Video Game / Spark the Electric Jester 3

Spark the Electric Jester 3 is the sequel to Spark the Electric Jester 2 and the third in a series by Feperd Games. On September 7, 2020, its first trailer was released, and Spark was reintroduced as the main character after Fark having taken his place in the previous game. Unlike Spark 2, the game features completely new locales and bosses.

Set after the events of the previous game, 3 sees Fark, hot off the heels from defeating Freom for good, form the Fark Force, a military organisation that has so far managed to shut the internet down and disrupt communications across the world, creating global strife. Once again, it's up to Spark, the titular Electric Jester, to fight the Fark Force and put Fark in his place.

The game was scheduled to be released on August 15th, 2022, but it ended up having an anticipated release on August 14th instead.

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This game provides examples of:

• Actionized Sequel: After combat encounters were downplayed in the previous game, this one refines them and adds various unlockable techniques for Spark.
• Actually a Doombot: Beating the Superboss reveals that the Freom that was fought over the past couple games was not the original Freom but copies that Clarity created since the original Freom wasn't fully onboard with her vision and their more aggressive personality overwhelmed the original's.
• After the End: Once Spark hits the Utopia Shelter with Float, the game essentially turns into this, as the last piece of resistance against Clarity's forces has been destroyed, and Clarity has now taken over the world. For context, while the final level takes upwards of 30 minutes, in-universe, the time frame in Clarity's world is different, so it's essentially thousands of years in real time. Putting it simply: thousands of years have passed during the events of the final level.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: While Spark is the main playable character here, other characters get to strut their stuff in the story:
  • Float is playable in the On The Run boss battle where she first fights the PCPD Megarrester in a dog fight before fighting Sheriff Beartrap on foot. It's initially assumed Spark is in the gunship piloted during the first half of the fight given the last section of the level preceding the fight had Spark take control of the ship, but it turns out Spark was just buying a burger during the fight.
  • Fark once again reprises his role as a playable character during the first phase of the final battle, where he has to fight a corrupted Spark.
  • And then there's Sfarx, a Fusion Dance between Spark and Fark, who's playable during the final battle against Claritas Centralis.
  • The boss themes against every opponent have a motif of guitar and rock... except the final boss.
• And the Adventure Continues: Overtly a part of the regular ending and the ending of the Endless Dive DLC. At the end of the regular game, Spark and Fark prepare to start looking for survivors of Clarity's purge. At the end of the DLC, cutscenes implied to take place at a point in time after the proper ending of the game play out where Spark has more or less mastered his role as the chief factor of the simulation and runs into a scan copy of Freom's original body, who reveals himself to be far more benevolent than initially presented in the original Spark the Electric Jester and the sequel. Satisfied that this Freom isn't a threat and is honestly confused with the state of the world, Spark leaves him be and urges him to invoke this trope to get a grasp of the current situation, implying he may let Freom out of the simulation to carve his own path.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The game's physics can be tweaked so Spark becomes a bit slow and floaty to make platforming easier. In this mode, rails also gain larger hitboxes.
• Apocalypse How: Class 3A, all courtesy of Clarity virtualizing all people in the planet and disposing of the bodies. However, there is hope in the ending that there are survivors, and Fark (with Spark as an AI now) are working to bring everyone back.
• As You Know: After the prologue, the game plays a scene where Spark's "subconscious" recaps the series' story so far to him and the players. It is implied this is Clarity's simulation reinforcing its hold over Spark before sending him into a new loop.
• Assimilation Plot: Clarity intends to bring the minds of others into her own world, effectively draining them before leaving their dead bodies behind. It turns out that Fark has been trying to free the world from Clarity's control.
• Backstory: At certain points the game will show non sequitur backstory tapes that reveal the tragic pasts of Freom, Double, Flint and Float. This is after most of them died in the previous game.
• Big Bad: At first, the game portrays the Fark Force as this with Fark as its head. Then it turns out they were trying to stop the real antagonist, Clarity.
• Bittersweet Ending: At first it seems that it'll be played straight with Spark deciding to use his new network powers to teleport everyone out of Clarity's world and that his personality will eventually disappear before he uses his powers to shut down Clarity's network. It's then averted when Fark is pissed at Spark using his control over Clarity's network for suicide and then decides to snap him out of his funk. They then decide to free everyone and find any survivors in the real world.
