“Eggmanland took me 50 minutes to beat. It was tragic.” ONLY 50?!?!?!

Sonic Free Riders should be an honorable mention. Mastering the jank motion controls takes time.

The hardest Sonic games I've played are probably SA2 and Unleashed. I hope Frontiers brings in a good learning curve because we definitely need it.

Sonic 2 8-Bit almost made me go insane

I actually really enjoyed the level design of Eggmanland, especially as a final level. Really disappointing that sonic games haven't had that level of difficulty in a while.

On Unleashed, the first time I did Eggmanland, it took me an hour and a half to complete… this remains the only time I was more than happy to get an E rank.

Bro when I played through sonic lost world 3DS I didn’t know that The charged homing attack existed till THE FINAL BOSS! 😂

1. Sonic Heroes is criminally overlooked to this day IDC what anyone says. 2. I gave Lost World more than a fair shot, having the 3DS version. But that game is still a Lost Cause to me. 3. Dude. Sonic Riders LITERALLY has a tutorial to watch on menu select. I played that game from the moment I got it on my 12th birthday, played the hell out of it in anticipation for Sonic 06 that year. The truly tough part is unlocking Super Sonic. It’s not a bad or overly difficult game at all.

Sonic 2 8-Bit is easily the hardest Sonic game, especially the Game Gear version with the screen crunch.

From experience, 06 just takes long to complete & not difficult while UnleasHD is difficult specifically with Eggman Land. However I could say Free Riders because controls go against you even if you found a pattern and also, punching with Power Skill Gear Part and wiping off anything reducing visibility is very frustrating to do properly. Edit:Then there is trying to kill the President in his armored plane in Shadow 2005 which is agonizing even when your Allignment Guages are filled and you use Unlimited Ammo.

11:55 - 12:04 Matt: Whenever I do a Tier list I don't really count the storybook series and Shadow the Hedgehog because I don't consider them as mainline Sonic games Sonic in Sonic Generations: Yeah, No stranger than rescuing genies in magic books or saving aliens from an interstellar amusement park. I'm more concerned about finding our friends. Sonic in Sonic and the Black Knight: Heh heh! This brings back memories, except last time I was with Shadow.

Bro secret rings is literarly amazing. Like unleashed, you get way better the more you play and when you master the levels they are actually the best levels in the series. I’m deadass, if you have all the speed and upgrades unlocked then it’s actually amazing how nice it feels. I hated it when I first played it, but it actually gets like 10x better the more you play. It’s legitamately my favorite sonic game

Sonic Heroes gave me a lot of trouble as a kid. Only later did I realize it was because I had the buggy PS2 version.

The hardest Sonic game is Free Riders, as it's motion controls suck, they barely understand what you are doing, and require you to jump and do random shit again and again

Lol I was just rewatching your Unleashed encore livestream. Seems like perfect timing. It would be fun if you do a DLC livestream.

Dude really talked about both Riders and Secret Rings yet Free Riders wasn't seen nor mentioned once. Game is straight up impossible I haven't seen a single person beat that game.

You should have way more subscribers considering you are the best Sonic KZfaqr in my opinion. Love your content !

We need another Eggman land type level again. Found it really challenging in a good way 🙌

You should've included Shadow the Hedgehog, mainly because of how much of a pain in the soul it is to 100% complete it.

I feel very weird since so many people think the controls in Secret Rings are hard, but I feel like it's the opposite. As someone who has beaten the game several times I can say it feels pretty satisfying to speed through stages with accuracy and precision even with motion controls after you get comfortable with them. [Although the final boss still destroys my wrist not gonna lie]. I hit level 99 and Sonic feels like a different beast completely

Easily Sonic Spinball. That last level is especially brutal.

Aside of my years of struggle with Sonic at Wave Ocean, 12 year old me was able to complete Sonic 06 surprisingly easy. Unfortunately after I got Unleashed that same year, the struggle was real, and since then I have still yet to beat Unleashed and that was 12 years ago!

I recently played through Secret Rings again on a nostalgia trip (played it before i had any quality control or reference for my games), and it physically taxed me by the end of it. The final boss where you essentially had to shake the wiimote vigorously the ENTIRE time was absolute hell. I dunno if it was just that boss fight or from the waggling of the whole game before that, but my arms were sore the following day. It makes me imagine people who speedrun Secret Rings as Gigachads with beefed up arms from all the waggling. The music was mostly fire though. And who could forget "DINO...JUNGLE...IT'S DINO...IT'S JUNGLE!"

