Well,
Sonic 3 was one of my first Genesis games (alongside
Sonic 1,
Sonic 2,
Spinball and several other titles that I needn't go into). Even without
& Knuckles, it felt like the most refined of the set:
- The levels were larger and more cohesive, with seamless transitions between acts and generally logical transitions between zones - actual cutscenes, which Sonic 1 and 2 barely had (the intro to Scrap Brain Zone 3 and the end of Wing Fortress being the only instances I can think of, endings notwithstanding).
- The levels felt more complex than either of its predecessors; while all three still eventually boil down to moving from left to right, like most platformers in existence do, Sonic 3 had more of a tendency to loop around on itself, and had more situations where the level mandated you move up or down (as opposed to Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, where the paths generally remained parallel to each other and just had you fall into a lower, slower path if you botched up a jump).
- More hidden areas with bonus goodies, but even hidden paths entirely.
- More shields! Shields that DID things! No longer was it just a matter of grabbing a shield to protect your ring count; now you grabbed a shield to protect yourself from the rocket jets on bosses, from electrical attacks by those weird robots in Carnival Night, from ever drowning in a water stage ever again (which got a suprising amount of use, since five of the six zones had water in them, even if only for Act 2 in most cases). Plus, all three had more active effects - double-jumping either had you dash forward without needing to spin dash, do an actual second jump to gain height when Tails wasn't around, or bounce downward directly onto a robot's head with enough force that you'd rebound way up into the air. Sonic even had a move for double-jumping without a shield, although I didn't grasp how useful the Insta-Shield actually was until several years of using the Internet later. Good stuff.
- An actual save system, so I didn't have to tackle the entire game in one go, and then New Game+ once it was beaten, so I could jump to whatever level I felt like replaying instead of always starting from Angel Island. Nor did I have to get all the emeralds in one go - the New Game+ let me pick them up at my own pace, which was good, because that yellow/purple one was giving me a lot of trouble.
- More bosses! Instead of fighting one boss at the end of Act 3 or 2, every level had its own unique boss - Eggman only piloting half of them personally. The game even ended with not one boss like Final Zone, and not two like Death Egg, but three bosses in a row, all of them being pretty intense fights to six-year-old me (especially Squeeze Tag Robot/Big Arm, which is the only one of the three I'd say is still a fairly challenging fight, since screwing up your jumps slightly in either direction immediately gets you punished, leaving little room for error).
- The music quality was seemingly higher. More varied drum samples, for one, but then you also had unique mixes for each act, instead of the entire zone sharing the same theme. The Michael Jackson influence wasn't even a blip on the radar for me at the time, but the fact he was involved just makes the whole thing that much more mind-blowing.
- Tails could fly at your command, instead of just when he was scrolled off of the screen, meaning playing as him actually opened up new areas, whereas in Sonic 2 you were kind of just playing as Sonic, but with orange fur instead of blue. Heck, he could actually swim, too; something Sonic could never figure out.
- There was a total graphical overhaul. The levels were much more detailed, graphically. Item boxes were taller. Sonic looked more three-dimensional. Now, looking back on it, Sonic 1, 2 and CD kind of benefitted from the cleaner, more colorful and more geometric look they had going for them, but 3 was still one helluva looker, and I'm not ashamed to say is one of the best-looking games on the system.
Of course, it wasn't without its faults. We went down to six unique zones from
Sonic 2's 10/11 (depending on whether you count Sky Chase/Wing Fortress as one zone or two), making for a "shorter" game (although given how long the acts were, it kind of evened out). There were some noticeable road blocks I encountered when trying to get through; the huge wall chase in Hydrocity Act 2 being my first, and then, well,
that thing being the second, bigger road block. There were obviously large swathes of the stages that neither Sonic nor Tails could access, making you wonder just what these barriers could be hiding behind them - but you'd never know without cheating! The game was also pretty glitchy, particularly if you started to use the level select to any degree (I distinctly recall going to Marble Garden Act 2, leaving the level and going to another one, and the new level still having Marble Garden Act 2's title card - it wasn't very stable, either). Still, it was undoubtedly the best of the three games.
...and THEN came
Sonic & Knuckles. Not only was it a fairly competent game in its own right - still kinda short, and the Aqua Shield's primary use was kinda useless without any water to swim around in, but with a new character whose moveset was different still from Sonic and Tails and let him access areas that not even Tails could get into - but it could lock on to
Sonic 3, turning both games into one single meaty campaign whose length definitely outshined
Sonic 2's.
Those areas in
Sonic 3 that I could never figure out? Turns out those were all for Knuckles, with large chunks of the stages being completely different from those the other two would run through. Angel Island started off similar, but then most of Act 2 was spent underground. Hydrocity had gliding challenges that the others couldn't reach (or clear, even if they could've reached it). Marble Garden had a completely different boss fight. Carnival Night was entirely spent well under the main stage, although disappointingly, it lacked a boss fight (well, unless you knew where to jump to allow Knuckles to play Sonic's Act 2 and then climbed up the suction tube at the end; THEN you could fight CNZ2's normal boss fight). Ice Cap went further underground in Act 2 where Sonic and Tails ran around on the surface. Launch Base Zone 2 took place in an entirely new underground segment, nothing like the Launch Base I was used to, but on par with it in terms of difficulty. This design ethic carried on to
S&K, too, although not quite as pronounced initially; only small sections of the stages would differ from Sonic's, with the exception of Lava Reef, which was almost entirely different once again. But then Knuckles hit Hidden Palace, and suddenly Sky Sanctuary was completely different from Sonic's, with a nifty boss gauntlet that the others couldn't get to. It was practically like getting two games from the price of... well, uh, two games, I guess,
but never mind that.
Launch Base was a competent final stage, but Death Egg really took the cake. It was even better than
Sonic 2's incarnation; where that had been nothing more than two boss fights, here you had the hardest stages ever put into a
Sonic game to get through, and it was capped off with a fight against a humongous Eggman mecha with multiple stages to its fight! Took me a while to figure out you could jump over the giant laser, so finally putting that thing in its paces was extremely cathartic. Then I used the New Game+ to cheese my way through the
S&K half of the game, collecting all the emeralds from the
Sonic 3 half and not checking in to the
S&K half's special stage set, letting me play through as Super Sonic. I then used Super Sonic to easily beat the final mecha fight, content that I'd once again beaten the game, only this time a little easie- holy shit is that a secret extra stage
whaaaaaaaat
And if you weren't content with locking on to
Sonic 3, you could lock on to
Sonic 2 and play with the third new character through
that too; they even added new things to the old zones to encourage use of his unique abilities, such as the 1-Ups near the end of Chemical Plant Act 1. Plus, if you liked the special stages from
Sonic 3, lock it on with
literally every other Genesis game ever made and you'll get a unique stage - except for
Sonic 1, which gave you
134,217,728 of them. (Yeah, they're just made from different combinations of 128 different corners, but not like I'd noticed that at the time!)
So yeah, that's why
S3&K is the best of the lot.
Sonic 3 on its own would already be a strong contender, but then
S&K came along and fixed most of the remaining little things that didn't sit well with me, making it by far the most ambitious of the three. In essence, it is to the Genesis games what
Super Mario Bros. 3 was to the NES
Mario games - bigger and better in practically every way imaginable.
(I'm not entirely sure where I fit
Sonic CD into this, incidentally. Unlike many, I genuinely love that game, enough that it's a contender with
S3&K for top spot, in spite of its somewhat haphazard level design and the race against Metal Sonic in Stardust Speedway - I really hate that race. But of the three Genesis-only titles, it's no contest;
S3&K all the way.)
