Sonic Adventure: Myth and Meaning

Available now on YouTube

“Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem. And more than once, that impression which I can’t describe except by saying that it’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.”

- CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

Introduction

My first nightmares were of thunderstorms, torrential judgment from faceless gray clouds. And in Florida, where hot rain would fall for hours in a static haze, I felt powerless as my beady eyes blinked out from under the bed. Even now, when the thunder starts to rumble overhead, I think back to missed days of school and interstate nightmares, my eyes squeezed shut in peril. I hate the sound of rain.

At first, thinking there must be something wrong with me, they put me in therapy. All I did was color mutely. The psychologist would watch me from the other side of the desk and take down notes. I always wondered what they wrote, but in the meantime, I kept my nose down to the crayon scribbles. I used blue, lots of blue, painting the water above my head a swimming pool shade in a school of impassive grace clouds. If my reservedness had precluded talk therapy, the meaning of my drawings had escaped the ineffable. And on I colored.

These, in retrospect, had been the days of giants who walked the earth. Rain or not, my fears would bury their first roots these formative first years. My unchecked thoughts would multiply beyond themselves. My shakiness could not be resolved short of ceaseless reassurance and repetition, and in what other soil are religious imageries first founded? The Children’s Bible pushed me even further into these clumsy spires wherein inferior replications overwhelm the limits of the American Protestant imagination. The artist’s fantastical illustrations belie the author’s dismissive tone throughout, a voice both distant and uncaring: “Then all they saw were the dead bodies, washed onto the beach”. Had the adaption’s intent been to reveal the spirit of the Old Testament as a faceless totem, an uncovered fetish for a warrior sect, there may have been some success here. Instead, the distance between the text’s reader and its sacred origin bloat greatly to an impasse, shutting all doorways to the divine. Was this the true objective?

Creation stories impart as much significance to the creative agent as they do to the audience of the day. And in the ancient world, where such stories were frequently borrowed and retold among different personages, the adaptations and their mutations of the epics brought forth new meanings byway of mythological synthesis. The morose illustrated edition of the Christian creation story did not impress its wisdoms upon me, nor did my fear of rain subside. Instead, illustrations of a world literally awash in its sin terrified me as a thunderclap from above. The story of Noah’s Ark is a common introduction to Christianity for most of we Protestants, but I struggled to reconcile the great angry god of Noah’s time with the religious jubilee of my childhood in any other way than simply placating God, who was quick to anger and seemingly just as capable as changing his mind. Were my street ’ s rains, too, a response to man ’ s anguished sins? These scenarios humor me now, but as a child, I feared not the waters but their spring, the faceless judgment in the sky and desert sands. I was afraid of God; I think most children are.

There may be an element of incredulity to the relevance of Sonic Adventure, no less its relevance here. But as myths inform people and people write myths, so, too, do the images of one’s childhood offer a lifelong foundation for meaning. At present, the values and symbologies of a life lived trace their genealogy to impressionable minds and a steady media diet. Are these myths and meanings to be discounted? One considers the significance of a first recallable nightmare, heeding especially the identifiable components and their origins in the images of one’s childhood. A friend, for example, sheepishly recounts a phobia of dogs crudely strewn together from jagged corner-cut memories of Beethoven. I take the accusation in stride, that I am reaching in the dark for a personal narrative; myths and meanings have long lit the way out of the dark.

Sonic Adventure, then. And what more to say? I am not its first revisionist, nor would I be the first to fawn over its style, its sound, or its speed. 1999’s 3-D hedgehog adrenaline sponge all but guaranteed a multigenerational legacy, weaving together breakneck gameplay with the sleek tones of modern day. Sonic the Hedgehog leaps from landmark to landmark, smashing through office corridors and spinning across Mesoamerica. All throughout, tone gushes freely. Sonic and his ensemble cast are as emblematic of the late ‘90s as Outkast and Bill Clinton, sporting sharp lines, hair gel, attitude. The game captures a glimmering optimism in a parallel to the decade’s own.

