Complimenting Sonic Adventure 2

Not with movie Sonic lol

 

Iizuka actually said that Sonic canonically has two separate eyes.

 

Two separate eyes?
With that mono-eye?
Nightmare Fuel! xD

 

Iizuka lies to us once again

 

So the connecting part is just some gross white patch?

That's worse lol. Or is it like those early fan made videos that used Classic Sonic's model where there was a kinda visible divide between both eyes.

 

In this case, not a lie from Iizuka. :p

Those 3D models that visibly separate his eyes are horrid though.

 

The funny thing is that they did make a Chao mobile game...in 2002.

 

Everything involving the Chao is one of the best gameplay loops of all time. It is a crime that they haven't really appeared in that way since, nor have tried to expand on it more. It had all the mechanics I wanted from Pokemon - another series I was and still am severely deep into - like two decades before that series decided to pick them up.

Cannon's Core is a pretty great final level IMO. This was the first game to have the "good guys" and the "bad guys" collaborate to save the world, and it blew my mind. I also like how progressively eldritch it gets the farther in you get, and it's one of the few areas that feels surreal and colorful...even though none of those aspects of it make any kind of sense given the backstory of ARK and the like...

 

Sonic's final environment in Cannons Core was really cool and I wish they expanded on it, even if it kinda makes no sense (why is like SA1 Lost World in space now?)

And it all leads up to the final battle, a space lizard with a cannon up its ass where you must pop its boils :specialed: it was epic when I was 10, and it still is pretty climactic, but fuck is it silly when you give it some thought.

 

Supposedly, the explanation is that Gerald studied the Ancient Echidna civilizations from S3K and SA1 and modeled the prototype of the Ultimate Life Form after Chaos, which is why the Biolizard is a reptile (based on Perfect Chaos). It's also why there's artificial Chaos robots on the Ark, and the core is based off of Lost World and the Master Emerald Altar from SA1. The reason he switched from a Lizard to a Hedgehog for the Ultimate Life Form is because he allegedly saw the mural from Hidden Palace, or at least something similar to it, which could explain why Shadow has a gold aura when spin dashing/homing attacking and his quills were shaped similarly to Adventure-era Super Sonic.

 

No I get that, just seems weird stone architecture was used in a space station at all you'd think the altar for example might look similar but it'd be made of metal.

 

Actually I remember reading...somewhere...that he originally had a black aura, like how Sonic's matches his fur, but they found it obscured his apparent direction when rolling/charging a spindash/etc, and so opted for the color inverse of Sonic's aura instead.

 

Most likely just an aesthetical appearance.
Beyond those layers of stone might lie tons of metal.

 

I mean, this is the same series that has checkered colored grass/rocks, trippy looking special stages, has gigantic casinos and carnivals on islands, and a giant space station with a pointy nose and mustache on it, so it's not really that out there.

Really? Huh, neat, if true. I noticed they changed his aura to red in some of the later games too, like 06 and Generations. I guess it's just an aesthetic thing. The gold aura still looks cool in my book, though.

 

That's always what I thought too. People would eat up that shit. Hell make it a companion app to a game or something idk, you could get bonuses from Dash or Forces Speed Battle or whatever the next Sonic game is on consoles. They could add tons of mini games and online races could be a thing, maybe you can bet rings (as long as you can't buy them with real money anyway). There's so much potential.

I was never super into chao, maybe if they made the progression a bit faster. Fuck feeding them coconuts. So many hours like watching them eat and then force feeding them when they complain. Sorry chao, but it's the only way to gain stamina. So EAT THE COCONUT.

Actually what are the main fruits? I've always thought they were coconuts

 

Yeah, it's crazy that they've never really cashed in on the Chao after SA2. At most, they get cameos and references, but that's about it. Honestly, there's A LOT of stuff they could be doing with the Classic era, Adventure era, and even the Modern era style stuff to make bank on, but they just keep sitting on it and placing dumb mandates that basically amount to 'No Fun Allowed', which is really stifling the series' appeal in the long run, imo.