The Arid Sands Night room they lock you into is completely optional btw, it's pretty much a death trap which is really funny to me. I assumed you knew this but this video seemed to show otherwise

Yeah, Matt, I agree. Secret Rings is the most difficult Sonic game I’ve ever played by far. The controls just seem to always want to fight with me every time I play it. But I still love the Storybook games for what they are, and still hope we get them remade as fully-fledged RPGs. Maybe like Persona-style, that’d be cool.

That's where you and I differ, my good man. you see, I first got this game a year after it came out. I was 7 at the time. And whereas it was extremely difficult with the motion controls, I also found a lot of enjoyment and fun to be had. I ended up beating the game within about a week's time. And I was rewarded with this BEAUTIFUL CGI cutscene I was working toward. and it just made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Don't get me wrong, I had as much trouble with the final boss as I did with the tutorial on how to back up (which is unnecessarily hard). But was able to overcome it with enough determination and learning his pattern.

I found 06 to be relatively easy once I knew how to work around the bugs. It's surprisingly so.

I personally found Skyscraper Scamper - Night the hardest in Unleashed because of how easy it was to fall to your death. But yeah, I had forgotten about Arid Sands - Night. That was insanely difficult in some moments.

I can still never get past the 1st boss in Sonic 2 Game Gear. Easily takes the cake as the most difficult Sonic game for me 😆

"Driving a man insane". I said Sonic 4 on the community post and this description pretty much confirms my opinion on this matter. There were some hard and frustrating things here and there across the games I have played, but none approached that level of kek of EP1 and I basically took a break of uncertain lengh from continuing with the game for my personal health and well-being(lol. Still like the game, paradoxically. It was a fun experience to get Semi-decent at the game.). Never played Unleashed due to a personal lack of ways to do so and if footage and reports on some of the content are accurate, then that game may punch me in the face just as hard or harder. There are also these times when something is a lot more tedious or just dumb than a legit kind of hard. Secret Rings is actually usually pretty good at difficulty-scaling during the story(When one gets the unfinished controls to work. Thank the heavens for controller-mappings on Dolphin for making it less strange to work with). A good chunk of the sidequests are decent, the storymissions are managable for the most part and even if there are some stupid hits one is going to take on some bosses(The ifrit-golem can suck my small toe), they are still fair to beat. However, the optional dinosaur-egg mission is buttcheeks, the final boss is booty and almost all the post-game missions are way too precise and demanding to be reasonable to the playerbase. I don't think those things should really increase the difficulty-score of the game beyond "kinda challenging", because they are mostly optional and sometimes not even "hard", rather than just stupid.(There is nothing actually difficult about the dinosaur-eggs. It just takes a long time in a casual attempt because of the bad gamedesign) 4:55 If we factor this in, then Lost World and later riders still aren't really that special in the discussion, unless one weighs the moment of "unbeatable unless you know"-Zavok so incredibly hard. Why? Because this type of nonsense is not uncommon in the series. Shadow does jack all to explain its game flow and certain gameplay-sections, one just has to understand. Unwiished Final Boss is really easy...unless one doesn't know. SA2 is a mess when first playing, even with mods that get rid of certain artificial barriers. Big's story in SA1 sucks on first playthrough because all of the fish just bite, but froggy for some reason requires an up-input for the minigame to start, so this is once again unbeatable unless one knows. Some portions in Sonic Advance overwhelm or downright just kill the player unfairly unless they know how to approach the leveldesign, etc. The series is the king of "this is actually not bad, you just don't know yet".(Not to be confused with games that are actively trollish, but can still be incredibly rough if you know the secret sauce)

Hear me out... Sonic Lost World... 3DS.

Surprisingly I finished Eggman land in 30:15 on my first try then on my second try I finished in 22:55 and I was shocked from what I've heard I thought it would be very different

I think Sonic Heroes deserved a mention. That game genuinely had me throwing my controller when I was younger. I still enjoy it tho

Another example of Lost World not explaining what to do: Hidden World Zone 1. You know, the zone with the giant Rubik’s cube and the timer that’s constantly counting down? Which typically means that you DON’T want to run out of time? And then it turned out that you’re supposed to let the timer run down in order to win? Screw that level.

The thing about Secret Rings is that it depends on how much your brain vibes with motion controls. For example, the controls are completely fine for me and I quite like the game (though I do have problems with the structure of it among other things).

1st - Sonic Unleashed wasn't challenging to me 2nd - Sonic Lost World wasn't hard when I first beat it, but it is now 3rd - Once I looked up how to play Sonic Riders and properly take shortcuts, it's a cakewalk 4th - Sonic 06, despite its obvious flaws, was always super easy. Just long... 5th - The storybook games are the second hardest to play to me 6th - You didn't even mention Sonic Free Riders lol!