But back to myths and their meanings. I was born in 1998, just one year before the game’s release. Had there been any expectation of my plastic brain absorbing the game’s innovative level design or Bill Clinton’s balanced budget, it would have to wait. My first experience with Sonic Adventure had been from behind my fingers in the dead of night as my older brother flicked the controller buttons, our faces immersed in blue lights, and in my mind’s eye, I constructed a facsimile of what I understood to be the narrative. By the time I would muster up the coordination to tackle the game on my own, it would be 2004, and I would be six years old; by the time I could truly wrap my head around all the semantics, I wager I was 12 or 13. Our GameCube was purple, but our controller was silver; I remember that much of the time. Quickly, however, my impressionable self would fall in love with not only Sonic Adventure but its brilliant story. And so I stake my claim to Sonic Adventure not on any game-based merits but its story, its soul. When the game finally started and our hero faded into the coming conflict, I took a deep breath, and undoubtedly I must have braced myself, for our villain is of water, and his herald is rain.

Sonic Adventure has done more than dazzle my mind. It has informed my theological imagination; raised life where there once was none; and, in no small feat, plunged deep into the dark, murky waters of Noah and the Ark, searching for answers.

We Have Our Own Styles That We Won't Change

There is silence, a city stretching to meet an awakening evening populace, and then — and there always is — commotion. Sirens! Police chatter sprinkles the moonlight airwaves. They are in hot pursuit, kicking up dust and deftly avoiding pedestrians. Who are they, and what can they do? All questions dissipate as Sonic jumps into view. This is our character, our audience surrogate. Sonic is fast, fast like the wind, and immediately he races to the scene. This is how Sonic Adventure kicks off the story; more, this is how we’ll define our hero. Fast, courageous, impulsive.

Not too long after our superhero introduction we acquaint ourselves with Chaos. Dr. Eggman — the returning antagonist — directly characterizes him as “the God of Destruction”; cross that with his quick dispatching of our officers, and Sonic is quick to battle, narrowly reaching a stalemate. The story continues from here, and Sonic and his friends must race to gather the seven Chaos Emeralds before Dr. Eggman can fully empower his new bioweapon and take over the world. This is a story of heroes and villains. But this interpretation is not the full story, and it is only the literal reading of the story. This is not the story that captured my imagination; at most, even though this description accurately presents the literal sequence of the game throughout, it is only the beginning of that cherished truth.

Sonic Adventure uses chronological breaks to tell its story — narrative time travel. There are two conflicting bylines within this saga: the primary narrative events, straightforward as they are, and the fragmented memories of the past, revealed just as inexplicably and serendipitously as encounters with the divine and other Old Testament theophanies. The game’s ebb and flow leverages this choreography to establish narrative suspense and build tension with the player’s expectations. Returning to our heroes and villains interlude, the fluidity of time in Sonic Adventure forces a certain empathy onto its captive audience, reversing character roles as motivations are spotlit and heightening the story’s stakes with new information. Further compounding these effects is the slow burn reveal of this exposition, never flooding the player’s senses but instead complementing movements in the present. Centrally, the game emphasizes that conflict buckles under the pressure of divine revelation.

At any rate, the playable characters all respond to the threat of Chaos as is expected of their persons. Sonic races against the clock in a mad scramble to collect the Emeralds before Eggman, locking horns with Chaos in a few scattered climaxes. Tails and Knuckles follow in their respective styles, but both storylines follow a similar path to Sonic’s. What stand out, then, are Amy’s, Big the Cat’s, and E-102 Gamma’s modes. Heroic all the same, these stories provide unique perspectives to an epic. Big, for example, plays something of a civilian role as he seeks to rescue his friend Froggy, the two of them caught up in a drama far larger than anything they could have expected, while the entangled threads of Amy and E-102 Gamma dive further into the game’s pathos. These 3 characters — Amy in particular, given her performance immediately following the role of a damsel in her first appearance in Sonic CD — clue the player into the question of heroic identity, demonstrating that a hero may take many forms, some most uniquely unexpected. For the bulk of Sonic Adventure, this thought awaits fulfillment.

Ancient Cities Blazing

Our shifts through time and space paint something of an issue for Sonic and the player. For one, the information gathered does not come into the fold — ever. Throughout an individual character’s playthrough and between all the remainders, at no point does the audience find a use for any of these corrupted memories. At this point in Sonic’s arc, one imagines stumbling upon some sort of weakness to exploit against Chaos. (A potential solution does emerge, even if it is ultimately rejected, but we are ignoring endgame events for now.) Perhaps also memory is too feeble a phrase; dream suffices plenty. The ancient world of Sonic Adventure is quiet and dreamlike. In fact, these environments are completely silent. There is no looping background music; instead, these are the only playable hubs without some variant of it. This choice by the game designers marks the past as an other, something at best conceivable but never experienced in full as in a dream. The acute silence suggests a touch of the divine.

Without a complete portrait, Sonic treats Chaos as an otherwise unremarkable challenge among others, just one of many. This is true for all of the characters who directly challenge Chaos, whereas the few who do not confront the creature are those who actually had glimpsed him in the past. Perhaps this speaks to a blindspot in our characters’ vision, a subconscious bias against Chaos that masks their view in both chronologies. One can not understand the past without total perspective, underscoring the need for active participation from within. Is this where I had first gone wrong with Noah and the ark? My childhood interpretation — politely excluding from the conversation the lingering lens that had followed me partially into adulthood — had rested on something of an assumption after all, albeit not one with which I had come up myself. The original meaning had been effected by the mythology of God in my American youth: again, the intimidating throne of the faceless giant, quick to flood out his creation and in truth impossible to trust fully, the shortsighted rainbow promise notwithstanding.

Of course, this had been only my perspective at the time. When speaking with regard to fundamental misconstructions, a revision of the past in search of the full picture is the beginning of the healing process. What’s more, these pilgrimages condemn not the beast Chaos himself but his proper beginning: warfare, murder, genocide — violence. Chaos is not indicted or, worse yet, justified by our newfound knowledge. He is contextualized, allowed to breathe something deeper into the game. These themes reverberate throughout the complete story, tying each thread into a completed tapestry best viewed from afar. Violence is the source of this drama, much as it was in Noah’s day. What Sonic Adventure has to say about violence is that it is a cycle, stretching back immeasurably into generations past and returning always. It is violence with which our heroes initially respond to Chaos and, through reflection, it is violence that is condemned as a boomerang and rejected outright.

Put in these terms, it is easy to understand Chaos as something of the Old Testament God in the story of Noah. After all, Chaos lashes out at the fallen world in a wrathful answer to the murder of the innocent, child-like Chao; his crusade is a reaction to violence. Truly, Chaos floods the world, an analog to God’s own decision when faced with the corruption of our world. This is how the ancient Echidnas understood their world, and it is how the player in the last act understands theirs. The former is communicated by the ominous mural in Sonic’s “Lost World” level, depicting a monstrous leviathan destroying civilization in a type of a myth within a myth. As a child, when I first made it far enough in the game to find this mural, I was afraid, just I was when I happened about the ghastly illustrations of the flood in my illustrated Bible. Yet Sonic Adventure asserts that it is decisively not Chaos whose climactic vengeance is divinely sanctioned; in truth, no one’s will be. Sonic Adventure insists that retribution is not the antidote to violence, and I extrapolate this claim to infer retribution is insufficient as an antidote to sin. As Tikal says, “ greed is our enemy, ” and “ once it starts, you will always want more. ” Is greed the conditional phrase here, or can it be swapped with any systemic sin, always necessitating a perpetual victimization? By any account, Chaos — in his own massacring of innocents — demonstrates that victimhood is a fluid identity, that the makings of an aggressor can be assumed at will, no matter its beginnings.

Creation stories are not intellectual property. They are shared across cultural lines, adapting to the needs of a people and to the curvature of their environment. Noah’s flood is predated by a nearly identical telling in The Epic of Gilgamesh, although as always it is the seemingly minute deviations that color the page. As Marilynne Robinson writes in Reading Genesis, these traditions begin as an attempt to “suffuse material originally foreign” to them, something I envision between the Genesis flood and Sonic Adventure (although Genesis is a bit older than it, in truth). Genesis takes the Babylonian flood myth and imparts its own ideas, most notably that of God’s mercy, the true climax of the story. Mercy as a critical attribute of God is the meaning of the myth, a sharp contrast to the filicidal spectacle in Gilgamesh. Somehow, this all had been lost in translation when I encountered Noah’s Ark in the Children’s Illustrated Bible. Maybe it was not the exact words but rather the dismal illustrations, a bleak reminder that the promise to never again do this was coming from the God who had done this to the world and all its creatures in the beginning. My knowledge of God was the darkness of the flood, its dark blue waves stretching across the endless black night. Surely, a young player may think, this is Sonic’s experience with the depiction of Chaos in the “Lost World”.

