#this devolved into word vomit so fast lmao whoops

[zosonils]

about the sonic/mega man crossover, how would Sonic figure into it? would Sonic be like a player 2, maybe have his own separate side story, or what?

i was like 'hmm i haven't thought about it much so i guess this'll be a quick ask' and then the part of my brain that's thought about sonic level design every day for the past ten years awakened and i wrote so fucking much [and tragically it's not even illustrated this time] so this is gonna be under a cut again bhjfkngbkjg

there's a handful of ways you could go about this but i imagine it'd work like classic and modern sonic in generations where every stage has one act for sonic and one act for mega man that you can play in either order! alternatively the sonic rush approach where they both have their own story and you beat both to unlock the final boss could work. there's also the idea of doing it like sonic rush adventure or mega man and bass where you pick one character at the beginning of each stage and can go the entire game only playing as one of them, but this wouldn't really work for the same reason it didn't work in mega man and bass dialled up to 11 - sonic and mega man gameplay are so fundamentally different from each other that it's almost impossible to design a level that's equally fun and fair to play through for both of them. either sonic has to slog through a slow-paced level filled with enemies that can attack him from afar with no way for him to counter from a distance, or rock is constantly tripping over his own big ol robot boots as he stumbles through a level that's throwing shit at him from every possible direction faster than he can reasonably react

sonic's gameplay would probably function more or less identically to sonic colours, i'm thinking for consistency's sake it'd pull from the ds port rather than the wii version so that the entire game is a sidescrolling platformer. all the wii-exclusive wisps [cube, hover, spikes] work in two dimensions and two out of those three are exclusive to the 2d segments so there'd be no issues with squeezing those down to a purely sidescrolling experience, as opposed to the logistical nightmare of making up a way for every single colour power to function in 3d - sonic lost world on 3ds kinda did that for red burst if my memory is correct but it's just not as fun. also i think the thing modern sonic does sometimes where it switches between 2 and 3d mid-level is clunky but that's just me

the reason i talk about wisp logistics is that of course sonic's still gonna have the wisps. nearly all of them would function pretty identically to their ingame incarnations, but unlike in regular sonic colours where you can only use certain wisps in certain spots in certain levels, they'd act more like mega man's weapons where sonic can activate and deactivate them at will until an energy gauge runs out. [i say 'nearly all' because as i mentioned in the last post about this au i think blue cube sucks ass and that'd be even more apparent if you could use it whenever you want. keep some optional ring/cube puzzles for funsies, that's fine, but i'm envisioning a heavier emphasis on the ground pound aspect of it that the game sorta glosses over so that it feels less underwhelming]

just as rock unlocks a new weapon with every robot master defeated, sonic unlocks a new colour power. of course this means that even sonic's levels would have to be almost completely reworked so that you can beat any of them without a single colour power, since i wanna keep the near-total non-linearity from mega man, but honestly i think you could make just as fun a sonic colours experience treating wisps like this. side note, i think i heard a rumour or leak or whatever the kids call it now that sonic colours ultimate is leaning towards this approach, and i have no idea if it's true or not [after all the playable tails rumour [which i had a very vivid dream about while staying at my grandparents' house one summer when i was i think 9 or thereabouts, i wanted it to be real so bad] turned out to be not real :(] but if it is that'll fucking rule

also this should've gone earlier but i can't find a good place to insert it so i'm just saying that both sonic and mega man's gameplay styles will probably lean a bit closer to each other so it doesn't feel too jarring for fans of only one series. since i love both i could just rip straight from their respective titles and it wouldn't matter but unfortunately i care about game design. the core gameplay would be pretty identical for both of them, it'd just be little differences - mega man levels naturally flow faster and the punishment for charging in headfirst is a little more gentle, sonic levels have tighter platforming and encourage a slightly more thoughtful approach without sacrificing the momentum-based gameplay. sonic's stages are a bit trickier than usual [at least on par with the genesis games] and require deliberate skillful movement, mega man's stages are more forgiving and give you more room to breathe, striking a tough but fair balance between 'sometimes challenging but rarely distressingly so' sonic and 'for the love of god please help me' mega man. each character still plays distinctly like themselves, but with adjustments to make it easier for a fan of specifically one series to ease into the other's playstyle, and also so that the constant shifting between two different gameplay styles feels more natural and less jarring

really the biggest issue that this hypothetical crossover poses in terms of gameplay is bosses. of course the robot masters are gonna be the main bosses, but who's gonna fight them? rock could take on the robot masters while sonic fights his own guys, but sonic bosses aren't nearly as interesting as robot masters by nature of each series' core design [sonic is all about the levels themselves whereas mega man is pretty much defined by the showdown with each boss]. is the boss a separate, self-enclosed act 3 you can choose either character for? what's the point of a mega man level that doesn't end in a boss fight, though? is there a forced structure of act 1 as sonic and act 2 as mega man? do they BOTH fight the robot master at the end of their act? if so, how did he come back when he got beaten the first time, but not the second? i guess i'll go with they both fight the robot master and he just teleports away from whoever beats him first or something, but it feels like an incomplete solution and it bothers me lmao

obviously the boss issue only comes up with the robot master stages and the boss rush [would you even want to do a boss rush if you've already had to beat them twice] because the obligatory egg/wily stages at the end would be fine with more generic bosses - maybe the actual bosses from sonic colours repurposed for the final levels, at least on sonic's side of things. the true final boss would naturally have you switch between the two of them in a completely different gameplay style that you have to learn fast or die trying a la sonic adventure 2 or the rushes, and almost definitely is the nega-mother wisp from colours ds