I would love to see the secret rings mod with just normal controllers no motion controls

I would like to enter Sonic's Pinball Party into the discussion.

Honestly, my experience with eggmanland was actually the opposite. It wasn't a cakewalk, but I found jungle joyride day harder than the sonic segments, and empire city night harder than the werehog segments. and my first time beating it was about 40 minutes

My dude never tried Sonic Lost World for the 3DS. THAT made me wanna commit heinous crimes.

I Love how Unleashed takes SKILL and your full attention! It's Consistent! I Love that about the Game! Awesome Video Matt!

You're right '06 is hard because it's broken, but once you know where all the holes are the game's a really fun time

I'm a little surprised that the 8-bit games didn't even get a cameo or honorable mention

Sonic Spinball. Never got past toxic caves (which is the first level).

Him: Unleashed is not that Difficult Unleashed DLC: Are You Sure about That?

Dude, I love the Sonic Frontiers wallpaper on your computers!

Sonic Schoolhouse is clearly the hardest Sonic game. It is literally impossible to beat.

50 minutes your first time in Eggmanland. You are a god.

Personally, I would like to see a review of Shadow the Hedgehog. I think that, while kinda bad, that the game is decently difficult while also being very indepth with how the story progresses. It's honestly kinda fun to see that no two playthroughs lead to the exact same ending.

Very funny take on these games, great video

Okay but can we all agree that Lancelot Returns from Sonic and the Black Knight is the hardest boss in any Sonic game? That fight is just absurd

when i think of difficult games i don’t think of “oh this is not telling me what to do”, or even “this game is so hard” in sonic it’s usually just these difficult parts of the game, for me, it was difficult to learn how to vine swing from alligator chase unleashed, it wasn’t eggman land but it was that at 1:45 until i figured out there’s a secret passage way to finish level early for 06 i like the game it’s just janky, for sonic, it’s sonic 2 death egg and zavok forces battle because i was confused but that’s just me not knowing how to do it

Sonic heroes can get really difficult at times, so I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. Anyways, great vid!

From personal experience having beat it at some point, Sonic Battle is an underrated difficult Sonic game. The game loves to challenge the player and force you to put thought into how you fight. Customizing Emerl’s moveset and optimizing it is a skill that takes trail and error to master, since there are many possibilities for experimentation. More times than not I’d lose a battle only to go back to the menu and craft a build that’s better for that particular fight. Battle is a game that takes skill, but it also requires you to think and strategize. I got stuck plenty of times before I found a moveset that appealed to me. It can be unforgiving and demand maximum effort to claim that win.

Unleashed is one of the hardest, and one of the most rewarding. You FEEL Super Sonic when you nail the levels!

Another thing. When you were talking about the storybooks games I took my Secret RIngs and my Black Knight discs and I caress them

Black Knight was a pain in the ass for me, the motion controls would never register properly and I finally got a breath of fresh air from Unleashed when i played it

The hardest sonic games for me have been Sonic 3 and Unleashed. Yes I know Sonic 3 isn’t hard but when I was 7 I used to be trash at the classic sonic games and after I got sonic Mania and beaten it multiple times, it is pretty easy imo. I also beat all the classic sonic games in origins at least 2 times and I breeze through all of them with barely any difficulty besides the end of sonic 2 and sandopolis in sonic 3. I literally got stuck in a loop going down sand slides in that zone and it took me 5 minutes to figure it out. Act 2 doesn’t need any explanation as turning on the switches while it gets dark can get very annoying after a while. I struggled more with sandopolis than Death Egg Zone 🤣🤣

I always wondered what his face really looked like i actually loved the secret rings because I was good at the game

It's hard to say that the early sonic games were easy by any real stretch. Remember the Eggman robot at the end of Sonic 2? Or literally any 2D sonic water level? Having said that, you are absolutely right about the Secret Rings. While I enjoyed it as a kid, playing it now is just painful.

Loving the new background look!

Sonic Advance 2 and 3 have still got to be the most frustrated I've ever been playing a Sonic game. Collecting the chaos emeralds in those games to get the true ending was actually rage inducing.

Secret Rings is not that hard, I was able to get used to it just fine, and I’ve been actively enjoying it. Now is clunky sometimes, and some moments do get harder in it then in other games, yes, but I never had an issue with it. Same goes for Black Knight but more so.

started play secret rings yesterday, didn’t even finished the lost prologue. i’ll try to finish it and update the comment than, but now i can absolutely agree

Sonic Unleashed is hard but a good game to me!

