Lessons from cartoons and video games #1/?: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

As I mentioned in a previous post, when my brother and I were young kids, we watched a lot of cartoons and we played a lot of video games. To be honest, this hasn't changed. We have more work now, but when my brother and I are free, we usually spend time watching cartoons and/or superhero movies and playing video games. Lame? Maybe. But it's pretty fun. And occasionally in those video games and cartoons I find bits of insight that I think is worth sharing. So I'm making these insights into an unofficial series, creatively called "lessons from cartoons and video games". I don't know how regularly these posts will appear, but I can pretty much assure you that there will be more than one.

This is the first of two that I have for now. Yes, I wrote it a long time ago...but I still think it's good enough to post again. I wrote it in 2011 about a game that every Sonic the Hedgehog fan will remember in infamy: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). There was a litany of things that were wrong about that game, from the gameplay to some of the plot elements and much more, but in general we get more insight from our mistakes then we do from our prouder moments, and for Sega, it's no different...

***

Before reading this, you must know...I am a geek. According to a facebook quiz, I am seven different types of geek. So you should not be surprised by what I refer to here.


I was watching some of the cutscenes from a recent Sonic the Hedgehog game which someone had compiled into a movie, and the end really made me think. To explain the situation, the main villain of the game and the final boss is a fire-type thing named Solaris who ends up devastating everyone in the game. Solaris was originally kept as a little flame in a castle belonging to the duke of Soleanna (where the whole game takes place). At the end of the game, Sonic (our main hero) and the duke's daughter Elise go back in time to find this flame so they can blow out Solaris and save the future.


They find the flame and Elise is supposed to blow it out. Elise realizes, however, that if she blows out the flame, she and Sonic will never have met. She almost refuses to blow out the flame because she doesn't want to lose her friendship with Sonic.


Watching this happen, it's pretty hard not to scold Elise for nearly choosing Sonic over the world. And yet sometimes, we do the same thing. We forsake the mission, the life that God has planned out for us, because of something that we love that we don't want to give up. We think that thing is big, but in relation to the plan God has to (basically) save the world, it really is not.


Sometimes we may think that what we have to give up is so big and too hard to give up. However, considering that God is in control, we should know that when we give up that habit, we are helping with the great commission, the plan to get as many souls saved as possible before the end of the world.