//All Sonic Games Ranked (F-Ranks to E-Ranks)
While I planned on using these blogs for news and stuff (I updated my commission prices, go check em out at my carrd and buy me something!), I also like to watch myself type shit. If there's something I love, it's ranking and categorizing stuff. I LOVE tier lists and Top 10s, you have no idea. And I thought, what better place to try this than my own site!
Most of you who follow me might know that I'm a big Sonic fan, ever since I played the classics in my sisters' SEGA Genesis, I've been glued to the speedy blue rat like a moth to a flame. However, I'm opinionated and perhaps autistic, so I have a lot to say about Sonic games in general. However, a lot of these have not been in my hands, mainly due to me not owning certain consoles, not being interested on buying them, or just not being a lucky 90s kid who was able to try the Japan-exclusive arcade game where Sonic is a class enemy (Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car, look it up). Therefore, I'll be ranking the Sonic games I've played, whether I've played them extensively for the past 23 and a half years of my life, or just a couple of minutes before getting bored.
Take in mind, this list is entirely subjective. I am no game reviewer, I am no game expert, nor would I do better in the developer's shoes. Please don't take any of these placements too seriously, alright? Also, while I was writing this list, I realized it would become too long too fast, so I'll write these in four different parts and post them throughout this week.
Without further ado, let's begin!
F RANK
The créme de la crap, the worst of the worst. For this category, I didn't want to put the obvious objectively bad games, just the ones that I can't think anything positive about, regardless of how decent it might be to play. And what perfect way to start than...
36. 
This game sure does hate being a Sonic game! I don't know what you want me to say, it's objectively decent, it plays okay. However, it just represents pure corporate greed and a lack of understanding of what this franchise is.
This is basically SEGA's try at being a Mario game, it's painfully obvious. Of course, it's not a honorary Mario game, usually those are good. This game apparently was born from a SEGA-Nintendo exclusive partnership that was so successful it lasted a total of three games.
I HATE how this game looks. Everything looks like plastic, not even the levels from the classic era look like this (which they seem to be taking inspiration from, so your typical 40-year-old Darth Vader t-shirt wearing manchild who hasn't played a Sonic game in decades can clap). If the characters themselves had a more stylized look, like how Mario characters look in SMB Wonder, or how Kirby characters look in Epic Yarn it would be one thing, but it's just so dissonant, especially since these models, like them or not (I don't, sorryyyy), are better fit for more down-to-earth environments. Stylized, yet down-to-earth. It feels too much like a rejected Storybook series game that was set in a coloring book or something.
Aesthetics aside, the gameplay also sucks massive balls, because why on God's green Earth does Sonic THE Hedgehog need a running button. Not a boost button, a RUNNING button, like Mario. That and Parkour being so awkward to use, Sonic's control scheme is a mess of things and it just doesn't fly well.
Now, for the worst part: the story and characters! Holy shit this is my least favorite Sonic narrative, period. Sonic storylines aren't usually... good? They can be interesting, have good character moments, have good lore tidbits; but as someone who wants to be a writer myself, I can't, by any stretch of the imagination, call most Sonic stories good. They usually lack good character interactions, they tend to be overtly complicated in areas where they shouldn't be, they love telling more than showing, etc. However, this game tried to do something much more different: adding character conflict and make it important to the story. However, they surely did some stupid things with it!
First off: the villains. Eggman takes a backseat this game and is usually by our heroes' side, since the Deadly Six are in town!!!
I swear to God these are some of the ugliest character designs I've ever had the displeasure to laid my eyes on. And their personalities don't fare off any better! They have a total of ONE personality trait each, and they make for such terrible, terrible threats, but they're somehow ultra-powerful villains, and I dunno man, does this scream main villain material to you? They look like random enemies you kill in one or two hits in the middle of a level in like a Crash PS2-era game or something. Doesn't help that SEGA tried to push Zavok (the red one, the "leader", the totally-not Bowser stand-in) as a recurring character for a while, even if nobody cares about him outside of a couple of bara artists out there (no shade tho, get that bag sis).
