Personally, I've taken to calling the current set of games the "Wisp Era" since all of them have had Wisps as the power-up system, bar Sonic Generations though that does use them, understandably, on Planet Wisp. Before that is the Flame Era, as the series had a bit of a thing with fire going on for a small chunk of it (on my timeline, which I know is not the standard, but eh, I'm using it): Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) had Iblis Sonic Rush/Sonic Rush Adventure had Blaze and the Sol Emeralds Sonic Rivals 2 had Ifrit Sonic and the Secret Rings had the flaming arrow Considering that's five of the ten games in that era...
Objectively, every single theoretical Sonic era you could possibly think of is real, except the meta era, which is fake and gay.
To add more fire to that flame, hohoho, I distinctly remember the starting cutscene of Shadow.t.H. having the "Fire in the Sky Festival" for the Black Comet on the newspaper. Don't remember the rest of the game nearly as vividly to tell ya what became of it, but it's there! 10 times minimum! Spoiler: Shadow (2005) This would be a nice clean division between things in terms of release date (same release day for both it and Rush), but doesn't work very neatly with the "Heroes->Shadow.t.H.->Battle->Advance3" arrangement that most sane people stick with timeline-wise to deal with Shadow's presence in Battle.
Yeah, that part of the Timeline is pretty much set up in a way you can't really change it. Still, interesting their little fire obsession toward the end of Naka's time. I wonder if they were quietly working towards something there...
Based on the way Ian Flynn was talking about knowing the origin of the emeralds but being unable to tell us I'm wondering if sonic team have plans to elaborate the lore in the near future. Which got me thinking, what is the current chaos emerald lore? Based of the manuals and logic the original idea in the classics each location has it's own set, this is then retconed in SA1 as one set. After that we have some connections to the gaia temples in unleashed, but that's it. Has there been any lines in the recent games so we can infer what the current direction with the emeralds is? It still confuses me that despite the emeralds being in almost all the games we still know very little about them. And what we do know will probably be retconed to hell and back whenever they do add to the lore.
I don't think any games outside of maybe Adventure have truly changed how the emeralds could be perceived, except for 06 since they get locked in time loops and all that. It just seems like random cultures have managed to obtain and utilize them in the past.
Hmm. This piques my interest. Is it possible that the emeralds don't abide by typical time-space rules? Is it possible that the emeralds could be duplicated by fucking with time? Do they have some sort of object permanence across all of time at once? That could possibly answer how South Island, West Side Island, and Angel Island all had sets of emeralds. It was really just the same 7 emeralds, but time shenanigans opened up the door for the gems to occur in various different places at the same moments throughout time. I probably explained that really poorly, so I'll try to back it up with a different example. In Sonic 06, Mephilis and Iblis use the 7 emeralds to become Solaris, a God greater than time itself, with that "object permanence" across past, present, and future. The only thing able to stop Solaris is the 3 musketeers, also powered up by the chaos emeralds, now able to withstand the flow of time too. But then Gens kinda raises a few questions of it's own. The emeralds seemingly need some form of time to function properly, as they're clearly not immune to white space (who wants to bet the time stones are though?). But now I'm wondering if the time stones have their own version of chaos control, which set of gems would be stronger against Solaris, do the time stones have object permanence, are the special stages also immune to time, and wow, my head's spinning- I should stop lmao
Considering that the Master Emerald is a transcendental object across time and space, there is precedent that the Chaos Emeralds may have some element of that was well. We do know they can warp spacetime both spacialy and temporally so there is some temporal element to them. Really all we do know though is that various civilizations have coveted the power of the emeralds as they can literally turn thoughts into power and that they have wound up destroyed or eradicated as a result (In a lot of ways it's similar in concept to the Triforce, or, more tellingly, dragon balls). We also know the Master Emerald exists specifically to control the emeralds, acting as a sort of failsafe in case the chaos (heh) grows out of control. The fact that a Master Emerald exists to keep the Emeralds in check suggests that someone created the 7 emeralds first and then created the Master Emerald later.
I always thought, that they spread around the world after use, like Dragon Balls. Sonic in true ending of Sonic 1 uses them to fix the island, right? Then they spread onto special zones of Sonic 2. In my headcanon, the emeralds had to be used first, in order for them to get back to special zone. Is there a possibility, there are more Emeralds than this one set? I mean, it was never stated in any game that there is ONLY 7 emeralds, right? You need 7 to do certain things, and even one is really powerful. Maybe they are so hard to obtain/find, that they happen to collect same ones or sth.
Yes But then Westside Island having a civilization that misused the emeralds which remained there until the present day suddenly doesn't make sense. Well that's what I always thought too. It makes sense from a gameplay standpoint, but with almost any adventure era story, that also doesn't make sense unless they've just been visiting the special stages in every single game offscreen before each adventure starts. Again, the adventure era. I'm pretty sure multiple times characters said "THE seven chaos emeralds". Hell, even Eggman did at the end of heroes. Adventure retconned that one pretty hard. There always has been, and forever will be one set of 7.
I believe You are right. Adventure era contradicts much of the classic era, and let's not get started on Super Emeralds (yeah I know, not canon)...
Yeah, there are canonically 7 Chaos Emeralds and they scatter per Sonic Channel: Source: https://pastebin.com/ZujZcpb3 They're not like the Dragon Balls in that they have to be recollected after each use. Rather, they stay with you until they're fully used up, then they fly away and basically recharge themselves. We saw it happen right before the Perfect Chaos boss battle in SA1.
My headcannon on the emeralds is that they aren't located in any specific time or place. However portals to the special stage do, this allows them to be misused on west side island and remain in the special stage until sonic grabs them. Now to explain why South Island doesn't sink when sonic gets the emeralds in other games. The special stages are gateways to the emeralds right? I'm pretty sure that's agreed on, so from my understanding, being connected to the special stage is esentially the same as being connected to the emeralds allowing it to float wherever the emeralds are (I assume when the emeralds are powerless like in unleashed the island sinks). In my head the emeralds aren't in the special stages instead they're like a jump point to the emerald. So just finding an emerald lying around like in adventure is possible just unlikely as there's only 7 in the entirety of space time.
I'm personally operating on the logic that Chaos Emeralds produce enough power to create a singularity, which is what causes Chaos Control. Basically, they can warp timespace through simply supplying enough power. Time Stones control time itself. Where you can warp time to a standstill and travel back and forth along the stream, you can't actively control it. The Time Stones would enable this power, allowing you to command time to stop entirely, rewind instead of having to jump back in time as with Chaos Emeralds, shunt a bad future into a good one, and so on. I'm actually working on something with this idea, so... yeah
I thought Sonic Chaos said the island was sinking cause Eggman nabbed the red emerald and threw the other 5 present at the time off balance?