Dust Hill and Mystic Cave Discussion 2019

It doesn't indicate anything in particular, just that the right person was convinced that the product should ship with "Cyber City" instead.

Madonna wasn't a cultural difference at all. That's probably coming from that statement from the Sega of America employee, which never made any sense. The purpose of Madonna is roughly the same as the purpose of Amy, Breezie, Rouge, etc, but especially Sally, who started off as a Madonna-like character... for various American series with the largely American Sonic backdrop that they have. She was even planned to be human at first.

Enslaving animals for use as batteries, repeatedly polluting and exploiting the entire game world, and building a WMD to terrify all living creatures are not things that convey a bumbling and comical villain. His running animation might be funny, but his schemes are not. AoSTH, sure, he's a goofball. But in the games themselves, he's deadly serious. Have you seen some of the bad futures in Sonic CD? They're pretty messed up places. The Death Star was a weapon created by overt space Nazis, and the Death Egg was a direct reference to that. I'm pretty sure the Freedom Fighters and Sally as they came to be were nods to the Rebels and Leia as well, seeing as all that happened after Sonic 2 to the best of my knowledge. Does something like "Genocide City" really not add up?

Now that we have the Sonic 3 proto and suddenly we have all these people talking about what was "the PC music", it's easy to imagine that the same thing could have happened to "Genocide City". Let's say the game actually shipped with the GCZ it was supposed to have. I imagine parents would be freaking out, but not much else. People probably would have made the connection to the Death Egg very easily back in the day.

 

...why do we think OOZ's music could be sand shower's? Oil is most well known for being found in deserts, so the aesthetic matches that zone just as much as it'd match that place's.

 

Because not only does it fit a desert theme, but it remains in the prototypes unassigned to a zone while OOZ has Casino Night 2P's music; which is thought to be it's original track.

 

The final Oil Ocean music being played in Brenda's desert makes as much sense as Lawrence of Arabia in a Western.

 

Probably part of the thought-train as to why they scrapped it and then proceeded to make an Arabian desert in the next game. =P

 

I strongly doubt that the Sonic 2 developers intended to use the word "genocide" in the same way that Americans would think. Instead, it seems to be a common mistranslation (or possibly repurposing) in Japanese media at the time. For example, the Street Fighter series includes a move called "Tiger Genocide," the King of Fighters series includes a move called "Genocide Cutter," Captain Commando includes a boss named "Genocide," and so on. In all cases, they were simply going for an intimidating word similar to "destruction" or "mayhem," not the definition that native English speakers typically think of.

 

This is crazy, I remember reading you guys having this exact same Dust Hill naming conversation around 15 years ago haha.

Good to see it still brings intrigue. Dust Hill as Mystic Cave never sat right for me.

As for Genocide City, I agree that it was probably just the devs not really understanding what it meant, and used it because they thought it sounded all techno n shit.

 

The Death Egg is quite a surface level reference though. The thought process probably wasn't really anything more than "This is a cool super weapon, let's give Eggman one of these!".
The designers liked Star Wars, and Sonic always had these little homages in there (Chaos Emeralds/Dragon Balls, etc..). The connotations and meaning of the Star Wars Death Star, and the Empire being Space Nazis (we all know Zeon are the superior supreme space race anyway) don't really come into play, or get the chance to come into play.

 

The Death Star explanation really doesn't require an elaborate thought process... I'm not calling "Genocide City" deep here, it's pretty straightforward in context. I don't see why we should write off this incredibly vicious human being, made even more vicious in nearly every other work afterward, as an overall bumbling cartoon villain. The Thanks Ken Penders blog even outlines the ridiculous juxtaposition in early Archie Sonic of "evil dictator that completely rules the world and destroys everything" with "madcap single-digit age humor". All the bumbling-cartoon-villain Eggman behavior is in stuff outside of the games anyway, at least until you get to Colors with all its ridiculous memes.

As for the other usages of Genocide... two of those are very much on purpose. I never got the Sagat usage because he was never shown to be a particularly bad guy, but that's a clear exception; Rugal is a genocidal monster and the Captain Commando character is all geared up to conquer Earth. It just seems silly to insist on "oh they clearly didn't know what they were talking about" even if it makes perfect sense in context.

The Dragon Ball thing isn't really the same as there's not much more you can really do with that than wish granting and Super Saiyan-type stuff, and Sonic Team already did a lot with that as is. They even stuck in a Super Sonic that has ascended past a Super Sonic for Sonic 3. I'm legitimately surprised they haven't tried to turn Hyper Sonic into some Super Saiyan God ritual, even. No planet-sized Chaos Emeralds yet either, unfortunately.

The majority of "deeply thought-out" references... just aren't. Most of this isn't complicated. The complicated references are the ones that aren't obvious and that very few would catch for there to even be discussion about them.

