Big the Cat will be in my nightmares
Posted by brilokuloj on Sep 16, 2024
Depression, as you may know, is a weighted blanket with evil intentions. It’s the nap on the couch that you swear will only take half an hour, and then when you wake up the sun has already set.
Over this summer it felt like I was up to my neck in depression. I was desperate for anything to do, but burdened with no motivation to try new things. That was when the stars finally aligned: my friend Forest posted on Mastodon suggesting that they would like some friends to parallel play on RetroAchievements with them.
This felt like a moment I was made for. When I’m depressed, there’s nothing that gets me through it better than maxing out a video game, and this time I could actually show people I had done it! Not just that, but I could finally use this opportunity to finish Sonic Adventure, a game I’ve been struggling to 100% ever since I first got it.
Unfortunately, this undertaking meant that I played Big the Cat’s levels.
Big the Cat
As you may know, the Sonic games are about being a little guy going Really Fast. Though the amount of Fast that you can achieve varies from game to game, the goal remains the same: speed. So nobody knows why it was that with Sonic Adventure’s release in 1998, Sonic Team chose to introduce Big the Cat, the slowest character in the series.
Sonic Adventure features 6 playable characters with their own unique campaigns, and the goal of 5 of them is to go as fast as you possibly can. Big the Cat’s gameplay, on the other hand, is… a fishing minigame. The plot dresses it up with the explanation that Big is looking for his friend Froggy, who is for all intents and purposes a non-sapient frog, but is never referred to as Big’s pet. Circumstances lead Froggy across 4 levels, and where he goes, Big follows.
As you can imagine, Big was not a popular character. His levels were considered to be the worst in the game, if not the entire franchise. But I’m a diehard Sonic Adventure fan, and for years I insisted that his stages weren’t really that bad. I’ve beaten the game what feels like over a dozen times by now, after all; sure his levels were a slog, but they never made me want to actively kill myself like the helpful people on Google were acting.
Well. I had never actually cleared his A-rank missions before, though.
Big challenges
The C-rank objective is clear: catch Froggy. Our first problem is that Froggy is a bitch to find. The fish are all fairly similar-looking from a distance, and your camera options are nonexistent.
The fishing itself is monotonous. You cast your line, wait for it to sink down, pray that you actually shot it in the correct area, and wait for the fish to see it. Try not to get your lure too close to the bottom, or you’ll have to reel it in, and that risks smacking it on the side of the pool.
Once you’ve got one, Big announces “Something’s biting!” Then some of the most stressful music I’ve ever heard in my life plays. This will be your background music for this entire playthrough.
The fishing itself is bullshit. I would like to think I am a patient gamer - I did finish it, after all, and it really isn’t that hard. But it’s bullshit. There is no sense of gravity. You have very little control. The objective is to reel the fish in, but you have to stop reeling in if the line gets strained, and the line can get strained at any time, and sometimes the fish will seize the lure and just start swimming away and there is. Nothing. You. Can. Do. About. It.
The tactic is to try to catch a fish that is near a wall, so that it doesn’t have much room to swim away. This is impossible when it’s Froggy; Froggy is always placed in the middle of the water in a fixed location, because of course he is.
Big the Cat was assuredly a metaphor about taking your time to appreciate what Sonic’s world has to offer, but it’s impossible to do this when you’re fishing. The camera sucks you into a front view of the fish thrashing across the screen. The visuals give you no information, and the fish themselves often look quite disturbing.
Big levels
An oddity that contributes to Sonic Adventure’s peculiar atmosphere is its level pacing: Sonic’s story follows the codified progression of severity in the series’ level design sensibility, and then from there Tails has most of the same levels in the same order, but the other characters… just kind of go wherever. This is the “logic” behind why Big the Cat’s first level is Twinkle Park, a distinctly midgame level for Sonic.
You’re constrained to a single area, namely the pool next to Pleasure Castle. Any further exploring is met with dead ends; the game really wants you to just focus on the body of water. This is a further inversion of the way Twinkle Park is presented to you prior, as an enormous and spectacular sightseeing environment. Big doesn’t give a shit. There is nothing to see here except for Froggy.
