For some reason I wasn't expecting this much discussion about the topic, but I'm more than happy to tell my bestest friend in the whole wide world that his opinion caused a little debate here. (Not for the first time, obviously, but a win's a win.) As for my opinion, yeah, I don't really see why the planet being named Earth changes much. If anything I think it being Earth (even a pretty darn different version of it) makes it a whole lot more fun. Sure, the teenage tweenage whatever hedgehog Amy lives in a city otherwise populated entirely by humans, that's fun. I like a world where there's floating landmasses and also cubicles.
I like how Sonic X does the Adventure games because it puts the two most "hmmmm this seems far from the normal stylistic worlds" games and sets them on a different planet to Sonic's planet. Mobius. =P Heroes, where things get somewhat back to normal, is after they all go home.
with Frontiers establishing that the Chaos Emeralds are straight up from another planet, it could be argued that maybe it really is Earth, but with a vastly different history to ours owing to the literal alien rocks messing things up long before modern times.
I guess. It's just I saw too little of the world, the people and the dynamics in it to care about what happens to all of it. "Sonic and friends are in danger!" and "the world is in danger!" end up not making that big a difference, which to me makes the stakes feel hollow -- and that is why, even as Earth, I'd have liked the scope to remain smaller. The fact that it's Earth just makes it a bit muddier to me. (I suppose Unleashed does a good enough job of making you understand the kind of stories that would be interrupted if the world ended, but it's an outlier to me.) And again, sure, this sentiment isn't universal. Some might say they feel connected to the world as a whole in those games... I just don't.
I don't think it really matters either way, but it does make more sense for the series to take place in one world given the opposite provides way more headaches, like how the hell any of these characters travel between the worlds for one, like do they go through space? Is it like the sol dimension? If the sol dimension is next to sonics dimension with his world, does it mean there is also a human sol dimension next to the human dimension??? It's just more trouble than its worth to explain away something as trivial as sonic games having a unique art style for each entry. I much prefer the modern explanation of furries on islands, and humans on continents. That tracks with pretty much the entire lore (besides Forces, but that game doesnt make sense no matter how many worlds you have,) so I think it's a good one size fits all solution.
Unrelated, but I really love Pumpkin Hill's skybox. Much like Mario 64's skyboxes, it combines realistic textures with really fantastical settings, making for a dreamlike feel that's both familiar and otherworldy at the same time. It's a shame that you don't see stuff like this in games nowadays, as modern hardware lets you render everything in full detail without having to make the environments seem larger artificially.
an aside, a Ghost's Pumpkin Soup came on recently in foobar and I did a double-take when I realized that fucking Ohtani did that track. what range! I think my favorite rendition of "dreamlike" worlds is still the first Spyro the Dragon...the textures and the baked lighting just do it for me.
I feel like games probably should keep the whole textured sky thing more often, and other cute little measures to make the game run better. Adds character and is efficient, as long as you can't really tell it's a texture at first glance . Like with SA2's shot in the Hero's first cutscene, and the city looks really flat.
Sonic games have been phasing out detailed skyboxes for a bit now, Forces was the first game in the series to not have any background elements in its skyboxes, instead all of them are just the sky and nothing else. Nowadays background details like that are fully modeled or billboarded in the level itself. In fact Frontiers actually doesn't even use traditional skyboxes, it replaced the old method with a procedural system that allows skyboxes to be edited in real time by devs or modders, without any texture work. It's way more efficient and supports the existence of the game's day/night cycle, its neat tech.
OK yes there's exceptions but by and large the tropes are much more real-world than say Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
I think the city and prison island levels are the only ones I'd consider significantly more realistic than the games that came before it, green forest is practically a mirror to angel island in terms of how realistic they are and outside of that, the pyramid, space, and pumpkin levels are all pretty fantastical. Not too far off from SA1 in that regard, it employs both realism and more classicy surrealism whenever it sees fit and SA2 continues that.
Flight cancel is a horribly busted ability that should never ever be given to Tails in an official 2D Sonic game In fact, I'll probably think less of your romhack/fangame if Tails has flight cancel on by default with no way to disable it
This has me thinking, actually, to what degree are 3K's tropes 'fantastical'/"less real world"? We've got a tropical island, flooded underground ruins, above-ground ruins, a circus, an industrial base, a forest, an airship, a pyramid, underground/in a volcano, floating ruins, a space station, and space itself. Sure there's wacky and surreal geometry, but that's just as true for places like City Escape.
Honestly the Sonic series was moving in the realism direction with each game up to SA2. Sonic 3 & Knuckles is pretty realistic next to Sonic 1. And then Sonic Adventure is a bit more realistic than that with levels with Emerald Coast not feeling too far off from a standard beach, but then having levels that feel more fantastical like Speed Highway and Windy Valley. Then SA2 pushed it a bit more, while still having some more fantastical levels like the space levels and Pumpkin Hill.
Good point. There's something that's a bit more ethereal, but that S3&K also started or made apparent, that is how stages feel "closer" to the background. The relationship between foreground and background is very faint in say Chemical Plant or Stardust Speedway, which gives a feeling that the action is taking place far from the bustling environments you can see behind the loops and slopes you're traversing. But I don't feel like that in some outdoor stages in S3&K. In 3D, that's mostly unavoidable, sure, but I think it enhances the idea of "realism" just a little bit. (Doesn't really help that you're chased by an Actual Truck and grind on Actual Rails. I think it's mostly the man-made stuff that became more familiar than before)
Enormous flooded underground ruins, unlike anything that exists in the real world A circus-themed industrial area full of futuristic technology and abstract structures A sci-fi construction site built on top of mystical ancient ruins A forest full of gigantic mushrooms A floating sci-fi battleship not unlike something you'd see in Star Wars A volcanic cave that contains a mystical shrine for magic jewels ...are you seriously insisting that this isn't fantastical? And this one is from Star Wars again
I think the distinction as to whether or not, say, a city is fantastical or not is entirely in the execution. Compare and contrast Metropolis Zone with City Escape (based on San Francisco, a metropolis) versus Grand Metropolis, etc, etc.
No. I was asking "to what degree are 3K's tropes 'fantastical'/"less real world"?" Despite their reputations, the Adventure games also have their share of fantastical executions of their tropes. People brought up the Pumpkins, but what about the Egg Carrier? What about the ARK? What about the endless highways just floating above the ocean? What about the endless rails floating above the Pumpkins during the daytime? They certainly draw on photographs and field research from real world locations like San Francisco and several places in Central and South America, so yeah, they're less fantastical than 3K. But 3K's environments are also less fantastical than CD's. It ain't as black and white as "classic is surreal and adventure is realistic", the way some people treat it is my point.
