Sometimes it's not the battle that really matters, but rather the events leading up to the battle. For instance, in 1monkeyfromhell's "The Winter of Tails", Sonic's sidekick is on the run because everyone he knows has been murdered in horrible ways.
Ouch.
Cream the Rabbit? Raped and murdered by "some bizarre creature". Knuckles the Echidna? Impaled on a spike. Sonic himself died attempting to thwart one of Dr. Eggman's nefarious schemes, and Shadow the Hedgehog dies without any explanation whatsoever. It's enough to make a mutant fox creature want to take his own life.
"I was very close to suicide, and no one was there to comfort me."
Yeah, this isn't your average Sonic the Hedgehog story. This is some dark shit.
For instance, these terrible events finally drive Tails into taking a long, soul-searching journey. A journey that, for no apparent reason, has him winding up in World of Warcraft's Zul'jin. There he meets...Metal Sonic!
I just barely made it twenty feet when Metal Sonic shot a round, tearing right through one of my tails! I reached for my weapon and shot Metal, disabling him temporarily. I ran out of the field and tripped over some barbed wire, gashing my legs and belly. I then fell into a freezing creek, disturbing a nearby tribe of murlocs.
Shot, belly ripped open by barbed wire, plus murlocs? Now that's a bad day.
As I said, the actual battle doesn't matter quite as much as the circumstances leading up to it. In fact, it's quite brief.
Ten horrible frog- like creatures surrounded me, their knives gleaming in the sunlight. They started to stab me, one by one inserting their poison-covered blades. I was very close to death, and I knew that this could very well be my last breath. I suddenly felt the warmth of a very powerful jewel and glanced at the chest the murlocs were guarding. Inside was one of the most sought-after gems in all of Mobius, a Chaos Emerald! I reached through the terrible mob of beasts and grabbed it. I then tapped its awesome power and generated enough energy inside my body to bring out death upon the murlocs!
"CHAOS BLAST!", I roared and then a huge fireball of chaos energy roasted every single murloc who dared injure me.
Tails stumbles about in pain for a while before collapsing on a road, where a truck driver picks him up and takes him to a hospital.
At this point I have no idea what world we are in anymore, and that's just how I like it.
In the hospital Tails is reunited with his...old lover? Someone named Cosmo, I have no idea. They kiss, there's a nuclear attack, and they hop into an F-15 to fly home, a long and perilous journey that is completely skipped over. I'm sure it was entertaining.
When they finally reach Tail's home, Fan Fiction author 1monkeyfromhell drives home his point: he really hates Tails.
After a month, we had finally made it home, only to find my home utterly destroyed. I looked for pictures of my friends in my safe, only to find they had disappeared! I sobbed quietly to myself, knowing that the last traces of my friends were completely gone.
"Fucking bastard." I muttered to myself.
The Winter of Tails [FanFiction.net]