However, I think the worst aspect of this game is the weird Sonic-Tails-Eggman conflict they have.
Basically, Sonic fucks up and Eggman has to help them defeat the Straight Pride Troop or whatever they're called. For some reason, Tails gets extremely pissy and insecure out out of nowhere, like after a couple of cutscenes and levels where they're working together just fine. They try to make Sonic look bad for... trusting Eggman more than Tails??? He isn't????? Like yeah, Eggman betrays them in the end, but Tails wasn't mad for Sonic not being able to see through Eggman's façade, he was just having a crap attack because he's an insecure little freak and because they decided they needed them to fight so Tails could later be separated from Sonic. Turns out, the Ginger Minj Fanclub traps Tails and they turn him into a cool cyborg but not only do we never get to fight him on a boss fight or something, but it ended up being a lame trick that lasted a total of ONE CUTSCENE. They forced this dumb as hell conflict for what exactly? It's just a really bad story, did their Three-Act Structure cheatsheet corrupt or something?
Also this game has some of the cheesiest, most obnoxious dialogue possible. Sonic saying "I'm supposed to be the fastest thing alive, but I wasn't fast enough to save my buddy..." or Eggman's out of nowhere ragequit rant to the The JohnLock Conspiracy Posse, it's just so bad.
So yeah, don't even try to purchase this on Steam, it's a boring game with no soul. Let's pray for the Libertarian Discord Group Chat to never appear in another Sonic game again.
35. 
Ah, yes, the fabled Sonic Project 2017, the game that they felt the need to promote for their 25th anniversary next to Sonic Mania. Sonic and his friends go to war, things look bleak for our heroes, and we even get to play as our own original character! What could go w- I'm not finishing that sentence, this game is terrible.
Again, not a BAD bad game, it plays... fine. Not great, but it's not such a slog to get through. However, there are soooo many fuckups and missed opportunities in this one, it's shameful.
So: the concept of Sonic and co. going to war has been done before: the Archie comics started this way, and so did my beloved Sonic SatAM. Nontheless, you can't but get curious by SEGA having their own take on the idea. How would our colorful cast of characters get through something as big as a massive attack by Eggman, powerful enough to have 99% of the world in his hands? Well, why do you think this game is ranked second to last?
Sonic Forces fails at many, many things. The levels? Way too easy and short; The aesthetics? Basic and washed out; The music? Kind of okay actually; The gameplay? Bad; The story? Poop from a butt.
Let's start with the aesthetics: For a game to take so much from Sonic Generations, why couldn't they take their art direction? This game looks terrible! How do you go from this:
To this:
Everything looks flat, the colors pop less, the stylization dissapeared entirely! And most of the levels look like this, even the Death Egg level looks like crap. How do you fuck up SPACE? MAKE IT LOOK COOL, THIS LOOKS LIKE A TEST LEVEL.
And the levels are absurdly short! You can beat some of them in a minute without speedrunning strats! This game has 30-something levels and you can beat it in three hours! Sonic games for the Sega Game Gear had more content than this. Even then, the structure of how you go through these levels is interesting, you have certain "areas" with levels inside, kind of like how you could find similar-looking stages around the same spot in the map in Sonic Adventure 2. However, these areas are... odd? You have Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Again. But you also have "City" (no name), Metropolis (which looks nothing like the one from Sonic 2), Mystic Jungle (not Mystic Ruins. Jungle.), and the Death Egg. While the areas they chose are weird, I think a hub world connecting the levels would've been a cool touch, maybe a good indicator of how your progress with the Resistance is doing (since the only way to know is seeing the overworld map going from red to blue, with a big progress bar).
That's a different thing: Eggman's takeover is super lame. There's a lot of cool concept art that showcased stuff like Green Hill becoming a prison, but in the final game, Eggman just replaces the water with... sand. Thrilling. Then he turns Chemical Plant into an oil refinery, which would be cool if there wasn't another level originated from the same game that had that exact theming. And the worst part is that we gotta believe Sonic and friends are suddenly useless against Eggman's new plan. I call bullshit, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Eggman's plan is a plot point taken from Sonic Mania, retroactively made a companion game to this one because of the Phantom Ruby, a gem that creates tangible illusions. You see, in Mania it transported character to different places or warped stuff. In Forces, it can literally create a fake sun that can kill people. Wild. Also, while the selling point of the game at one point was that Sonic would fight old enemies from the past, you only do fight two of them, while the other two are taken down in cutscenes only. I find that odd, since it would've been more interesting if they played any role in the story, but uh no, they just don't.
