The Curious Case of Sonic 2's Music

DefinitiveDubs · Jun 29, 2022

DigitalDuck said:

DefinitiveDubs said:

The problem with that argument is Tropical Sun's concept art is clearly like a seaside beach, not a jungle. I doubt Masa would've been thinking of composing something evoking rainforests and a Tarzan yell looking at that.

Also, I can't see anything in the internal data order that points Aquatic Ruin's music to be EHZ 2P, so can you elaborate? Aquatic Ruin, even in the Simon Wai build, is playable from start to finish and the first level loaded for demo purposes. If that's the case, why doesn't it have the correct music? I suppose Sonic Team might've thought another theme fit it better, but that requires a lot more assumptions than my explanation does. I believe in Occam's Razor.
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I was chopping and changing things around a lot and I think that statement kinda got lost as a result; I meant that Aquatic Ruin's music fits in the sound test exactly where I'd expect Tropical Sun's music to be - EHZ 2P is looking more like Dust Hill there, which is an option given we don't really know what Dust Hill was supposed to be, but is too tropical sounding for that to be the case for me.
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You can't rely on the sound test completely. If you believe the sound test, then EHZ2P's music was for a zone after Cyber City. I can take the sound test as evidence right up to Metropolis, after which it goes all over the place.

DigitalDuck said:

DefinitiveDubs said:

On the map, yes, that is the case. Thing is, that map must've been made very early point in development, likely as part of the original pitch, because Yasuhara's timeline clearly has a different order. The Japanese reads that "Blue Ocean" comes after "Tropical". The arrows stop after that, so I don't think the map was truly intended as a rigid order of events, rather just a general idea of how the story would progress and how Sonic would move around the island.
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Yes, but what remains in the internal level order generally follows the map and not the timeline - so an argument that uses the internal level order should base it on the map. Of course, this actually further supports your argument of EHZ 2P being Tropical Sun, as it would be the zone before Hill Top and in the Wai build the zone before Hill Top plays EHZ 2P.
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Aside from the Blue Ocean/Tropical Sun order discrepancy, there's little difference between the map and the timeline. It could follow either one and would make no difference. Rock World's "Past" location was removed in the timeline, which also seems to be the case for the internal level order, otherwise there should be a slot between Hill Top and Hidden Palace...unless you think Hidden Palace took Rock World's slot, somehow.

SoNick said:

I'm veering quite off-topic here but this website really wasn't founded on speculation. Depending on which branch you want to start with, it was either founded on a person finding a Sonic 2 prototype ROM on a non-English website and creating a page to document information and provide a download link, or as a wiki for documenting information regarding Sonic hacking. In the early days we left the baseless speculation to other sites and in the mid-2000s we actively discouraged such activities heavily in favor of ROM hacking.
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Not the website specifically, but the entire Sonic research community, circa 2002 or so. I think any speculation I'm doing still has credibility that's a step above emailing Craig Stitt and going "Ain't dat the Master Emerald?!" Speculation is necessary to fill in blanks that can't be explained otherwise. It's a process of ruling out what CAN'T be the case through evidence, and hence assuming that certain things MUST be the case, and filling in the gaps in the most logical way possible under that assumption. Logic, process of elimination, and Occam's Razor.

DigitalDuck · Jun 29, 2022

DefinitiveDubs said:

You can't rely on the sound test completely. If you believe the sound test, then EHZ2P's music was for a zone after Cyber City. I can take the sound test as evidence right up to Metropolis, after which it goes all over the place.
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No? EHZ2P's music is ID $0C; given the music ID is generally zone ID + 1, this correlates to Dust Hill. And I explicitly said I wasn't relying on the sound test completely (hence rejecting the idea that EHZ2P's music is for Dust Hill) - just that there's enough correlation there that it should be considered evidence.

DefinitiveDubs said:

Aside from the Blue Ocean/Tropical Sun order discrepancy, there's little difference between the map and the timeline. It could follow either one and would make no difference. Rock World's "Past" location was removed in the timeline, which also seems to be the case for the internal level order, otherwise there should be a slot between Hill Top and Hidden Palace...unless you think Hidden Palace took Rock World's slot, somehow.
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I don't know where you took this table from, but both the timeline ordering and the map ordering are wrong/misleading.

The map clearly shows Tropical Plant leading directly to Hill Top, and not to Blue Lake, so why the table shows otherwise is confusing. There's nothing in the map that suggests there should be a slot between Hill Top and Olympus/Hidden Palace, unless you enforce the idea that Olympus must be last in that time period (which does make sense from a story perspective). There's also no given ordering between Casino Night, Chemical Plant, and Genocide City, and an anti-clockwise path that matches the final ordering is definitely valid.

What exactly slots $05-$09 should be according to the map involves speculation as to whether the placement of "Warp Point" means you start in Rock World or not, and where you go after Hill Top, but it's entirely consistent with Rock World -> Tropical Plant -> Hill Top -> Olympus -> Blue Lake, which would put Hill Top and Hidden Palace in their final locations. It does, however mean Blue Lake comes after Olympus, which isn't ideal.

On the other hand, the timeline places Death Egg after Dust Hill and repeats Hill Top and "Blue" before going into Casino Night, and doesn't mention Olympus, Hidden Shrine, or Hidden Palace at all. Why is Death Egg in slot $0E when according to the timeline it was already planned and therefore should be in $0C (after Dust Hill) or $0F (Neo Death Egg, after Genocide City) or even later? And why are Casino Night and onwards one slot too low? If Rock World Past's (or Present's) removal causes such issues for the map order, why does the removal of Hill Top Ancient and "Blue" not cause issues for the timeline order?

Of course, it's likely that revisits would not mean a new zone ID, but instead mean just a new act of the already existing zone - much like how Scrap Brain 3 is actually Labyrinth 4 internally. This "solves" the issue of Hill Top Ancient and "Blue" (assuming it's Blue Ocean Ancient)... but it also "solves" the issue of only having a single Rock World, and potentially the Olympus placement too.

For the most part, the maps do not have specific orderings, and everything in each map appears in the same block in the data. It does require creative ordering in the past map, but everything that's in the maps that made it to the final game is potentially in the correct place in the internal level order. The same cannot be said for the timeline, which requires you at minimum to pretend Death Egg wasn't there and that it later overwrote Genocide City for some reason.

... that was a lot of text to say "your table's wrong". And all that to argue in your favour for EHZ 2P being Tropical Sun anyway.

RDNexus · Jun 29, 2022

According to the plot structure and that level order by code:

This may be the order of the stages, as far as I manage to understand.

I hope this helps you folks to get to the bottom of all this.

DefinitiveDubs · Jun 29, 2022

DigitalDuck said:

There's nothing in the map that suggests there should be a slot between Hill Top and Olympus/Hidden Palace, unless you enforce the idea that Olympus must be last in that time period (which does make sense from a story perspective).
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I enforce that idea because that's exactly how Yasuhara described it during his presentation. The Past era ends when Sonic and Tails activate the "shrine" to time travel, and he pointed out that Olympus was that shrine. So it IS last. If that's the case, then according to that map, Sonic must travel through Tropical, Hill Top, Blue, and finally Rock before ending up at Olympus. The internal level order that we see does not allow for Rock World (Ancient) to exist. By the time Yasuhara made his timeline, Rock World (Ancient) was gone, and now there was only Rock World (Ruined), which was an ice level.

DigitalDuck said:

On the other hand, the timeline places Death Egg after Dust Hill and repeats Hill Top and "Blue" before going into Casino Night, and doesn't mention Olympus, Hidden Shrine, or Hidden Palace at all. Why is Death Egg in slot $0E when according to the timeline it was already planned and therefore should be in $0C (after Dust Hill) or $0F (Neo Death Egg, after Genocide City) or even later? And why are Casino Night and onwards one slot too low? If Rock World Past's (or Present's) removal causes such issues for the map order, why does the removal of Hill Top Ancient and "Blue" not cause issues for the timeline order?

Of course, it's likely that revisits would not mean a new zone ID, but instead mean just a new act of the already existing zone - much like how Scrap Brain 3 is actually Labyrinth 4 internally. This "solves" the issue of Hill Top Ancient and "Blue" (assuming it's Blue Ocean Ancient)... but it also "solves" the issue of only having a single Rock World, and potentially the Olympus placement too.

For the most part, the maps do not have specific orderings, and everything in each map appears in the same block in the data. It does require creative ordering in the past map, but everything that's in the maps that made it to the final game is potentially in the correct place in the internal level order. The same cannot be said for the timeline, which requires you at minimum to pretend Death Egg wasn't there and that it later overwrote Genocide City for some reason.
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The simplest answer is that the map order was in the very early pre-planning stages of the game. Death Egg, and Sonic going to space in general, wasn't part of the very, very first concept, and the timeline was from a later phase of development when it was. In fact, I'm inclined to believe the map was merely a pitch and it was never anything set in stone.

Logic dictates that whatever was sent out to Masa was the final plan and set of zone themes that had been decided on. Otherwise, why the hell would they have asked him for a soundtrack? It's not as if they could ask him to make changes and compose more songs whenever they wanted. SEGA was working on HIS time, not the other way around. Masa must've sent in a finished soundtrack at least a month or two before the Simon Wai build, at which point the ambition was already being cut back. We have at least 16 level themes composed by Masa, and there's not much room to fit Tropical Summer, Rock World (Ancient), or Dust Hill in there. There's probably at least a few unreleased Masa demos we've never heard, that were intended for other levels (such as Ocean Wind), but if we assume the plan was always 18 zones, no more and no less (probably reduced even by this point, since there are only 17 slots) then by process of elimination, the notion of going back and forth between eras and revisiting zones was most likely dropped, and it was a more linear order of events. I wouldn't be surprised if even the time travel concept was dropped, and the story was just Sonic journeying across the island like in the final game.