• Bleak Level: Utopia Shelter becomes this in the second half, mostly being based on platforming challenges, and hardly any enemies to be found outside of brief combat sections. Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration is at play here, since Clarity's essentially downloaded herself into the Fark Force's system at this point (with her realm showing up at various points in the level), and Spark's already destroyed a majority of the Fark Force's militia.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: The game standardizes Fark's blocking ability as the way to parry attacks for all characters, unlike how in the original game Spark had to dash into attacks with precise timing to parry them.
• Bonus Dungeon: The DLC area Endless Dive is an endless level where you fight increasingly difficult groups of enemies with different names, you only have limited lives like in Utopia Shelter and you fight a stronger version of the final boss on Floor 100. However, the game does give you checkpoints which you can start from.
• The Bus Came Back: After being Demoted to Extra in the previous game, Spark regains his role as the main character here, with a redesign sporting a brown bomber jacket.
  • Float also makes a return and even helps Spark out. It's later subverted with the real Float having died years ago and this Float being a robotic replica created by Clarity with all of her original memories designed to further Clarity's goals and get rid of the Fark Force.
• Call-Back: One of the boss fights has you fight Double, E.J and Ryno Dyno, with static transitions reminiscent of the first fight with Romalo.
  • The first phase of the final boss, Linework Spark has its first two forms as references to the The Beast and The Reaper boss fights from the first game's Fark Story and Spark's Challenge modes, complete with hellish red and black landscape. In addition, Linework Spark himself acts as a stand-in for the Virus's copy of Super Fark.
• Challenge Run: Carried over from the first two games. You can either go for a speedrun or get as many points as possible.
• Collection Sidequest: You can earn medals for certain tasks and find up to 10 of them hidden around each level. The more you get, the more lives you receive for the final level.
• Combos: The game features a combo gauge and keeping it high raises a damage multiplier.
• Conspicuous Electric Obstacle: Some stages have electric barriers that Spark shouldn't run through.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Fark establishes a military force and upsets the global order in the name of fighting Clarity, which earns him the distrust of the population including Spark, who sets out to stop him. The hero finds Fark sat upon a throne and sporting a new form similar to his father Freom, as if he became the same as him. However, the world truly was in the brink of an apocalyptic scenario and by foiling Fark's plans it comes to pass.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Fark could have avoided the genocide of trillions had he just left his proverbial ivory tower, approached Spark in Flint's place, and talked to him about Clarity. Fark even reflects on this trope and calls himself out for his part in the tragedy left in Clarity's wake following the final boss fight.
• Cute Machines: What Clarity actually turns out to be. They take the form of adorable girls with a monochrome palette. Claritas Centralis averts this entirely, with its appearance best described as the Lavos Centre Pod with a squid-like appearance.
• Dark Reprise:
  • "Backstory Cutscene" contains a sad reprise of Fark's leitmotif. It plays on cutscenes detailing his creation by Freom and Clarity, the tragic past of the androids he's fought in the past and the reveal that he failed to prevent Clarity from taking over the world.
  • "Final Loop - Revelation" is a sad wind up music box rendition of the first game's main and final boss themes. It plays when Spark comes to terms with the fact that he's a virtual copy and that his actions enabled Clarity to end civilization.
• Darker and Edgier: While the game starts out as typical Spark fare, the game's climax deals with Clarity having already assimilated everyone in the series into her network. The cutscenes that give insight into the backstories of the Renegade Trio and Freom can get rather unsettling as well, with mass murder and implied Unwilling Roboticisation.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: As per usual for the series, the game gives you unlimited lives. That is until you reach Utopia Shelter, the final level, which gives you a limited amount of lives to complete based on how many medals of all types you've collected up to this point (up to a maximum of 30). And it's the longest level in the game by far.
• Demoted to Extra: The Jester Powers have been de-emphasized, with the only one around being Reaper (which gives Spark a Sinister Scythe). All the other "Jester Powers" are in fact other characters like Float, Fark, and Sfarx.
• The Determinator: Even in the face of hopelessness, Fark has refused to stop trying to defeat Clarity. In the end, even after Clarity was defeated, he refused to let Spark kill himself to stop the machine. No matter what; Fark wants this world to be better and will do anything to make it happen.
