That was a great little Christmas gift from SEGA and the Mania Team. Thanks to all involved! Loved Sonic's expression at the end.
Did you also notice that the flowers Amy uses are from Collision Chaos? They drove home that particular reference to Collision Chaos, which is adorable.
So it is! Well spotted. As usual Retro's powers of Sonic knowledge knows no bounds. So Ice Cap Zone and Mushroom Hill Zone confirmed for Mania 2 then. :v: Yeah it's probably just wishful thinking and if Mania is going to receive a successor it'll likely be all original zones - but this is the first indication of illustrating Classic zones in these shorts so overtly and they would also be great picks for new remixed zones in a potential Mania 2. Everyone loves Ice Cap Zone after all. Or maybe now I'm just reaching. News of Mania continuing next year hopefully in the form of a new game can't come soon enough. Hope we see something about it somewhere in 2019. That I did not! Thanks for the heads up there. Tyson and co. really love Sonic and it shows in excellent little touches like these - and the quality of these shorts overall. Lovely to see.
Its strange to me that Mania Adventures so perfectly captures the feel of Sonic, or at least my vision of Sonic, given (barring Mania) the utter lack of media that has succeeded (or even tried) in doing so, going back to the early 90s.
No one gonna mention that Robotnik is wearing his pyjamas from Man of the Year? Come on SEGA, let the Mania crew finish Man of the Year! We all remember it! D; (Though considering it's set in the 'Human World'... Remind me when this alledged world split was supposed to be?)
Yup I recognized Robotnik's man of the year PJs almost immediately, I just failed to mention it here :v: Ooff and yea, human world... I have no idea anymore Sega is so damn inconsistent when it comes to that. I'm going to guess that Angel Island is uninhabited save for Knuckles most of the time, with the other core Sonic cast going by there frequently. Other than that maybe the humans exist but just in other places? Even in the classic games though there are some places that don't make sense to exist without other inhabitants though, like Marble Zone, Spring Yard Zone, Casino Night Zone, and Mystic Cave Zone (Carnival Night Zone is a weird one but I like the take that the final Archie Sonic took on it, implying that Robotnik had it built because it was fun to him). Maybe they're just all in hiding because Robotnik's badniks are all over the place and Sonic's the only one brave enough to fight them?
That was cute as hell, I love it. Also feel a bit sad for metal being completly self abandoned and hopeless. But I can't not laughing at it. XD
I feel like this can be read two ways. Amy takes pity on Metal Sonic, seeing him as sad, lonely and abandoned. She treats him like a person. When Eggman opens the door to Metal Sonic, he doesn't pick him up like a person, but rather like an object/appliance. In the credits Eggman has his feet up on him, again treating Metal Sonic like a thing, an object. People have called this short sweet and heartwarming, and from Amy's point of view it is, but the ending we're actually presented with subverts the expected outcome of a warm reunion. It's a great punchline. What makes it even greater though, is that we're never explicitly shown or told whether Amy's reading of the situation was correct, or if she was simply anthropomorphising a machine. Did Metal Sonic truly "feel" so depressed that he couldn't move, or was Metal Sonic simply a machine that was greatly damaged, low on power and didn't have any commands to follow? I prefer the "Metal Sonic is just an appliance" reading of the situation, but it seems like a lot of viewers were so charmed by Amy that they took her perspective to heart.
I can't seem to find where he said it but during the release of Sonic Adventure, when asked Yuji Naka stated that there are humans because the previous games took place on isolated islands. If we're talking about the Classic era, I think this is the best way see things. As for the "Modern" era, well the Sonic X two worlds canon I guess. It's what Iizuka goes with.
Part 6 was such a sweet episode. Amy is adorable. This version felt so true to her mid 90's look and personality. Was a really good idea to devote pretty much a whole episode to Amy. She may not have been playable in the game, but including her in this animation-short probably feels like a partial-victory for all those fans who complained about Ray and Mighty being playable instead of her. I love the nods to the classics; the remix of Jp Collison Chaos Present (which is probably my favorite track in Sonic CD) and the Jp CC future & MS remixes are lovely. Add to that the appearance of Ice Cap, Mushroom Hill, the Man of the Year animation reference, the little flower Amy gave Metal & Sonic (referencing the flowers released from the capsule in Collision Chaos act3 - thanks to Blue Blood for pointing that out). The Flicky who some-how survived trapped inside Metal for a few months. It was a nice way to celebrate what has been another good year for Sonic Mania. The last two and a half years since Mania was first announced have been such a fun ride. If this is the last piece of media they're gonna provide for Mania, then they've gone out on a high.
This was definitely intentional. When pitching it I always described Metal as broken/depressed because it's not one or the other. You can only do so much without words, but the subtext is not just that Metal is "defeated" but that he simply doesn't care that Amy is there. The last time they tried to use Amy as bait the plan failed and an endless Bowser/Peach scenario is thematically something I'm not interested in. Even if Metal could move, he probably just wouldn't bother. Amy brings him home because in his current state he doesn't seemingly pose a threat anymore, so in her naive sweetness she doesn't see the harm in returning him. When Eggman takes Metal back there's definitely an ambiguity to it, since Eggman's expression is a very clear "whatever, might as well bring it inside" but the music is telling you that it's a very sweet moment. I didn't foresee the music as going into such a great emotional swell but I liked it when I heard it because I think it's funny that this begrudging resignation is as "sweet" as Eggman gets. He's not emotionally moved by the flower or bow, he rolls his eyes at them but from Amy's perspective she's done the perfect job. Eggman still sees Metal as kind of a lost cause at the end because like you said, he brought him inside to rest his feet on him. If there's any real lingering sentimentality I wanted it to be that in the ending image Metal is staring at the flower in fascination because he doesn't quite understand what just happened either. As a killer robot he was just the "victim" of a great act of kindness that he didn't particularly deserve and that it could be reaching him in some way. Anyway, that's all the subtext and even if the common read is that the short is just cute and sweet I'm %100 okay with it because then the audience is seeing the situation through Amy's perspective which is one without cynicism.
If I thought SEGA cared about continuity between Sonic Classic and Sonic Adventure, I'd have said they were sowing the seeds for Amy's fondness for E-102 Gamma. She displays a similar fondness for the Robotnik robot there.
Don't ignore the fact that Metal Sonic had a liitle animal inside like the common badniks all that time, that could have been embarrassing for the hi-spec robo.
I'd say longbow...He wasn't staring at Amy's panties //forums.sonicretro.org/public/style_emoticons/default/v.png
Unless you're referring to something else, the flicky that escapes from Metal is the one that gets landed on earlier in the episode implying that it was stuck there for all that time.
Yes, that's what I mean, he didn't have one inside... until that moment. That's like being demoted to regular badnik, so to speak. :v:
Hey, it looks like Classic Amy's simplified skirt is now an official part of her design elsewhere: https://twitter.com/sonic_hedgehog/status/1077627027983949824 Man, I wish they would start shading those new classic artworks properly.
