Sonic Riders

"Even without wings, I can still fly!"

A Racing Game Spin-Off series of Sonic the Hedgehog. Started in 2006, it stars Sonic and his pals as they meet a new Power Trio of characters known as the Babylon Rogues, composed of Jet the Hawk, Wave the Swallow, and Storm the Albatross. Together, they race at high speed using devices known as Extreme Gear.

There are currently 3 games in the series - Sonic Riders, Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, and Sonic Free Riders.

Tropes used in Sonic Riders include:

• Anachronism Stew: Metropolis Speedway in Sonic Free Riders resembles an old western European city, but has flying cars and hovering trains. See Fridge Brilliance below.
  • In a different sense, Rocky Ridge, also in Sonic Free Riders. This is a still-inhabited Old West mining town. In other words, Sonic and his acquaintances are having a hoverboard race through a town whose citizens still travel about by steam locomotives and horse-drawn covered wagons. It's also quite anachronistic in the context of the series--whereas the rest of the series has a distinctively futuristic look, this place seems stuck in the 1850s.
  • Basically any ruin level in the series really. Babylon Garden and Sky Road have a security system complete with planes, Dark Desert has some weird zero gravity machine, the Gigan Rocks has part of the track move while Gigan Device is putting itself together as you race, not to mention Digital Dimesion which is a virtual reality chamber on the centuries old floating city. Starts to make sense when you consider who made all this stuff.
• Ascended Extra: Shadow, Rouge, and Cream are plot-relevant in Free Riders when they were bonus characters in the first two.
• Bare Your Midriff: Wave the Swallow and Rouge the Bat.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Dr. Eggman manages to get the treasure in Sonic Riders. He doesn't like what happens, however, and calls it a day.
• Boastful Rap: Jet's theme "Catch Me If You Can", especially the Zero Gravity version.
• Book Ends: Metal City is the first racing course in Sonic Riders, and the final course in Sonic Free Riders.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Every course in Sonic Free Riders has a very tough counterpart. While previous games had course counterparts for the Babylon Rogues which were tougher than the Heroes courses, Sonic Free Riders took this concept and stretched it incredibly far.
• Cobweb Jungle: Green Cave and White Cave are filled with enormous cobwebs. They are used as trampolines.
• Cool Airship: The Babylon Rogues travel in one when not racing. Jet has a jarringly formal looking office in there.
• Cute Bruiser: In each game after the first, characters are no longer bound between Speed, Flight, and Power. You can make some very bizarre things happen like Cream punching out giant stone pillars. In addition, Aiai and Billy Hatcher are assigned as Power characters by default, despite neither looking too threatening.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: In all three games, they have ridiculous rubberbanding and play as if they have a full stock of Rings. In Zero Gravity and Sonic Free Riders, they will try to grab Rings when in front of you to prevent you from stockpiling them.
• Die, Chair, Die!: Power-type racers work this way, with them punching any obstacles out of the way. All of the courses in Zero Gravity are also filled with random props one can destroy or fling into the sky with Gravity Control and Gravity Dives. Particularly large ones will stay in one place in midair, allowing you to touch them to slide along them and refill your boost gauge for each object. These objects subsequently fall and explode upon hitting the ground.
• Eternal Engine: Egg Factory, Ice Factory, parts of Dark Desert, MeteorTech Premises, MeteorTech Sparkworks, Crimson Crater, Security Corridor, Astral Babylon, and Final Factory.
• Face Heel Revolving Door: Dr. Eggman in Zero Gravity, who starts out bad, then becomes good, then becomes bad again for the climax.
• Fartillery: Eggman's level 3 attack.
• Floating Continent: Babylon Garden.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Wave the Swallow with Extreme Gear; Dr. Eggman with robots (when in a helpful mood); Miles "Tails" Prower with appliances.
• Gravity Screw: The entirety of the second game, obviously.
• Hailfire Peaks: Egg Factory is both Eternal Engine and Lethal Lava Land.
  • Egg Factory gets frozen over into Slippy-Slidey Ice World as Ice Factory.
  • Aquatic Capital and Torrential Waterway are a utopian technological haven that's also apparently a water park.
  • Frozen Forest is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, combining a forest in the wintertime with what seems to be a dragon graveyard full of gigantic skeletons.
  • Magma Rift is a Lethal Lava Land combined with Roman-like ruins.
• Idiot Ball: Why anyone would enter Eggman's Grand Prix in the original game to begin with. When Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik is asking everyone for Chaos Emeralds, it should be blatantly obvious he's up to no good.
  • While the entire cast doesn't seem to be too bright, Eggman holds it for Zero Gravity. To sum up his scheme for world domination: He lets his robots go berserk and run amok so he can go to the Crimson Tower, take control of them again, and rule the world. With a MacGuffin-stealing robot who has an odd habit of exploding at inopportune times.
• Jungle Japes: Green Cave in the original game, Botanical Kingdom in Zero Gravity, and Forbidden Tomb in Sonic Free Riders.
