Is The Original Sonic Riders Actually Good?

2006 was not a great year for Sonic, from the botched Game Boy Advance port of the original game to the infamous Sonic ’06. But a third game that was released that year stood high above them, one that would stand the test of time. The first racing game in over a decade, since Sonic R, Riders had big shoes to fill. Sonic racing games were considered pretty lacklustre at release. While Sonic R may have a soft spot in our hearts today, at the time, it was panned and disliked by most players. So, what made Riders work, and why does it hold up? Let’s dive into it.

Super Sonic Style

Sonic Riders, in name, is almost synonymous with the unique 2D art style every character is granted. The key and overall art direction of the game was handled by Hideaki Moriya. They have worked on an astonishing number of Sonic and Sonic Team projects, such as Billy Hatcher and NiGHTS, as well as other SEGA projects like Sakura Wars. The key appeal of the art here for me is the extreme sport vibe it brings; it bestows a similar feeling to Super Mario Strikers, but in a very visually distinct way.

Whereas Super Mario Strikers leaned towards an overly detailed, pointy, and rough sketchy style for their character illustrations, Riders takes a more clean approach. Taken as a two-layer visual style, it starts with thin, clean lines for the front and a more detailed layer of the character’s design, which is contrasted heavily by its back layer. Most of the rear elements are in total shadow, with cross-hatchings and heavy shading applied to give a striking dynamic with a sense of depth. This encourages the key details of the front layer to pop with vibrancy.

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High-Octane Beats

The stage music retains this fast philosophy, with electronic beats engaging the player, and multi-levelled percussions keeping the loop fresh as you race around the track. Thanks to this, the music never gets boring and can easily be listened to on loop without it ever getting stale. Many racers struggle to accomplish this, in my opinion. The same could be said for standard Sonic act music, though. Sonic Team seems to have mastered the complex looping nature of game music with multi-faceted beats and rhythms that keep adding to the appeal on repeated listens.

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Lyrical Treats

The game also features a few lyrical tracks, notably Jet the Hawk’s theme ‘Catch Me If You Can’ and ‘Super Sonic Riders’. The latter is utilised as the game’s opening with a beautifully animated intro that oozes style. This utilises the character style outlined earlier with an excellently produced and performed song by Runblebee, who also performs Jet’s theme. This does an excellent job of letting the player know what they are getting into, style-wise, before the player even pushes a button.

Jet’s theme is fitting, utilising similar key notes to ‘Super Sonic Riders’, but describing Jet’s mannerisms, attitude, and personality perfectly. Its execution is familiar to the character themes from Sonic Adventure and fits nicely among those as classic character themes. The song is also antagonistic and arrogant, boasting their speed and style as uncatchable, ungraspable, or unattainable. This adds to the allure and intrigue of the character.

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The Treasure of Babylon

Riders features two story modes, both from the perspectives of the two main teams, Team Sonic and the Babylon Rogues. Both teams are sucked into a racing competition, which is boasted as “not just a race, a special race, to see who’s the fastest”. Whilst not the greatest motivation for a story centred around racing, it’s enough to push hot-headed Sonic and his friends to prove themselves and their speed. Whilst the entrance fee of a Chaos Emerald does bring their intelligence into question, it’s easy enough to look past it to get into the story properly.

The Babylon Rogues’ story takes a different approach; they are luring in Chaos Emeralds from Sonic and team by entertaining Dr.Eggman’s proposal. He informs them he knows where Babylon Garden is and how to access it, but this requires Jet’s family artifact and all seven Chaos Emeralds to achieve. Once the plan is in motion, and Jet has antagonised Sonic to the point of healthy rivalry, Babylon Garden surfaces, and the characters are forced to work together to take down an ancient genie to uncover the lost treasure of Babylon.

There is enough intrigue and confines of Sonic lore to make the story believable. On top of this, the new characters fit the Sonic universe perfectly. A band of Sky Pirates who utilise ancient technology to power their advancements in extreme gear tech and antagonise a speed-loving character with their manoeuvrability is totally within the realm of a Sonic side story. Plus, the CG cutscenes are breathtaking for a sixth-generation game. They border on the realm of a Final Fantasy cutscene.

