vivian lim ⭐

now that we're on cohost and not twitter. let's clear the air on something we've all had to keep quiet about but i'm gonna really be the one to speak out on it.

Oh yeah, the way Sonic Adventure gets dragged so far out of its original context to be laughed at is so disappointing. (in fact, @BlazeHedgehog has an excellent teardown about how the readily-available-to-today's-youtubers versions are "bar none, the worst possible version of Sonic Adventure," "in a way that actively ruins the original game" -- well worth a watch! https://youtu.be/8uNsTXIzgGI)

There are a few nuances around this overall topic I'd love to ramble about for a bit! Particularly about the journey from 2D to Adventure to '06.

The perception of Sonic's awkward transition into 3D wasn't just owed to Sonic Adventure (though Adventure definitely cemented a few unfortunate things into the formula, some with dire consequences that came to a head in '06), but also to keeping the series in a holding pattern for the entire Saturn era. It missed that critical period, the few years in which it was OK to not have 3D completely figured out yet.

In NiGHTS into dreams... for the Saturn, Sonic Team showed that they were perfectly capable of making a fantastic 2.5D game, but they were still insecure about competing with SM64. And rightly so -- Mario's slower-paced gameplay is much easier to translate; he doesn't need so much room to run around.

When you look at recent fan efforts to "properly" recreate the original Sonic 2D feel in a 3D engine, you notice that the levels are enormous. And they're just tech demos (check out Green Hill Paradise and Sonic Utopia from a few years back, as well as the more recent Sonic GT, Sonic Worlds DX, and Sonic Encore, and the continuing flow of new projects in this vein shown at SAGE every year).

The gameplay loop for Sonic 3&K had you exploring these sprawling, maze-like levels, and doing so very quickly, covering a lot of ground in not a lot of time as you zip from puzzle to puzzle. Gating that progression reasonably when you've got a whole 'nother degree of freedom was a level design challenge I don't think either the technology or the designers themselves were yet able to take on at the time. With NiGHTS and Sonic R, we had smaller worlds and simply did laps in them (with branching paths and exploration, still!) to make up for the fact that it couldn't be bigger. Sadly, people probably weren't gonna buy that kind of gameplay loop in any other presentation package than racing or, uh, dreamy score-attack.

You can look to Sonic 3D Blast for another example of where they (vicariously through Traveler's Tales) were experimenting with how to make this happen.

In the platformer genre, with there being no obvious "go right" in 3D space, you need some incentive to explore the space you're in. So within the isometric faux-3D of the 16-bit era, they toyed with some collect-a-thon elements, where you'd have to hunt down all the Flickies before you could finish the level. It... didn't feel much like the Sonic people knew; despite having the momentum-based gameplay intact, the gameplay loop built around it (and the fiddly Badnik combat) didn't combine with it all too well. We had the sprawling levels to explore, but every time there was Mandatory Isometric Platforming challenges, it usually wasn't particularly fun.

X-treme, which died in development hell, experimented with a fish-eye lens and changing gravity as gimmicks to make up for the challenges of translating high-speed precision platforming into 3D. The problem was famously made more difficult because of intra-Sega politics and Yuji Naka not letting them use the NiGHTS engine, which compounded the baseline challenge of... Well, the Saturn certainly could do 3D, but its GPU was what you'd get if you kept going down the path of "oh, 3D is just a lot of faking it with sprite transformations." That's why they chose not to bother trying to render Sonic in real-time, they'd just pre-render a veritable combinatorial explosion of 64x64 sprites instead. Yes, every frame for every relevant euler angle. (You can find leaked prototypes of X-treme and run them on your own Saturn or emulator to see how well it was going, or to be more precise, how well it wasn't)

I think a compelling, S3&K-style 3D Sonic would've had to have a map on the same order of the size of Breath of the Wild, per zone (albeit with a touch more verticality). And a lot more effort would've had to go into structuring the puzzles and layout appropriately. In Frontiers, over two decades later, we see them finally addressing this problem-space by making a hard delineation between high-speed platforming challenges and the larger spaces to move around between them with incidental springs and bumpers and rails.

The state of the art of game development circa the Saturn's lifespan simply wasn't up to the task. Sonic Adventure definitely took its own swing in that general direction -- they knew what they were doing, even back then! -- by splitting up adventure fields and action stages similarly to what we see Frontiers returning to now. Adventure had to solve another problem, though -- controlling Sonic, normally something that had been heavily reliant on using and abusing physics to get around, in 3D.

When you play 2D Sonic, you generally maintain control over him as you move around complicated curves and loops with few exceptions, but from Adventure onward, as soon as you get in proximity of a curved bit of terrain, you get snapped onto a spline and lose all but one degree of freedom. This is probably an acceptable compromise for most, but it was definitely a noticeable one if you were used to Super Mario 64 and the 2D Sonic games and this was your first experience having game suspend direct control of your character with that degree of regularity.