But violence, no matter its origin or its target, is always a misstep. Through these flashbacks, we understand Chaos’s transformation from a gentle protector to an outright monster as a consequence of systemic violence. The real heart of this storytelling is not a justification for Chaos’s violence, either throughout a retributive framework or under divine command, rather that the true solution to widespread destruction is healing, starting from within and slowly working its way outside. With a closer reading of the climax, we may reject outright also violence as a means of stopping Chaos, a steep refusal of the oxymoronic “ just war ” theory. The game goes to great lengths to prove both points.

I'm Not Gonna Think This Way

Fortunately for us, the game plants the seeds for Chaos’s ending long in advance. Gamma’s story begins as one of Dr. Eggman’s latest creations. Through epiphany, he embarks on a story of redemption, a crusade to free the animals that power his fellow machines that ends in suicide. The truth of a redemption arc in the real world is that they do not begin ex nihilo ; they are always products of external intervention. In Christianity, they are closely follow divine revelation. Consider Saul on the road to Damascus and his resultant Christophany. The encounter leaves Saul — now Paul — blinded for some time, suggesting that redemption may exact a toll of some kind and reinforcing a common association of vision and belief as was typically understood in the Greco-Hebrew world. Gamma’s story incorporates this duality.

There had been a quick allusion to this storyline in our initial inventory, but the truth of the matter is that this plot is the cipher for the climactic events that follow its completion. If I could wrap this idea up neatly, I would say that there is no true engagement between the audience and the themes in Sonic Adventure without Gamma. Gamma’s story is the most blatant of all the game’s nudges toward a particular narrative; without it, the final encounter between Sonic and Chaos would appear more accurately as a non sequitur. Through this robot’s point of view and all of its dramatic foreshadowing, we are given all the necessary pieces to predict the ending in advance.

Gamma begins his story alongside his “brothers”, all of whom are powered by animals inside their metal frames and instructed by Dr. Eggman to retrieve a frog who has swallowed a piece of Chaos’s body. Succeeding in his mission, Gamma is then tasked with kidnapping Amy, whose new friend — a bird (a dove, perhaps) — possesses a Chaos Emerald in its necklace. This new mission is bookended by an accidental discovery of the fate of the other robots who failed in their mission, as Gamma discovers the gruesome fate awaiting them as they are painfully vivisected onboard the Egg Carrier. Later, Amy pleads with Gamma to release both her and the bird, and, surprisingly, Gamma obliges. He abets the duo in their escape and, following a brief scuffle with Sonic onboard the Egg Carrier, later betrays Eggman to set free the other E-102 series robots.

Gamma ’ s true turning point in his arc from mindless machine to an independent agent of his own accord is the miraculous experience of love. Through flashback sequences after Gamma’s disappearance from Eggman’s fleet, we see two repeating motifs within his perspective: the faces of both Amy and Dr. Eggman. In Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Love Alone Is Credible, the Swiss theologian describes the awakening of love within the child as our first bridge to the external world, using the example of a newborn child seeing their mother’s face for the first time. In Gamma’s mind, the juxtaposition of the two characters represents not only an ethical dilemma but also Gamma’s second birth. It is ultimately the witnessing of love, however inexplicable, that awakens a cohesive belief system within our protagonist, allowing him the breadth of freedom to be not necessarily what he wants to be (which, as the villain would have it, is a murderous drone) but rather the freedom to be who he is — namely, the pink bird that sets aglow his own conscious spark, much like the pink hedgehog whose love is sufficiently credible. The reality of Gamma’s journey crosses a one-way road leading directly to death, both that of the machines imprisoning the birds and his own.

Love, second birth, and death. It is all so convoluted; surely there must have been a tighter way for the game to have expressed its themes without this peculiar syntax. What is the point of this perplexity? The answer is no doubt an undertaking in myth and meaning; these ancient Christian myths (in no way a judgment of their falsifiability) convey a deeper meaning that strikes at the ineffable, that itself being the heart of Christian mystery. Love baptizes Gamma into his second birth, and his second birth begets a death of the previous self. “ You must be born again, ” the Gospel of John says; “ unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit ” . In the modern, more sanitized world, we might describe this as something of self-renunciation at death. E-102 Gamma’s tragedy is that he must destroy himself to save what he loves, and he takes it on faith that he has chosen correctly. Sonic Adventure interprets these myths in a different medium for a far different people, yet the meaning persists.