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The Babylon Rogues

As for the characters themselves, as previously mentioned, Jet the Hawk is an overconfident and egotistical ass that constantly antagonises, boasts, and sticks his beak up at anyone considered slower or lesser than himself. Whilst initially unlikeable, he has layers of complexity. He cares deeply about his friends and works hard to hone his skills and uncover the ancient secrets of his family. His design is sleek, cool, and a great contrast to Sonic with his deep green feathers and tall red boots. His goggles match the setting and the speed of the extreme gear to a tee.

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Wave the Swallow is seen as Tails’ foil here; the intelligent mechanic who constructs and maintains the gang’s gear. She is often seen “dissing” Tails, as Knuckles puts it (yeah, this was 2006, it’s part of the territory), and trying to put him down whilst secretly respecting his work. Her design consists of white and purple streetwear: a tracksuit and head scarf, which works as a good counter to Amy and Tails simultaneously, whilst allowing her to stand out against the wider cast.

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Finally, we have Storm the Albatross. The bone-headed muscle of the crew. Naturally, he is a foil to Knuckles, but the game mostly pits the two strength-obsessed dudes against each other without much substance. Storm is agile and strong, but his lack of intelligence holds him back from being a notable character. Design-wise, being a big grey bird is a bit dull, but his gold chain, orange gloves, and boots combo contrast well against his feathers and allow him to stand out easily on the track.

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Extreme Races

The controls are a double-edged sword. Sonic Riders has an incredibly high skill ceiling and takes a lot of dedication and patience from the player to truly master its systems. Pair this up with the worst tutorial I have ever seen, and you have a recipe for disaster. Moving past the game’s innate flaw of instruction, the depth its mechanics present make for an experience that is brutal for beginners, yet inviting for those who want more out of a racer.

Using a similar system to Sonic Heroes, Riders splits each racer into three distinct categories: Speed, Flying, and Power. These split the players into different stat groups and unlock specific shortcuts for each category. Speed characters often have high acceleration and can utilise grind rail shortcuts. Flying characters are usually better at handling, have more balanced speed and acceleration, and can utilise boost ring flight shortcuts. Power characters have high acceleration and can break through walls and obstacles on the track to regain air and take shortcuts, but have a lower top speed.

Riders utilises an air system. Whenever you hit other players, perform tricks, collect items, or level up, you will gain air to aid you in races. Air is used for several mechanics. Boosting consumes air, as well as sharp turns, jumping, and, in turn, your ability to utilise shortcuts. The race takes a delicate balance of utilising mechanics, maintaining your air to ensure you can race effectively, and not use it all up. If you do inevitably consume all of your air, then you will be forced to run until you either find a pit stop to regain it or perform an action that would normally reward air.

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Extreme Mechanics

Another severely misunderstood feature that is not explained well in-game is the ramp system. While this sounds simple enough, the actual execution can be difficult to master and hard to explain without feeling it in-game. Specific ramps in tracks will allow the player to shoot up into the air and take a shortcut, but only under certain conditions.

The player must hold down the jump button until the exhaust turns red, whilst on a ramp, and release it at the edge of the jump whilst performing a high trick to shoot up and take the shortcut. You can speed up the process by boosting whilst holding jump, but the actual feel and timing is something you need to feel out for yourself through practice.

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Trick or Treat

As you race along the track, performing tricks and maintaining your air, you’ll notice that leading racers create an air turbulence half pipe behind them in which you can ride and perform tricks. This allows players to quickly catch up to leading players and allows players with lower air to regain some as you speed through the slipstream. This occasionally will occur under a shortcut you may have missed, and allow you to break through the floor into a higher area, allowing you to benefit from the potential shortcut.

There are also items you can collect. Whilst not as important as in Mario Kart or other racers, they can mix up the race. These include a ball and chain to slow you down, a ring shield to attract rings towards you, and an explosion to hit other players. You’ll also be collecting rings to level you up and increase your air capacity. There are three levels, and if you are hit at all, you’ll be back to level 1 and the minimum air gauge.

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Extreme Gear

The boards are designed like tech boosted surfboards with exhausts, but do come in other form factors. There are some among the gimmick boards, like the witches’ broom, but two distinct categories exist that are not boards at all. The first of these is the bike. Used primarily by Dr.Eggman, it features an on-ground, air-based mini bike that boasts higher power but poorer handling due to its reliance on traditional wheels. The second type are the skates, utilised by Shadow, that are agile, responsive, and quick, but are weak and lack any real power and slow acceleration.

Having options is great, especially if the board gameplay didn’t agree with you for whatever reason. But both of these are locked behind story completion, so they are not super accessible to the player, especially if they couldn’t hack the boards.

