I was having a conversation with Daria yesterday, during which she asked out of the blue, "is there Kaizo Sonic?" and of course, yes, there is, there's kaizo everything. I figured this was the case before looking, but I still said "probably not really," and I gave two reasons for this.
Edit: This post originally called out Castlevania: The Adventure for the gameboy rather than Capcom's gameboy Megaman titles. Gravis Gaming regrets this error.
First, Mario - from whence the kaizo genre arose - is a far more abstract game. Sure, the world elements are ostensibly realistic (platforms made of brick, wood, dirt) or at least magical-realistic (mystery question blocks, stomp switches, platforms that move along skyhook rails) but right from the first game there's never any promise of internal consistency: Super Mario Bros (1985) has blocks that appear out of nowhere, and the platforms making up the world do not seem to have any specific function other than to be an obstacle course.
More importantly, the world often follows magical rules, up to and including being openly sadistic at times. I have no doubt that the seed of the kaizo concept was planted in T. Takemoto's mind by one of the many scenes in SMW or SMB3 where you, for instance, jump down into a pit, then jump back up only to bonk your head on an invisible block, and discover that what you thought was an easy path forward actually demands you tediously work your way back through a whole other part of the level. Not to mention the super high jump springboard in SMB2 Japan.
It would be absolutely ridiculous to suggest that Sonic's world makes sense - he appears to live on a planet made entirely out of stunt loops that only he has any chance of navigating, so, that's off the table. But the fact remains that between 1985 and 1991, the sense of "solidity" in videogame worlds had advanced tremendously, and a much higher standard of internal consistency was expected. Sonic's world looks a lot more real, a lot more relatable.
It's hard to pin down exactly what the Mushroom Kingdom looks like - Nintendo has reinvented it completely at least a dozen times, but even so, it really doesn't resemble any stock locale, and certainly not our world, past present or future. I'd have to call it... Wonderlandesque? It's an idyllic, childlike place full of whimsy - flying turtles and food that makes you get bigger - but also terror: everything is out to get you, even the sun.
Sonic's world is absolutely more consistent across all his games, and right from the get go it looks like a place. Green Hill Zone is a bit vague and fantasylike, perhaps, but Chemical Plant Zone looks like... well, it looks like a Chemical Plant. A silly one, sure, but nonetheless it's made of pipes and machinery and fluid reservoirs, just in nonsense shapes.
Indeed, Sonic's world may contain ridiculous elements like pinball flippers and springboards, but they mostly follow physical rules; they're usually built into the earth and walls, not just suspended in midair, and things that do hover seem pretty clearly to do so by technological means.
Things also don't usually appear out of nowhere; there are no magical door maze puzzles; the "monsters" are just nature wrapped in a veneer of human (?) malfeasance; and the goal is to win a war against a tyrant, not rescue a princess who's been kidnapped for unclear, fairytale-esque reasons. Despite its undeniable cartoon nature, the world feels more nailed-down, grittier, more serious. Damn, I wonder why kids went nuts for it.
So, one could say "why not make Kaizo Sonic? who cares if it fits with the original gameplay or not?" but the fact is that Kaizo Mario World is Mario. It's an extension of the way Mario already was, with his unpredictable world and its magic and secrets. Kaizo just feels like the Mushroom Kingdom - a character in its own right - shifted gears from "playing a funny prank" to "actually trying to kill you in real life." Kaizo Sonic might be possible, but it doesn't suggest itself, nor would it feel nearly as appropriate.
But then there's the second difference: Sonic is bigger, and his world is smaller. Like, literally, Sonic is physically bigger than Mario, and this... probably explains why I never liked Sonic.
It took me a really long time to figure this out. I never understood what people enjoyed about the Sonic games if I'm frank - I mean, they are unbelievably stylish, and I think that's 75% of what sold and continues to sell them. That's good on its own, but whenever I play them or watch anyone else do so, it feels like the actual gameplay is "run really fast for 2/3 of a second, then bonk into a wall and stop dead, losing all your momentum."
I never understood the appeal as someone who cut their teeth on Mario, where it's entirely possible for a beginner player to make it through a whole level without ever breaking stride. I get that with practice one can get better at not bonking, but it still kinda misses me. And what I realized is that this is partly because Sonic has Gameboy Platformer Syndrome.