Absolutely. It doesn't really confirm or deny two desert levels, but it does provide some good inspiration for someone who wanted to make two desert levels. Comparing Sandopolis and Desert Palace is also helpful.

 

Wow, you guys have been arguing over this for nearly 20 years now. This pic is as relevant now as it was back then.

I think that's just a dictionary error.
I've looked up potential words for dust, and one of them (黄塵) means "dust (in the air)", so dust particles, but the kanji themselves mean "yellow" and "dust/trash/garbage". That sounds more like sand to me.
The one you found, 粉塵 just means fine/powdered dust/trash/garbage, which could also mean sand.
Finally, 土埃 is "dust of the earth" which could also be interpreted as sand... but also as soil, you tend to have soil in caves.

I think these are too ambiguous. Perhaps someone with better Japanese knowledge could tell if there is any word used for excavation/cave related word that could be translated to simply "dust" in English.

Genocide written in kanji would be 大虐殺, built up from the kanjjis meaning large, tyrannical/oppressive, and killing. So a massive atrocious killing, of which the western equivalent is the word genocide. "Massive atrocious killing" is certainly something that could be associated with a bad guy in command of an army enslaving little fluffy animals, living in his own volcano superfortress, and owning his personal Death Star; if Robotnik had a white cat to stroke he could be easily mistaken for a James Bond villain. But it also explains why you'd have fighting games use the word Genocide to a special attack, presumably to make it sound like the attack has brutally murdered many people and if you get hit by it you are dead. And it also explains why a bad guy would be named as such: he's not just a bad guy, but the baddest meanest motherfucker who won't think twice about killing you like he killed many others before.

Or perhaps the Japanese consider genocide a less evil word because they don't have the media feeding them guilt 24/7 about how white men are literally responsible for the holocaust and for slavery and for all the evil in the world. Or they are just closer to nature, and nature includes deaths, making it is a normal part of life, not something to shy the kids away from - and in that context, a person capable of handing out mass murders is someone to be feared and respected, ie. a very powerful villain.

There are obviously fundamental cultural differences to consider, but I can understand why they'd use a word, since it just means "nasty big killer", not "literally Hitler".

 

The above post is exactly what I'm talking about. Japan doesn't really "take things out of context all the time" any more or less than Americans do about their own stuff. Japan has a long history with Christianity as well as with Buddhism, and they seemingly refuse to forget about it. Americans themselves take large portions of Christianity out of context, so...

"a mass killing" and "the active extermination of a race/nationality" are the same thing. This is how genocide is actively done in the world today. Might wanna watch some documentaries about this stuff or something. Simply making people suffer to death and ruining the planet is basically the same thing as well.

Friendly reminder that Eggman edges a bit too close to "tyrannical bloodthirsty world-destroying dictator" for a kid's game... which, again, is how we got SatAM, the later comics (especially anything involving outright killing characters), all those Sonic CD bad futures, and of course everyone's favorite Adventure 2 cutscene. The word is not diluted in the slightest when referring to these forms of Eggman, particularly the games. When you think of AoSTH Robotnik or Boom Eggman? Sure, it's obviously out of place then.

Oh look, there at the end, yet another declaration of "Dust Hill WAS ALWAYS Mystic Cave". It's so "checkmate atheists" it hurts. The evidence is entirely circumstantial and doesn't actually confirm or deny anything in particular. I doubt many of the people saying this actually believe that Aquatic Ruin WAS ALWAYS Neo Green Hill or whatever, especially when the maps seemingly point to it being one of the "Tropical" concepts.

(I'd also just like to state for the record that Japan saw Blade Runner for what it was well before anyone else ever did)

 

I know Dust Hill is a pretty controversial topic around here, but how the hell did we went from debating whether Dust Hill was always Mystic Cave to debating the meaning of the word "genocide"?
Can we just go back to harassing developers online about a game they did 30 years ago like civilized people

 

...

Why would they go in a roundabout way to describe sand when Japanese has several words for sand?

There's several Japanese words that could translate to dust but the only one that seems fitting for a mine/cave type level is funjin.

 

I meant someone who lives there and can tell which word they use in context, not a dictionary result.

Because Japanese is a very nuanced language with plethora of words which are different in implied context, that have no direct English equivalents, and a dictionary can't list those. Plus a lot of wordplay where one kanji can be read differently, or one word can be written as a kanji with different meaning.

case in point, funjin can also mean 奮迅 【ふんじん】 (n) impetuous dash forward
quite fitting for a sonic game.

 

Wow, that specific reference to mining was quite unexpected.

 

Very interesting developments right there; seeing it spelled out like that feels like the Sonic "Clackers" realization all over again. When given that sort of context, it makes a lot more sense it'd be called Dust Hill, perhaps with the idea that the dust refers to the mines, and the hill refers to being -inside- of said hill. This also explains Diamond Dust Zone, though I assume that's what Taylor meant anyway.

So when do we figure out what they meant by Panic Puppet Zone?