Video Game / Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity

Shift into Zero Gravity.

Ride through gravity, just right through what Earth planned!
Ride through gravity, right through, now, let them loose, oh!
Ride through gravity, for all that's not falls down!
Right through anomalies, with one worth believing in, oh!

— Cashell, "Un-Gravitify"

Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity is the second game of the Sonic Riders franchise, released in 2008 for the PlayStation 2 and Wii.

One day, several meteors falls to the earth, falling into the hands of Team Sonic and the mysterious MeteorTech corporation. It's soon revealed that the meteors are actually part of the fabled Arks of the Cosmos, an ancient treasure of the Babylonian civilization. It soon becomes a three-way race between Sonic, the Babylon Rogues and MeteorTech to gather the Arks of the Cosmos.

Zero Gravity presents a heavily streamlined version of the gameplay originally introduced in the first Sonic Riders. The Air Tank and manual Tricking mechanics have been removed completely, along with the ability to Boost, drift, and drop tornadoes. The central mechanic of the game is instead the Gravity Points meter, which builds up with successful Tricks and other stylish actions. With sufficient GP, the player can perform the powerful Gravity Dive maneuver, whereupon the user bends the flow of gravity to surge forth with incredible speed while also kicking up debris that can be struck to gain additional GP and a speed boost. Also new to this game is the Gear Parts mechanic; each Extreme Gear can have up to three distinct Gear Parts, which can be unlocked during a race by paying collected Rings. Unlocked Gear Parts upgrade and modify the current Extreme Gear in the middle of a race, giving players the opportunity to gain great power and turn the tides.

Zero Gravity was followed by a third (and currently final) Riders game, Sonic Free Riders.

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Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity contains examples of:

• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: Mobius Strip, has you riding through a track in the starry sky full of red and purplish eclipses.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: After playing through the Babylon Story as the Babylon Rogues, you retake control of Sonic for the final battle.
• And the Adventure Continues: The game ends with Jet arriving after Sonic and his friends before speeding off, with Sonic promptly taking off on his Extreme Gear after him with it all but being said the two have decided to race each other once more as the game ends.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • In the Gigan Rocks track, the Gravity Dive section ends with a big jump out of a cave into the end section. As a precaution against overshot Gravity Dives, there's a barrier at the end of the track that will automatically launch anyone still in the air into an X level trick so they can still make the jump. You won't get any GP from it, but at least you won't throw yourself into a pit.
  • Thanks to the nature of the racetracks, a shift in the gravitational pull as you fall will often times be just enough to toss you to safety if you were to whiff smaller jumps and even some big jumps that cover a relatively small horizontal distance.
• Another Side, Another Story: The Babylon Rogues version of the plot.
• Awesome, yet Impractical: Boosting/Diving becomes this with Super Sonic. Reason being that GP consumption is tied to Rings while playing as Super Sonic, and attempting to do either chews through a massive amount of Rings. Especially Gravity Dives, which will practically send you from 200 Rings to empty in a single Dive sequence. It's much easier to rely on the Super Sonic Boost to go fast, which is always active once you hit the Ring threshold needed to trigger it and doesn't burn Rings as quickly, despite being slower.
• Boastful Rap: Jet's theme "Catch Me If You Can".
• Character Development: Knuckles gets to show off his treasure hunting abilities here, having become smart enough to decipher ancient ruins and recognize archeological sites. He's also shown not to fall for Dr. Eggman's lies anymore and calls him out when the latter tries playing innocent.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The computer ramped their cheating up to the point that it's easy to assume they're playing an entirely different game. In certain sections of the track, the computer racers will very noticeably have their speed suddenly explode up to speeds between 190 and 250 in mere seconds without any help and maintain that speed until they hit an obstacle or are otherwise obstructed. It gets to the point that with in some races against some characters (like the Meteor Tech robot you can only obtain by beating him) the race can easily become a Luck-Based Mission.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Untouchable gear. It holds the same stats as the Fastest gear, but whereas the Fastest is equipped two max speed-up gear parts and a rail grinding gear part, The Untouchable has nothing but max speed-up parts. It takes forever to accelerate, possesses pretty much no ability to turn and its speed will sink like a stone if you look at it funny, but if you can get it up to speed, wow can it fly!
• Darker and Edgier: The game has a more epic feel than in the previous game.
• Developer's Foresight: In the Mobius Strip track, as per the plot, everyone is stripped of their gravity powers and their Arcs of the Cosmos are absent from their character models. This also applies to the bonus characters who don't participate in the story; they lack them if they're used on the course in multiplayer.
• Die, Chair, Die!: Power-type racers work this way, with them punching any obstacles out of the way. All of the courses in are also filled with random props one can destroy or fling into the sky with Gravity Control and Gravity Dives. Particularly large ones will stay in one place in midair, allowing you to touch them to slide along them and refill your boost gauge for each object. These objects subsequently fall and explode upon hitting the ground.
• Early Game Hell: Super Sonic suffers greatly at the outset due to starting a race with no Rings and being Ring powered. Even once you have Rings, he's not much better than regular Sonic on the Blue Star. However, once you buy Ring Magnet and at least one Ring Cap Up, Super Sonic becomes significantly better, being able to sustain Super form for effectively the rest of the race and is capable of staying in Super Sonic Boost mode all the time if the player is skilled.
• Face–Heel Revolving Door: Dr. Eggman, who starts out bad, then becomes good, then becomes bad again for the climax.
• Final Boss: Master Core: ABIS.
• Floating Continent: Babylon Garden.
• Foreshadowing: The theme song: Un-Gravitify manages to hide one. During the second chorus, the line "Ride and let go, In light in which sun drowns." and later on, "Through light in which sun drowns, don't stand down, Break through." is a blatant reference to the Lightless Black, the black hole that the Arcs of the Cosmos created when they resonate together.
• Fragile Speedster: Characters with the Speed attribute have excellent speed, but are average in everything else.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Wave the Swallow with Extreme Gear; Dr. Eggman with robots (when in a helpful mood); Miles "Tails" Prower with appliances.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Part of the plot is that berserking robots are chasing down Arks of the Cosmos, and the people holding them; despite story-wise being chase sequences, the game plays out these chases like a standard three lap race with the robots simply trying to place first against you. Zig-zagged with Sonic's first race, with a unique intro following from the cutscene beforehand, but then it goes straight into just another race anyway.