This different medium may prove troublesome. After all, Gamma’s particular levels are the most violent in the game’s roster, depicting his premeditated killing of the other robots and ultimately a climactic murder-suicide. Distancing ourselves from a literal understanding of these events allows for a more useful depth of understanding. Firstly, the limitations of video games as a medium necessitate some degree of interactivity for the player, which are more pragmatically realized through typical gameplay metrics such as hitboxes, health percentages, and a win condition. Secondly, Gamma is not actually killing anyone. This may seem unbelievable to anyone who has played through Gamma’s levels, which are high octane lock-on shooters that end in destructive boss battles against the other E-102 robots. The key to understanding the truth of this narrative is that the robots and their animals are not two separate consciousnesses but rather two expressions of the same consciousness. This theory is supported by Gamma’s flashbacks, which pull from both Gamma the machine and the bird trapped within. I believe, truly, the machines are corruptions of the self, and their destruction is a cleansing fire. To reiterate, Gamma is not destroying anyone; on the contrary, he is restoring them. As a rule, interactivity is an inconclusive topic in the debate of whether video games are art, and for good reason. In Sonic Adventure, for example, the level design of Gamma necessitates some sort of action, even if it seems to obfuscate the narrative scope. However, cutscenes, flash backs, and other stylistic elements gently steer the player into understanding the meaning of it all, which, in this case, is death to oneself in pursuit of something far more precious: love.

Gamma undergoes a sort of death, and, once the fire settles and the smoke dissipates over the broken body, the spirit rises. Similar fire imagery is used across the New Testament for a similar end. The idea of a furnace, to which it was once alluded in a previous synoptic myth as a cause of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” is elucidated more brashly in the Apostle Paul’s epistle as a refiner’s fire, separating out the impurities from the valuable gold underneath. Both myths are true, and both myths ultimately share the same meaning. Surely, Gamma undergoes what must be a very painful death — he explodes, after all — but this death is not until a final image flashes into his head, that of Amy’s bird, his older brother’s bird, and an unknown bird. Yet it is the gold that persists through the fire, and the player finishes Gamma’s story with the reunion of all 3 birds, a reunited family, now including Gamma’s true self in this new bird, a pink bird — pink, like Amy. Gamma’s death as an act of expressing the inarticulable — love, anguish — justifies the acute silence that permeate his playthrough. He cannot, and does not, articulate the reasons for his crusade; instead, we are handed everything visually, because love is already plenty ineffable even for humans, let alone machines . Love alone is credible, indeed.

The penultimate chapter in Sonic Adventure elicits a sobering feeling. The emphasis on machines over flesh for our dramatic perspectives, one that allows not only a bloodless dramatic trajectory, is useful, to be sure, for expressing these meaningful ideas in a video game. There is a layer of abstract foreshadowing that, then, the player is responsible for realizing. At this point in the narrative, questions remain. What are we to do about Chaos, whose near absence from this playthrough casts an unmissable shadow? Is Gamma’s story a mere prelude to much higher stakes in the climax, giving the player time to breathe before moving on to what matters most? The most important question is the one provoked by the conclusion of Gamma’s story, which posits that a final victory is impossible without restoration.

Or rather still, if anyone can be saved, can everyone be saved?

Gotta Open Your Heart, Dude

After beating all six characters’ unique stories, the player is given a seventh from which to select: a golden question mark, later revealed to be Super Sonic. This is the climax of the game, the ultimate showdown between Sonic and Chaos, both empowered by the Chaos Emeralds, but in reality, its seeds had been planted all along. Truly, the game takes us back to the beginning before it ever reaches the end. Far before Sonic seemingly defeated Chaos, before the Master Emerald was shattered, before the echidna Tikal had ever begged her father to not conquer the shrine of the Chao ’ s, there was an ark, the flood, and Noah. Sonic Adventure dives headfirst into the waters of mythology in its pursuit of meaning and invites its players to do the same.