Big’s second level is Ice Cap, which introduces the unnecessary difficulty of tediously slow platforming and breakable ice. It also takes place entirely within the mountain, so if you were hoping to go snowboarding as Big the Cat… sorry, bud. (Has anyone modded that yet?)
Ice Cap’s worst offense is having multiple pools of water. This is true of every level except for Twinkle Park, but for some reason Ice Cap even bothers to have them stacked vertically and in separate areas, leaving you with no choice but to monotonously wander the identical-looking caverns.
Big gets a reprieve with Emerald Coast, the only level that actually manages to communicate the base idea of a really chill experience, with its dopey music and relaxed beach vibes. Unfortunately, this is the level that drove me to insanity.
For one thing, the water pools are massive, meaning the fish have as much room as they want to swim off and break your line. To make matters worse, the best place to fish is inside of a secret cove that doesn’t exist in Sonic’s version of the level, which is admittedly really cool and memorable but also the same exact premise that makes up 90% of my video game nightmares. No, I would rather not go into the secret door, thank you.
We finish our journey with Hot Shelter, a level exclusive to the “secondary cast” of Sonic Adventure (Amy, Big, and Gamma). Hot Shelter already has an oppressive atmosphere, being the longest level in the game for Amy and Gamma, but Big’s rendition takes it a bit further with a strong feeling that you just do not belong here.
Not only is the main portion of the level clearly not designed with his bulk in mind, but there’s a secret path you can take where you can actually break shit. A passage leads to a room with a drain plug, which you can fish up and flood the main aquarium area, not only making it infinitely harder to catch Froggy, but also allowing your entry to the top part of the level.
I am not kidding when I say that I have had nightmares about this area. The area’s black skybox, its path requiring you to do something destructive, and its presence above the stage: all of this gave me the impression as a child that I had noclipped out of the intended area. Even though I knew it was clearly deliberately designed, it just had the exact same feeling as any of the other places you can get to without the developer’s wishes. It was creepy.
If progression in Big’s levels wasn’t gated by one of the most tedious minigames ever imagined, it would be almost revolutionary how all of his levels take you to places you thought nothing of during your previous playthroughs. But the game does not reward you for taking your time. Arguably, exploring brings you to better fish, but I’m not even sure if that’s true, because people just make shit up.
Big myths
You might be here, like I was, desperately banging your head against the monitor, praying you can find that special trick that will make even just one of Big’s A-rank missions not take half an hour.
I have no advice for you. If there is a trick to it, I did not figure it out. This game was designed under the apprehension that you have unlimited free time and patience, so you might as well pretend that you do.
It seems that Big the Cat’s gameplay is surrounded with a certain mystique. Which is to say: people just lie.
A common sentiment is that in order to clear the A-rank (catch a fish weighing 2000g), you need to hunt down and catch the “robot fish”. This is true in the first level and no others, because Twinkle Park is the only level that an extra-large robot fish spawns in.
People will also say things that are trivial to prove false, like that the 2000g goal can be fulfilled by catching multiple smaller fish. And nobody is sure what exactly Big the Cat’s lure upgrades do: do they make it easier to catch fish? Or do they make it so that bigger fish spawn in the first place? I could find the answer, but I’d have to replay his story.
One of the funnier urban legends, and one that I myself mistakenly believed, was that Big the Cat’s levels existed to sell the Dreamcast’s fishing rod-shaped controller. This is not true, and sadly, the controller isn’t even compatible with the game. Once again, there is no easy answer to be found.
I always find myself thinking that video game urban legends are dead, but they evidently live on in the games that people haven’t dissected and decompiled down to their bare atoms. In that way, I’m thankful to Big the Cat for giving me a dreamlike experience, the likes of which I haven’t experienced since I played Sonic Adventure for the very first time. I only wish it hadn’t taken three hours off of my life.
But I’m feeling less depressed lately, so… maybe it really did help?
Tagged: sonic adventure retroachievements mental health depression
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