When game studios started trying to continue their NES series' on the new Gameboy hardware, many of them fell prey to the same mistake: Capcom's Megaman games and Rare's Wizards & Warriors X, for instance, used the exact sprites from their NES counterparts, and that meant that on the much smaller Gameboy screen (half the size!!) they took up a lot more space. Platforms and enemies had to scale up as well, and the effect was one of "zooming in" the virtual camera, leaving the player with a much narrower field of view.
Action games struggled with diminishing playfields ever since they left the arcade. Donkey Kong let the player see the entire "world" on one screen, allowing the player to omniescently plan their attack - and, of course, the gameplay was designed with that in mind, so everything moved at once, requiring the player to monitor and react to the entire world at all times.
Console action games, with lower resolution and less need to punish the player to extract quarters, shrunk the scope of the action; Mario need only think about how a couple of slow-moving enemies on the current screen interact with three or four platforms in order to make his decisions. This was a well established practice by the time the Gameboy came out, so nobody thought much of just continuing with it - but Rare and Capcom perhaps did not remember how much breathing room was lost when moving to consoles, so were not prepared to make adjustments again.
The early Megaman and Wizards games put out for the Gameboy were extremely cramped experiences, basically like playing the NES titles through a magnifying glass. The player can only see the space immediately around them; upcoming enemies and platforms are invisible until they're right on top of you, leaving no time to react. And this problem was never really solved, because the Gameboy just doesn't really have enough pixels to fit in a conventional platformer; those that managed were pretty compromised.
But you didn't need to be starved for pixels to have the same problem. Despite the SNES having virtually the same resolution as the NES, Konami must have been incredibly hype for its larger sprite capacity, because Castlevania IV makes Simon much bigger than in any of the previous games - almost a third again taller than in CV3. This didn't stop the game from being a huge success, and it's a much less violent mismatch than the aforementioned Gameboy titles, but at least some people noticed and hated it.
Probably the reason it didn't ruin the game though is that Konami compensated by simplifying the world. If you compare them side by side, the average scene in CV4 probably contains fewer elements than in CV1, 2 or 3, placed further apart to make room for Simon's greater bulk. There's just less room to put platforms and enemies on the screen while leaving space to do things, so they made changes to accommodate this, producing a slower and simpler game in exchange for greater graphical fidelity; a reasonable tradeoff.
Sonic does this too, but goes even harder. Not only is he about twice as big as Mario, pixel for pixel, but the elements of his world are typically much bigger even in comparison. Mario considers a single 16x16 brick a comfortable platform, and all the games regularly expect you to land and stand on them. Moving platforms in SMB1 are wider, but extremely thin; only 24x8 pixels. But those moving blocks in Sonic's Chemical Plant Zone are 32x32 - almost bigger than Sonic himself, and most significantly, extremely thick.
For comparison, you can only fit about 7 of those on the screen vertically; half as many as the number of Mario bricks you could fit in the same space. And in general, the "ground" in Sonic tends to take up a third of the screen or more.
Sonic, thus, feels more like Castlevania IV: each screen has very few elements, be they enemies or platforms, and on any given screen you can only really see the spot Sonic is standing, then perhaps two other places he could move to, which continue off one edge of the screen or the other. An entire platform rarely fits on a single screen; you're choosing to jump onto the edge, and only then will you find out where the rest of it goes. And rather than doing complex platform-to-platform-to-platform motions, at any given moment you're only really deciding whether you're going to take the high road or low road; there just isn't enough space to fit in more decisionmaking.
This is not a judgment of Sonic's value as a game. It DOES explain a lot of why I don't like it, though - the games I grew up with and became accustomed to are just more complex at any immediate moment, and that's what I prefer, but I actually suspect this simplicity is part of why Sonic is so popular. I think it demands a lot more memorization to complete a level smoothly, since pure reaction is just less practical given that you can't really see what's coming, but maybe not; maybe Sega adapted to Sonic's cramped viewpoint by just making every path valid other than Falling In A Damn Pit. Certainly I can see why a lot of people would prefer that over Mario's endless precision jumping puzzles.
But nonetheless, it means that Kaizo Sonic is not very practical. I've looked at a couple videos and, yeah, I have to say, it just looks boring. Sonic just doesn't have the same kind of "ha ha, fuck you" stage elements that Mario has, but also, while you'd think the combination of spikes and bumpers could add up to some Wild Shenanigans, I think the fact that you just can't see much at once makes it impossible to really do the kind of pixel-perfect ten-steps-ahead planning that Kaizo demands, nor to react quickly when your planning fails by a pixel or two. Well, thanks for coming to m
