Boy they really fucked up Sonic Adventure huh?

Remember how I said “mostly” up there? Here’s another post to talk about Gamma’s story, which is the best story a Sonic game has ever told.

Gamma the robot’s journey starts with him fighting his “brother,” Beta, and defeating him. He then competes with 3 other “brothers” and has to watch as they are disassembled for losing. They are reassembled as generic badguys and put into the war efforts as cannon fodder. This memory of his family being disassembled recurs to Gamma multiple times throughout the game as he struggles with the morality of his actions.

Later, Gamma is forced to chase Amy and try to steal her Flicky bird. He ends up letting them go, and this is the first hint that something sinister is going on, as the bird seems to recognize Gamma.

Gamma has a series of flashbacks of his terrible life and ends up deleting his allegiance to Robotnik. He then tracks down his reassembled brothers and murders them to free the animals inside. After taking down 3 of them, he realizes that the first brother he defeated, Beta, is still alive and on the egg carrier.

Beta has been reassembled into a large death robot dedicated to defending the Egg Carrier. He and Gamma fight, and Gamma wins, but sustains a severe injury. In his last moments, he realizes that he, like all of his brothers, is powered by an animal that must be freed. But it’s not any animal - it’s the mother of the Flicky he was originally tasked with capturing. Instead of repairing himself, he self destructs to set the Flicky free, ending his short, somewhat miserable life.

Like, this is on the short list of things in a video game that has made me cry. I’m particularly sensitive to issues of family loss, I think, but I believe this is a genuinely moving and also disturbing story. And it definitely turns Robotnik from a goofy badguy into a truly sinister villain who traps sentient creatures in robots and forces them to carry out his bidding. Something about the horror of having your will removed, your body destroyed and rebuilt, your own family lost to evil, and even after all that sacrificing yourself to save someone else’s family…it’s pretty amazing.

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i think a lot about how between fleetway comics/archie comics/the sonic x cartoon and sonic adventure itself there are like somehow 6 or 7 different versions of the e-102 on the egg carrier fight

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Honestly I’d guess this is a translation bug; the line was replicated for both scenes and they were translated days apart without noticing they were supposed to be the same. Checking with the JP version would tell.

oh this detail was lost on me, damn. but yeah, in terms of the games, this is probably the most/only bit of poignancy I ever recall.

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i do wonder about how different the lines are in the japanese translation but i’m like 90% sure this weird rashomon dialogue is on purpose. tons of little lines like sonic calling e-102 a bucket of bolts vs a cheesy chunk of hardware in different stories seems like it would be weird to translate wildly differently if you were seeing it multiple times

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Sonic Team is crazy enough that I can be convinced of this

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Okay like

I just checked and you’re right

why u gotta ruin this 4 me

EDIT: It’s even weirder because in the english version of Amy’s story he says “You’re late buddy!!” So yet another weird variation that has a fairly different tone as well. The English translators really had style

to be fair, even if this stuff was a choice by the english language side, there are tons of moments where dialogue in different versions of the same scene is omitted/added/changed the order so the point about each story being a pesonal perspective still stands

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this is just another example of woolsey-esque localization being the only true form of art

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The camera angles are all very different as well, it was really thoughtful. It would have been easier to just play the same cutscene for both sections but they really went out of their way to make each one unique.

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i mean that specific moment is honestly amazing because sonic or tails or e-102 can win the fight and whoever loses is exhausted and broken down in the next cutscene and if you play as amy the fight doesn’t even really play out like that it’s this amazing unreliable narrator moment in a game and it’s so unique. i agree with you that it’s a really unexplored avenue

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lies

when you’re 12-15 the sonic adventure story is a lot more effecting. as can be seen by looking at the internet, of course.

people who didn’t play sonic adventure 1 & 2 at the time of release while also being the right sort of kid to get their full effects (chuuni) are missing out, i think

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i think i have the same amount of nostalgic fondness for SA1 as some people do for FF7 or Ocarina of Time. when it came out, it felt like this turning point in graphical fidelity that made it seem like a more ambitious step towards 3D game experiences than even Mario. obviously Mario 64 still holds up (in parts) as a solidly built game, but heck, SA1’s goofy anime plot and stages designed seemingly to be used as clips in commercials was still a lot of fun.

i think i went through a cycle of loving it, then really hating it, to eventually appreciating its charming crappy weirdness that makes it more fondly remembered than its somewhat technically better sequel. a lovely little time capsule from the early 2000s.

A lot of the VO I track (translated or otherwise) that has branching paths often end up with certain lines having subtle variations because different writers were working on different parts of the branch at the same time. Or more typically, one branch got duped in the beginning so a single change could be added, but then another writer came in later to do rewrites on the main branch and didn’t bother to make changes in the duplicated branches, because those duped lines have unique file ID’s and need to be hunted down.

Either way, I really appreciate when there are differences, even when they were never intended to exist. Heck, given carte blanche, and if it’s a narratively important scene, we will usually just get a different pass on a duplicated branch as an excuse to search for a subtly different performance because, why the flip not.

As a side note, I go crazy when designers create generic sets of lines for systemic reasons and those lines get duplicated across 30+ NPC actors, whose scripts end up being largely identical in content (I know why this happens, it’s a time/resource problem and systemic stuff needs consistency, but it’s nevertheless a punch in the gut on your fifteenth pass of “huh, must have been a rat, or something”). It’s pretty much why the arrow to the knee thing became a thing, because every “voice type” in Skyrim (anyone you talk to who isn’t a main story specific character) has the same exact set of generics, including that bit.

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YES – it’s so obnoxious given how much cheaper writing is than VO that these instances of duplicated lines across different actors persist

Yeah!

When you boil it down, rewriting a hundred or so short systemic lines probably takes… two-ish hours of a writer’s time, if they’re taking their time?

A day in the studio is like, an absurd premium in comparison. Union talent is at least 781 dollars for one scale session, for just one actor (unless you’re a bigshot actor and negotiate more than scale), and that is whether they come in for ten minutes or a full four hours. So if you have 4-6 actors come in for even just one day in the studio, and factor in studio time+director+coordinator+prep+lunch, that’s like…6-10k monies a day! That’s a lot to spend to just carbon copy lines!

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my SA story is that I bought it used and somehow got one of the bad GD-ROMs from the console’s launch that would only properly boot into the game for every 7-8 tries

for me, the jank started before the game

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As someone who’s never liked Sonic that much I can confirm that seeing Sonic Adventure at a friend’s even in like 2001 was very impressive

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You know what they could do, is just write the shit, and not have any VO at all.

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