  • Also regarding the Arks, there are five in existence. Sonic and Jet wear theirs for the majority of the plot, Amy has hers until she's chased to Aquatic Capital, and the final two are with Eggman and his robots. In spite of this, every main character gets to be playable at least once throughout the campaign and will have their own Ark of the Cosmos to use.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: There are a handful of missions that involve your character, locked into Charge Mode, being tasked with chasing down opponents to beat on them. While it's incredibly difficult to keep up with the overpowered foes, the object layouts are changed to simply throw you around corners and up walls so you don't have to rely on gravity control.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: In free-play modes, Eggman can go toe-to-toe with Sonic and co. on Extreme Gear.
• Gravity Screw: The entirety of the game, obviously.
• Grind Boots: Speed-types can hop onto rails and grind across them, which not only restores Air/GP, but also moves faster than regular boarding and generally takes you through shortcuts. In Zero Gravity, some boards can access Gear Changes that let them Grind when they cannot do so otherwise and Freeriders has a freely equipable Grinding Gear Part that can be used with any combination of character and gear provided the gear has a slot for parts.
  • Skate type gears in Zero Gravity are able to grind rails by default, making them a more literal example of this than usual.
• Guest Fighter: The game has three non-Sonic SEGA characters as secret unlockables for completing every mission in Mission Mode: Amigo, NiGHTS and Billy Hatcher.
• Guide Dang It!: Nowhere is it alluded to what the Angel/Devil gear actually does. Angel Mode decreases your top speed but increases the odds of getting good Items from the Item Box, while Devil Mode does the opposite.
• Humongous Mecha: SCR-HD uses the gravity rings to become Master Core: ABIS, a titanic roaring monster merged with the core of the black hole he is generating, for the final race and boss fight of the game.
• Idiot Ball: While the entire cast doesn't seem to be too bright, Eggman holds it. To sum up his scheme for world domination: He lets his robots go berserk and run amok so he can go to the Crimson Tower, take control of them again, and rule the world. With a MacGuffin-stealing robot who has an odd habit of exploding at inopportune times.
• Jungle Japes: Botanical Kingdom.
• Luck-Based Mission: The final boss of can only be damaged if the player is in 1st place during the automated Gravity Dives, but the race takes place on a straight, barren track with very little the player can do to overtake other characters if they get hit by an attack and fall behind. Sometimes the AI will just suddenly overtake you for no discernible reason. The only way to get a decent lead again is to hope that you get a generous pattern of debris to bounce off of during the gravity dive, or an item box gives you a speed boost. What makes this particularly frustrating is that the other characters have narratively the same goal as Sonic during this stage, but if they hit the boss, all it does is prevent Sonic from doing so for another attack cycle.
• Nerf:
  • Experienced players in Sonic Riders would do nothing but boost from beginning to end because it was so easy to gain Air. This was fixed in Zero Gravity by not only substantially increasing the cost to boost, but now gave it a charge-up time and made Gravity Points (equivalent to Air) harder to accumulate. The end result is that there are only one or two viable spots per course to boost in. Sonic Free Riders reverted back to the boosting as seen in the first game but kept the high cost to boost in Zero Gravity, striking a good middle ground.
  • Super Sonic was greatly nerfed. The first game made him a Master of All that had maximized stats and could use every type of shortcut, at the cost of consuming Rings in place of Air. In the second game, his stats were reduced to that of a better Blue Star, and he can only use Power shortcuts, and only when he's using the Super Sonic Boost, which requires at least 60 Rings to initiate and begins eating them at an alarming rate. Thankfully, this was re-balanced by giving him Ring Cap UPs and a Ring Magnet, which not only allows him to hold more Rings, but also allows him to grab them easier.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The Babylon Rogues have discovered they are genies from space.
• Power Up Letdown: Ironically, Super Sonic has the least useful Boost power-up. It is identical in function to the Super Sonic Boost, but can harm opponents it hits. This means it has a max speed cap of 180, whereas any other character's Boost can go far faster.
• Secret Final Campaign: The game uses a Sonic Adventure 2-style campaigns. You must first clear the Heroes/Team Sonic campaign to unlock the Babylon campaign, a retelling of the same story from the Babylon Rogues' point of view. Clearing this campaign unlocks the final campaign, where Sonic faces off against the True Final Boss.
• Shout-Out:
  • The game had playable characters from other SEGA franchises. NiGHTS Amigo and Billy Hatcher.
  • The 80s Boulevard and 90s Boulevard tracks are packed full of references to SEGA games from their decades and has Opa-Opa and The Crazy as boards.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Snowy Kingdom.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Knuckles has finally stopped falling for Dr. Eggman's lies and is even the first to call him out when he claims innocent on the newest scheme. While he has believed a guy who has openly plotted world domination a little too much, there's only so many times you can fall for the same trick before you catch on.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: In the final boss fight, instead of racing around the track you have to deal damage to the boss.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: To a greater extent than the first game, Amy joins Team Sonic throughout the story. She is notably present when both teams meet up in front of the Crimson Tower and seen joining them as they storm the base. In the following cutscenes, though, she is completely forgotten. This becomes even more jarring when she suddenly reappears in the epilogue, completely aware of the final events despite being absent.

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