• Land of Dragons: Gigan Rocks and Gigan Device have a distinctly ancient Chinese theme.
• Lethal Joke Character: Cream the Rabbit in the original game. She has the lowest top speed of any character and is a lightweight, tossed around if anyone makes contact with her. However, because she's so light, if she gets a boost for any reason, she will sustain it for an incredibly long time. Put Cream on the Light Board (which decreases a character's weight), and a sufficiently skilled player can spend pretty much the entire race in a boost, initiating another one roughly when the previous one goes out.
  • Super Sonic from all three games can count as one as well. He eats up Rings like Joey Chestnut at a hot dog competition. However, in the first game, he can grind on rails, use flight hoops, and punch obstacles whereas all other characters can only do one of the above. In subsequent games, he can attract Rings to sustain himself. In multiplayer, this gives the additional effect of preventing other players from gaining Rings (which provide upgrades after reaching certain amounts) if the Super Sonic player can obtain an early lead.
• Lethal Lava Land: Egg Factory in the original game and Magma Rift in Sonic Free Riders.
• Lightning Bruiser: Any character with the Power attribute, in addition to being as fast as the other racers, can punch obstacles away effortlessly. Other characters are bumped backwards, but Power characters not only don't slow down, but gain Air (or Gravity Points in Zero Gravity) for doing so.
• Made of Explodium: All objects affected by gravity shifts in Zero Gravity will either explode immediately or will be flung far away, then explode, regardless of what it is.
• The Mole: The robot Shadow and Rouge recruited at the last minute in Sonic Free Riders turns out to be Metal Sonic, who has been collecting data on all of the racers. Doubly so, as Metal Sonic passed bogus data to Dr. Eggman and saved the real data for himself.
• Nerf: Experienced players in Sonic Riders would do nothing but boost from beginning to end because it was so easy to gain Air. This was fixed in Zero Gravity by not only substantially increasing the cost to boost, but now gave it a charge-up time and made Gravity Points (equivalent to Air) harder to accumulate. The end result is that there are only one or two viable spots per course to boost in. Sonic Free Riders reverted back to the boosting as seen in the first game but kept the high cost to boost in Zero Gravity, striking a good middle ground.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: By Zero Gravity, the Babylon Rogues have discovered they are genies from space.
• Nostalgia Level: Metal City from the first Sonic Riders appears in Free Riders.
• The Other Darrin: Free Riders is the first North American game to use the new voice cast, beating Sonic Colors by eleven days.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The World Grand Prix organizer in Sonic Free Riders looks like a hairier Dr. Eggman in an Eggman-red carnival ringleader outfit voiced by Mike Pollock. One guess as to who he really is.
  • "I'm King Doc! Of, uh, Toreggmania!"
  • Played with since no one falls for it.
• Rollercoaster Mine: The last portion of Rocky Ridge in Sonic Free Riders consists of this. Interestingly, the mine carts go faster than the hoverboards they're racing on.
• Second-Person Attack: In the opening, Knuckles punches Storm like this a few times.
• Shifting Sand Land: Sand Ruins.
• Shout-Out: The first two games had playable characters from other SEGA franchises. Both had Ni GHTS. Sonic Riders had Ulala and Aiai. Zero Gravity had Amigo and Billy Hatcher.
  • Hang-On and Super Hang-On are vehicles that will change the background music to the ones for the respective games.
  • In addition, Zero Gravity's 80s Boulevard and 90s Boulevard tracks are packed full of references to SEGA games from their decades and has Opa-Opa and The Crazy as boards.
    • Both of these stages sure feel like something from Crazy Taxi, music and all.
  • Metal Sonic's scheme to gather data from the main characters to destroy them is exactly what he tried in Sonic Heroes.
  • Sonic characters hoverboarding? That sounds familiar. Additionally, Jet and Wave's appearances seem to have been partially inspired by Manic and Sonia.
  • Ark of the Cosmos? Sounds familiar? Raiders of the Lost Ark, perhaps? Or...the The Bible?
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Snow Valley, one of the Battle tracks from the first game as well as Ice Factory; Snowy Kingdom from Zero Gravity, and Frozen Forest from Sonic Free Riders. Each game seems required to have at least one. The latter two actually have iced-over segments that make steering difficult.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Well, for the anti-hero at least. All the teams seem rather disgusted by Team Dark's apathy to their malfunctioning teammate (E-10000G). By the end of their story, Cream is essentially begging them to get it treated.
• Talking to Himself: Jason Griffith voices Sonic, Jet, and Shadow.
  • Dan Green voices Storm and Knuckles.
  • In Free Riders, Wave and Tails are both played by Kate Higgins. The Knuckles/Storm parallel is kept; they're both voiced by Travis Willingham.
• Tomorrowland: Future City.
• Tron Lines: Final Factory from Sonic Free Riders is packed to the brim with this.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Indirect example. When Team Dark's E-10000G breaks down after the end of the finals, Cream begs Rouge to help her teammate. She points out they aren't teammates anymore and leaves it to frazzle.