In Sonic R, you had a little more direct control of Sonic as you went upside-down in the loop, and it mostly worked without assistance. Somewhere between that and Adventure, someone got nervous that the controls were too confusing, and decided the compromise was to take away a little more player agency, which was an brave step to take in an action game genre where maintaining direct control at all times has always been seen as crucial. But really, you only break the illusion if you try slowing down or hitting jump during a corkscrew or loop (which, to be fair, can get very janky -- your gravity and momentum go bonkers as it sometimes resets you to your facing direction before you started the loop, sometimes not)

The engine may well still have the capability to put Sonic's ass above his head naturally, without the use of splines. At least, it still did back in Heroes. This was something I discovered accidentally while glitching out-of-bounds back in the day: A level called "Hang Castle" had a gimmick where you'd "invert gravity" at certain points, which in reality just loaded an upside-down version of the map. I'd been messing with a bug that could let you fly to unintended areas, and I managed to make my way up to the "top" of one of the loop structures in the ceiling. It had collisions, it didn't have the splines loaded. Despite that, I was able to run around it and control my character on both control stick axes. Prior to that, I'd just figured the physics engine math was just too hard, and it wasn't just a usability/accessibility hack for people not to get disoriented. (And as a little kid, I was livid that they'd deny me control when it was technically possible!)

Anyway. Fundamentally, they needed to preserve the brand of "going fast," but even on the Dreamcast, slow optical media and limited VRAM couldn't support a world as compelling to explore and go fast in happen in real-time. So for what they couldn't do on that axis, they made up for in showmanship: a few scripted running sequences, cutscenes, and some delicious cheesy ADPCM rock 'n roll. And it worked! It had its rough edges but by god it worked.

Like, what do you do when your franchise started with back-to-back-to-back hits, with 1, 2, CD, 3K all being pretty phenomenal...
Then their last foray into 2D on the 32X flopped (banger special stage tho,).
3D Blast was... perhaps not as compelling as a direction for this series as much as it would've been for Flicky.
R was a neat spinoff but couldn't be presented seriously as a 'mainline' Sonic game.
X-treme couldn't even make it out the door.

With these data points in mind, it's no surprise they went a bit kitchen-sink with Adventure, perhaps because they were unsure exactly what would sell. (Heck, Adventure was originally going to be an RPG while it was still a Saturn project, and it still carries some of that legacy with it with the vibrant set of NPC dialogues around the adventure fields, the equipment upgrades, the storylines)

The big thing people cared about at the time was graphics. So naturally, SA stuffed the disc with pre-rendered MPEG videos to punch above their weight where they could. They also did a reasonably good job at making a lighting engine that could produce colors and shading somewhat consistent with the old Sonic aesthetic (which DX discarded, sadly). And sure, they maybe went a little overboard with animating the facial expressions. But they produced a game that looked impressive, was fun to play, and moved a fair number of units!

Sonic's action stages are a bit linear, but he's clearly the main event of the game, boasting 10 of them. The rest of the characters, while having far fewer action stages, often have the flexibility to do more interesting things within them -- and the fact that the different characters' gameplay recontextualizes the levels makes me wish they'd all gotten more. I think the Knuckles emerald hunting in SA1 was probably the best fit for the medium. You got to explore the level, you had natural spatial player-driven discovery with all the radars active at once (which SA2 lacked, replacing it with obtuse map trivia clues).

It's also hilarious that on the far end of the spectrum away from speed, we also have fishing; it's honestly a shame that these were just one-and-done catch-Froggy missions and not something where they could meaningfully expand your experience to reward you for catching trickier fish. (by the way, if you like Big, you owe it to yourself to play Big's Big World, probably my game of the year when it came out, not kidding.)

And maybe it's a little on-the-nose to make Amy's gameplay loop be running away from a weird stalker, but you know, whatever works! I also want to acknowledge that making a Sonic game where the ultimate enemy is literally water was clever :)

E102's story was probably the most clever one in the game. You can finally play as one of the Badniks, and they pretty much nail how that should feel, movement-wise. And the little story of realizing that it and its brethren were tiny animals in robot suits, as Badniks have always been, and deciding to "rescue" them all, was about as touching as I can imagine a story getting in the SA universe. (Sadly, as becomes a trend from here on out, Sonic Team fails to identify the good from the bad here: In SA2, mech motion feels overly clunky in a very bad way, and there's none of the heart that we saw here, no reason for them to be in mechs other than just 'cause)

Adventure also has few of Sega's insecurities worn on its sleeve. Mario 64, the competition, had 120 stars, so we'd better have... 130 emblems! And multiple missions per level! Even though those elements weren't necessarily relevant to the type of game Sonic has always been, I have to imagine years of pressure to have an answer to SM64 resulted in a few design decisions of this sort.

