone but it's never boring and it works so well as both a starter and mid point and really the more I talk about it the more I realize this level deserves way more credit than it gets but whatever is all that we need to get back to the super-mo orb more specifically what they unlock hyper sonic but you gotta wonder what's there really left to do after Super Sonic he's already super fast and invincible and more gold for colors solitude transformation is insane gold but now brilliantly flashes all the colors all the emeralds in rapid succession he also leaves an afterimage and has all these giant sparks of energy shooting off in every direction and yes-man sorry I'm gonna dive deeper than necessary once again because hyper Sonic is awesome they don't think people really talk about it outside of well which just looks cool at least for me the hyper transformation matters most is Sun I mean look at him he is bursting with power the other two can't even compare to he's tapped into the power better than any other character and yet part of that is because it's Sonic and of course he gets the coolest stuff but to me hyper sonic represents a story of growth overcoming weaknesses going beyond what you thought was your best and discovering your full potential was so much greater than you could have ever imagined it's like super sonic copied the Super Saiyan transformation and hyper sonic copied all the things that made that transformation matter to begin with but let's be real also looks so cert when he first got here he had reached a newfound power he was untouchable except when he was touch in just the right way and loses it all the instant he hits the island knuckles arrival tell Sonic and the player whatever you know whatever cool abilities or powers you might have doesn't matter this is my home these are my rules and you are not ready stress it enough supersonic is taking out full stop and the adventure has not even commenced but instead of turning tail and hopping back into his plane sonic runs headfirst into a hostile and unfamiliar island and along the way he surpasses knuckles in the one thing he should have a handle on better than anybody else without Sonic maybe Robotnik wouldn't have attacked Angel Island at least not at that point but also without Sonic they would have never discovered the untapped potential of the emeralds and how the emeralds can reach their own super form without the assistance of our favorite animal men it's a symbiotic relationship between the people of this world and these powerful gems and while Knuckles handily demonstrates this he's had an entire lifetime to form the bond between him and the Master Emerald Sonic rolls in and through his adventure he unleashes the full power of the Chaos Emeralds and himself and even takes down knuckles without the assistance of any kind of transformation I'd like to think that even though Sonic had unlocked all this power and surpassed not only his own abilities but Knuckles as well he harnessed the massive power of the emeralds as well as well as well as the Master Emerald itself he's harnessed all this chaotic energy this power that's emitting off him in a violent gear and he uses it to destroy the Death Egg once and for all and save the home of the guy who had literally tried to kill him a few times despite a bruised ego how can knuckles not find some respect for this crazy Hedgehog now again I'm probably looking way too deep into this but you know that was kind of also the job of the comic writers you had to use these wordless cutscenes as a basis to tell their own stories am i sane I'd kill it if I made Sonic comics but what I'm saying is in if the all this stuff is way more than what the developers intended what they did give us was enough to be interpreted in such a cool way and even if he took it at just face value this transformation still mattered a lot to us fans we worked our butts off to unlock this thing we had super sonic relinquished from us twice first forcefully and then willingly when we realized yeah we can do just fine without them and in turn be rewarded with something even better when we were ready I mean the lock on nonsense was the main selling point of Sonic and Knuckles and outside of playing knuckles in all of Sonic 2 & 3 this was a single most important change so maybe you can understand why it riled up so many fans when Sonic team said that combined adventure was not canon I didn't even bat an eye when Disney announced that all the expanded Star Wars universe was no longer Canon but when some slight gameplay tweaks are not considered part of the lore in a series where lore is largely inconsequential about lost my damn mind I know all of this stuff is fake obviously it's fake but when you combine Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles you get the very best version of this game and you get the greatest game in the series sit down Adventure 2 fans and you guys are telling me it doesn't matter the game was meant to be a combined experience it's always been touted as such and the ultimate reward the ultimate journey the one that made this game feel complete doesn't matter I know what some of you're gonna say hypersonic doesn't exist in the modern sonic timeline but maybe it still exists in the classic timeline why is this so complicated like I could do a whole video on this topic alone and I don't have the temperament for it so many fans are debating on if the classic and modern Sonic's are two different characters or the same one with a different art style or time displacement that's not why they said the hyper forms aren't canon it's much simpler than that we already have supersonic like I explained with mushroom Hill it was probably only designed so you didn't super your way through the entire game and could continue that giant ring hunting and when it comes down to it super emerald just doesn't sound as cool or iconic as Chaos Emerald that's a staple of the series yet can't replace them and you can't walk back on it either with the super emeralds now involved how can you ever go back to the Chaos Emeralds unless unless they just never existed I will at least give them props for displaying the busted super emeralds and main which can't imply that the hyper form was a one-time thing but didn't the Emeralds transform to the Graystone first so how the problem with everything I said the character arc growth all that crap is that the series was not going to end here not with Sonic 3 it just wasn't ultimately the problems of having this form exists causes in terms of telling new stories and making new games don't justify all the work it would require to figuring out how to walk it back so instead the high performed exists I get why they did it I'm just not happy about it because Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles are better together they are better than either game alone and even better than just playing the games one right after the other separately this is the pinnacle of the classic series and in my eyes and many others the pinnacle of the series as a whole and the folks are running the show the ones that can't keep the quality consistent through the series are telling me the very best of it does not matter making it a separate timeline just confuses things and further divides the fanbase and of course the worst part for us torch means hypersonic will never appear in another game we're never gonna get any dope official merch for this stuff even though that make a sick night light and it makes everything in this video entirely inconsequential maybe you didn't think about as much as I did maybe you thought about it differently but canon or not canon hypersonic is rad and a ton of fun for fans that still of the design it doesn't take away what this game meant to us how awesome it felt the first time we unlocked this form and of course this is nowhere near the worst thing that's happened to the Sonic series and ultimately they can't even keep their own story straight don't try and pay attention fans don't try and sort it out you're just gonna get punished for it and you don't maybe hypersonic never mattered this much to begin with but after watching this video I hope you at least understand why it mattered so much to us but that's just one part of the greater whole whole - to hypersonic warriors [Music]

Channel: Game Apologist

Views: 1,229,938

Rating: 4.8722072 out of 5

Keywords: sonic the hedgehog, hyper sonic, hyper sonic transformation, why hyper sonic matters, sega gensis, classic sonic, izuka, sonic team, sonic 3, sonic & knuckles, s3&k, angel island, underrated, best sonic game, sonic vs knuckles, master emerald, chaos emeralds, super emeralds, game apologist, & knuckles november, super saiyan, retro gaming, sonic theory, fan theory, sonic the comic, archie sonic, hidden palace zone

Id: dS22SEj7XGo

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/piazzolla89]

Achieving hyper sonic after losing super sonic was my most satisfying video game moment as a kid. His absence has been my biggest disappointment with every sonic game since sonic 3 & knuckles.

[u/HeckuvaSmile2004]

sit DOWN adventure 2 fans!