Sonic and his friends quickly discover that Chaos is not only alive still but enraged, having spilled his anger onto Dr. Eggman, his “master,” and seeking the full power of the seven Chaos Emeralds. Before he can act — and how fortunate we are that he does not — Tikal spirits Sonic away to the past for a final revelation. There, he sees the past in its totality. Not only is he fully playable in this sequence, adding to a sense of cohesion between the two timelines, but he, and the player, is finally made aware of the meaning behind the bestial mythology he, and the player, discovered in the Lost World sequence. Tikal’s father has called the warrior echidnas to arms for a decisive siege upon the shrine of the Master Emerald. She begs for him to lay down his weapons, but he persists, trampling not only his own daughter but killing the child-like Chao who roam freely upon the sanctuary. Sensing the violence, Chaos emerges from a puddle in his aqueous first form, absorbs the Chaos Emeralds, and floods the world. Desperate, Tikal traps Chaos and herself in the Master Emerald, stopping the flood although unable to rescue any of her species from their demise. Sonic awakens from this flashback, but before he can secure the final emerald, Chaos grabs it at the last second, transforms — decays, really — into his Perfect Chaos form, and launches a devastating flood upon Station Square, killing thousands at a minimum as Sonic watches in horror.

This sounds eerily familiar. A god, seeing the violence that has spread across his world like a plague, decides to flood his creation in a destructive purge, sparing only a good-natured individual. This is the story of Noah’s Ark as it had first been portrayed in my childhood’s storybook Bible. The hermeneutical advantage of Sonic Adventure is its dialog with this ancient flood mythology. When Tikal enters into the present time after Perfect Chaos floods Sonic’s world, she is quick to suggest that they again imprison the monster, but Sonic questions the move altogether.

"How can that help?" He asks. "It won't change how he feels inside, will it? His heart will still remain in turmoil, and his anger won't just vanish. He'll just be trapped -- forever!"

Read literally, as most modern Christians would, God’s flood in the Old Testament certainly did not help. Violence persists, not only in our world but in the world of the Old Testament, and much of it sanctioned by him. But, more importantly, it is repeated directly by the descendant generations of the deluge’s sole survivors. Noah himself goes on to sin against God immediately in the chapters succeeding God’s promise to never again flood the world. To say nothing of the flood itself, the apparent shift in character, from the retributive God of the Old Testament, to the Jesus revealed in the New Testament, creates a cognitive dissonance that many modern readers do not have the exegetical tools to fully decipher. What makes Sonic Adventure remarkable is not that it invents a new exegesis — quite the opposite, in fact. The themes of Sonic Adventure mirror how the earliest Christian communities understood the flood, Noah, and God himself. Among many deeper ideas that simply would not fit the purview of this project, God is fully revealed in Christ, and the mythology of the Old Testament must be refined by the cruciform.

Tikal offers no answer to Sonic’s question. How could she? Inside, she must be surprised by his rebuke, and someone as empathetic as her must feel somewhat responsible for Chaos’s lashing out. Whatever the case, their interaction is interrupted by the sudden appearance of the Chaos Emeralds, now drained of color. Tails arrives with the rest of the playable characters and explains that Perfect Chaos must have used only the negative powers of the emeralds. Should Sonic harness their real power, positivity, he may be able to stop the beast. This is exactly what Sonic decides to do, and he is transfigured into a holy, golden state: Super Sonic. He ascends to the sky for a climactic showdown as “Open Your Heart,” the game’s theme song, triumphantly plays out for the first time.

Sonic’s new strategy is later explained by Tails as using the positive energy of the emeralds to neutralize Perfect Chaos. What does this mean? Within the confines of the game, this means another boss battle, albeit with a golden flare. Read symbolically, however, Sonic is accomplishing two key things that successfully demarcate this conflict as conclusive. First of all, Sonic is actually confronting the problem, not merely avoiding it as Tikal had done in the past and then suggested repeating. To expand on this, Sonic’s abrupt restructuring of the situation to accommodate helping Perfect Chaos and resolving the monster’s emotional needs introduce the idea of a “problem” beyond immediately disarming Chaos. Consider Satan, who in John Milton’s Paradise Lost laments that he could make a Hell out of Heaven; without addressing the underlying spiritual sickness, wherever Chaos goes, there is only Hell.

