On The Beautiful and Tragic Weirdness of Sonic Adventure, Part 2: A World in Pieces
Written By Zolani Stewart
After going through Emerald Coast and having a long, exhaustive conversation with Tails, we’re brought through Station Square’s train station into the “Mystic Ruins”, another one of the game’s Adventure Fields. What makes the Mystic Ruins peculiar is how it has a totally opposite effect on our experience of the space. It doesn’t make Sonic Adventure’s world feel larger, but smaller. It actually intensifies Sonic Adventure’s sense of isolation and density, despite its reasonably large area size.
Sonic Adventure always feels small and isolated because it has no sense of continuity. The game is mostly a set of disconnected stages, but we rarely have a clear sense of how they’re connected and how they make up the larger world. That Station Square has one train car that goes in one direction towards the Mystic Ruins and back doesn’t clarify how these two places are related. Super Mario 64 uses the image of magic paintings that Mario jumps through to throw out any question of spacial dissonance, but Sonic Adventure’s transitions only seem to amplify its fundamental confusions. The result, I think, is something not easily explained by the game’s surface context. Sonic Adventure is more abstract and complex than a large continuous world. It’s a space that contradicts itself at every major turn.
To start, let’s consider “Speed Highway,” a mid-point stage that we enter through an elevator in the lobby floor of the business office tower of “Cyber-Net Inc.” After we complete Twinkle Park, a key card magically appears on the median of Station Square’s cul-de-sac, and we use it to open the building’s silver garage door, and enter the elevator that closes and loads us into the stage. Speed Highway very clearly presents itself as a sprawling cityscape, magnitudes larger than Station Square, but there’s no implication in Station Square that Speed Highway even exists. This isn’t like Twinkle Park, where the amusement park building is clearly visible from the hub space, or how we clearly transition from the beach area into the beginning of Emerald Coast. The Cyber-Net building elevator may as well just be teleporting us into some new city. Or, perhaps, the elevator is just going to the top floor of the skyscraper, and we’re merely using the height to cross the barriers of the hub world into a new area. That would imply Speed Highway is right next to Station Square, even though the two areas are wildly different in size, scope and range.
The path to Windy Valley is triggered when we step into a caved area that is blowing wind upwards, and given the setting, we can assume that Sonic is being pushed tens of thousands of feet into the Troposphere, where Windy Valley presumably takes place. So we could imagine Windy Valley as a town that just floats thousands of feet above the Mystic Ruins, out of view from our place on the hub world. Similarly, we enter Ice Cap by climbing a mysterious ladder out of the screen, so we can imagine that Sonic has to climb very, very high, for a very long time, to reach these expansive freezing mountain ranges.
It’s quite easy to see Lost World as an underground space, an ancient city buried under the Mystic Ruins. Even that reading is complicated by the fact that we do end up going “outside” in Lost World, we seem to go deeper and deeper into its chambers, until, we reach a point where we are looking out onto its skybox, a vast forest populated with hundreds of pyramid structures like the one we’ve entered, cast under a demonic, cloudless green sky. And, as someone pointed out to me on twitter, Hot Shelter, Final Egg and Sky Deck are implied to be much, much larger than the Egg Carrier that contains it. Their exaggerated, incoherent sense of scale only further instills Eggman’s Ship as an impossibly massive machine, an endlessly layered monstrosity that is complex beyond our own comprehension.
The point of all this is to demonstrate the ways Sonic Adventure forces us to fill in the conceptual gaps of its world. No explanation fits quite right, but every step of guesswork we make only illuminates the game’s surreality. Sonic Adventure becomes more vibrant and evocative as we realize how little we actually understand it. And its “Action Stages,” the game’s most important sections and spaces, are where we really get to engage with its conceptual nature in a powerful and dynamic way.