• Double Jump: Spark has no problem jumping mid-air.
• Drama Bomb Finale: Most of the game is pretty colorful and lighthearted besides the backstories of the villains from Spark 2, with a strange lack of plot to go with the stages as Spark journeys to Utopia Shelter. Then once he confronts Fark, he learns something horrifying has happened thanks to his own actions: Clarity virtualized the minds of everyone in the planet and disposed of their bodies after he let her hidden agent Float into Utopia Shelter.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • The story takes a very dark turn simply because Spark wasn't told about anything that went down between Fark, Float, Freom and Clarity in the previous game. He assumes Clarity is a hoax for Fark to become a dictator and knows nothing about Float, while players are aware that Clarity is a real threat and that Float's Unexplained Recovery is a major red flag.
  • Freom's ultimatum to Fark in Spark 2 takes a rather ironic approach in this game. Freom's plan in Spark 2 was to intentionally launch the Apocalypse Thruster into the planet, killing millions of organics and robots, but also killing Clarity in the process. He even extends an offer to Fark to join him. Fark, due to his heroic nature, disagrees with this, and kills Freom. However, in this game, Fark ultimately ends up doing the same thing; costing millions, if not billions, of lives, in an apocalypse scenario, with Clarity being destroyed. However, this cannot be blamed on Fark: the situation was already reaching a climax, and the only reason why his (reasonable) plan to corner and destroy Clarity without huge casualty counts didn't work was due to factors he couldn't see coming, like Spark's dismantling of the Fark Force militia or the clone of Float tagging along with him and being an Agent of Clarity.
• Easter Egg: Certain stages have trucks placed in isolated places for some reason.
• Eldritch Location: Utopia Shelter gets...weird, and not in the sense that it's just optical illusions fooling your senses like Historia Hysteria. The major city within Utopia Shelter is visually glitching at all times, the level frequently transitions abruptly to a colorless 'world' floating in the sky with a larger focus on platforming, and by the end of it the stage goes full Alien Geometries as it becomes impossible to reconcile Utopia Shelter with the colorless world, as odd squares dot the middle of some flat, featureless plain at what feels like the center of the earth, with the next layer up having a backdrop that almost seems to be literally bleeding. Of course, the level gets away with not making any sense because it's the terminus of Clarity's simulations for Spark. Typically, when he gets to the end, she just resets the entire journey for him, so he never really gets to reflect on just what he's running through. Even with the revelation that Spark is in a massive computer simulation, it's rather off-putting to think Utopia Shelter's core could be represented by a computer in the manner by which it's presented.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Clarity claims she's providing everyone the chance to relive their greatest triumphs while Fark wallows in his greatest regret, not killing Spark when he had a chance. In reality, Fark's greatest regret is not reaching out to Spark when he had the chance.
• Excuse Plot: Compared to the previous games there are few story cutscenes on the way to stop Fark's supposedly evil plans. Other than Spark meeting Float and encountering "The Guardian" a couple of times, the remaining scenes relate to the past of already deceased antagonists. The Reveal, however, is that the entire game is a looping simulation of events that have long transpired. So until that point anything but the minimum stimulus to pit Spark against Fark is indeed irrelevant.
• Falling Damage: New to this game is fall damage, where Spark can take damage from falling from too great a height, signified by a red sign with a red circle timer next to him showing up. If the timer runs out and he's still in the air, he'll automatically die. The trick is that you can cancel it via dashing, jumping (via a reserved double jump), a charged Jester Dash, and/or landing on a slanted slope before the timer runs out, which resets it. Normally not a huge factor in levels, it becomes a threat in Pacific Abyss and Utopia Shelter's second half, as the levels are primarily designed with a downwards path in mind.
• Fission Mailed: Losing to the Guardian in Lost Riviera or District 5 plays a cutscene of him grabbing Spark by the neck and throwing him off of the arena. However, this merely progresses the game to the next stage. Beating the encounters does get you the Reaper Jester power, though, so it's not a Hopeless Boss Fight. Also justified; Flint has no actual issue with Spark, and in their first two fights there aren't really any high stakes by Fark or Flint's reckoning. It's not until 'Float' gets involved where Flint fights to kill.
