GAME CLEAR No. 279 -- Sonic and the Black Knight

Sonic and the Black Knight (2009, Wii)

Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: SEGA
Clear Version: Wii
Clear Platform: Wii U
Clear Date: 2/22/26

---

Why should I care?
If you like cute ideas with pretty awful execution, you’ve come to the right place.

---

Where chivalry goes to die

At MAGFest, there’s a thing called the community orchestra. It’s an invitation for all willing and able musicians to form an ad-hoc orchestra and perform a short set of video game songs. Sometimes the actual composers of the pieces will step in to conduct their own music, or if the piece has a vocal part, the original singer may take the mic if they are a guest at that year’s event. Vocalist Johnny Gioeli of Crush40 did exactly that for the song “Knight of the Wind” this year.

My girlfriend participated in the community orchestra as part of the choir. This time, instead of flying, we drove from Atlanta to the convention in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of DC. It’s not the shortest drive, but it did provide ample time for my fellow traveler to practice her songs on the way up. I was really tickled when this song came up. Gioeli has a certain inimitable corniness and sincerity in his voice that has always endeared him to me, and like so many Sonic fans, I’ve always had a soft spot for “Live and Learn” from Sonic Adventure 2. It amused me that this was on the setlist, though, as it is a tune from one of the most critically derided games in the franchise, one that is noted for its 21st-century struggles. I made this known to my practicing passenger, to her amusement.

Through a combination of repetition and the fact that it bears many of the charming qualities of “Live and Learn”, I came to quite like “Knight of the Wind”. Gioeli getting misty-eyed as a ragtag force of dedicated musicians learned and performed his music with him warmed my heart too.

I think you can connect some dots here. I got home and played the game to an enthusiastic audience of one. It’s pretty god damn bad lol. As an object of play it is, anyway.

As a concept it’s pretty good! It’s a fan fiction about the Knights of the Round Table with characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog series portraying famous figures from said organization. Its story is told through a combination of gorgeous, pre-rendered 3D cutscenes and comic book-style scenes also quite competently illustrated. The voice actors are from the Sonic X anime and deliver the kind of child-friendly but solid performances you might expect. And, of course, it has, if nothing else, a very Sonic soundtrack.

The genius and downfall of the game is that Sonic has a sword that talks. Perfect for a system with a vertically oriented motion controller with a shitty little speaker in it! Also the sword is stern and serious and Sonic is Sonic. Banter!

Unfortunately, like the late Mike Leach, the game wants you to swing that sword fucking constantly. I’ve always been a motion control defender, but the derisive term “waggle” from the Wii era may as well have been coined for this game. You are going to be flailing that fucker from beginning to end.

It’s just antithetical to Sonic as a series. His whole deal is being fast. Don’t make me stop and slice people up! In the classic games, Sonic mows through enemies by just rolling up into the spiky ball form that his species is well-known for. No slowing down whatsoever. In the more modern Sonic games, this is typically replaced by doing a series of acrobatic homing attacks at clusters of enemies, often serving the secondary purpose of allowing Sonic to progress from a platforming perspective. Here, you can still home in on enemies, but it does jack shit unless you then commence wailing on them with the sword. It’s a pretty awful prosody of play for the blue blur.

There is ostensibly a combo system that would allow you to slice and dice chains of enemies without losing your stride by timing your swings (or something?). Sounds pretty cool! In practice, I very seldom was able to make this happen for anything approaching an extended period of time. Invariably, my momentum would halt entirely at some point. Maybe I’m just a dumbass, but if there was an intended reachable flow state, it doesn’t seem to have been apparent to contemporary critics either.

So anyway, it’s a pretty frustrating experience. Like other Sonic games of the era, there’s also sort of just a pervasive lack of gameplay polish. It contrasts quite bizarrely with the high production value of the music, cutscenes, storytelling, acting, et cetera. Those things really make you want to like the game itself! Unfortunately it just kinda sucks.

“Knight of the Wind” still rules, though. And now I’m a Certified True Fan. 😎🦔