That said, if the Chao ever come back, I imagine they'd need to do things to expand upon them other than just make them be a time waster that's required for 100% completion. Maybe make the Chao less tedious to raise/evolve, add more types/evolutions to expand on the different types of Chao you can raise (like Chao based on other characters like Silver, Blaze, the Chaotix, Mighty, Ray, etc.); have more accessories and costumes for those Chao, have more minigames other than just Racing and Karate, and so on. Also maybe have them assist you in stages like the buddies in Runners or the RC Vehicles in Lost World (kinda like what Balan Wonderworld seems to be doing with the 'Tims'), or have them do stuff in the background of some stages like in NiGHTS.

 

I feel like this is the best way to handle any future Chao content. Putting it on phones with weird controls and/or microtransactions, watering it down, or making it faster would probably ruin the time-killing aspect of it that plenty of people seem to enjoy. Most simulators are pretty slow paced as it is, and the best way to make it less tedious would be to simply add more to do.

But yeah, keeping it completely separate from the main game would be the best option so completionists won't have to play it if they don't want to.

 

How can something be overrated when it's so earnestly loved? That's like saying "genesis-style physics are overrated"--it doesn't make any sense, because people earnestly love those physics and want them in Sonic games because they're good.

Chao are cute, they an evolve into a huge variety of unique yet still visually cohesive forms, and on top of that SA2B (the game that basically made the generation of Sonic fans who love chao) introduced 12 colors, shininess, genetics, etc. People like chao because they're such a *weirdly* in-depth side mode in SA2 (let's be real no one plays SADX for the chao gardens and the DC games are super simple in comparison).



Four of my chao for instance. All different colors and evolutions (hell a fifth is in the back lol). This is actually what keeps me coming back to the gardens--just seeing what unique kinds of chao I can make.

And, to be fair, I totally get it. The vanilla system is pretty damn slow and tedious in a lot of matters. I have use mods and a flat-out chao save editor to cut out a bunch of the tedium. Mods like Chao World Extended do things like bring back literally a hundred unused animations that Sonic Team just...didn't use for some reason? Along with other features; chao having much stronger differences in personality and behavior; unused stuff like angry chao being able to bully others; the ability to mix colors for like literally 300 more; fixing a bunch of glitches, etc. But if your sole frame of reference is the vanilla versions than yeah. I totally get why a lot of people think the mode is just a tedious waste of time...because to be fair, it kinda is.

Also, I can't help but feel that a lot of older Sonic fans where diehard SEGA dudes/dudettes who therefore would have gotten Dreamcasts when they came out and played the Adventure games that way, and then mostly just ignored the Gamecube ports or played them a bit. Because the DC chao system is so barebones compared to the GCN one, I can get you older crowd just not noticing the differences if you already didn't care much for chao (especially as the games don't indicate that the systems are even different to begin with!). Literally NONE of the five chao in the pic above could even exist in the DC games because they're all different colors and three of them are shiny. In addition, they all would have the same "grades"--because grades didn't even exist in the DC games--so the whole metagame of evolving them to make them even better at the stuff they are good at and later patching up their bad grades is completely gone. Why bother to plan out a chao's evolution when there's no mechanical benefit? Why breed chao when there are no grades to pass down or colors to try to get? And then we have stuff like the VMU functionality just making things more tedious.

Becuase wow, when I put it like this--no wonder older Sonic fans find the popularity of chao to be baffling. As people who almost certainly played on the Dreamcast first, you started off with the super simple versions of the gardens that have so little of what us younger fans love about it.

But that's why us Adventure kids--really us SA2B on the gamecube kids--love Chao so much--we started off with the vastly superior version of the gardens and we were kids. We had a shitload of free time to just dick around in the gardens. Most of didn't even know the DC versions had a much inferior version for years, and even now in the chao community, a lot of hidden details about the DC versions are unknown because no one cares enough to document them.

So, yeah, I totally get why you would think the gardens and chao are overrated. But I hope I've explained why us younger fans love the gardens so much in a way that doesn't boil to just "ok boomer lol".

 

and of those, only the space station with the nose and mustache were kept in SA2 while the architecture is still technically surreal, the aesthetic isn't - brown mountains, brown stones for the pyramid, grey/red highways, brown/grey military interiors.

wait. W H A T. is this on steam??? and does it up the 8-chao-per-garden limit?