Critically, Sonic is also solving an immemorially extant problem, that of violence. Throughout the game’s flashbacks, it is revealed that the immediate conflict of Sonic Adventure has existed far longer than the span of the game’s main plot. Violence — contextualized as boomeranging from the warrior echidna tribe, to Chaos, to the ancient world, to Chaos again, and then to the modern world — has established an impossible win condition, an infinite feedback loop that limits the available tools to violent means that effect violent consequences. As an original sin, violence corrupts the world and pathologizes itself. It is the problem that God sets out to resolve in the book of Genesis, and though the flood is not denoted throughout the Old Testament as engendering additional violence in response to it directly, the persistent proliferation of brutality implies that a violent solution (e.g., an apocalyptic flood) to a violent problem is insufficient for addressing its root causes; in other words, the weeds will continue to spread throughout the garden . By refusing to either turn away from the problem or propagate it further, Sonic instead chooses a third way, that of radical non-violence and restorative justice. This dramatic break with the established status quo parallels the ethics of the New Testament; it is Christ who says to not resist evil, later reiterated as not repaying evil for evil and instead overcoming evil with good. (There are many additional examples, but they do not bear repeating here.) Wrath, it must be said, invites a dangerous cycle.

When the final battle concludes, Chaos has reverted back to his initial state. Seeing the Chao for the first time in thousands of years, he is disarmed, peaceful. Tikal appears before him, these two intimately entangled characters face-to-face for the first time in the narrative. Cathartically, Sonic’s plan has worked: Chaos is neutralized, perhaps remorseful, a stranger to his past personages all the same. Yet, when Tikal reveals to him that the Chao have not only survived for generations but have coexisted peacefully with humans, one cannot help but surrender to the sublime in all its awe. This beautiful sequence informs the player that, finally, true peace has been achieved — on its own terms, no less. When Tikal ingratiates the player at the end, there is this idea that Tikal, too, byway of Sonic’s heroics, has been changed for the better. If no one is safe from the viral effects of violence, then it follows that all can participate in the restoration of a broken world.

“The fighting’s over,” Tikal says, “harmony’s restored, and life goes on.” This powerful statement, always quick to stir my heart, surprises me every time. The dramatic reveal that the climax of Sonic Adventure is not violence but peace fixes my eyes to the sky above. There is a subversive beauty to the arc of the game’s narrative, one that appears all the more unique as retrospectives on the early 2000s swell to a critical mass. Even still, so what? Sonic Adventure, like a great deal of stories, portrays a redemption arc and (plausibly) leans upon mythology with its flood imagery. Certainly abnormal for a fifth-generation tentpole video game, no less a “Sonic” game, but is it worth all this time and energy?

Some personal thoughts are warranted here. There is an attractive quality to synthesizing some of these bold claims outward; I’d like to argue an equally outlandish conclusion, something such as “Sonic Adventure was the first of its kind” or, more brashly, “the game I spent so much time writing about was, coincidentally, a childhood favorite of mine”. I do think that Sonic Adventure is unique in its storytelling, and I hope I have argued that case sufficiently enough, but there’s a deeply personal appeal at play here. What I hold to be far more important than the revision of Sonic Adventure is the meaning of the Christian texts, and I happen to also think that mythology — both the great ancient words and the stories of our time — is the mode of meaning. In “The Consuming Fire”, George MacDonald spoke of the ancient Hebrew audience in relation to their religious writings, affirming that incomplete revelations are partial, yes, but “partial in order to be true,” and I believe this claim to be congruent here:

“No revelation can be other than partial […] For what revelation, other than a partial, can the highest spiritual condition receive of the infinite God? But it is not therefore untrue because it is partial. Relatively to a lower condition of the receiver, a more partial revelation might be truer than that would be which constituted a fuller revelation to one in a higher condition; for the former might reveal much to him, the latter might reveal nothing […] The true revelation rouses the desire to know more by the truth of its incompleteness.”.

I like to think that I have grown closer into theology than when I had first started years ago, my tiny fingers underlining the glossy worlds of my storybook Bible. I realize now that my struggle with an ancient myth, one divorced from its readership by an impossible gulf, is less so a critical evaluation of the creative agent of our world than the community in which the myth adapts and evolves — in which the myth lives. I owe this deeper understanding to the myths of my time and all of their partial revelations: Genesis, the New Testament … and Sonic Adventure. I experience life freely now in the rain; disappointingly, I notice it only in the annoying splashes on the back of my shoulders, forgetting to cherish the tenderness of a July storm. One’s experience with a work of art is the aftertaste, the quiet walk back to the car after the movie. My experience with Noah’s Ark is the slow burn of steam on my ears, the rushing overflow of a rocky river on a stormy hike, the smell of wet concrete in the city. By that same grace, my experience with Sonic Adventure is the burnt smell of one last “zap” on the CRT, a disarming chuckle in the darkness as childhood fears melt away. There are few pursuits more valuable than mythology.