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Spark the Electric Jester 2

I'll admit, I passed on Spark the Electric Jester when I first heard of it. Which might seem odd to people that know me, because I'm a MASSIVE Sonic fan, so it should have been right up my alley, right? Thing is, Classic Era isn't really my thing. It holds a place in my heart, I grew up with it after all, but I grew up again in the Adventure era, with the naff PC port of Sonic Adventure 1, and the gamecube version of 2. My unabashed love of Shadow the Hedgehog is well documented. I'll even defend Sonic 06 in a pinch. For me, this is MY era of Sonic. In the same way that Chris Eccleston is MY Doctor Who.

So when I found out that Spark the Electric Jester 2 was a Sonic Adventure throwback, my wallet came out faster than a wild west gunslinger.



When I was in high school, all the computers had access to a shared "Resources" drive, for keeping powerpoints, internet links, word documents, stuff teachers might need to run a lesson. Naturally, a Student account couldn't modify any of it. Now, for some reason, the teacher running the Anime club I attended decided to create a folder in this Resources drive for use by the club members. This folder had no such restrictions. What did I do with this power, you may ask? The ability to place something in a drive linked to every computer in school, accessable anywhere on site? Of course, I filled it with BlitzSonic, a Sonic fan engine made to resemble the Sonic Adventure games. It wasn't even a full game, just an engine that could load up custom levels one at a time by renaming folders. Playing Spark 2 brought these memories back with a vengeance. It's a clear product of this particular era of 3D Sonic Fandom, an evolution of the toolsets and standards established between all the different versions of BlitzSonic from back in the day.

Spark the Electric Jester 2 sits a little bit above the skill ceiling for it's inspirations, which opens up a lot of possibilities, but makes for a harder balancing act. The 3D Sonic games all have moments where they essentially play themselves, as bumpers and dash panels take the wheel and give you a moment to breathe. Not Spark 2. Like BlitzSonic befrore it, if you want to pull off a loop-de-loop, you gotta keep yourself on target for the whole thing, or you'll end up flinging yourself off the side. But get the angle right, and you can use that fling to shave a good few seconds off your time. That's the line Spark 2 tries to ride, taking off the usual limiters, making levels free of invisible walls and scripted sequences, hoping that it's players will be familiar enough with the genre to survive without the literal and figurative guardrails.

Which was a defining facet of the BlitzSonic I grew up with. Amateur game dev rarely has time for polish and streamlining, so invisible walls and fiddly geometry details like railings were off the table from the start. A level was often just the main path, with some very basic shapes for flavor, often evoking a theme from an existing Sonic level(Metal Harbour and Crisis City were favourites). As the scene evolved, so grew an embrace of this "open-plan" level design. Original levels started being designed for what BlitzSonic actually was instead of what it was trying to evoke. Stages grew larger, not in terms of "content", but sheer mass, as a way to spread things apart and make absolutely massive skips harder, but encourage lots of smaller ones. You also saw a lot of increasingly creative use of just enemies, springs and dash pads, in contrast to Sonic games' large array of interactable objects, many often made just for a single stage. Something new had emerged, and to see it back again as it's own thing after so many years is wonderfully hearteneing.

There was no agreed upon toolset between versions of BlitzSonic. Some stuck with just the old fashioned spindash, maybe even omitting a homing attack, though most borrowed the boost mechanic from the post-Unleashed games. Spark 2 feels like a crystalisation of all the experimentation between different versions of the engine, by which I mean it kind of just has everything from all of them and then some. Controlling Fark(It means "Fake Spark". Yeah.) feels a bit like operating a fighter jet at times. In addition to the standard issue homing attack and spindash equivalants, there's also wall jumping, a quick boost that can be aimed downwards for faster freefalling, and a full combat system. That last one is big, the Adventure games always had enemies exist to either aid traversal or be ignored, so a combat system runs the risk of slowing down the pacing with drawn-out fights. Thankfully, Spark 2 understands this, and keeps the pace up in a bunch of cool ways.

The first is the way blocking works, which is independant of your attacks. Pressing the block button forms a familiar-looking bubble shield around you for a few seconds, and doesn't interupt you, letting you sustain and block attacks simultaniously, and even block environmental hazards like lasers and cannon blasts while moving. In addition to feeling cool as shit, perfect blocks build up the static bar, part of the other momentum-maintaining tool: multipliers. The static bar is basically a combo meter, filled by timing your blocks and dealing damage without getting hit, and rewarding you with a 2x or even 3x damage boost. Coupled with an additional multiplier for staying under the par time, you can ace even the strongest enemies in just a few hits.

But doing that is rarely necessery, you can still just sail on by enemies if you want. You'll get no such option against boss fights though, and while you may get a medal for your clear time, there are seperate medals for getting a good score, which will need you to break a few tin cans on the way to the goal. So while it's done a great job of making a combat system that feels in concert with the momentum-based gameplay, you'll still get a lot out of Spark 2 is just want to play the way you always have. Just remember that you'll have to break a few things at some point.

Spark 2 also lifts the Anime Melodrama of Sonic Adventure 2, but really doubles the fuck down on the tragedy. I ran through Spark 1 before starting Spark 2, and it's relatively upbeat tone in the few cutscenes it had did not prepare me for how hard 2 goes. I was completely caught off guard by how much I came to like it's cast. Every well-trodden trope is played with complete sincerity. And the game's belief in it's cartooney Jester-themed characters as vehicles for a dramatic story carries it well. And it moves at a pace appropriate to it's gameplay, never lingering anywhere, nor keeping characters around to cause trouble. But while it makes the story compelling in the moment, the eagerness at which Spark 2 kills off characters leaves me wishing I could have spent more time with them.

My biggest takeaway from Spark 2 is actually a contextual one. It's existance is the herald for the next exciting stage of Sonic fangames becoming their own things. Between the first Spark, Freedom Planet and even Sonic Mania, an actual honest to god Sonic game, fans of the Classic Era have been well served for games that evoke that style. But we're finally hitting the point where Adventure Era fans like myself are starting to make commercial games in the same model. And that's exciting! I'm stoked to see what sort of finished games come out of this style, because I know just how broad the ideas about how Sonic should play stretches. Who knows, maybe we'll even get the Sonic Adventure equivelant of Sonic Mania some day, where it all comes full circle and 3D Sonic comes back to life once again. You better beleive I'll cry if that happens.

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