Mystic Cave is Dust Hill. Oil Ocean and Mystic Cave are 0A and 0B in the final, and "Oil" is followed by "Dust" in the timeline picture. The Simon Wai proto told us so nearly twenty years ago and no one listened.
This is all so incredible. ... if I were ever to decide to make a Sonic fangame I think this would be it...
But Dust Hill takes place in Green Hill Zone bad present area, Mystic Cave Zone doesn't match the style of the level like Hill Top Zone does as its past counterpart. If it wasn't sand, I can't imagine what else would be that "dust" or how GHZ could have been with that name after being affected by Eggman actions in the past. Sonic Forces is going to have a semi-desertified GHZ now that I think about it.
Clearly this is what Classic Eggman went back to after the whole Time Eater thing flopped on its face. But in all seriousness, with the whole Time thing isolated to CD and Generations, it's kind of staggering to see how extensively they'd planned out an entire "back to the past" time-hopping storyline due to Eggman screwing over the timeline.
I feel like time hoping is actually a very common Sonic trope. Sonic CD, Sonic Adventure 1, Sonic 06, Sonic Generations, Sonic Boom RoL, and Sonic Forces all have time travel elements in them.
It's almost like I blocked '06's nonsensical use of time travel from my mind. Sonic Boom was a case where they wanted a whole thing about it but all it amounted to was an illogical stable time loop caused by a single level. And we all know Adventure's kind of cheating since that's really just visions / flashbacks. But it does show overall that Sonic and Eggman alike can't stop coming back to time hijinks.
Well, as others have said, this explains the dinosaurs in Hill Top since it's the past of Emerald Hill (Green Hill). Hidden Palace has dinosaurs too, though. Some might be thinking you accessed Hidden Palace to warp to past/present/whatever, but going by the dinosaurs, that means it's set in the past I'd think. Not sure what to take from it, especially since they've always referred to it as having been planned to be a special secret level. They wouldn't make a secret level be the only access point to warping between timelines. Unless the secret level idea was what they came up later with in order to prevent having to ditch Hidden Palace and all of its art once the time travel concept was ditched. Especially compared to something as primitive as Wood Zone it's easy to see they probably would have preferred not to waste all that art and did what they could. But then why was Hidden Palace in the ROM for so long into development but they never bothered finishing it up? Still so many questions. It's like being taken back to the late 90's/early 2000's era of Sonic theories again
Pretty sure it was proved on here some time ago in an interview with Dust Hill artist Brenda Ross, that Dust Hill was not Mystic Cave, and a brand new level as shown in the mock ups
That reminds me about the winter stage that Dust Hill supposedly was planned to transform into. That's not mentioned anywhere here. Maybe an indication that what Yasuhara is sharing is even earlier before that was planned?
Do I need to bring up this post again? It'd make sense if Winter Hill was a "ruined" version of Dust Hill, but that doesn't seem like it's possible because all four timezones have zones there. It could've been a later idea (along with Aquatic Ruin and Mystic Cave, it seems). A related question: If Dust Hill is the desert level, then what the hell is Sand Shower?
Replying to myself, I'm going to conclude this is just a final sketch. Nothing appears to differ other than (what it looks like) the S-tube checkpoint area with the rings, but that was already known for some time now. Clearly I have too high expectations, as djohe told me... but kudos on the time travel documents! Now we have guaranteed proof that time travel did exist, although that was old news as well. The Simon Wai theories always left me with curiosity when I first discovered Sonic Retro around early 2009, and now they have risen from the grave once again. Especially this one, sorta... https://randomsonicn.../theory_029.txt It doesn't make any sense now, but it atleast somewhat signified a correlation of Dust Hill to Emerald Hill... P.S.: fuck broken Retro emoticons
I wonder if some of these things are going to be on the Sonic artbook that's going to come out. I think unseen level/concept art was one of the highlights of the book. Unless it's just Oshima/Uekawa stock art.
We found a few binders. Aaron mentioned we have books for SA1 and SA2, but we found more Heroes, Shadow, and even Rivals 2. Older art isn't as easy to find, but there are a few. Maybe one day we can release something. For reference, these binders are where those designs of Terios surfaced from.
Well, looking back at GoldS's post... ...it looks as though Hidden Palace would have been probably about 8 Zones into the game. If the plot involved time travel, I would assume the following. Zones 1 through 4 is Sonic traveling to and discovering Eggman's time-travel machine. Eggman does his usual fight with Sonic and loses. He then escapes into the past, with Sonic giving chase. Zones 5 through 8 would be chasing Eggman through the past, culminating with finally catching him in Hidden Palace Zone. If all of the Emeralds have been found by this point, an extended cutscene plays out where the Emeralds react with Hidden Palace and act as a "natural" time-travel device, sending the duo back to the present. Eggman's time in the past during the second section of the game is what instigates the ruined present/bad future. The final arc of the game would be going after Eggman in an era where he has the advantage. If you think about it, it could work that way. The bad ending would be ending the game at Hidden Palace Zone, implying that Eggman was defeated, but the two are trapped in the past. A sort of bittersweet ending. The bad ending would still be around 8 Zones long, a fairly lengthy game compared to the original game's 6 Zones. The amazing thing if this idea panned out would be that getting all the Emeralds wouldn't just get you an extra level and ending, but a full additional 8 Zones, doubling the length of the game for the good ending. The main fault with this idea would be that the Emeralds are useless during the latter half of the game, unless they pulled something like Sonic 3 & Knuckles where you lost the Emeralds after Hidden Palace and had to re-collect them. This would potentially allow a bad ending, neutral ending (Eggman is defeated, but both are in the bad future), and good ending (Eggman is defeated, the Emeralds trigger again and send them back to the "proper" timeline). This would also seem like an acceptable concept for a cutscene-driven time-travel plot if we weren't going to be time traveling mid-level. What I'm curious about is some of the scrapped levels. Were there going to be two desert levels, "Sand Shower" and "Dust Hill"? Could the pictures we've seen of Dust Hill really be of Sand Shower, and Dust Hill would be another recolor or something? Possibly Dust Hill would be a recolor of Green Hill, in the same way that Hill Top is a recolor of Emerald Hill? Mystic Cave isn't on that list, but there was originally a "Rock World" Zone. Maybe Mystic Cave was a rename of Rock World? I can believe Blue Lake being recycled as Azure Lake in Sonic 3. However, what was Tropical Plant? I'm kind of liking the idea mentioned earlier of comparing the Master System version of Sonic 2, and seeing which of those levels match up with the concepts for the scrapped Genesis levels. It would make sense that the number of abandoned concepts would explain why the two versions of Sonic 2 are so different.
This stuff is sweet and all, but I'm really hoping we get a video of the whole presentation eventually- it wasn't just a Sonic 2 beta conference. I don't think anyone in the eastern games industry is as passionate about level design as Yasuhara, or at least, nobody else is so dedicated to sharing all these preproduction sketches and tile maps on graph paper. There's probably plenty of other gems in that talk.
So Whitehead said that HPZ music in the Wai protoype is the original music and Track 10 is the cutscene music. Now we know for sure(?) when it'd be played: during time-travel transitions.
Question is how would time travel transitions occurred. I guess Eggman using some device and Sonic jumps into the portal created? It wouldn't be the HPZ emerald since that's been long concluded to have just been a breakable object. Hard for me to imagine that song just playing out of nowhere.
