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BlackHole, on 06 June 2015 - 05:35 PM, said:

If it's not because of sales or because of SEGA...well, I have two theories. One, Boom is being killed off so Ian can work on a different fourth book, be it something videogame related or not. The other? Archie did pull their kickstarter, saying they still intend to release the new Archie-centric books, just later than originally anticipated. What if canceling the Sonic Boom book is just so they have enough money to launch one of their flagship titles? Since I have no idea how Archie's finances are, the second is just a wild guess on the negative. Maybe the artists have just refused to draw Sonic with blue arms any longer, I don't know. More ridiculous things have happened.

JaxTH, on 06 June 2015 - 08:22 PM, said:

You neglected to mention her last name! Garnet, which is the wildly-accepted mistranslated version of Grannet, I.e. Mary Grannet, the storybook author and wife of unnamed test pilot who was nicknamed "Sonic," exploding in an attempt to break the sound barrier. Ian also said she has elements of a third character, more than likely Topaz of Sonic X fame. A trifecta of obscure female characters in the Sonicverse!

Neowl, on 26 May 2015 - 07:46 AM, said:

Well, to be fair to the initial poster, the topic wasn't opened up with a slew of random rumors from 4chan about how the next Sonic game is actually a loving tribute to Big the Cat or some such thing. But yeah, we tend to skew away from pointless speculation. It's not a complete shocker there will be a new game featuring everyone's favo(u)rite blue hedgehog, and while it's nice we have a working title, who knows what it means, if anything at all. Until something more substantial is shown (screenshots, a trailer, what have you) we can put a pin in this. Then we can speculate for pages upon pages about how Sonic is slightly off center or is accelerating too slowly/much too fast.

ICEknight, on 12 May 2015 - 01:37 PM, said:

Manabu Kusunoki is the character designer for Mighty the Armadillo. He is listed in the credits to Chaotix as "Original Character Concept," his only previous credit Sonic-wise being for the arcade title. While it's been said that an armadillo was considered for Sonic at some point in the past, it definitely wasn't Mighty. Could Manabu been inspired by seeing internal concepts for Sonic 1? Who knows. But more than likely, Ohshima's armadillo character was a vague doodle that was never expanded upon, and it was more coincidence that Mighty was the same species. After all, Sonic rolls into a ball, armadillos roll into a ball, and if you're trying to come up with an animal that just happens to mimic Sonic's second-most recognizable shape...

Edit: oh I just realized nowhere do I explain my super excitement over these new images. These images super excite me.

JumpingRyle, on 11 May 2015 - 05:58 PM, said:

I can give the source of that, since I wrote the paragraph in question. Yuji Naka told the story during Summer of Sonic 2011, which is either in this video or the followup. I'm not sure of the exact moment he mentions it, but that's because its been four years since I watched it. What's interesting in that video is that Naka also seems completely ignorant of the American storyline, with the brown hedgehog and Kintobor and all that nonsense.

Now, my guess? I feel like it's a bit more complicated than one side is telling the truth and one side is lying. Because it just feels weird that Sega of America would take credit for all these changes, members of Sonic Team going on record telling a completely different story, yet the former SoA employees still telling the same things over and over again. Now, to be fair, I don't think anyone has ever asked Tom Kalinskie "hey, are you sure that SoA killed the rock band and it wasn't this other story about Ohshima running out of time." But is it entirely possible that both sides are kinda telling the truth?

Maybe when Madonna was faxed over to America, people like Madeline Schroeder voiced their concerns, but at the same time in Japan as Sonic Team was trying to focus on the core of the game, they removed her because they felt she made the game seem too much like a Mario rip-off, instead of a unique platformer. Same thing with the band. SoA didn't want them to be the focus of the game, but they were never intended to be the main focus. That the development team wanted to direct their resources to the gameplay, and all the extra bits involving the band were cut more for time than for anything else. There are sketches that show the band members were going to be in the ending sequence, but if it was taking too long to animate them for the sound test, then having them appear anywhere else was just out of the question. It's possible Sega of Japan wanted the band to take "center stage" in promotion, and Sega of America vetoed that, so while they still appeared in the manga and a couple other promotional images, they were never part of the proper advertising campaign.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, perhaps slightly closer to Sonic Team's story since they were the ones who actually made the game, with ego getting the better of both sides in retrospect. Also, whenever anyone American would tell the story of how they "softened" the character, it always felt more like "we need to redraw Sonic so he looks as he does on the cover of the American Sonic 1," not that they told Ohshima to stop drawing Sonic in the more raw looking, initial Hedgehog sketch. Because like you've pointed out, the look of Sonic is pretty much finalized once we get to the Tokyo Toy Show, when Madonna and the band were still on the table.

One final note, when it comes to the Console Wars book, it says right there in the beginning:

Quote

What's that mean? Not everything in that book is 1:1. Slightly annoying when you want to use it as a primary source, such as trying to come up with an exact timeline involving the earliest concepts for Sonic. While I don't think anything has been outright made up, it certainly feels as though this was written with the inevitable movie deal in mind.

MotorRoach, on 07 May 2015 - 06:23 AM, said:

In Ken's grand Echidna narrative, by the time the Floating Island actually became a floating island, the Echidna society was already highly advanced, technologically speaking. The plan to use the Chaos Emeralds to lift the landmass into the sky wasn't some tribal thing where they dared to go against the gods, like the games. Instead, they were scientists who were taking a page out of the book of Krypton. Instead of a whole planet getting destroyed, it was just their city, and instead of just...I don't know, moving to another location, the best idea they had was to lift the city up into the sky, in the process becoming isolated from the rest of the world.

At some point, technology was decided to be a bad thing. The police went around and collected all sorts of tech, and those who were against the idea became The Dark Legion. However, the rest of society that didn't become The Dark Legion were still wrapped up in technology. They still lived in modern cities, they still had access to cars and weaponry and all sorts of nonsense that their beliefs apparently told them was bad. And yet? They would decry the Dark Legion (a terrible name if you're trying to garner support on a political issue), though the Legion's only difference seemed to be that they loved to shove electronics in their face. If that was actually the main reason behind the divide, that would have been ok. But it wasn't. Because through the entire series, they just went on and on about technology in general, even though the Brotherhood Of Guardians used tech extensively, spying on everyone and everything on the island!

Perhaps Ken wanted these contradictions because he wanted to write a story that really examined how the system had fallen apart, and that Knuckles would set things right. But he never got to that point, even though he wrote on the Knuckles strip for over a decade. And even if he had been left to work on it, I can't say that he would have ever reached a satisfactory conclusion. Hell, the Mobius: 25 Years Later story really didn't offer much insight into these contradictions, especially since people who had tried to kill Knuckles over and over again were allowed to just live with everyone normally instead of...I don't know...being in jail. Unless they were in jail, but there's no hint to that, either.

It's so weird, and was leaps and bounds from the source material even back in the 90's. I get there wasn't much to go on, but you'd think he could have come up with a few more story ideas before reintroducing a million echidnas into the narrative.