REVIEW: ‘Sonic Prime’ Season 2 Delivers A Solid Adventure For A Younger Audience.

With the Paradox Prism still shattered, Sonic has to team up with Shadow if they are going to restore Green Hill Zone to normal. As if hoping across the Shatterverse, finding the missing pieces wouldn’t be hard enough. The Chaos Council is also searching for the shards, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. Now, Sonic has to go as fast as possible if he is going to restore his home in Sonic Prime Season 2.

Sonic’s continuing adventures to restore his world keep a solid pace as it speeds through its eight-episode run. The world-hopping continues as he revisits the various alternate versions of his friends he met in the last season as he goes about his quest to collect the shards of the Paradox Prism. The show manages to keep the core story surface-level and easy to follow while giving each world its own unique scenario to play out. Sonic Prime Season 2 utilizes the ever-shifting worlds and cast well to keep its simplistic plot as entertaining as possible.

Much of the best moments of enjoyment here come through the show’s large cast. With all the various versions of characters coming and going, the series can keep a freshness to the supporting players that bring some fun interactions to the show’s moments. This is especially true as the season moves towards its conclusion, and some alternate versions of certain characters begin to collide with each other. How characters respond to these encounters can be chuckle-inducing and bring just the kind of memorable moment that feels like it would hit for young viewers.

This constant motion between worlds and characters is good, as the few characters who show up a lot in the show, Sonic, the pirate Knuckles known as Dread, and the Chos Council, are easily the series’ weakest elements. While none of them are terrible in any given episode, the largely one-note nature of these characters makes them feel wholly played out by the end of the season. This is especially true of Dread. By the time the season was done, I didn’t want to ever see the character again.

The stand out of the cast is the Tails lookalike Nine. Spending most of Sonic Prime Season 2 in the clutches of the Chaos Council, NIne works behind the scenes to hamper the Council’s efforts to acquire the prism shards, as well as providing support for Sonic. Nine’s place in the series slowly grows over the season till he fully steps into the limelight in the closing episodes. When he finally gets to share the spotlight with Sonic, the two have a complicated moment that serves as the linchpin for the season and a great payoff that explores the nature of friendship and how we perceive others.

The animation does a good job of keeping the world bouncing adventure action and visual humor coming to the viewer. The numerous battle sequences manage to mix up the attacks and scenarios that they take place in enough to keep things interesting. There are a couple of stand-out sequences that go above and beyond for the show, letting a couple of battles truly pop. Most noteworthy is during a battle aboard a pirate ship when the camera utilizes one long smooth 360-degree pan to follow characters in a sort of visual tag moment. As each character completes their attack on a bad guy. another arrives to move with the camera, keeping the motion feeling natural and entrancing. It’s a great sequence that made me wish we could’ve seen more of that level of work from the rest of the series.

Where the visuals come out best, though, is in the season’s climatic episode. With everything on the line, both the Chaos Council and Sonic step it up a notch for the final battle of the season. The animation delivers the last big tricks from both sides with some cool effects and heightened scale that I know would’ve blown me away when I was a kid.

Sonic Prime Season 2 delivers a fun experience for its target audience when all is said and done. While the simple story and largely one-note characters don’t bring enough to captivate a grown-up audience, I think it brings enough to please younger viewers with its simple antics, well-delivered action, and narrative.

Sonic Prime Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix.