This brings us to question where that baseline is, because does it really matter that one decision came after the other? If the single action button philosophy was what made curling into a ball the solution -- and that, in turn, made the main character be a hedgehog, does that mean Sonic being a spiky hedgehog isn't crucial to the game? How do we extend this logic withot concluding that the only baseline fundamental premise was "hey guys we need to make a game that kicks ass", or maybe "hey guys we need to make a game that kicks ass in the US specifically"? Just because some idea was not the only idea that could logically have arisen from an earlier premise, that doesn't mean it isn't at the core of the game. In fact, I'll go so far as to say "the core principles of Sonic's game design" are contingent, because they depend on its perceived legacy and influence. It's not directly observable, as any attempt to draw a baseline the way you're trying to will be arbitrary.
While i think the time limit mission is superfluous, (except arguably in the Treasure Hunting stages), I disagree with this claim about SA2s missions as a whole, for the simple fact that you are ranked for each mission and ranked differently for each of them. It's not just about completing the mission, but how well you perform in doing each of them, which I believe has merit. Especially when it comes to the hard mode mission 5s. I don't consider myself a completionist, but I can't consider optional additional content in a game or rewarding a player for completing it a bad thing as I enjoy having excuses, methods or direction for engaging with a game beyond just doing the thing I already did over in the same way or in ignoring or erasing any progression that was already made previously. Even if the content isn't on par with ,in terms of depth, to the main campaign. Having small distractions from the main campaign has value as well, and these things can act as ways to give deeper context to the levels, game mechanica, story, etc Where I get bothered really is if overly important things are locked behind them. I dunno if City Escape in particular really works in reverse. Unless you more mean like a mirror mode. It absolutely matters, because the claim that it came first comes with the presumption of it being foundational to the design phylosophy of the game, and that, from the perspective of analysing the design intent of the game, is crucial. Super Mario Bros has Shell Kicking and kicking shells is a pretty prominent aspect of the game. I'd argue moreso than rolling in Classic Sonic is. Yet it'd be false to say it is a game about kicking shells, or that it is a core or foundational aspect of Super Mario obviously, and analyzing the design of the Super Mario series around how much the game focuses on kicking shells while having value in isolation, would be problematic when applied as a sort of universal baseline for our judgement of the games, wouldn't you agree? From a mechanics and game design stanpoint? No, not really. Obviously there is more to a game than just it's mechanics, but that's stepping outside the bounds of the convetsation obviously. I believe the game started with just a kid running through loops and slopes before any iteration of Sonic would even be considered. The statements made by the devs cross examined with what is in the game I would say would be a good place to start. To my recollection, the base idea of the game was that of a game where the emphasis was on slopes and smooth movement, "speed running" and levels that look and felt like rollercoasters to zip through. As an add, I find the last statement odd, if not non-constructive. It's essentially saying the idea doesn't exist and shouldn't be bothered with. Which, I don't agree with for one, but more importantly, it's not really engaging with what my stated contention is, which is how from a conversational standpoint (which let's be real. This idea is and will continued to be applied) can schew analysis of the design intention of the devs and obscure insight that can be cleaned when examining them. My interest is not in really trying to dictate what the player should like or care about. I find that rather silly.
I wouldn't. First, because when it comes down to the purely formal analysis of both Sonic and Mario, they're "about" the same thing: going from A to B a discrete number of times while not dying more than the default number of lives plus the amount of lives a player is able to accrue while playing. That's it. Anything else is superfluous for this analysis, and enters the zone of how a player is supposed to do that, which then encompasses expectations and languages that aren't purely mechanical -- and, in which case, it does becme very foundational to Mario that harmful objects are able to interact with each other to the player's advantage, actually, and it's differential to -- for example -- Sonic, who can only interact with anything by touching it 99% of the times. But game design isn't (just) mechanics design. It's expectation design just as much, and Carol Yas worked in Sonic with this in mind. The moment you make a game that's supposedly about smooth movement, slopes or speedrunning, you're emphasizing a player behavior that cannot be formally scripted in the game. S what's a player to expect from the game, and how a player is supposed to do that (and rolling is a huge part of it by virtue of, well, existing in the game) becomes crucial, a corollary even. I didn't say it doesn't exist. I said it's contingent. So from my point of view your approach is entirely flawed from the start, beacuse you're examining the game isolated from what it was made for, as if it could exist in a vacuum, withut even so much as a soul to play it even though your very contention would depend on the process of playing it to be true.
I prefer SA1's Sonic gameplay for how more open-ended the level design is and just how more loose Sonic feels. I still prefer it to SA2's tighter physics but also more restrictive level design. That being said SA2 has a stronger place in my heart for being such a time capsule of the late 90s. It's such an eclectic mix of a game that I can't help but like it. As for the games that came after, the novelty just wears off.
The Dreamcast in general is a symbol of Y2K optimism to me and yeah SA2 was the last gasp. There's something sadly perfect about it being discontinued and SA2 releasing the summer right before all that end-of-history optimism was abruptly dashed.
I think it's because of how it ends, with Shadow dying and all. While SA1 also ended with a tragedy (Station Square's flooding), it's just kinda glossed over. But SA2 really hammers in Shadow's death, with the entire cast solemnly contemplating over it before moving onto a new day. It's a weird mix of melancholy and hope that surely must reflect Sega's actual mentality at the time, what with them leaving the hardware business and finding new ground as a third-party dev. It's a more grounded kind of Y2K optimism, I suppose? Another contributing factor to SA2's unique vibes is Eggman having a family. It's the first time that the games acknowledged family, and even today it's still an incredibly rare thing for the games. Even outside of the games, one of the post-Penders mandates is no new family members. I get why that's the case, there's not really much space for family members in a series like Sonic. But to me, Eggman's family even having involvement in the plot made him feel a bit more real to me; he was so shocked by his grandpa's madness that he couldn't help but vent to Tails about it. For better or worse, it's definitely not something you'd see these days. Even Shadow (as in the game) felt like a bit of a retreat from this, by showing more of Gerald's good side, reframing his science as a force of good, and having aliens as a clear-cut villain for everyone to rally against.
Sonic Adventure 2 feels like the Season finale of a long running series, it being Sega's swan song for the console market is definitely a contributing factor to that. It would explain why the immediate next game, Sonic Heroes, feels like a soft reboot in a lot of ways. The story is incredibly simple and mostly serves to highlight who the cast are and their dynamics and its deliberately structured like a Classic game, right down to the brighter aesthetics and two-act stage structure. Which makes sense given its the start of Sonic being multiplatform, so it definitely a Season premiere of sorts. The funny thing about Sonic Adventure 2 is, as @Palas mentioned, it basically codified a lot of the design philosophies that are still used in this series... for better or worse.
You're indeed correct that the idea to have Sonic curl into a ball was not the very first idea they had, but... ...neither was speedrunning. Oshima's sloping level design was the core concept, if we want to completely delineate what came first from what didn't. If we want to say "sloping and flowing terrain" is the core concept of Sonic's gameplay, then that's fine. If we want to start including additional things in our conception of what the "core" is, that's also fine, but we're going to be drawing a somewhat arbitrary line somewhere. I think "what they had in mind before they started building levels" is a fine enough place to draw that line, as it appears to be where you'd like it to be drawn. But the fact remains that you've still included more than the original idea that ended up evolving into the game as we know it. Though, if we're talking about Ohshima's Twin Star level concepts being intended to "feel like a rollercoaster", then it sounds a lot like aspects of the "game feel" I've been talking about were indeed already there from the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. Rollercoasters, which usually rest on wheels (which roll) and gain speed while going down hills. This reminds me of something I said in a different conversation in this thread earlier this year, with regards to the way it feels to move Sonic along this sort of terrain even while not curled into a ball:
I think I won't get much agreement on this, but I actually kind of prefer the radar system in SA2. The SA1 radar could be a sensory overload at times and if you mastered it it made the stages super short. I don't mind having to look for one emerald at a time and it made you actually have to be aware and look around the stage for potential freebies instead of just following the radar like a drone the whole time. But I fully understand why people think the change was contrived. That's actually a fair point and I kind of agree. I didn't really mind playing the stages over and over, since I really liked playing the game and wasn't really concerned about a time frame or anything. But yeah they could have removed some grinding there. I am curious how many people making these story complaints have played the game in the original Japanese. The translation job really botched a lot of the dialogue, making the story make less sense needlessly. It's completely reasonable for people to expect the story to make sense in English if they bought the game in an English speaking country, but ya'll might consider trying the SA2 Retranslated mod. It doesn't radically change the story or anything, just makes a lot of elements that were confusing before make more sense. example: Shadow saying "あなたの願い叶えて差し上げましょう", which means something like "I'll make your desire come true" doesn't get translated as "I will grant you one wish", which makes it sound like Shadow is a genie.
That is an interesting perspective, however it is also the direct followup to SA2 and the story works a lot better with that context. I don't think Team Dark would make any sense without SA2's story.
I'm sick and tired of people complaining about the green eyes and blue arms debates. No, not people complaining about green eyes, people complaining about the debates over green eyes. Those people. The people who love to say "ugh Sonic fans are whining about green eyes again" unironically on Twitter. For some reason, the Sonic fandom has gotten a reputation for "making a big deal out of every tiny insignificant thing" and the whole green eyes/blue arms thing comes up very often. Maybe I missed something, but I don't recall anyone actually pointing to eye color and saying it's why the series sucks, or throwing a temper tantrum over it. It was just a bunch of artists who were fans of the series and were voicing their very real, very valid arguments. People who loved Sonic's art otherwise and just wanted it to be better. And the only reason they ever got angry about it is due to the response from non-artists who, because they didn't know what the artists were talking about, blew them off and said they were wrong. There is virtually no difference between a debate over Sonic's character design to a debate over his voice actor. But fans have that debate daily and nobody bats an eye. I'm sick of the idea that because nobody complains about something, said thing isn't a problem. That's not how it works. Progress comes from challenging the status quo and demanding better. And I KNOW this is an unpopular opinion, because I know some of you have looked at people complaining about character design on this forum, and responded with the equivalent of "who fucking cares lmao".
I don't like categorizing black eye fans as artists and green eye fans as non-artists. It's just a nice color contrast, like his shoes. Makes his eyes more noticeable from far away too.
I find the eye color debate weird because yeah, as a kid I never cared what color Sonic's eyes were. When SA2B came out on Gamecube and I was introduced to Yuji Uekawa's goated art, I never questioned why all the characters had colored eyes now. Just seemed natural that way. I don't know man, I like pretty much all art styles of Sonic. Even the Boom stuff, for the most part. Why can't we have all of them?
Yes and no. Playing Sonic Adventure 2 certainly helps, but because Shadow has amnesia, he effectively gets hard-reset as a character in Heroes. The game even plays up the "mystery" surrounding it (even though we found everything about him in the last game, and Rouge logically would spill the beans immediately) and only gets followed up in the next game, which properly serves as a sequel to Sonic Adventure 2 as unlike Heroes, it actually follows up in plot points established in the former. To put it simply; you don't need to play Sonic Adventure 2 to understand who Shadow is in Heroes, but you absolutely do need to play it if you're playing Shadow's game.
I just watched the relevant Sonic X episodes to see what part of the story was restored that was missing from the game. Honestly? The only missing part was a prologue. Everything else is also in the game, minus goofy Sonic X shenanigans. There was something about a group within the intelligence agency, but that was too vague to mean anything, so who knows if it was part of the original story. I really need to play Shadow the Hedgehog one of these days to finally resolve the mystery.
Well there's little things like Shadow's inhibitor rings, Shadow telling Sonic "Sayonara" after their first encounter which sets up Sonic doing the same in the final cutscene.
The main re-additions are the scenes with the president (which are important to the themes of the story and make sure people even know what Rouge is doing) and the "full" story of what happened 50 years ago. (it's actually explained who Maria is to Shadow, and what happened to Gerald - GUN took him into custody and forced him to continue work on Project Shadow and didn't tell him his granddaughter died as a result of the raid and he had to find out for himself, which is what drove him to turn Shadow into a weapon. while Gerald's diary in the final game references some of this stuff it's almost completely ignored as ramblings. I'm not super sure that the stuff about the secret cover up agency was ever intended but it is a nice addition.
Perhaps this is a much broader topic but social media, its ubiquity and how it is the defacto activity for downtime with most people anywhere, anytime is making everything and everyone significantly more miserable. Specialized forums like this being the default to most people, healthy competition in the instant messaging space, more than one or two social media spaces and a barrier to entry on internet time be it slower clunkier phones, data caps, etc made things such as "fandom" much more bearable. The way things are and the way things are going, every little thing is going to be divisive for boredom's sake and/or for attention seeking's sake. Quit social media. You'll be a much happier person.
Maybe I'm dense, but what happened to Gerald wasn't made clear enough for me. He got captured, yes, but why and what he did after that is left unsaid. Then it's revealed that somehow he worked on his revenge while in prison.
