Sonic Origins Rant

 (yeah I make non vs stuff occasionally)

Anyway I wasn’t gonna make a blog on this… but eh Screw it.

Sonic Origins is kind of a rip off and I don’t understand why  so many Sonic fans have such a fervent need to defend it. There’s no reason why 4 genesis games should cost 40 dollars in 2022. Nor should these games have additional content locked behind 5 dollar DLC paywall. 

You could buy Sonic1/2/3/K/CD for 3-5$ each on Steam, PS3, Xbox and other platforms until just recently. That’s literally 20 dollars and less than half the cost of this collection's full package. Yes this collection has some new content like animated cutscenes, a hard mode(with the DLC), some extra music(with DLC) and a mission mode, but those aren't worth such a massive price hike. Especially when these games have been available dozens of times on multiple platforms over the last 30 years. Those features are the absolute bare minimum of what should be expected to make buying a collection like this worthwhile.

Even if you try to claim that “these games are remasters built from the ground up, not just roms” that still shouldn’t justify hike the price up so high. Sonic 1,2 and CD were ALREADY remastered like 10 YEARS ago and were also available for 3-5$ each on multiple platforms with several of the features Origins is trying to use as a selling point. This collection is clearly using those remasters as a base, leaving only Sonic 3 and Knuckles as it's new content. But in all honesty both of those games only avoided being remastered because of legal issues with Michael Jackson's music and would have cost 3-5 dollars if released several years ago as well.  Realistically the remasters of all these games would have cost around 20 dollars together(again). Sega clearly realized this disparity in value, which is why they delisted all previous versions of the Sonic genesis games so people couldn’t buy them(which is also an anti-consumer practice people SHOULD NOT support) and added the controversial Denuvo DRM to the games coding. 

This is also compounded by the fact we’ve had much more comprehensive and economic Sonic collections in the past. Sonic Mega Collection plus launched at 20$ and had Sonic 1/2/3/K, Sonic Blast, Sonic Spinball, Robotnik's Mean bean Machine, Ristar and 6 Sonic game gear games. Sonic’s Ultimate genesis collection launched at 40$ and had Sonic 1/2/3/K plus 40 separate genesis games from dozens of series. Sonic Gems collection launched at 20$ and had Sonic CD plus 11 other assorted games from the Arcades, Saturn and Game Gear. All of these collections having similar side content, art, and extra music Origins had on top of their base games.

I get some people are going to point fingers at Nintendo and claim Sega’s put in more work than the Zelda remasters or the Mario collection(both of which were also overpriced), but just because Nintendo has bad game preservation practices, doesn’t mean Sega should be excused for it. Heck other franchises have far exceeded them both. Devil May Cry had the first 3 games(all 3D) remastered for 40$. Crash Bandicoot and Spyro both had full on 4K remakes of their first 3 games for 40$. You can buy the HD remasters of like 7 3D Kingdom Hearts titles plus Kingdom Hearts 3 in a single package for 40$.

I love Sonic as much as the next guy but realistically this collection should be 25 dollars at most with no DLC whatsoever. Even then it should “probably” have more features that actually matter, like adding additional playable characters(something fans have done quite easily to previous releases with mods and should have been possible given assets from Mania) or a few extra levels to bump up the content for people who have already bought these game multiple times. But I doubt that will happen given the collection apparently didn’t make Knuckles playable in Sonic CD and couldn’t even be bothered to license out the Michael Jackson music that prevented the Sonic 3 and K games from being remastered for so long. 

Look if people wanna buy this collection I won’t stop them. I might even get it later down the line if it goes on sale. But I’m not gonna pretend it's some kind of slam dunk, rather than being a missed opportunity.