Sometimes I try to imagine drawing Sonic's world (Earth/whatever) map, but it looks like most of the places we know are located in North America or South Island. The exceptions would be Soleanna, those cities in Unleashed, and some places of Forces because who knows where they should be in a decent map. The stages from Rush series, Rivals series and Riders series I have no clue and I think the games don't give any (though something leads me to believe that the Riders series takes place in Japan for some reason).
Then why not reuse elements like in Sonic Colours? Or why don't anything else with the Earth just make a random planet, if a planet is that easy to cook up that they can throw a new one together and into the background for all of 10 seconds of focus? If Green Hill Zone is any indication, Sonic Forces is entirely on South Island beyond the space stages, since there's no separation between it and the rest of the landmass. They're apparently around Station Square, on Sonic Advance 2's island.
I don't think that Green Hill is any indication because they talked about Chemical Planet as if it's near Green Hill. But I didn't dig into Forces that much, I might be wrong. I've always assumed the Advance series takes place near the same locations the Adventure series does. Now I can't say why I've always assume that, maybe due to similarities in design? But that conection with the Rush series is nice, I hadn't noticed it.
There can be multiple Chemical Plants. Still, perhaps the Phantom Ruby has 'rammed' South Island into West Side Island. Illusionary, of course, but perhaps Green Hill is now stuck in Desert Zone. I mean, Westside Island is called The Illusionary West Side Island...
Or maybe during those 6 months of world domination Eggman expanded Chemical Plant so much that it reached South Island. We can see Chemical Plant from outside, in the sea like a 3D Oil Ocean.
It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. It's a minor inconsistency that 99.9999% of players won't notice. "One level background's depiction of the planet doesn't match up with the world map's depiction of the planet, therefore the entire game is set on South Island" is an insane leap of logic. The premise of the game is "Eggman has conquered the world", not "Eggman has conquered South Island".
Then Sonic's World is a single landmass, and a majority of it is Green Hill Zone and some mountains. What a wonderful world.
I made some changes in my timeline. The main differences are: 1) the subdivision of Modern Era into two: Boost Era and Wisps Era (I don't like the names "dark era" and "meta era"); 2) Chronicles was moved from the Wisps Era to the Adventure Era (there were no wisps after all, and it feels like it's from the Adventure Era because of multiple characters and GUN); and 3) Runners was included. I'm still unsure about the Classic Era though. Ian Flynn said Sonic R was canon a few years ago, and I guess 3D Blast is as canon as R, but I don't know if Mania changed things. And Knuckles Chaotix is always troublesome. I left the three branches of the Classic Era untouched, but maybe Chaotix, R and 3D Blast are all canon after Mania (or Chaotix before Mania, the same discussion as ever). Spoiler: Classic Era Spoiler: Adventure Era Spoiler: Boost Era Spoiler: Wisps Era
You are putting 1000% more thought into all this than the developers. The maps are made for gameplay purposes first and foremost. Adding to all that, it’s unlikely that most of them even know about Genesis-era game manual lore about South Island etc. As for maps in cutscenes, you speak about it as if not using earth and instead drawing their own planet texture is is some grand undertaking that they wouldn’t do without a deliberate purpose, but in high quality scenes they make all the textures themselves. It’s actually easier to make your own layout because you don’t need to reference any specific map. Essentially what I’m saying is you are not meant to think too much about this stuff.
There so many reasons as to why they didn’t re-use the asset. It could be technical reasons (the asset was in a format that wasn't easy to re-use). Or it could just be that the person doing the planet artwork was a different person from previous games and didn’t know that an asset existed. It's like in Mega Collection, they have scans of all the manuals. These are saved in Sega's propriety texture format. Each manual page is a separate texture file. In Gems Collection, they ported this over. But then changed it, so each manual page is saved as several texture tiles. So now every manual page has to be split up. And then the game has to stitch all the tiles back together to create a single manual page. And this stitching is done each time the player changes the page. Why did they do this? It's taken a simple process and made it extra complicated for no benefit. It's probably the case that the person doing the Gems Collections manuals didn’t know about the Mega Collection system and so just created their own system. Inconsistencies like this are very common when it comes to reusing (or not reusing) assets between games.
Eh, just seems silly to me to create an entire planet for barely seconds of focus, especially if it's so much hassle to make a planet background as claimed. And it's not like other games don't make new planet maps: Sonic the Hedgehog 4, a tiny budget title, went right ahead and made one for the background of E.G.G. Station, while Sonic Generations made an Earth image outright, for the exact same purpose. Not to mention they still have to modify it, why not just make a new one? It just seems odd to me, that's all.
Because different people approach their job in different ways, or just do it a certain way on a whim. It’s not like there’s a certain specific logic everyone must follow for making a planet texture. For most people, artist included, it’s just scenery.
Well, I changed my mind. The canon of the Classic Era kept hammering in my head. Ian Flynn said last year that Knuckles Chaotix isn't canon but Sonic R is. So I decided to go with that. And if Sonic R is canon, so should Sonic 3D Blast, because they were both made by the same company at roughly the same time. So now only Knuckles Chaotix is on a dead timeline; Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R come after Sonic Mania. Now my timeline has only three games that didn't happen: Knuckles Chaotix, Sonic Chronicles and Sonic 06. The dead timeline that was created to fit Sonic Chronicles is a bit far-fetched, but it's as good as it gets. (Of course, what Sonic Team understands about non-canon games is slightly different from my understanding when I put them in dead timelines. For Sonic Team, if the game is not canonical it means that the events never existed and the lore information is not valid. In my timeline, these events stopped happening because of spacetime changes, and so somehow never existed as well, but the lore information is still valid. Sonic Team barely cares about continuity anyways, so we can't go wrong here.) I took the opportunity to include all Silver's known futures. There are four: the bad future from Sonic 06, the bad future from Sonic Rivals 2, the good future from Sonic Colors DS and the bad future from Sonic Forces. I really wanted to create a dead timeline to fit the Game Gear titles (and Sonic Pocket Adventure, because I see this game as a sequel to the Game Gear titles), but it seems impossible. But maybe that's a good thing, because if I could do that I would have to find a way to fit Sonic the Fighters somewhere, and I'm always running away from that game. Spoiler: Classic Era Spoiler: Adventure Era Spoiler: Boost Era Spoiler: Wisps Era
Random tidbit, that Phantom Ruby falling from the Dimensional Rift thing isn't mentioned in the Japanese manual.
That is weird... But Christian Whitehead said that the Phantom Ruby arrived in Classic Sonic's timeline, so it wasn't there before.
I hadn't seen that tweet. He referred to Classic Sonic's timeline as "the Mania timeline (Classic Sonic post-Generations)". Huh. That makes it sound like he views it as an alternate timeline created by Generations, rather than another dimension.
Considering Forces shows that they can still interact to some degree, I don't see a functional difference between "timeline" and "dimension".
I believe either 2018's or 2019's SXSW had a question asked of Iizuka-san where the answer basically reconfirmed what Christian said there. It's literally just the word "dimension" in Forces' localisation that has resulted in muddiness here.
