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

It's possible they took some level mechanic ideas (e.g. the lava) and threw them into other zones.

 

Interesting to think about, since Hill Top was to take place during the volcano's eruption on the 2nd past map visit. There's a lot of lava/earthquakes in the zone.

 

How do we know that? I realize the documents aren't 1:1, but how are you so sure what it does or doesn't predate?

 

Based on the comparison of changes between the maps, documents, and Wai proto internal order.

The first document is nearly 1:1 to the maps, the changes being the updated names, removal of Tropical Sun and Rock World's duplicates, and the addition of Death Egg and Death Egg Neo.

The second document removes Blue Ocean and Hill Top's duplicates, merges Death Egg and Death Egg Neo into a single zone, and adds Hidden Palace.

The Wai proto internal order adds Neo Green Hill and cuts the 2nd past map, moving Blue Ocean and Hill Top to under Metropolis 3/Tropical Sun's slot. Hidden Palace (where Sonic originally discovers a 2nd warp point and returns to the past) is also moved from the ruined present to the past map, further suggesting the 2nd past map getting cut at some point.

EDIT- I got so excited about the cut level's translation I forgot to bring up something important:

The 2nd past map was different at one point. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the idea here was the tsunami originally mentioned. After the volcano level idea was scrapped, perhaps that led to them replacing the tsunami with a volcano for the 2nd past map?

 

A volcano level in the past? And one with pine trees that would easily set on fire were said volcano to erupt?

I don't think that this mystery is as deep as we think.

That being said, didn't Craig explicitly say that the burning trees were meant for a ruined future ravaged by Robotnik?

 

Huh. The volcano supposedly erupted between the past and the ruined present, and as mentioned above, we know the Death Egg and the player would travel to the past after the future era.

One of the story documents also implies that after warping to the past, the Death Egg was knocked down to the mountains and buried.

Maybe the story would have gone something like this: the player chases Eggy to the Death Egg in the future and knocks it down. Before landing, the DE warps to the past, and lands on the volcano ala S3K. Cue this "fire mountain" zone (proto-Lava Reef?). Then the final level(s) take place (Neo Death Egg + the last battle in space). In the ending we find out that the (Neo) Death Egg being on top of the volcano now prevents the lava from escaping and destroying the island, preventing the ruined present from happening and restoring the island in the present.

That's what I was thinking. Hill Top is basically a "fire mountain/hill" already, despite there being no volcanoes around its location in the maps. That might explain where the volcano gimmick came from. After they scrapped proto-Lava Reef, they moved the gimmick to HTZ.

 

Yeah, it looks like elements of the idea were rolled into Hill Top.

 

That's what I initially thought too, but it seems like we were wrong. Turns out that the volcano erupted during the 2nd past visit, which may have been a revision of the scribbled out section after they scrapped the volcano level idea.


EDIT- For curiosity's sake, here's what the original pathway for the past 2 map looked like before the revision:

 

Does anyone have a link to the full document? Granted, I suspect that they would have just used katakana to phonetically write out グリーンヒル (gurīnhiru) and ヒルトップ (hirutoppu).

 

https://note.com/beep21/n/nc711d5372986
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?posts/1056149/

 

The maps and documents with translations are available here on Retro and TCRF:
https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(16-bit)/Development#Time_travel

https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(Genesis)/Scrapped_Zones#Map

 

Fire leaves ashes and dust, so DUSH HILL ZONE CONFIRMED

 

Can we please leave the comedic duds at the door and focus on research?

I found this software, quite useful. Dunno how accurate this is, but this is my best attempt thus far:

乂の凶
弄尾

 

It did look to me initially like 乂の凶 was the kanji but it doesn't make much sense in context whereas something like fiery hill or volcano something zone would -- and it is definitely 山, not 凶

 

In my opinion, the most likely kanji are:
火の山 ZONE (fire mountain zone)
宇宙 DEATH EGG (space death egg)

 

So it seems to specifically be "Fire Mountain" and not "Volcano". If it were "Volcano", it would've been written as 火山 without の.

The issue is we don't know if contextually they are describing the theme of the zone, or if "Fire Mountain" is its actual name. If it's the former, it's highly likely that they actually mean "Volcano".

 

Or maybe it's a mountain that was set on fire by the Death Egg crash landing on it? We know the DE fell into the mountains at that point in the story.

 

A little offtop:
I always thought that it's weird that Hill Top is purple on level select icon. Is it supposed to be? Re-recolour?
Here is for comparison level select icons, Hill Top with level select palette and level icon with actual game palette.
I wonder if it supposed to be early palette, but probably it's just a mistake/design choice.

Spoiler: Icons rip from web

Spoiler: Imgs

 

The buildings in CPZ are the wrong shade of green and MCZ is redder than usual, its probably just oversights.

 

Purple Hill Top doesn't look that bad...