New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

Doesn't Winged Fortress and Death Egg end with cutscenes?

 

You can include Sky Chase Zone as well, since there's a scripted event that segues into Wing Fortress Zone. WFZ begins and ends with cutscenes, and Death Egg ends with one.

 

I was wondering when someone would point that out!

Like the ending, some kind of cutscene was inevitable for Death Egg Zone. With the preceeding levels, you can assume Sonic and Tails just walked to the next stage, but you can't just put Sonic in space (without Tails) and not explain it - people would notice.

Similarly the cutscene at the end of Scrap Brain Zone Act 2 - you can't just drop Sonic into Labyrinth 4 and not explain it. You were in Robotnik's base, now you're not. You were on the Earth, now you're not.

 

100%, though as a fan I always wondered what level transitions for the other games would look like if they added them. Labyrinth -> Star Light would be a doozy, unless Sonic popped out of a sewer somewhere near the highway. Sonic 2 would be all over the place.

 

While obviously no equivalent transition exists in Sonic 1 SMS, the in-game island map used to contextualize level locations certainly suggests that Eggman's base is built on top of the mountain on the island, over cave ruins of Labyrinth which are inside it (and the water in the stage is also the source of the waterfall down that mountain). If anything, the harder transitions to justify would be the ones in and out of Spring Yard.

 

Death Egg doesn't end with a cutscene. You retain full control of Sonic/Tails and can walk at your leisure and even stop to take in the sights while the flames burn behind you. The remake changed this to make your character automatically run out.

 

Nah, it worked like that in the original. You're probably getting that cutscene mixed up with the Eggman chase sequence.

 

The original level order of Labyrinth going to Marble Zone instead would've made it a lot easier.

Honestly, I'm a little glad they dropped the whole "island map" thing. Sure it would've been interesting to see what all these levels look like from above, but I think the level transitions done in 3&K are a much more natural, less gamey way of showing how Sonic moves from place to place, and it's better for the game's pacing.

 

Either that or debug mode shenanigans.

 

So some people here have found Mystic Cave's spiky stair gimmick in the level maps, while others are speculating if Wing Fortress reuses some of Genocide City's assets.





Because I wonder why nobody ever talks about this parallel.

 

Y' know something... Mystic Cave has a lot of objects made out of wood.
And there's quite a few vines; the kind you might find in a jungle.

...Wonder how'd it'd look with other backgrounds?

(I'm like half serious.)

 

Does it still hold true that the original plan for Mystic Cave wasn't a cave at all but a haunted house? Because... you might be onto something if that's the case. Speculative, sure. But interesting.

 

The more I think about it, why the fuck are there that many vines in the cave?

 

Well, the vines aren't really growing out of the cave.



They're hanging from those fence-like thingies on the ceiling. You can see that those "ceiling fences" are made out of logs tied together with vines.So I think the idea is that the people that built those thingies simply used vines (taken from outside the cave) as rope, and left the spare ones hanging there for when they're needed.

 

I mean is there any concept art out there for Mystic Cave? I've always personally speculated that it was the "Mountain Madness" level reskinned. The concept art even had the draw bridges used in Mystic Cave in it.

 

I'm all but certain Madness Mountain is Mystic Cave. In fact, I'd wager the firefly badniks were originally ghosts. Or ghost badniks.

This thread is slowly turning into a clone of the other development lore thread. I'm starting to wonder what the difference is.

 

I agree. We should shift discussion of things like Mystic Cave back over there.

Unfortunately, until we have the next development dump from Frank's documents, we're stuck in limbo here. All we can do is wait and see what either he or other former devs release themselves at this point.

Let's try to keep the focus primarily on GCZ stuff and any revelations tied to it.

 

Well yeah, I mainly brought up the parallel between the MCZ vines and the WFZ hooks simply because we know that both zones reused some gimmicks meant for GCZ. I had zero intention of starting a discussion related to Mystic Cave's aesthetics lol.

 

Either that or some updates on Hez's interpretation of the maps would be interesting. I'm curious how the gimmicks and layouts are being handled. I also wonder how hard it would be to replicate the work being done in an actual Sonic 2 ROM.

 

It definitely would be nice if he could share this stuff already, 4ish months and it’ll be a year since it was shown. Marking the date on my calendar.