The story progression is bad and nonsensical, we're told a lot of stuff, like "Sonic's been tortured for months!" or "Tails has lost it," none of which ended up being true or relevant. The dialogue is also really really corny and bad. Have you ever seen that Archie Sonic meme of "Sonic learned the true meaning of war"? Well, they made it into a canonical line of dialogue, played completely straight. Ho-ly SHIT.
The characters do suffer a lot from bad writing too, since we have stuff like: Sonic having been kept prisoner for half a year and said to have been TORTURED during that time, only for him to be free of harm, physical or emotional when we see him again; Knuckles being set as a commander and being terrible at it, presumably getting many soldiers killed; Silver being here for no reason but Blaze being inexplicably absent; Amy being relegated to an operator when Rouge could've had that role; Tails cowering in fear as he's confronted by Chaos 0, a character which was introduced in Sonic Adventure 1, both the first thing you fight in that game, and a boss fight that takes three hits before dying (Tails has fought tougher versions of Chaos in that same game, but the base form is too much for him now, okay (Remember when Tails did stuff instead of explaining the game's lore to you and being in Sonic's shadow? Good times)). Speaking of shadows, Shadow is... strange in this game? He's written fine enough, but all events surrounding him are bizarre. Part of the plot happens because of him and it's weird, since the only thing he does is kick the antagonist's ass and call him a bitch.
AND OH BOY DO I HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY ABOUT OUR ANTAGONIST! Infinite is such a sorry excuse for a villain. His design sucks, he lacks any personality, his backstory had to be laid out in external media and it still makes him look like a dumbass, and his motivations is just: "Shadow called him weak, so he had a massive breakdown" and that's it. I can't believe so many gigabytes of data were wasted on this piece of shit. I hope he doesn't get revived for a future game.
Let's not forget that Classic Sonic is here for... some reason. He plays even worse than in Generations, and he has no place in the story at all, but hey, he worked as a hook for when the game was teased. Then, we have our Avatar. I do not mind the Avatar, they're fine as an addition to the game, but it feels too much like the world bends over to us for doing an okay job at most.
TL;DR: Sonic Forces is yet another game devoid of soul or passion put into it. I ranked it higher than Lost World, because at least this game tried to do something new, even if it failed miserably.
34. 
Fun fact: this game caused Ken Penders to sue SEGA and snowballed into the cancellation of the Archie comics, just when they were getting really good. A good reason to have this game so low!
But seriously, if you ever wondered how well would a Sonic RPG would perform, keep imagining it, because this is just not it. The story for this game is not very good, especially because they decided it would be a fun idea to have multiple dialogue options, some where Sonic acts like a featureless plank of wood and some where he's a jerk because I guess we needed mean dialogue options??
Not to mention stuff like bad characterization, the bad fanfiction vibes of the whole "Sonic abandoned his friends for a year and they're mad at him!" plot point, how much of a slog it is to play, etc.
Also the combat sucks balls, it's like if those shovelware Wii Mario Kart clones developers tried their hand at an RPG, the game just sucks at doing what other RPGs do naturally.
Not to mention the music! Some of the worst I've heard! A sacrilege for this franchise actually, and being a DS game is not an excuse, Sonic Rush exists and that game's OST is one of the best of the whole series.
I do not have much more to say about Chronicles, it's just a piss poor experience from start to finish and a lot of things would be different for Sonic if it hadn't been created.
Oh, to live in that alternate universe... Read the Archie Sonic arcs after the reboot, you won't regret it. Fuck you Ken Penders.
E RANK
Games under the E Rank are bad, no doubt about it, but they're not so bad for me to hate their existence, just to bother me enough or make me raise an eyebrow at them. You might find some you absolutely hate here, but I might be more ambivalent to them for one reason or another. Let's get on with them:
33. 
