Sonic CD's Mysterious Cut R2 Level Discussion - Post Origins Edition

Thanks for the efforts your making. I would just be careful pressing too hard. I think what you've written there is probably plenty. If he doesn't respond to that, he's probably moved on.

 

I keep seeing people say the D.A. Garden is the music for Dubious Depths, but never seen a source provided so can't really say that for certain. I do know they had enough space for such things like the D.A Garden with it's own song, Fun is Infinite screen, etc, so not sure how some music is the issue that saw its removal.



I would say the Director of the game is more of a valid source for this than the Landscape Designer, myself.

It could also be a combination of both: they found the quality of the level lacking early on, and also realised they didn't have the space for all they wanted to put in Sonic the Hedgehog CD, so cut it out early to save as much space as possible for everything else (though not early enough to stop it getting sent over to the animation team for the credits).

 

I don't recall this one. Do you have a link?

 

It's on the wiki, but here's the direct link to the archived tweet.

 

Interesting! "And the development schedule was tight" implies that the music wasn't the only reason it got cut.

He mentions both space and schedule constraints in this tweet too: https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/136837158827851777

EDIT: He also confirmed that the Little Planet D.A. Garden song was planned for the Present version of the stage: https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/1446260362391678981

 

That tweet also mentions that the D.A. Garden track was gonna be used for the missing stage, and says in this reply that it was for the present.

EDIT: Got edit-ninja'd

 

I acknowledge the dangers of drawing assumptions from limited data, but given the two early nicknames we do know aren't alliterative (and aren't even necessarily limited to two words, although people have pointed out rendering "Toybox" as one word isn't too outrageous) it seems relatively unlikely to me that "Dubious Depths" was merely a Salad Plain-style placeholder rather than the name chosen for when the game was released.

 

"Now hold on a minute, you guys don't find it strange that the horse talks?"

 

I wasn't thinking about a page move, actually, I was more thinking about adding a line like

But yeah, your thoughtful reply is why I said this should be handled by someone with more experience than me.

edit: I just noticed that the page does indeed say something like that now, I'm sorry I didn't check before I replied, but at least it turns out we're all on the same page.

 

I think I might have been a bit misinterpreted here. I think what @MasterDreamcaster has done is great and it is of course very possible that Ohshima checked notes and it is indeed Dubious Depths.

I'm just of the opinion that unless we see it in a protoype as some hard proof that I'm a bit hesitant about everyone calling it Dubious Depths as some hardline fact when I think it could be a name for a different level at some point in development or misremembered.

I understand others will disagree with me and that's fine. I'm not having a go at anyone or anything like that.

 

How many years has the community wondered about R2? And only just now has someone managed to ask the game's director about it. It's so surreal, like, "oh, huh, that was easy..."

As for Ohshima's memory: hasn't he usually been pretty good about clarifying whether he remembers details about such an old project or not? Note that he doesn't use the words "I believe" or "if memory serves". He said "it IS Dubious Depths" with no hesitation. It's believable to me that he would remember the name of a level being cut from the game without knowing what was in that level. After all, he seems to still be in possession of tons of development materials that SEGA doesn't have.

I just don't think the community should have the authority to place doubt on the man himself, even if it HAS been 30 years. I mean, if we can take film directors' words at face value when they recall details from when they made stuff in the 80s, surely we can do the same for video games. How many times is Miyamoto doubted about what he remembers about making the original Legend of Zelda?

 

Im pretty inclined to believe Mr. Ohshima as he has proven time and again not only does he have materials we don’t but knows very well what they were.
I understand it’s hard to accept something without seeing the document he may be referencing or seeing it in game with our own eyes but for now I genuinely believe that it’s the official name. Even if he may be wrong he is one of the only people in the world who would have been allowed to assign a name to it so I’m gonna roll with what he says until I’m shown otherwise.

 

Personally I'm just amazed it got far enough to get an alliterative name - the switch to the final names for the Rounds must have happened a lot earlier than I'd assumed, though obviously after the assets in the v0.02 build were created.

 

I’m inclined to believe Oshima as he was the actual director of the game

 

So did it get further than Salad Plains then? The timing seems a bit weird here, depending on how far into development it actually got, which I didn’t think was a lot.

 

Even if he IS the director (and I believe him as well), I can still understand why someone might doubt his claims. Yasuhara has stated, and proven, time and time again that he barely remembers anything from back then, and he was way more hands-on with these games than anyone (sans CD). Both him and Naka have been wrong about details about these games, and that was waaaaay less than 30 years later when they said those things. So it makes sense to doubt what someone would say about a game they made 30 years ago, especially if they also added they don't remember anything else about it.

But to cite him saying "the name is Dubious Depths", and then write that as "the name might be Dubious Depths" on your Wiki, is just plain rude. Like, I just don't think the community has the right to have their own word be the authority over an official developer's words until proven otherwise.

 

I don't think the timing is that weird tbh, I assume the zone names were decided fairly early on considering no one even knew about Salad Plains until the v0.02 proto was dumped a couple years back. It's also possible that Salad Plains was already an outdated name by the time the proto was built, but they either didn't feel like updating time trial card for the proto or didn't have time to update it before the proto was needed for the demo.

 

Indeed - that's the same reason in my post above why I said it must have changed after the assets in the v0.02 build were created, rather than after the build itself. It could very well be that behind the scenes, the name "Salad Plain" was already outdated by the time the build was showcased publicly.

Either way, I hope one day that we do manage to discover what the original "Salad Plain" era names for all the stages were - there's still a naming mystery which includes R2 there, haha! I know we've since been told Wacky Workbench's original name too - hopefully the rest will eventually be brought to light.

 

I think anyone can doubt anything they want. Who wrote the rule saying otherwise? Sometimes people are wrong. We have all of human history to cite.

So simply saying that Oshima said it is pretty neutral, and the correct way to do it if the the evidence isn't 100% solidified. If we were to say "it might be this", I agree that's a little tacky. But it is within our right, discussing it amongst ourselves here, to question it.

 

I'd be wary about level names - Sonic 2's Emerald Hill Zone was "Green Hill" for a good chunk of development, but Oil Ocean had its name at the early concept stage (see also: Dust Hill Zone). There's nothing to suggest there was a set of eight "placeholder" names in Sonic CD that were all replaced with "alliterative" ones in one go.