• Final Boss: The first phase involves Fark fighting a corrupted Spark, then the two fuse into Sfarx in order to take down the Claritas Centralis.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle: Flame traps are rather common hazard and take in a few different forms, such as surface-mounted flames and rotating flame traps.
• Flash of Pain: Enemies briefly turn light grey when hit.
• Foreshadowing: Spark's only available Jester power is Reaper, and until the post-game your only other playable style is in the form of Float. And as Spark later discovers, he would inadvertently go on to enable the destruction of all society by escorting Float, who was resurrected as a machine similar to Astra, to Utopia Shelter and destroying the Fark Force's headquarters. In a way he is a Grim Reaper.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: As Spark notes, Fark's effective takeover of the entire world wasn't taken too well, with the Formies immediately panicking as the banks shut down with the internet and throwing protests across the planet. Not only can you see these protests in the aptly-named Protest City stage, you can use the massive crowds as trampolines to get further into the stage.
  • Even further; the concept of challenge runs and perfecting your playthroughs is fully contextualized within the story as different versions of the Lotus-Eater Machine Spark is trapped in, subconsciously wanting to improve his performance, and thus being reset to before he did so and being able to do it again with more muscle memory.
• Grind Boots: The game introduces rail grinding. Spark gains speed on them by crouching while grinding downwards and he can also swap between groups of them. On the easiest difficulty option, they get Hitbox Dissonance on the player's favor.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: During Clarity's speech, she implies that Spark has been reliving his adventures over and over, hoping to do it faster and better or choosing to explore the world for the sake of it.
• Homage: Drynion Desert, especially Lost Riviera, is too blatant to just be a Shout-Out; it's Rail Canyon in all but name, sharing the same aesthetic, the same water-wheels, the same western grunge, and Lost Riviera even starts with a section ripped straight out of the Sonic level that it so lovingly drew inspiration from. The music is also very similar, sharing the opening riff and using the same instruments; bits of Rail Canyon's theme is strewn about the rest of the theme. It even has the enemy robot trains!
• Hope Springs Eternal: The concept of the ending. Clarity won, and most of the formies and robots have been purged from the moon, but Spark was able to override Clarity's role within the simulation and free Fark and a previous, nicer iteration of Freom from captivity within the simulation. Though Fark believes most people have died over the last several centuries, there's nonetheless a chance that there are still formies and machines left to seek out.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: There are two sets, one for platforming and the other for combat. The former has Easy, Normal and Hard, and the latter has Easy Jester, Electric Jester, Hard Jester, Hardcore Jester and Challenge Jester.
• Irony: Float believes Flint is a brainwashed servant of Fark and is working to free him. She might know something about servitude, given that the original Float is dead and this Float is an agent of Clarity. It's ambiguous whether this Float is a sleeper agent for Clarity or knows she's working Clarity's will, but either way there are definitely elements of the pot calling the kettle black, here.
• Individualism vs. Collectivism: The game's themes can be easily be summed as this. Fark Force are very much on the individualist side whereas Clarity assimilates everything into herself, making her a collectivist. The game's ending makes it clear that Fark's individualist beliefs win out.
• In-Vehicle Invulnerability: Spark won't get hurt when he crashes his vehicle.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During Clarity's speech, she mentions that Spark has been reliving his adventures over and over again, either to do it faster and better or just to explore, clearly a nod to what a player would do.
• Lighter and Softer: Played with: while the exciting music combined with the smoother, more stylized cel-shaded graphics seemingly hints at this compared to the previous game (although one stage is an abandoned city center), the plot mostly averts this, having some pretty heavy themes involved.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Unlike the rest of the cast, who are aware of who Clarity is and the threat she poses, Spark has next-to-no knowledge of her at all due to him being absent in the previous game, assuming it to be some lame excuse the Fark Force are using to justify their rule. Not surprisingly, this ends up biting everyone in the ass when he unwittingly lets Clarity (here disguised as Float) into Utopia Paradise, allowing her to download herself into the system.
