Sonic Prime is a three season Netflix show. It is good and fun. Sonic the Hedgehog is a fun series. We love Sonic the Hedgehog woohoo. In this review I will shadowbox the complaints of children before I get into my thoughts.
Common complaints about the show
- The show doesn’t utilise enough of the cast and just has multiple variations of the same characters over and over again
I think the show cast is maybe bloated with characters that don’t get a lot of use after their initial appearance but I enjoy the arc the Amys get with each other and seeing the character multiples interact.
I can accept though that the show is an easier sell to normies/non-fans if you keep your base cast to the undisputed recognisable fan favourites, and that’s a little sad.
Then again, characters like Big and Rouge and Knuckles have more loudly conveyable designs/personalities at a glance compared to say Silver (good boy) or Espio (brooding ninja) and are therefore easier to make variants out of.
- I don’t like that the show isn’t about common fan what ifs
I can understand this, just disliking the show because they want to see other concepts but I don’t think it’s fair to say it makes the show bad or a missed opportunity. It’s just not what you would do.
Do you actually want an authoritative canon answer on “What would have happened if Maria lived”? Three thousand people can make their own fanfiction or fanart about how Shadow would be different if Maria had lived and they are all going to be interesting and fun explorations. Enjoy that the what-ifs are being left up to you!
- There wasn’t enough Shadow
Shadow is extremely cool but if you put explosions on screen every second they lose their luster, you use your cool explosions sparingly, much like you use Shadow
- Sonic is too reckless/childish
“I don’t like that the main character has a character flaw that’s understandable for him to have and that we aren’t taking into account 30 years of linear character development that definitely exists and isn’t just Sonic’s character being tweaked to suit that specific game’s needs or the preferences of whoever was writing him that time”
- I don’t like that someone said the show was canon to the game timeline
Go outside
- Sonic Prime is a good show but a bad Sonic show
Shut up
- The Chaos Council aren’t good
The baby being treated as an equal member of the group who the others understand and respond to in plain language is funny
My thoughts about the series untethered from fan complaints
I actually like a fair few of the character variants just for showing us previously unexplored sides of the main cast.
Obviously Tails doesn’t have a Nine in him but an alternate Tails becoming a reclusive traitorous weirdo who works for whoever’s paying him that moment makes sense. I love the drama of upgrading himself to a nine tailed fox. I love that when walking neutrally closes the mechanical tails to conceal his two furry tails he’s ashamed of. The main series doesn’t quite have an avenue to explore this potential aspect of Tails’ character and I like that we have it here.
Knuckles Dread is a fun reversal on Master Emerald guardian Knuckles, if regular vanilla Knuckles is our slightly naive determined guardian Dread has had more than enough experience in this world thank you very much. His maddening obsession with his world’s prism is fun and good.
Rebel Rouge is another fun reversal, instead of spying solo for the government and stealing shit on the side she’s strictly principled and a leader of her movement. I like that she takes the role of main strategist in the last section of the show.
I actually like the Chaos Council, it’s fun to get a few different takes on Eggman rather than our vanilla-stock-standard guy who I’m bored with. I like that they never have a redemption arc or the like, they remain evil fuckers up until the very end. Their dynamic with each other is fun! It is extremely funny that the group respects the opinion of the baby as an equal member and that they talk to him in plain language! I like watching them onscreen and I like that there being multiple Eggman means they can play mini-boss.
Sonic Prime suffers extremely from its release format, being produced as one 23-episode season, then split up by Netflix into three ‘seasons’ and dropped in those portions. I believe I remember seeing people who worked on the show surprised by this release format and if you don’t have this context that actually, the show is all one season, it makes the show flow really, really weirdly.
Because of this release schedule, ‘Season 1’ ends after the show’s had its establishing episodes, and the climax of the show being a long protracted back and forth fight between The Entire Cast against Nine with near-infinite power is now an entire season instead of just the back-end of the series.
‘Season 3’ is quite controversial by that metric and I confess the final fight possibly drags a bit long but not by that much. Plans are made and succeed or fall apart. Nine respawns his army and recharges. Nine’s army is defeated and he brings out a larger mech which is a major setback. The Council’s mothership is attacked and needs to be repaired before it can land a blow on Nine. I enjoy the ebb and flow of it’s so over -> we’re back -> we’re cooked -> we’re SO back.
The show maybe has too many flashbacks especially given the show is just one season and by being a Netflix show it’s something you’re not going to be dipping into day by day.
I like that all the characters have their own motives and keep to them. When the universe starts falling apart and the rebellion against the Chaos Council is forced to move everyone inside the dome, people are perpetually unsure and there’s tensions between the Council and the rebellion even with the rebellion having made the decision to get everyone inside. Characters need convincing to work together for the greater good. Nine betrays the rebellion by stealing a prism for himself and the other characters absolutely do not forget this and find it hard to trust Nine’s promises at the end. Rebel Knuckles even scales Nine’s tower to get a few personal hits at him in the endgame. The alliance with the Chaos Council being so tenuous and immediately betraying everyone the second the prism is whole is very expected but satisfying.
I don’t super enjoy the power scale of the show, extremely difficult to fight robots can become just fodder in the next scene. Sonic has a long fight against a robotic duplicate of himself (Chaos Sonic? It’s not Metal Sonic or Silver Sonic) who is like 50% more annoying than he is and it’s a genuinely very difficult fight, but after it’s defeated and Nine has his own robotic variants then they just become the standard enemy the others have to fight and they’re significantly easier. Also jungle!Amy has a wood hammer and this can deal with hoards of steel robots. When a wooden pirate ship is confronted by a steel ship with plasma guns it isn’t a worry that oh they’re absolutely fucked here, but I think the technological scale fudging is ultimately forgivable. Let the pirates stand up to the robots with plasma guns that’s more fun.
In general, I like that Sonic has caused the problem here, he’s at fault. This isn’t that he wasn’t fast enough or that Eggman did this on purpose, he shattered his home world because he did something stupid. He’s got to live with that.
I also like that Sonic just doesn’t consider Nine probably doesn’t want the prism to be restored if it means every new reality being destroyed, just because he’s ultimately kind of self-centered. By the end of the show his desire to return everything to normal is diminished to the point he’s happy to sacrifice himself to fix the prism and restore all the worlds created. Sonic is rewarded for this by being able to return home, granted.
I also like that the giant fight is kicked off by Sonic deciding he’ll sacrifice himself for the prism to be restored but his no one left behind ethics he’s instilled in everyone else means the others follow him intending to fight Nine instead of allowing Sonic to self-sacrifice. When Sonic is able to try and self-sacrifice again, the others are bewildered by him defending Nine and not allowing them to hurt him. It’s good!
I think the show gives us some of the most fun choreographed fight scenes in the series, too. Shadow fighting Sonic for his regulators is the best shit in the world until Sonic 3 the movie happened and we got an even better one.
Overall Sonic Prime is very good actually and if you are a Sonic enjoyer you should watch it.