Devon · Jun 30, 2022

DigitalDuck said:

given the music ID is generally zone ID + 1
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No, not really. The IDs in the level music ID table jump around quite a bit in both the Simon Wai proto arrangement and final arrangement. Not even the ordering of the music internally in line up with that at all (which the Simon Wai ID arrangement follows very closely) Only a few IDs follow that logic.

Simon Wai

Code (Text):

dc.b $82 ; 00 | EHZ, EHZ music

dc.b $82 ; 01 | Unused, EHZ music

dc.b $83 ; 02 | WZ, MTZ music

dc.b $90 ; 03 | Unused, OOZ music

dc.b $83 ; 04 | MTZ1,2, MTZ music

dc.b $83 ; 05 | MTZ3, MTZ music

dc.b $93 ; 06 | Unused, EHZ 2P music

dc.b $96 ; 07 | HTZ, HTZ music

dc.b $86 ; 08 | HPZ, MCZ 2P music

dc.b $8F ; 09 | Unused, SCZ music

dc.b $81 ; 0A | OOZ, CNZ 2P music

dc.b $85 ; 0B | MCZ, MCZ music

dc.b $84 ; 0C | CNZ, CNZ music

dc.b $8D ; 0D | CPZ, CPZ music

dc.b $8D ; 0E | Unused (Genocide City), CPZ music

dc.b $87 ; 0F | ARZ, ARZ music

; 10 | DEZ, corrupt

Final

Code (Text):

dc.b $82 ; 00 | EHZ, EHZ music

dc.b $82 ; 01 | Unused, EHZ music

dc.b $85 ; 02 | Unused (WZ), MTZ music

dc.b $84 ; 03 | Unused, OOZ music

dc.b $85 ; 04 | MTZ1,2, MTZ music

dc.b $85 ; 05 | MTZ3, MTZ music

dc.b $8F ; 06 | WFZ, WFZ music

dc.b $86 ; 07 | HTZ, HTZ music

dc.b $90 ; 08 | HPZ, HPZ music (0x10)

dc.b $8D ; 09 | Unused, SCZ music

dc.b $84 ; 0A | OOZ, OOZ music

dc.b $8B ; 0B | MCZ, MCZ music

dc.b $89 ; 0C | CNZ, CNZ music

dc.b $8E ; 0D | CPZ, CPZ music

dc.b $8A ; 0E | DEZ, DEZ music

dc.b $87 ; 0F | ARZ, ARZ music

dc.b $8D ; 10 | SCZ, SCZ music

I did notice that the original zone slot for WFZ in the Simon Wai proto plays the EHZ 2P music. Also, to be clear, DEZ in the Simon Wai proto does not have a proper music ID defined, so it's just setting whatever's after the end of the table.

More things to note is that the August prototype music ID table is basically the same as the Simon Wai prototype's, but with the new music arrangement implemented. The unused slot that became WFZ still uses the EHZ 2P music. Hell, in the September prototype, SCZ didn't even use the final music, it used WFZ's.

And of course, in the Simon Wai proto, DEZ uses zone ID 10, while in the final it's 0E, replacing Genocide City, with SCZ taking over ID 10.

EDIT: No, I haven't seen that video until after I posted this lmao

DigitalDuck · Jun 30, 2022

DefinitiveDubs said:

The simplest answer is that the map order was in the very early pre-planning stages of the game. Death Egg, and Sonic going to space in general, wasn't part of the very, very first concept, and the timeline was from a later phase of development when it was. In fact, I'm inclined to believe the map was merely a pitch and it was never anything set in stone.
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That... doesn't answer any of what I said. I know the map order is early and the timeline is later.

Also since the wrong table has been reposted, let's do this:

This is what the actual ordering looks like for both the map and the timeline concepts. If that one Rock World Zone causes so many issues with the map ordering... then what about Death Egg, Hill Top, Blue? The lack of an actual "Hidden Shrine" level (but a gap where one should be)?

The internal level slots were clearly assigned on either the maps we have or something very similar, and definitely before the timeline. The alternative is to assume they removed Rock World Past, added Death Egg, moved Hidden Palace to after it as a non-level, added another time period between that and Casino Night, added Neo Death Egg, and then... undid nearly all of it again? You like Occam's Razor, why not apply it here?

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The Curious Case of Sonic 2's Music

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