• Main Character Final Boss: After being filled in on the details by Fark regarding Clarity and the fact that Spark had inadvertently caused Clarity to successfully assimilate the entire planetary population into her simulation in addition to finding out his entire adventure was a "Groundhog Day" Loop, Spark snaps and ends up becoming Linework Spark. It takes Fark defeating the corrupted Spark to free him, and then after the two fuse, they proceed to take on the Clarita Centralis.
• Marathon Level: Pacific Abyss is a huge doozy of a level. For context, while previous levels had the Diamond Speed Medals at about 4 and a half minutes at most, Pacific Abyss has its Diamond Speed Medal at nearly 8 minutes.
  • Hoo boy, Utopia Shelter is most certainly this, being the longest level in the entire game, clocking in at about twenty-five minutes at most. It's especially telling that it uses a life system based on how many medals you've obtained.
• My God, What Have I Done?: At the endgame, when Spark is told by Fark and Clarity that he has essentially been a pawn this whole time and aided Clarity in taking over the world, he is trembling and terrified, even denying it initially. Once Clarity has been defeated, Spark is so ashamed over everything that he offers his life up to shut the machine down and release Fark. Fark refuses and smacks some sense into him, telling him that Spark's plan is garbage, and that a much better plan is for them to work together from hereon and try to find survivors, with Fark stating he has as much responsibility in what Clarity has done as Spark does right now. This helps Spark change his attitude, realizing he will be stuck as an AI forever, but at least he and Fark (who still has a living body) can try to fix the world.
• New Game Plus: Beating the game allows you to start over with all your upgrades, powers and characters though your stage progress and medal count will be deleted. To top it off, you're even allowed to pick your difficulty of choice.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Spark doesn't end up taking down Fark Force as its leader points out. If anything, him bringing Float to their base ends up ruining their plans and making sure that Clarity assimilates them. Not that they had any way of knowing, something Fark outright admits was his mistake, and there isn't a chance to amend this since this happened thousands of years ago.
• Nintendo Hard: Besides some tricky bits of platforming and certain bosses requiring you to understand the game thoroughly, most of the game isn't this — until you hit the Utopia Shelter. The game goes out of its way to warn you pre-emptively that you now have Video-Game Lives compared to the unlimited tries you had in all previous levels, and you'll need every single one of them for the trials ahead as the game tests you on everything. Run out of those lives? You're all the way back to the start of an extensively long Marathon Level.
• Nitro Boost: The game contains boost pads that help the player to quickly gain speed.
• Nostalgia Level: An update on November 17th, 2022 added all of the stages (sans the boss fights) of Spark the Electric Jester 2, unlocked after completing the final stage of the base game, Utopia Shelter.
• Orchestra Hit Techno Battle: In contrast to the hard rocking Ultimate Final Boss from the previous two games, the battle theme for Claritas Centralis makes full use of this. The secret boss fight with Freom MK:0 and Limerent Claritas also uses a battle theme invoking this as well.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: Endless Dive's title and game over screens invoke this as do some of the rooms and even some of the nonsensical names that some enemies have on their HP bars. As if to imply that the simulation can barely keep itself together.
• Orcus on His Throne: Played tragically. First, Fark isn't evil. At worst he's paranoid about the full power of Clarity. Making things worse, the fact Fark never leaves Utopia Shelter makes it nigh-impossible for him to command anything. Despite effectively ruling the world at this point in time, protests are everywhere, a lot of cities are suffering from heavy pollution, hardly anyone buys Clarity as anything more than a bogeyman to solidify Fark's power, and the one person who can earnestly help Fark with dealing with Clarity, Spark, is actively opposing the Fark Force. It only gets worse from there, as Fark's inability to trust Spark with the Clarity problem and insistence on staying put just means Spark bumbles Clarity to the front door of Utopia Shelter, dooming the world.
• Patchwork Map: The stages are split into multiple areas with varying themes. Drinyon Desert, for example, starts at the edge of a canyon and then continues down into a river and later a woodsy base.
• Poor Communication Kills: Fark notes bitterly after the Final Boss that the biggest mistake he made was not simply talking to Spark about Clarity in detail and trusting him. Because Spark hears all of the 'anti-Clarity' propaganda from outside sources and not directly from the entity opposing it, Spark never takes Clarity seriously. This has dire consequences for the rest of the world, because Clarity simply uses a Float decoy to direct Spark right to where Fark is; Utopia Shelter, the one place Clarity can't enter on her own to assimilate. If Fark had come out to talk to Spark, they could averted the deaths of billions.