Windy Valley
What makes Sonic Adventure so awkward is how its spaces have no grounding. Unlike Sonic Adventure 2, which we can say is about history, history as a something that decays, a burden we are forced to navigate as part of daily life, Sonic Adventure seems to have no sense of history. Its settings aren’t contextualized in anything — they exist in a context-less metaphorical floating space. But leaving it there would ignore that many sonic game levels, including Sonic Adventure 2's Radical Highway and Route 102, or Sonic Heroes’ Frog Forest and Bullet Station/Rail Canyon, actually are in floating space! They are at once literal and metaphorical objects, symbols of Sonic’s affinity for abstraction and the isolation that abstraction necessitates. Their spacial isolation turns them into independent visual essays, intricate pieces of rhythm and space that we are supposedly meant to asses and appreciate on their own terms, without any baggage of grounding, the baggage of History.
But Sonic Adventure always felt more explicit about this than the games that would come after it. Windy Valley, Sonic Adventure’s second Action Stage, is a floating concept. It exists as nothing but an idea made material. It has no purpose but to embody a concept that Sonic can run through in six minutes.
If Windy Valley is a visual essay, then it’s an essay of three parts. Like many of Sonic Adventure’s Action Stages, Windy Valley is succinct and graceful in how it progresses. It starts us idle and gradually moves us into motion — it paces itself with highs and lows like a piece of music, but we’re always going faster until we’re eventually hitting the highest speeds in the game. That happens in its third “act,” right after a small tornado section, where we race on huge elongated roads that stretch out by miles. They keep mostly straight and curve themselves very slowly, to instill that sense of boundless speed.
Windy Valley is pleasant and fantastical until we hit its existential boundaries. Its roads are nice, but they aren’t perfectly built — it isn’t difficult to run into its sides at top speed, effectively killing your momentum. When this happens to me I hit the same epiphany that I do in Station Square. I’m trust back into a realization of the sculpted staticness of Windy Valley. It isn’t that Windy Valley isn’t real but that it can’t seem to consistently instill confidence in its reality. But that is, of course, until I get my speed back, and my doubts wash away and I’m back in the fantasy of sublime movement, the game’s major clutch.
Ice Cap
Sonic Adventure plays with its own constuctedness in different ways. Ice Cap is one of the game’s more interesting levels, partly because it is a structure which is so clearly and plainly built by something and it makes little to no effort in concealing it. Ice Cap looks like a hobbyist level designer built it in a Unity editor with a toolbox of models they would click and place where convenient. It’s a level that really does move Part By Part, as if built by block one after another with no overseeing concept or vision. One of those platforms has Sonic hanging on a series of ice pillars and jumping from pillar to pillar, and when you fall there is a little square ground space with a single spring pad that will jump you back to the front if you miss a jump. And further is a group of floating rings suspended in the air to resemble an arrow, weird not only because Ice Cap only has one path, so it virtually serves no purpose, but also that the it feels so damn intentional, too intentional to instill any credibility in the space. I don’t feel reassured by the per-placed set of rings trying to direct me as I am creeped out by them.
Ice Cap is also weird because of the slow, creepy soundtrack that plays under its second act, and the stage’s sluggish pace. We don’t really run in Ice Cap as much as we engage in slow stepping movements on tiny, awkward platforms. Ice Cap’s second act has us basically moving up in a spiral like fashion, along the inner borders of a cylinder-like structure. We have little movement room because the “room” we move in is mostly empty space in its centre. And the end of the path, where we cut down a giant piece of ice for us to cross to a bridge, is only a couple of meters from where we started. In fact, if you’re practiced enough you can just spin dash from the start to the end door of the act because they’re so close together. You can also skip the section entirely by spin-dashing up the slanted walls to the clearly visible upper cave entry from the start of the level, leading to the last section.
It doesn’t take much exploration to discover that Ice Cap has no design to it, no coherent structural vision. The level has a stuttered sense of progression, it doesn’t feel organic. You stumble through a space that is freakish and morphed instead of one that emerges convincingly from the context that produced it, that being a mountain range in an icy region. Again, we move into the conceptual space between what Sonic Adventure wants to be and what it truly is, a place that both alienates us and our expectations, but still succeeds in absorbing me into its universe. As such, Ice Cap is a place that confuses and surprises me. Like Windy Valley, it manages to stumble into the fantastical like an accident, and it’s a surprising and welcome change of pace.
