Sonic Generations Speedrunning: Chemical Plant

Sonic Generations Speedrunning

Stage: Modern Chemical Plant

For my second blog post, I decided to play through Chemical Plant as Modern Sonic. Modern Sonic is different from Classic Sonic in that his levels are both in 3D and 2D. His levels also has more emphasis on speed and reaction rather than platforming, so some of the shortcuts will be much more tricky to pull off than with Classic Sonic. On a side note, both the visual and sound quality of the videos have drastically improved, though they are still not quite perfect.

Attempt #1

Like before, my first run of the stage consisted of me taking the bottom path and doing more platforming. It was an easy run over all, even though I did make a few mistakes throughout the level. My ending time was 2 minutes 44.45 seconds.

Attempt #2

For my second attempt, I played through the stage again this time following the shortcuts as mentioned in the book. Right off the bat, I already encountered a problem. The first shortcut I am taking is the left side path, which I took at :21 mark in the video. Going down this path led me to a set of springs at the :27 mark. "The Springs launch you high above the silos running alongside the street area. When Sonic is aligned with a Rainbow [Correction: Dash] Ring, hit Boost to shoot through it. Target and Homing Attack across Springs to reach a domed top where a Super Ring lies [performed at the :27 to :32 mark]" (Birlew 56).

All this was a bit tricky, but none of this compares to what I had to do next. The book states "Now comes the tricky part: you must jump from the dome top, fly forward and hit another Dash Ring and Rainbow [It's another Dash] Ring. This propels you through a series of rings and over to the long uphill slope . . . " (Birlew 56). While in the video, it can be seen done very quickly from the :32 to :37 mark, it took a whole lot longer to actually achieve taking the shortcut when I was performing the run. It must have taken about 100 attempts in order to get everything in this section correct. No, this is not an exaggeration. Completing the speedrun took about an hour and a half because of this section. Additionally, there were somethings during this section that were completely out of my control. At the :34 mark, I needed to press the Y botton in order to go through the trail of rings to reach a lower platform. Sometimes, Sonic will hit the side of the platform instead of landing on top when going through the rings. This happens at complete random and there's no way to prevent it. I lost time in real life, my sanity, but more importantly, patience. 

Thankfully, the alternate paths from here on out are much more easy to perform. The next shortcut I took was at the :42 mark, where the book states "As Sonic begins to follow a blue chemical tube downhill, a clearly visible divergence in path occurs. Jumping and Boosting to the upper path eventually carries Sonic to the upper portion of the area, and a faster path out to the next 3D area" (Birlew 57). Overall, this path was really easy to achieve. The only issue I had was overshooting the top path, as Sonic needs to touch the top path in order to take that route. If that doesn't occur, then Sonic by default lands to the bottom path. To ensure I landed on the top path, I did a short stomp also at the :42 mark.

Because I took the route mentioned above, I was able to progress through the level without much difficulty. The next shortcut I took was at the 1:13 mark, where "As the view moves out to the side near the bottom, notice the rail just above Sonic's head. Quickly jump onto it for a slightly quicker route through the second side view area" (Birlew 59). Quicker it was indeed. While I failed to jump towards the higher path at the 1:22 mark, I was still able to skip most of the underwater section that I had to do during the first attempt.

The shortcut I took afterwards occurred at the 1:53 mark, where I had to "Ride the blocks to the top, where you have a choice of routes: the tricky but quick route is to the left, where you must run across collapsing platforms, bounce up to a rail and jump through a Rainbow Ring [1:56 mark] to reach the high corridor on the right" (Birlew 61).

The final shortcut I took required me to "Either land on the rail or take the slightly faster route by Homing Attacking to grab the crane hook at the last second, as soon as Sonic targets it" (Berlew 61). Since I am speed running the stage, I took the latter route at the 2:04 mark.

There were two more alternate paths I could have taken, but unfortunately I messed up. The first path that I could've gone down is with the railing (it can be seen for a brief moment at the 2:11 mark). "To reach it, hit the boxes covering the red Springs in the back left corner of the midlevel. Then bounce high above the area, target the rail and Homing Attack to reach it" (Birlew 61). The second path I failed to perform was to do an air Boost to reach the top level. However, I did this too late and landed on the platform in the midlevel at the 2:14 mark.

Getting hit

Additionally, I screwed up even further by getting hit by the blue liquid, and falling back down to the platform when I hit the springs to head towards the top level. Normally, I would've restarted the level and go through the stage again, but I was so fed up with doing the first shortcut over and over that I decided to just leave it as is.

Despite that big mess up in the end, my ending time was 2 minutes 10.39 seconds. As a result, I saved a total of 34.06 seconds saved from taking most of the shortcuts and alternate pathways. If I didn't make that big error at the end, the amount of time saved would have probably been ten seconds more.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, performing the shortcuts the book was much harder this time around. Modern Sonic's stages require fast reaction times and a lot of patience in order to succeed. On my last post, I may have stated that I was looking forward to the longer and more difficult stages, but now I'm dreading them. The stages I will be doing next is City Escape, Perfect Chaos, and Rooftop Run.

What did you feel about this speedrun? Feel free to leave a comment and any other questions you have about this post or anything about my blog topic in general.

Birlew, Dan. “Chemical Plant: Act 2.” Sonic Generations, DK/BradyGames, 2011, pp. 56–61.