• Post Endgame Content: Completion of the final level unlocks the levels from Spark The Electric Jester 2, as well as Fark and Sfarx becoming purchasable as Jester Powers in the shop. Completion of the Spark 2 levels unlocks Endless Dive, in which you fight waves of enemies for as long as you can.
• Precision F-Strike: In the ending, once Spark establishes that he's going to attempt to shut down the system and end himself with it, Fark freaks out so hard that he throws around the only curse words in the game, albeit light ones like "damn" and "hell" as he tries to call Spark out.
• Promoted to Playable: Float goes from being a boss encounter in the previous game to a playable character here.
• Reforged into a Minion: According to Float, this has happened to Flint, who now serves the Fark Force as the Guardian. This is however subverted; Flint was never brainwashed to begin with. Rather, he voluntarily joined forces with Fark to help him stop the real villain, Clarity.
• Robots Enslaving Robots: What Float thinks Fark has pulled on The Guardian / Flint. A darkly humorous observation, given where Float's loyalties, knowingly or unknowingly, lie.
• Rogue Protagonist: Fark became ruthless enough in his plans to rid the world of Clarity that Spark decided to oppose his organization as well. Ultimately subverted since, as shown below, he has a good reason for it.
• Rage Breaking Point: After Fark explains that he's effectively responsible for Clarity assimilating most of the world's population and Clarity's speech trying to convince to give in her, Spark finally goes ballistic and ends up gaining control over her network, transforming into Linework Spark who has 3 forms.
• Recurring Boss: The Guardian^note or rather, Flint, who's fought four times: the first two at Drinyon Desert and Protest Prison on foot, the third at Stratoria Interstellar at the controls of a Humongous Mecha, and finally at the start of Utopia Shelter on foot once more.
• Recycled Soundtrack: While not to the extent of Spark 2, it still dabbles in it.
  • The World Map theme is the same as the one in Spark 2.
  • Canyon Zero utilizes the Miniboss 2 song ^note Utilized for boss encounters with Romalo. from Spark 1.
  • The Throwback fight utilizes both versions of the Special Boss theme from Spark 2 (along with a new 16-bit composition). Justified, as the boss fight is against some of the bosses from Spark 2.
  • The theme that plays when Spark and Fark fuse into Sfarx in the endgame is the beginning snippet of Tower Climb from the original game.
  • The theme that plays during serious scenes involving Clarity is in actuality a reversed version of Lunar Bass from Spark 1.
• Sequel Hook: After defeating Freom Mk.0 and Limerent Claritas, you get a cutscene which reveals that the Claritas intend to get revenge, Freom Mk.0 is left to figure out his own path and Spark still intends to find any survivors.
• Shout-Out:
  • The sigil of the Fark Force is a stylized double F in an hexagonal shape, much like Dr. Eggman's EG sigil in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic Mania.
  • Fark's explanation followed by Clarity saying Congratulations brings back memories of the final two episodes and the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Clarity's plan is also a nod to Instrumentality in that she plans to absorb everyone so they all become one with her.
  • The end credits have Spark and Fark battle-rapping with each other on a speeding train in a style reminiscent of Friday Night Funkin'. Said sequence is actually based on a mod Feperd made for the aformentioned game to promote Spark 3.
  • Several of the stages, especially the early ones, draw heavily from the 3D Sonic stages in terms of visuals and events, beyond the Rail Canyon Homage Drynion Desert represents;
    • Terminal Village draws a lot of parallels to Windmill Isle Day from Sonic Unleashed.
    • Protest Prison is a bit more subtle about its inspiration, but it draws much from the Shadow the Hedgehog rendition of the Prison Island stages, including the various waterfalls and streams present in both games, and takes its hand-tram gimmick from the endgame level Cosmic Fall.
    • Protest City is an amalgamation of the highway-themed stages from Sonic Adventure 2, with the focus on mostly trying to avoid street-level gridlock and keep to the heights of the city taken from the first half of Sonic and Tails' Speed Highway stages from Sonic Adventure. It even pulls a segment out of City Escape from Adventure 2 as Spark goes up a loop only to run down the side of a building into springs.