Sonic Advance 2 was crazy! As a kid I never finished it and a few years later I played it and barely finished it on an emulator with save states. Sonic unleashed was pretty hard too and I played it on the wii so... yeah.

interesting video, good examples too! you bring up some good points. While I don't think 06 is as buggy or glitchy as you make out, the mach speed stages can only really be considered when the game is unfairly difficult.

also one thing: Sonic Riders has a tutorial... locked away in a mirror.

Video idea ranking all modern sonic stages

5:30 Bro the exact same thing happened to me I vividly remember that but remember nothing else from this game lol.

Man sonic riders felt like tryin to master a dark souls game as a kid 😂😂

Sonic riders was so hard as a kid but by man did i love it.

Sonic Advance 2 and Sonic Rush we’re pretty difficult for me personally.

I remember trying to finish eggmanland... it took me like 1h and 43 min. To this day still the most tragic sonic stage in history

I agree with you on Sonic Heroes and Riders bc I have played those, and they can get tedious at times tbh.

If the Labyrinth Zone boss from Sonic 1 was a game, it would be the most annoying and hardest game in history 💀

"This game was difficult at first, but after learning it, it's pretty easy" You can apply this to literally anything that isn't rooted in luck, physical/mental limitations, or constantly changing. Regardless of how tight a timing is or how often it requests different inputs from you, you can break anything down into just learning some pattern of required inputs that, once learned, "becomes easy". But if the length of time to reach that point in a game compared to another game is separated by several hours, then I feel that goes a long way to say which one is more difficult. You can probably take things a step further to start tracking how many inputs a game asks you to do, how much reaction time it gives you to complete that (or the window of error), separating these sessions out between each level or act and including how many retries you're given and what the punishment is for running out of lives, if applicable. You also could include optional challenges if you really wanted to poke at which games are the most demanding. Pretty much the whole point of this video is "I didn't enjoy playing it enough to learn it, so it's the most difficult." Also I don't think Sonic Riders counts as a mainline game

Sonic Battle. Until I learned to cheese the AI, I got whooped.

the most difficult one is sonic forces because you experience such a massive overwhelming feeling of disgust while playing it to where you want to throw your controller out the window

I remember in so many reviews of Lost World when it came out, most of them talked about how frustrating it was to complete, so it’s definitely not just you. I got game overs on most stages in the back half, and I got particularly frustrated on the second Zavok fight like everyone else, but I still find Lost World fun enough, even on my first playthrough.

Sonic fans who like to play Sonic games with a lot of difficulty are those who like games like: Cuphead, Bloodborne, Dark Soul, Megaman & Bass or Elden Ring

To clarify to anyone watching: Secret Rings is not "entirely controlled with motion controls". Its just steering left and right that is, as well as homing attacks with a shake. Jumping, shorthopping, sliding, stomping, braking, speed break, time break, are all done with buttons. It is no more motion contr intensive than Mario Kart Wii, which is also a high speed action game using motion controls.

For sonic worlds, I had the exact same problem for the boss battle. It was pain. I understand your pain, also I only learned to run after halfway through world 2. I never felt more dumbfounded in my life

Eggmanland was horrible but Sonic 4 Episode 1 had an annoying last boss. Getting the timing right fighting King Arthur was also pretty hard IIRC.

Your videos and magic mushrooms. Great combo

Sonic 2 Gamegear - hardest 2D Sonic hame Sonic Unleashed - hardest 3D game

Matt:Sonic And The Secret Rings is the most difficult Sonic game Sonic 2(MS/GG):Yeah,sure

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thought Sonic and the Secret Rings was incredibly hard.

Secret Rings isn't challenging, I'd actually say it's somewhat easy

Sonic 06 has lengthy loading screens that significantly challenge my patience.

Hear me out: Sonic Lost World 3DS - Frozen Factory Zone 4

*Plays seven rings in hand repeatedly*

for the 3D games, its gotta be Unleashed right? literally everything kills you in that game lol

I appreciate that secret rings is an auto runner before that became a popular mobile trend but the things that frustrated me the most was the two last bosses

Eggmanland for a first timer is brutal, but after you get used to the game's controls and mechanics you can easily earn an S rank in under 40 minutes

3:41 I laughed so hard on this but my inner voice says: " Don't be Surprised if that Happens" and I'm not feeling well now.😅

Sonic Spinball would like to know your location.

I still haven't beaten Sonic Unleashed and its been over a few years, Sonic Unleashed truly is my favourite sonic game

I had the hardest time with Free Riders 😅

Sonic 2 on Game gear. You're welcome.