Y'all knew it was coming.
Now, I don't vitriollically hate this game like a lot of people do, but I'm no Sonic 06 apologist, this game is trash.
Legitimally a flawed experience in every single way: very easy to find game-breaking glitches, gameplay that feels like controlling a slippery large block of lead, a story so bad and nonsensical that it deleted itself by the end, and even then? I do not hate this game, but why?
First off, I feel this game had a lot of soul and care put into it, even if it doesn't show. There's a lot of cool unexplored ideas in here that didn't get enough developing time to flourish. This game went through massive crunch to be released during 2006, coincidentally Sonic's 15th anniversary. This game's production was so disastrous their finished build of the game corrupted, so they had to go back to an earlier build, which is why so many animations and features went missing after being teased in prior gaming shows like E3 or TGS.
Everyone and their moms have listed every single flaw in this game, but I want to talk about the ones that bother me personally the most:
First off: Blaze's role in this game. Why on earth would you introduce the same character with two different backstories in a span of TWO YEARS? In Rush, Blaze is a princess from another dimension. In 06, Blaze is Silver's tagalong friend from the future. Not only does she not fit the story, she doesn't even talk to any characters that aren't Silver directly. Yeah, she's objectively one of the better characters in the game, but nothing she does in the story matters in the end, and she could've easily not been there and her character wouldn't be too affected, since, again: she was already introduced with a different backstory in a prior game.
Number two: that dumb as hell Blue Emerald paradox. Basically, Elise has the Blue Chaos Emerald in her posession at the beginning of the story, but she gives it to Sonic. However, it's later revealed that she has it because Silver gave it to het while traveling 10 ywars back into the past. Therefore: the Blue Chaos Emerald, one of the unique Seven Chaos Emeralds that Sonic has used multiple times in the past, has been in possession of somebody else for 10 full years, meaning that somehow Elise has had an unique item in her hands for TEN FULL YEARS, in which it's implied that Sonic's past adventures where he has used that same Emerald, had also happened in between. Am I understanding this correctly? It's funny because not only could this plot point not have been written in the story and virtually nothing would change, but IT LITERALLY ONLY HAPPENS IN SILVER'S STORY. In Shadow's Story, this same scene plays out, but Silver doesn't give the Emerald to Elise, meaning that for some ungodly reason we have two alternate sides of the same scene and it goes completely unexplained.
Tails and Knuckles do nothing in this story to justify their spots in Sonic's Story. Now, Sonic's Episode is... stupid. Objectively the worst one of the three, surprisingly simple, yet lacking any kind of character arc or anything that hooks you in. It's just Sonic saving the Baldur's Gate 3 rejected cleric character over and over again. Then, what do Knuckles and Tails have to do with this? Nothing, really. Tails, as always, gives exposition to things going on, and Knuckles... well he's there! And he's playable for two small sections! See, at least you get the rest of the characters in other stories. It makes sense why Rouge and Omega are playable in Shadow's, or why Blaze and Amy are in Silver's, but Tails and Knuckles feel too much like an afterthought, which leads me to:
Sonic, Shadow and Silver do not work as a trio. You can tell why SEGA absolutely forgot about this, but for this game's promotion, a lot of focus was put in the hedgehog trio. They're conceptually cool, Shadow representing the past, Sonic representing the present, and Silver the future. However, that's where it ends, because Silver is way too different from them to work as a possible third in their dynamic. Even then, it's stupid that they tried to do this, because Sonic, Tails and Knuckles are already the perfect trio! There's a whole game that's about their dynamic! It feels weird to have two iconic gaming characters shafted for two 'cooler' ones, at least for mid-2000s standards. Which leads me to:
This game is bad anime fanfiction. Now, you'll never catch me using 'fanfiction' as a negative adjective, as a synonym of bad writing. I've read fanfics that surpass their original IPs in every level. However, I do have to make a point of comparison within Sonic 06 and bad 2000s fanfiction. This game reads as a Sonic x DBZ fanfic on fanfiction.net. Something written by a 13-year-old who ocasionally makes Megaman NES spritesheet edits, one that kind of mastered Toriyama's style but still doesn't own a Wacom Bamboo, so they post scanned pencil-drawn comics with cringy dialogue to DeviantART. And if Sonic 06's story WAS indeed written by a 13-year-old in the year 2006 to some obscure Sonic forum, then I would be much less severe with my critiques. But this was published by a semi-respected game developer with years of experience. This shouldn't have ended up like it did and this is something we shouldn't excuse with time constraints like we do with it's troubled development. The story and concept were bad from the get-go, this story wasn't going to work.