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Tricky Tracks

If I have one complaint to make, it’s that the stage selection is lacking. Whilst it’s not a bad selection, there are five main courses with five variants for the Babylon story that all share basic set dressing and fundamentals.

While they may have differing layouts, colour schemes, and set pieces, it can’t help but feel a little rehashed in places. The stages that are present in the main selection, though, are tailored towards specific character types, which is a burden, yet a cool aspect that keeps you on your toes. It does mean that one character type per race is a little unbalanced, but the alternate versions of the stages do a good job at rebalancing this a little bit.

Bonus Stages

Once you beat the story, you’ll unlock a few additional tracks. Babylon Garden and Guardian are rough stages at first that really test your skills. If you aren’t prepared, they will kick your ass. This, to me, is perfect: a few stages that are comfortable, then a big challenging stage at the end is the best way to design racers. Just look at Rainbow Road! It’s satisfying to overcome a hardship like this.

The other stages are in the Digital Dimension, one of which is a standard loop—pretty boring—and the other is a horrifying gauntlet of ghosts, falling towers, and fleshy textures. This makes it challenging fundamentally, and a slight visual challenge, as its scenes can be distracting and a little unsettling to younger players. Lastly, we have the SEGA stages: Carnival and Illusion, which are visual delights, filled to the brim with SEGA history.

Not only are the SEGA stages bright and whimsical, but they are also challenging and test your skills, which is well needed at this point in the game. To complement these stages, you can even play as NiGHTs, Ulala, Aiai, or Meemee to keep the fun going. It’s tricky to unlock bonus characters from the game’s challenge mode; however, there are plenty of routes to master and discover in the game’s stages, so the replay value here speaks for itself.

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The Sequel Problem

Zero Gravity

Despite their best efforts, Sonic Team failed to deliver on sequels, in my opinion, at least. Zero Gravity was the second game under the Riders moniker, releasing on Wii and PS2 in 2008. It continued the premise of the original with some new additions. The biggest feature was its namesake, the ability to shift gravity to take tight corners and blast forward in a selected direction. While full of spectacle, the actual execution of this feature left a lot to be desired. For a glorified handbrake turn, it’s cumbersome, takes too long to pull off, and interrupts the flow of the race.

The additional story is nothing notable either, but neither was the first, really. It was just a means to justify racing. I do appreciate the characters they added, though. Blaze and Silver fit the cast perfectly, and it was great to see them outside of their own games.

The biggest issue I have with the sequel is the fact that they over-simplified the controls, making the complicated, but satisfying, skill ceiling of the original into more of a standard racer affair. This killed the momentum of the game for me. It was evident that the controls were simplified to accommodate the Wii’s motion controls, and this feels more evident in the PS2 version, where it’s a more direct comparison to the original.

Free Riders

This wouldn’t be the only time this series was plagued by a control gimmick, though; the third and final game suffered heavily. Remember the Kinect? Well, Sonic Free Riders decided to go full swing right into that gimmick, completely locking the game behind the controls with no options. This means that the only HD game in the series is a virtually unplayable mess that requires an expensive peripheral to even experience. The less said of Free Riders, the better, but at least its theme song is great.

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Is it good, though?

Sure, Sonic Riders has all the pieces to a great racing experience, but does it execute them well as a package? Personally, I think yes. I spent a lot of time as a kid, hitting the same wall over and over with this game. I got to the Babylon Garden stage in the Hero Story, and I just couldn’t do it; the difficulty was too intense for me. So, I practiced, got good at the game, and mastered its controls. Suddenly, I was blazing through both stories. The game rewarded me for my dedication, my practice, and I got more and more content to master and mess around with.

Whilst a lot of players may not have the time or patience to learn how to play a competitive game that has no real online matchmaking, the game rewards patience. The difficulty with trying to sell this game to someone is that once you dedicate enough time to it, unless someone else has as well, they’ll be instantly outmatched. It doesn’t have the pick up and play approach of a Mario Kart or one of its many clones. This game is best enjoyed with others who love it just as much, but if you’re alone, it can make an excellent single-player experience.

If you’re somehow sold by my pitch and decide to pick Sonic Riders up and master its systems, then the time trial community is still around. You’re welcome to pick up the mantle and try to aim for the leaderboards; the world’s your oyster! So if Sonic Racing Cross Worlds has you itching for a more vibrant extreme gear system, you know where to find it.