It's not. They're completely unrelated. No. Knuckles broke the pipes because they were obstacles in a video game and travelling through them got him from point A to point B. Egg Robo threw the bomb at the end of the level, something Knuckles had no idea would happen.
He breaks one that floods the level and does not travel through it. About 6:08 in. Considering the rest of the subtle story telling in that game, you can't say that wasn't possibly deliberate. You are right EggRobo threw a bomb, though. I misremembered that, thank you for alerting me to my error, I must have muddled it with Sonic's end of stage, where the Death Egg randomly starts exploding after the boss fight.
That's an interesting interpretation. However, he had been fighting Eggrobo since the beginning of his story, as shown by the boss battles from AIZ2 onward. It wasn't a new threat he met at MHZ.
Ah yes, the completely isolated pipe that serves absolutely no other purpose than to be in the way and cause the stage to flood when broken. Please, tell me, what exactly does that pipe do otherwise that can be attributed to it, because it is literally hardly an obstacle Knuckles has to overcome? No, but as far as he knew, he'd removed all the influence from the island otherwise, and the EggRobo really didn't have much of its own facilities to respond otherwise: from my interpretation, the Launch Base is levelled and the EggRobo leaves the island. No issue, until it comes back with the Flying Battery and resumes the fight. Of course, this is based on the Knuckles cutscene from Sonic & Knuckles, which we can't really ascertain as canon or not, since it's in an official game, but removed when the game is 'patched'. So...
It's a video game. It is an obstacle in Knuckles' way. There is no way to progress unless you break the pipe.
I know I'm probably drugding up a convo that everyone has moved on from, but I think it's important to consider that Sonic 2 overall suggests that Eggman was in a hurry and didn't get to complete a lot of his machinations as he got to the Island after Sonic did after tailing him One of the bigger clues to this is how the Winged Fortress is incomplete looking. Eggman's plan was to use the Chaos Emeralds to power the Death Egg, but evidently he had to launch it early without them because it's already up in space. And we catch Eggman making an escape from Sonic in a rocket to the Death Egg off of the Wing Fortress. My suggestion then is that Mecha Sonic is the way he is because like everything else, he is incomplete/slapped together, and Sonic is catching Eggman with his pants down. And we would see the a more progressed idea of Mecha Sonic in Sonic 3 with Mecha mrk II. Except Yamaguchi himself stated it was about placement though.
See, I'd buy that if it was simply one of the pipes you travel through. But it's not. You are specifically directed to go through it, whereupon it does something no other pipe does and floods the level. So yes, I would say it's part of the story.
Video games are designed by people, who put obstacles in the way for specific reasons. A random pipe to break through can serve multiple purposes, but the pipe in question doesn't add very much to gameplay. Why did the level designers put it there, if not to convey the story? You could just as easily say, "Sonic attacked Eggman because he was the boss in a video game and defeating him got him to the next zone. Eggman is not part of the story."
I'm not disputing that the stage being flooded is part of the story. I'm disputing this claim: There's nothing in the game that implies Knuckles broke the pipe with the intention of "submerging the foundation to soften the blow to the surrounding area before taking it out and allowing the base to collapse into the lake". As previously mentioned, this doesn't even work as a theory, because it was Egg Robo who set off the bomb at the end of the level. The story is "A pipe blocked Knuckles' way. Knuckles broke the pipe in order to progress, which resulted in the Launch Base being flooded, which made Knuckles' mission more difficult".
Of course. I'm not disputing that, I flat out said I misremembered the cutscene and adjusted my interpretation. The problem is: You keep saying it's nothing more than an obstacle, when it's a story aspect of Knuckles, at the very least, flooding the base. Ah yes, that all of 30 seconds of sheer difficulty as Knuckles leaves the facility he just flooded and goes back to open air, as seen in the video above.
The pipe is an obstacle that the player has to destroy in order to proceed. Destroying the pipe floods the area, adding a surprise hazard (water) that slows the player down. There's no deeper character motivation or plot relevance.
That you can see. As mentioned, it's my interpretation of events. Add onto the fact they attended to details such as Angel Island being in the air to indicate the plot takes place after Sonic's story, and I'm inclined to believe they were including a subtle plot detail without getting in the way of the gameplay, as they were doing literally the whole Knuckles story.
Sonic CD is CONFIRMED to be placed before Sonic 2! I just asked Ian about it in his live Q&A: - The Encyclo-speed-ia suggests that Sonic CD takes place before Sonic 2. Was this a current decision made by the SEGA/Sonic Team? - Yes. That is the official order of things, followed up with the hashtag #knowingsmile. Then Kyle and Ian talked about how they prefer the timeline to be. Kyle likes it before Sonic 2, and Ian prefers it after 3K. And then he completes it by saying: - But that is how it is, so I'm just gonna have to shut up. Timestamp: 46:18
In that case, the reason Mecha Sonic mk1 (Sonic 2) seems less advanced than Metal Sonic despite seemingly coming later in the timeline could be that he was designed for a different purpose. Like, while Metal was designed to surpass Sonic in speed (as stated in his profiles), Mecha was designed to surpass him in combat. So Metal was small and sleek and had a jet engine on his back, but didn't have the ability to spin attack or spindash. Meanwhile Mecha was more heavily armed and armored so he was bigger and clunkier (which was what made him look less advanced), but had his own versions of the spin attack (even able to shoot spikes in mid-air) and spindash. This is even reflected in their boss battles -- Metal faces Sonic by challenging him to a race, while Mecha directly fights him in a small arena. Then after both robots failed to defeat Sonic, Eggman designed Mecha Sonic mk2 (S3K) as the ultimate Sonic bot who was balanced in both areas. So like Metal he was smaller and sleeker than Mecha mk1, but had mk1's enhanced spin attack and "spindash". And as the cherry on top, Eggman endowed him with the ability to absorb Chaos Energy and go Super like Sonic.
(I updated my post with the timestamp.) So apparently Bean, Bark and Fang at the beginning of Mirage Saloon act 2 in Mania were the real ones? I thought all of them were Heavy Magician's trickery.
The Fang/Bark/Bean that appear in the Act 1 > Act 2 transition are never shown to be illusions. (A little off-topic, but what determines which one appears?) What does the book say?
I thought all of them were, because of the boss. In any case, it was never confirmed if they were real or not, was it? Looks like it's completely random. I guess. It's that thing about Tails.
All this Launch Base Act 2 Knuckles talk made me realize something. Why was the water level lowered in the first place? It happens for seemingly no reason in a game where they tried to subtlety care about canon. Then it hit me. The death egg was so large it raised the water level of the lake by just sitting in it, like Robotnik getting in and out of a bathtub. When the death egg launched the water level returned to "normal." Maybe the lake had to be stabilized and so when the death egg crashed the first thing Robotnik did was drain the lake to be at its natural level again otherwise say the land in act 1 would have been flooded as well. He probably wanted that land dry for his machinery and construction equipment and a place to store stuff in the act 1 ruined buildings he would want dry. So that was what the act 2 pipes are. Robotnik stored the extra water away into a holding tank somewhere. When Knuckles treked underground, it was indeed a mission to return the lake's natural water level without a death egg in it. So storywise Knuckles breaking that pipe to raise the water makes sense. Hitting that pipe must have started a chain reaction elsewhere causing the whole system to blow and the water to violently raise. Surely that single small pipe wasn't just the only one flowing water at the time. The water raised too fast for such a large area. But hey that's just a theory...a Game Theory!