Now, I've heard rumors that 06 was meant to be a reboot of the franchise, but I've also heard this is false. I'm not sure on what to believe, since a lot of previous plot points from other games get ignored or even retconned, meaning it might've been a soft-reboot, yet the game doesn't explain who the characters are to you at all, meaning it wasn't meant to be a re-introduction to new audiences. I don't know what it's trying to be, but this is basic stuff, you either go nuts or don't, doing stuff half-assedly leaves you with an unsatisfying product at the end of the day, and this is what this is.
But yet again, I like some stuff from this game. I love the music; I think the level design is pretty good, despite the bad controls; I like the idea of an Adventure-formula game with three characters per story, since you could do something like SA2 and expand upon that; I like SOME of Soleanna's imagery and concepts, even if the whole Mephiles-Iblis-Solaris deal makes no sense. However, these are just things that might've been cool, but ended up being confusing or badly implemented. Ranting about this game as if it was the worst thing to ever exist is like beating a dead horse at this point, so I tried to talk about some specifics that I don't see enough people talk about with this game. Sorry for not hating/loving this game even more, but uhhh I do like P-06! My faves from that remake are Blaze and Amy and my favorite levels are Sonic's Radical Train and Silver's Flame Core :)
32. 
You see, I was going to lump all 8-bit games together later, but it turns out this one started as a Genesis game, interesting. Anyways, HOW DO YOU FUCK UP A PINBALL GAME LIKE THIS? ARE YOU CRAZY?????
Sonic's Impossible to steer or control in this game, somehow they got the idea to add platforming sections with said controls, the levels are piss ugly, and it's overall a sad excuse of a game. If I was a kid and THIS was the game I got, I'd be pissed.
Not much else to say, don't even try and play this for nostalgia's sake. It's one of the sucky ones.
31. 
Not only Episode 1, all of it. Remember when they tried to promote this game as "a Sonic game with no other characters other than Sonic!!!" and they immediately went and added Tails to the sequel? Funny.
Calling this pair of games as "Sonic 4" is so... tacky. These games have nothing on the classics, they feel too much like mobile games that somehow got console releases, which in all fairness, might as well have been exactly that, since both of them were on mobile devices at the time. The graphics look like rubber, the level theming is extremely unoriginal for this to be Sonic FOUR, and there's absolutely nothing worthy of saving in this game. It's just bland and corporate in a way only Sonic Lost World is, but at least this one is a shitty mobile game ported to consoles, what was that one's excuse, am I right?
Also Episode 2 is better, but Sonic Advance 3 does the exact same team tag mechanic 10 times better. This game is just obsolete and not worth your time.
30. 
We were just scamming people back then in the 90s, huh? What a premise, Eggman changes Sonic's shoes for... slow shoes. Which make Sonic the Hedgehog go slow. It's funny because this game works exactly like Sonic 3D Blast does, with its isometric perspective and labyrinthic level design, yet they felt the need to make Sonic slow for some reason. That's dumb.
You have to collect keys in the level, and to go fast you have to Spin Dash and bounce off the level's walls, and it feels like it goes on forever. Again, I can't wrap my head around this concept. Sonic, but... slow. Why? Was Ecco the Dolphin unavailable?
Yeah, this one's bad and clunky, not worth it in the slightest.
So yeah, those were the six worst Sonic games (in my opinion). I wanted to make this list longer, but the other tiers will have to wait a bit, I'm a busy guy. Hope you're ready for the next ones!