Spark the Electric Jester 2

Sometimes a game feels like it's onto something, sometimes a game really gets it all right. Super Mario 64 got 3D platforming so right on the first try that Nintendo couldn't figure out how to improve on it and didn't really rediscover what made it so great until the past 5 years. Devil May Cry had a lot of trouble juggling its mechanical priorities and identity crises but the eventual result was the absolute apex of the character action genre. Typically, one would think that with enough iteration a game concept with a strong skeleton could be fleshed out into an ultimate expression of its particular mechanical form. And yet, the "Speed Platformer" has largely stagnated into cinematic fluff.

Sonic didn't have a rough transition into 3D, he had a rough transition into the real "Modern AAA" space; while I think the obsession with content-per-dollar is something that tends to be associated with online discourse from about a decade ago or so, the reality is that this was at least an implicit factor long before. On its initial release in Japan, Sonic Adventure was on store shelves right next to Ocarina of Time. A game like Sonic 3, where you could easily see the end credits in a couple hours, wasn't going to cut it anymore. Replaying stages couldn't be an activity that the player would be expected to do themselves, it had to be an explicit part of the game's design. 3D Sonic had to add hub worlds, side-quests, multiple characters, branching stories, alternate types of gameplay, melee combat, and all sorts of other distractions to make sure that the game was big enough to justify its price tag next to the competition.

Somewhere in all this, the core platforming was all but forgotten. Even a "good" modern 3D Sonic game like Colors alternates between 3D levels that practically play themselves and 2.5D levels that feel about as good as browser games from the same year. Even my personal favorite, the original Sonic Adventure, lost its focus on movement. From the beginning to the present, so many of 3D Sonic's set-pieces rarely expect the player to do anything other than hold forward, and often punish the player for trying anything else. Fan projects have offered alternate translations to 3D, or simple tests and demonstrations, but nobody until now has really built something truly great and complete on the solid foundation left in the initial move to 3D.

Spark the Electric Jester 2 doesn't just feel like the best execution of this core game concept yet, it feels like the beginning of a second "Golden Age" of video games. In the early 00's, 3D development was sophisticated, but in the absence of later high definition displays, fidelity wasn't a priority and all kinds of corners could be cut because through a composite signal on a 20 inch CRT who was going to care? 2D games had been around for decades and just generally speaking the process of game development was well-understood and relatively inexpensive in terms of both money and time. You could have a weird, experimental take on a franchise like Mega Man Battle Network, and it would get 5 sequels on a single platform. Xenosaga was such a flop that it will probably never be re-released let alone remastered or remade, and it still got 2 sequels. Until HD game development changed everything, we had this little pocket of time when games were worth taking substantial creative risks on, because the losses wouldn't be multi-million dollar disasters.

Today, the tools of game development are so sophisticated that a tiny team of passionate and dedicated fans can put decades of corporate projects to shame. While the trade-off is obviously that these tools also enable the kinds of cynical cash-grabs we see on every digital storefront, powerful hardware and software is so accessible and intuitive now that we really don't need to (and often simply can not) rely on massive franchises to deliver this kind of quality.

The first time that I got on a loop-de-loop my jaw dropped. I actually had to correct my angle to match the twisting turn myself, I could feel the deceleration as I hit the peak, and I could feel gravity kick in on my way back down. Set-pieces in Spark 2 aren't just static, scripted events, they're just part of the environment like anything else. The fastest way through a loop-de-loop is usually just to jump over to the track on the other side. The quickest way through levels is often to circumvent the set-pieces with clever "Jester Dashes". While some of the 3D Sonic games also had these kinds of shortcuts it has literally never felt like an intentional part of the game; it always requires either such precise inputs or such unnatural angles that I've never felt like I was really "learning the levels" or getting better at controlling the character the way I do in Spark.

Spark 2 has an absolutely unforgettable soundtrack, absolutely rivaling the historical platforming greats from major publishers. Not just in terms of the absolutely unbelievable level themes, the vocal tracks used for bosses capture the energy and purpose of Sonic's Crush 40 "butt rock" absolutely perfectly. The visuals, especially the characters, may not hold a technical candle to modern big-budget titles, but in gameplay they're more than serviceable; it's one of those things where even if the cutscenes don't look great, I have to ask myself, if a game from a popular IP looked and played like this, could I forgive a shortcoming like this? In every case with Spark 2, the answer is yes.

This isn't just "Not Sonic", this isn't even Spark. In this game you play as Fark, a fake Spark, a copy of a copy. It's only the second installment of the series and they've already done a soft-reboot. On one hand, for those who wanted to see the concepts from the original 2D Spark game translated to 3D, here it is, bigger and better than ever. On the other hand, for those who just want to get to the gameplay, this repeated narrative can be easily ignored, and that's one of the strangest things about Spark 2: it's a game with so many strengths, and yet to some extent it feels less like a proper sequel, and more like a proof of concept for the next game, the real sequel, where Spark himself is coming back and everything.

I'll never turn down another opportunity to spark it up.