It was the year 2000. To commemorate the start of a new millennium, Sega decided to beef up the Dreamcast’s library with Sonic Shuffle. A curious move, considering it was a card-based board game that has nothing in common with the high-speed platforming that formed the Sonic games before it. Upon release, it was overlooked for this aforementioned deviation, which is a shame because it’s probably the most creative and wacky Sonic game to date.
The Sonic we know and love was teased in the intro, with Sonic and friends blasting through a city at breakneck speeds. Then, in the blink of an eye, they all get transported to a dream dimension and must play a board game to return to their normal lives.
While a board game sounds tame, Sonic Shuffle made things chaotic by allowing everyone to steal each other’s cards, numbered 1-6 with an extra “S” card that could move you seven spaces. You had your own deck which only you knew about thanks to the Dreamcast’s VMU (think: a secondary handheld console that displayed your cards), but three other players had their own face-down decks you could take from.
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You never knew what card you’d get when stealing, so while youcouldnab a 6 card, you might also get Eggman who once summoned specialized in 16 ways of ruining your day; he could take all of your rings, give your Precioustone fragments (like stars, fromMario Party) to someone else, or move you far away from the nearest collectible Precioustone fragment.
Our main (and unplayable) character here was Lumina Flowlight. She guarded the Precioustone, which is the crystallized essence of everyone’s dreams and sustains Maginaryworld — a world made up of our collective dreams. Our main antagonist was Void, who shattered the Precioustone so that Maginaryworld began fading out of existence.
As any good guardian would, Lumina roped random travelers into her mess. She guided Sonic and his buddies through a series of dreamlands, each suffering due to the broken Precioustone. Sonic gathered the stone’s fragments with the help of his friends (and a too-cool-for-school Knuckles, who only joined in because, as he puts it, he has “nothing better to do”) so each land would return to its former glory.
A generic story certainly, but the presentation and creativeness was what made this game such a fever dream. For example, my favorite dreamland was Fire Bird. Intended to represent people’s aspirations of freedom, Fire Bird was, quite literally, a massive fiery bird trapped inside a large aircraft, hurtling towards the ground.
As with every level, you progressed by collecting stone fragments on the game board. Progress on Fire Bird involved the aircraft igniting and losing pieces as the bird inside grew stronger. This made the aircraft plummet and faster towards the ground, giving proceedings a hectic sense of pace and intensity. Of course, the fact that it was a board gamedidhamper things a bit. Everyone was still pulling cards and casually mulling over choices while certain death approached.
Like many turn-based board games, there were real-time mini-games meant to offer a break from the monotony. In Sonic Shuffle, these games did their darndest to push the “weird dream” idea. One of the minigames, Sonicola, had Eggman hiding a shaken-up soda in a vending machine. You and the other three players then came along. Whoever picked the wrong drink was treated to an explosion, while everyone else sipped theirs.
In Tractor Beam Tag, Eggman trapped everyone in the pull of his machine, but one player broke free. If you were in the tractor beam, you’d coordinate with two other players to grab the free one. Then, you could randomly get selected to be the freed one. Once freed, you’d run for your life and use the conveniently placed dash pads to get a speed boost, or just run in circles around the hotdog stands. The three players still inside the beam lost at the end, and Eggman was implied tokidnapall three of them while the remaining player casually celebrated. Nevertheless, all players returned to the board afterwards to carry on with the main game. That’s dream logic, folks!
These standard mini-games only kicked in if a player landed on the avoidable mini-game spaces, so they didn’t overstay their welcome. What was unavoidable, however, was the game’s concept of “accidents.” Accidents were unique and randomly-occurring mini-games that changed depending on which dreamland you were in.
Emerald Coast, the game’s first level, was a great example of how this worked.
Here, every accident mini-game involved the beach paradise concept gone wrong. Ring Tide, for instance, involved collecting rings while avoiding rip tides. Sonic Parasol, meanwhile, made everyone fight for control of a huge parasol to collect rings, or else take shade to avoid the solar flares of an Eggman-turned-sun. Every dreamland had a climactic final accident too, which on Emerald Coast was Sonic Surfing, where everyone must surf a tidal wave to escape a collapsed iceberg. It was a hell of a spectacle, and the fact that each level had these unique challenges made you look forward to each one.
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Things got even weirder though. Landing on spaces marked with “?!” symbols triggered mini-events — short stories presented as a kind of point-and-click adventure. Many involved Eggman donning a laughably pathetic disguise, which could be a detective sitting on a park bench, a game show host offering one million rings to winners, and a salesman at a local bazaar. Other mini-events were more nightmarish, such as the one where you opened a coffin (for some godforsaken reason) then got attacked by Medusa, who was lying inside. Surely one of the strangest moments in Sonic history…
Cel-shaded graphics gave a soothing dreamlike overcoat to all the strong concepts, and the fantastical soundtrack is great too. Even though the game didn’t always nail the execution, it’s hard to overlook the ideas Sega had going on here.
So why wasn’t there a sequel? With how much time has passed since 2000, there is plenty of subsequent Sonic material to draw upon, whether for dreamlands, minigames, or characters. Sadly, seeing as it’s been over twenty years and there wasn’t a ton of love for Sonic Shuffle back in the day, it’s probably safe to say we won’t ever be getting a sequel — but hey, if this game has shown me anything, it’s that dreams are often made of hopes…
… unless, that is, they’re made of Sonic turning into a kaiju and trying to eat his friends while they run away and gun him down.
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