Casinopolis
Between our completion of Windy Valley, and the emergence of the key we need to enter Ice Cap, we’re led into the “back” area of Station Square, a small cul-de-sac where there are no pedestrians or cars to be found. Here is we enter Casinopolis, one of the many Casino-themed levels that are found throughout both the 2D and 3D sonic games. But Casinopolis is a little different — it’s one of the few stages in a Sonic game that isn’t meant to be ran through. Instead, you complete Casinopolis by collecting 400 rings, so you can fill a room with enough coins to reach a top platform that holds a grey Chaos Emerald. You collect these rings by playing the Pinball games, in which Sonic becomes a literal pinball you play for rings, or by going through the underground garbage disposal tunnels that lie under the casino.
There are no people in Casinopolis. The building is completely empty. The main section of the level is a large circular room, centred by a large slot machine network you cannot play, with two pinball games on opposite ends to the wall. Between the two pinball games you can play lies a vacant “Information Desk,” and plastered on its back wall is one of several maps in the space, all too low res for us to use or make out. Further down the circular room is the door to a large “Shower Room,” not a bathroom, but a “Shower Room,” with a section of about 4 sink faucets for washing hands… in case you need to do so after taking a shower. And then there is the main hall that protrudes out of the circle, where you go into the large room to deposit your coins. It’s a large cylindrical room that has a wide bottom, like an empty pool, and in its middle is an elongated platform that extends from the door with the button you use to deposit your coins.
There is no exit door in Casinopolis. There is no implication that Casinopolis is a place you can leave. I think this was what disturbed me the most, that Casinopolis is a place with no conception of its own ending. Given the messy vision of Ice Cap, it’s eerie how Casinopolis is so deliberately structured towards idleness. The literal circle of the main room becomes a symbol of its aspiration towards banal perpetuity. You can finish Casinopolis in about 5 or 6 minutes, but I often spend between 10–30 minutes in the stage, just running around, being idle, and doing nothing. Sometimes, I leave Sonic standing for hours on my TV while I do something else; it becomes a thing I’m comfortable simply existing next to me, playing itself without me there to direct it.
It goes without saying that Casinopolis has no structure for progression. It is a virtual space with three games embedded inside it that you must play over and over to accumulate a resource. Both structurally and fictionally, it is not a place understood as something which can end. To get the 400 rings is more of a stopgap in its machine than it is a conclusion.
So what the hell is Casinopolis? What I find so strange is how Casinopolis puts so much energy in implying an inhabitance that it can’t populate. Casinopolis constantly works to compensate for its emptiness. It does so with glaring reds and yellows, bright flashing lights, and its endless jazzy tune that feels designed to never age. So while it replicates the spacial politics of a typical Casino, it’s clear that Casinopolis has no conception of what Casinos are. It’s a jumbled mess of images and objects that are meant to reference a certain ‘Casinoness’. And this is even more likely, because there are no Casinos in Japan! They’re illegal in the country. So it’s very easy for us to assume that no one at Sonic Team in 1997 had ever been to a Casino, and no solid idea of how they work and what they look like. Could they even have had reference images? There was no Google Image Search until 2001. So perhaps all they had to work with wasn’t an understanding of the structure of Casinos, but only an idea of what the Casino means and what it is for. That a Casino is a place where you do a boring, laborious task of endless accumulation to gain a resource, and that the space is somehow built to coerce you into continuing that task, perhaps against your better judgement. That a Casino is a place you can stay in for a long time, but it isn’t designed to end itself, it cannot accommodate the conception of an end. It is a complex thing that would probably need a special area for people who would need to be taught how it works. And that, maybe, Casinos really are just empty, pointless, lonely places to exist in.
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