    • Two-Stage Liftoff, a side stage from Stratoria Interstellar, is effectively an expanded version of the penultimate segment of Metal Harbor from Sonic Adventure 2, where Sonic quickly makes his way up the support pillars of a missile to hitch a ride.
    • Utopia Shelter is often likened to Eggmanland as an incredibly, brutally tough final stage meant to wear the player down through extra-life attrition. In fact, the entire gimmick of Spark having a limited number of lives to complete the stage with is not unlike the Playstation 2 and Wii ports of Sonic Unleashed, which functioned on a similar principle of lives being finite for a given stage and the player getting more lives to complete stages with by going out of their way to nab collectibles. While not the same visually, the stages even share a central objective; getting to the core of the facility, which for both stages are close to the bottom of the planet's crust layer.
  • Endless Dive plays very much like the Bloody Palace stage in the Devil May Cry series, in that you progress by defeating waves of enemies which get tougher as you progress.
  • Freom Mk.0 in his final phase has an attack combo where he grows a golden ponytail and his sword becomes a lot like the Z-Saber.
• Sigil Spam: The Fark Force logo appears in many stages in the game, and the tires on the dash panels are branded with the words "Fark Force Tire."
• Springs, Springs Everywhere: Springboards are found throughout the game, giving the player vertical boost when needed.
• Superboss: Upon reaching Floor 100 of the Endless Dive bonus level, you fight a dark grey version of Claritas Centralis called ju a: not in kon troul, which uses frequent, powerful area of effect attacks and Teleport Spam. Beating this one, in turn, unlocks Freom MK. 0 (Freom in his original body as shown in Spark 2) as a boss.
  • An update would later add a boss unlocked after clearing the dark claritas. It is a three phase fight where you face Freom as Freom MK. 0. After the first phase, you then fight the Claritas clone (called Limerent Claritas), and then fight Freom MK 0 again. Between phases, you are forced to do short platforming segments, and during the entire fight, your energy is constantly draining, forcing you to rely on basic combat and blocks/parrying.
• The Unfought: Spark is ready to throw down with Fark, even deciding to tell him to dismantle Fark Force. Instead of an actual fight, Fark complies and the two avoid fighting. Spark assumes there's a catch and there is! It turns out that Spark was assimilated into Clarity's network and they've been doing this over and over again. Then Fark decides to explain everything...
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Utopia Shelter. Before you even start the stage, the game warns you that a lives system is put in place and that the stage will be long and you can't save until you've completed it.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Some stages have Spark driving cars. Others have him piloting a flying vehicle equipped with machine guns and homing missiles. One of the bosses has him piloting a Humongous Mecha (titled the Stratosphere Mk. II) to face another (the Greater Guardian), though it plays very similarly to the usual playstyle.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The Guardian isn't that tough given how easy it is to parry-punish almost everything he does, but he's a lot faster than the first boss, which was effectively combo fodder. In addition, he also has combo breakers that force the player to pull back from him if the player isn't letting up on him, allowing him plenty of opportunities to turn the tide to his advantage. There's no punishment for losing to his first two fights besides some extra abilities remaining locked until he's taken out, but he serves to help illustrate how future bosses will generally require careful guarding and parrying to take out, and will use abilities that force the player to give the boss space.
• Wall Run: Spark can run along walls.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Fark Force turn out to be this, having shut down the internet and other global communications to stop Clarity from spreading through them. From the outside in, it seems like they're just consolidating their own power and Spark actually spends most of the game opposing them.
• Wham Episode:
  • Everything after the final level throws the story completely off the rails.
  • The final level itself also counts. When the game outright warns you of its difficulty and the implementation of a lives system, you know it won't be your typical level.
  • Beating the Superboss reveals that the Freom that Spark and Fark fought over the first two games wasn't the original but a copy created by Clarity after the original started disagreeing with her plans. Freom MK. 0 revealed that he never intended to harm any living being unlike Clarity, more wanting just to be able to give every living being a purpose in life.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Time flows very differently inside the Clarity network. When Spark confronts Fark, not realizing he's already been assimilated into the network, Fark explains several thousand years have already passed, even though by Spark's point of view it's only been a few minutes.

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