Sonic Prime review: A high-octane jolt of fun

Netflix’s ‘Sonic Prime’ follows the titular hedgehog running fast to piece back together his home world after shattering it into multiple alternate worlds owing to a mistake made in ego and haste.

Story

Sonic and his friends fight against Eggman in Greenhill but in a hasty decision and the warnings of Tails, he collides with the Paradox Prism — a powerful artefact with incomprehensible energy stored within it.

The collision, as it turns out, was Eggman’s plan all along, and as the prism gets shattered, all of Sonic’s friends disappear, along with him and Shadow who was chasing after Sonic earlier.

Sonic gets transported to a void with many crystalline fragments floating willy-nilly. He then enters an alternate world where Greenhill is barely recognisable and instead of the lush greenery, there’s a dystopian scenery blotted with skyscrapers and a cold, dark atmosphere.

The inhabitants are incredibly morose too, with strict rules and regulations forced upon them by the tyrant rulers — the members of the Chaos Council. This council is made up of Eggman variants.

Meanwhile, Sonic meets with the variants of his friends and eventually teams up with them to rebel against the Chaos Council. He also tracks down the shard of the Prism, the crystal that powers this New Yoke City he’s stuck in.

Upon touching the crystal/shard, Sonic is transported to another reality where the primal variants of his friends live in disharmony in Boscage Maze.

After instilling harmony and brokering peace between his variant friends, Sonic touches the crystal native to this world and gets transported back to New Yoke City.

While he assists Rebel Rouge and Renegade Knucks in their fight against the Chaos Council, Nine returns to lend a hand after having worked on the crystal that he’d fled with when Sonic was transported.

The Chaos Council figure out the benefits of the crystal as well as of Nine’s new technology that harnesses its energy to create portals to other worlds. They now want to go to these worlds and retrieve the different crystals for more power.

When Nine gets captured by the council, Sonic runs to help but his acceleration transports him to a new reality on its own. In ‘No Place’ live a new batch of his friends’ variants, and this time, they turn out to be pirates.

While Sonic helps these pirates out and becomes their leader, the Chaos Council manages to catch up to him in this world, thanks to their captor Nine’s Shatterdrive technology.

Sonic and his new variant friends fight off the council’s forces and the hedgehog manages to reach the crystal, touching which transports him to a Shatterspace where nothing but debris floats in an endless void until he notices that there’s someone else there.

It’s none other than his rival Shadow the hedgehog, who got stuck in the void after the shattering that led to the creation of all these alternate worlds. ‘Sonic Prime’ ends with an angry Shadow jumping at Sonic with a mean punch.

Performances

‘Sonic Prime’ is a lot of fun thanks to the great voice casting. All the voice lenders have done a brilliant job with the different jubilant characters and portraying their eccentricities with optimum competence.

Positives

‘Sonic Prime’ is loads of fun and with a crisp average runtime, there’s a lot of stuff that seems to fly by quickly, thanks to the great pacing.

While the look of the animation may not be everyone’s cup of tea, some of the action sequences are brilliantly animated and swift and punchy editing works great and feels befitting of the frenetic characters in the centre fold.

With all the high-octane action and silliness overdrive, it’s easy to overlook the heart of the story and how Sonic Prime’s repentance drives him to navigate through the perilous multiversal terrains and learn the value of friendship.

Negatives

With so much action taking place in each episode, a number of gags can be quite repetitive and ultimately feel devoid of any considerable impact.

Being the first of many other seasons to come, ‘Sonic Prime’ suffers from a deficit of explanations and expositions, with many questions left frustratingly unanswered till the very end.

Verdict

With drawbacks few and far between, Netflix’s ‘Sonic Hedgehog’ is a thoroughly entertaining affair that inspires a great deal of fun while remaining heartfelt in its core message for the central characters and for the viewers.

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Also Read: Sonic Prime ending explained: Does Sonic return to his home world?