If you've worked in games (or even played a simulation like Game Dev Story) you might know that to develop a good game, you tend to pick only a few aspects to allocate the effort to focus on polishing, or else you either end up making a "master of none," so to speak, or you burn so much time and money that the project becomes too risky (not all of us can spend years making a Breath of the Wild). So looking at the vast array of things they shoved into Adventure (as I said in a post about Frontiers earlier, it's an action adventure racing fishing tamagotchi collect-athon pinball poker slots shmup with light metroidvania elements!) that all still more-or-less worked, impressive as fuck! And like, listen. To folks who haven't worked in games, if a complex video game exists and is fun, it's likely because miracles and heroics happened to get it out the door.

It's only with hindsight that we are able to see how Adventure's influence on the franchise gradually led it astray. Because they threw so many different types of spaghetti at the wall all at once, it became difficult to identify what made it stick to have direction for the sequel.

Evidently they thought the fixed-path movement idea was itself a hit, because SA2 had a major focus on grind rails, which are basically a visible "owning it" version of the fixed-movement splines compromise. They doubled down on voice-acted cutscenes and dramatic storytelling. And they dropped the whole "enemies are robots with animals inside" for most of the game (save for the pyramid level), which had been a series hallmark until then. Knuckles' emerald hunting stayed, but was overhauled to be much slower-paced. E-102's gameplay was given... is there a word for "overhaul" without the connotation of "made better in the slightest?" Tails (non-mech), Amy, and Big were axed outright, of course.

They stopped sharing zones between characters at all, each character now getting five-ish of their own exclusive levels. And you no longer picked one character to run with for an entire playthrough; if you picked the game up because you were in a speedy mood, you now had to suffer through however many mech or hunting levels before you could play the next Sonic/Shadow one, making gameplay start taking more of a backseat to the story. The thing is, spectacle and cinematics were an easier investment to make in 3D, at least at the time. Having spent most of the late 90s working out to translate the gameplay formula, they were probably loath to sink any more resources into that particular black hole.

This was their 10th anniversary game, by the way. At this point, the series had spent its first 5 years with several mainline games each being bigger and better than the last, and then 3 years in a holding pattern with no meaningful new games on the Saturn, then we got Adventure, then the Dreamcast died, then SA2 came out. Sega ported SA2B and SADX to the Gamecube and went on as a third-party developer. Future Sonic games would be cross-platform releases, using middleware to abstract the differences, and no longer having an onus upon them to do anything technically impressive to drive console sales.

The next mainline game we saw was Sonic Heroes, which introduced a team-based gameplay where you could switch characters mid-level. Quirky and gimmicky as it was, I felt it was actually a thematic return to the series' roots, in a sense. There wasn't really as much a focus on story (though they added voice acted dialogues during gameplay). The levels had multiple paths, and looked aesthetically more cartoony and similar to what you'd expect from the classic games than what we got from the Adventure games (photorealistic South American ruins, San Francisco, etc.). And the team mechanic was clearly inspired by the old Sonic + Tails gameplay of S2 and S3K.

The game started focusing on combat sections to justify the "Power" formation, and some former staples of the series like spindashing were outright missing. Switching between grind rails becomes a bit more prominent, and this eventually will evolve into the quick-step lane-switching mechanic the later Boost series games added (Unleashed, Colors, Generations).

Despite bringing back a few elements of the original series' heart and soul aesthetically, Heroes was met with mixed reception, and I suspect Sega might've yet again had the wrong takeaway. The next mainline Sonic game was Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), and it saw the return of a lot of the least Sonic-like mechanics from the other 3D games: Edgier story, photorealism, SA1's "panel jump" quick time events... The pace-wrecking combat sections from Heroes were kept around and made even more damage-spongey, and mid-level character switches were no longer even initiated by the player as they were in Heroes. They also introduce the "mach speed" sections, which were barely-controllable, under-designed, fast for the sake of the idea of fast.

I guess a significant difference was that the Adventure games got to have a bit more time in the oven, but I also think Sega kept keeping too much bathwater and throwing out too much baby between each iteration. (This failure mode is also extremely apparent with everything they've done since Generations -- in Forces? Oh clearly the thing people liked about Generations was... Not the expansive levels with care and dedication poured into recreating them in HD, no, clearly what people liked was that there was two Sonics in the story, and also specifically Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and Sky Sanctuary.) But save for the severe lack of polish, nearly every design decision in Sonic '06, infamous for being the worst in the series, was made in the well-received Adventure series before it, in a way that worked much better as part of the whole.

I genuinely want people in this situation who follow me to do this. I'm excited to meet ya and see what you're about!