Sonic Origins Plus rounds out last year’s defining remaster collection, but is the physical edition or the DLC worth its weight in chilli dogs?
Before we begin, a caveat: your mileage with Sonic Origins Plus depends on a few different factors.
Sonic The Hedgehog’s 30th birthday may be over, but Sega and Sonic Team are lighting some more candles with Sonic Origins Plus, a much-deserved physical release of last year’s Sonic Origins with some extra bells and whistles. In addition to the four seminal games in the franchise (5 if you count Sonic & Knuckles separately), which are offered in an updated Anniversary mode with 16:9 resolution and in emulated Classic form, Sonic Team has expanded the library with all 12 of the series’ outings on Game Gear and made Knuckles and Amy Rose playable across all the Genesis games.
If you already own the digital version, you can simply pay $9.99 for the “Plus” DLC. Or, you can treat yourself to the physical edition, which comes with slick, reversible cover art and an art book, much like Sonic Mania before it. (Early reports suggest that the game contains a code for the Plus DLC, separate from the physical media.)
Seventeen games in one comprehensive package sounds pretty good, right? Sonic Origins Plus retains everything that made the base game one of the best Sonic collections to date, after all. Yet, sometimes more isn’t always better, and the question “should I buy this” is a little complicated to answer.
If you were a big Sonic fan in the 90s but somehow missed out on the base collection last year, what are you doing? Go snap up a physical copy of Sonic Origins Plus, put it on the shelf next to Sonic Mania, and sleep easy in the knowledge that you can easily access some of the greatest platformers of their era on your modern console.
The ports aren’t perfect, as many purists will tell you. And yes, it sucks that some of the original music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 can’t be used, but we have to accept that those versions probably won’t be legitimately usable again (RIP Ice Cap Zone theme). However, Sonic Origins lovingly rebuilds these games for modern displays while still offering the classic experience, and that alone should earn it a spot in any fan’s library.
What about those who already own Origins? Is paying a quarter of the game’s original price to have Knuckles in one more game, Amy in all four, and a heaping of Game Gear titles? This is where things get complicated.
For the new core game content, having all four games fully playable with all four characters feels right. Amy Rose has never been playable in these games, so she’s received her own unique play style for Sonic Origins Plus. Granted, it’s simpler than her style in later entries like Sonic Advance, but adding her hammer to the spin jump is fitting. What’s more unusual is playing her in Sonic CD, where she originally debuted following Sonic before being captured by Metal Sonic.
Similarly, Knuckles’ unique abilities are well-suited to Sonic CD, where he’s finally playable legitimately. Searching for teleportation signposts and robot transporters is easier with the ability to glide and climb walls.
These additions may be a nice touch, fulfilling a dream held by many modders over the years. It also feels like something that should’ve been present at launch a year ago or patched in as a free update. In this light, this feature alone isn’t necessarily worth the price of admission.
As for the Game Gear library, Sonic Origins Plus hasn’t exactly led with the best possible foot. “Twelve games” is an impressive point, sure, but what about the quality of them? Sadly, the Game Gear is aging no better than it performed in its own time. Many of these games will really only appeal to the minority of fans who played them back in the 90s—sacrificing AA batteries by the half-dozen for the novelty of handheld Sonic—or the most devout fans who want to experience some regional exclusives personally.
Most suffer from lackluster controls and the generally small size of the Game Gear. They may be bigger on a TV, but the literal boundaries of the nigh-forgotten handheld still constrain these games. Platforming and Sonic’s speed are harder to control when you can only see so much of the space before you.
Of the batch, the most interesting are Sonic Chaos, Sonic the Hedgehog Triple Trouble, and Sonic Blast. The rest include quirky attempts at kart racing, some adventures for kids based on Tails, and lesser ports of Genesis titles. It would take personal nostalgia or some serious devotion to either Sega or Sonic for most to find these fulfilling. If anything, it’s neat to see how close they got to recreating the series on a very limited piece of hardware, but it’s not a compelling gameplay experience in 2023.
The standalone Sonic Origins Plus would’ve been easier to recommend if it had included the Genesis originals of Sonic Spinball and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine instead and Sonic 3D Blast. This would’ve put the “origin” in Origins and completed Sonic’s Genesis library. Even if these were only emulated, not painstakingly rebuilt like the Anniversary editions of the core games, it would’ve been preferable to a dozen wonky handheld oddities.
There are also new Extreme trials for the Mission mode, and even more artwork and ephemera to unlock in the Museum, a nice touch for completionists. A small set of challenges commemorates Knuckles and Amy’s new playable horizons but amounts to a pretty token scavenger hunt of basic activities. It’s a little more icing on a cake that was already pretty sweet.
I don’t discredit the historical validity of preserving these niche titles or the worth of adding even more playable options to the main games—but $9.99 is a considerable price for a dozen hard-to-swallow pills and what could’ve been a free update. Headcannon and Sonic Team put a lot of care into everything else about Sonic Origins Plus, and this update could’ve done more to validate the extra price tag.
(The score below reflects the Sonic Origins Plus DLC as a standalone purchase. I still stand by the 9.5 I gave Sonic Origins last year, and I recommend the new physical version to anyone who loved these Genesis games as a kid.)
