Honestly, I agree with the Chaos Emeralds part. Let them be the eternal mystery of the series. I once suggest this as to why Metal Sonic looks so advanced compared to the others, but I'm honestly quite happy with my Metal Sonic is Good Future tech theory and the (other) Mecha Sonics are Robotnik trying to catch up to that technology before just recovering the original...
Sure, but we don’t know to what extent, and at any rate, Origins trying to work around future plot would be rather clunky, so I think they made the right call here, regardless of what they’re planning for Frontiers.
More complicated than explaining the missing Chaos Emerald in Sonic 1 is explaining why it disappeared again in the Game Gear games. Or why Sonic the Fighters shows eight Emeralds. Or why Sonic Spinball shows sixteen. You can explain all of this by creating some extra stories or even retcons (like Tails creating a fake Emerald, and those sixteen Emeralds being a different set of gems) but you need to create all of that anyway. It won't be possible to explain it with a single line of script.
Yeah the canon cannot be consolidated to a logical point without taking a sledgehammer to certain elements of the auxiliary games. That’s just how it is, really.
Or a surgical knife. I don't know why everyone seems to think a chainsaw is a valid alternative to surgical tools..
Kind of reminds me of how Star Wars used to handle canon prior to the reboot. They still had an in-house continuity group that essentially assigned levels of canonicity and I think the same sort of Applies to Sonic. G-Canon was the movies for Star Wars (George Lucas), and the mainline games here. T was the TV Stuff which was what other canon reoriented to fit over time (Which Didn't they say Prime would be canon or canon adjacent?), equivalent would be spinoffs with Sonic Team involvement. C and S were the supplemental stuff as long as it supported and didn't contradict the main stuff. Each tier going down was super-seeded by any of the higher ones by priorities given. Then N canon as the non-canon stuff which were later relegated to the multiverse and came to include new series like the Infinities (Multiverse What-Ifs), Tag and Blink (Parody), & The Star Wars (Concept Draft Adaptation). I kinda think this and working out some explanations would go a long way to weld some of the weirder outliers back together. And it usually comes down to Emerald Counts. Fighters was 7 emeralds and a shrunken down and miss-colored Master Emerald if they wanted to go the simple route. Spinball would probably be some americanized explanation. The American Chaotix manual mentioned some kind of Power Emeralds that ran facilities. If the "synthetic emerald" stuff applies as people oft speculate, just write them off as oversized Chaos Drives or something. Also, RDNexus does have a point. They did mention something about some early days of the Chaos Emeralds being involved with Frontiers. And there were always mentions at having some details Sega had notes on going back a couple or a few years. No idea if that was from before development of the current story took place or not. Note, we do already have a timeline of groups gaining access to them in the past even if we don't know exact order. The Gaia Temple people which was multiple of thousands of years ago, The Labyrinth people (Labyrinth/Tidal Tempest/Lost Labyrinth) of some indeterminant period, the Westside Island people who might be the same, and the Echidnas storming to take them leading to Perfect Chaos 3,000 years ago. The "knowing smile" from Ian and the still possibly fake leaks talking about some of the history of the emeralds, I kind of wonder if they go back to Time Immemorial that would be touched on as legend or if we just see something more contemporary happening. No clue what the overall plan is. Then we could possibly extrapolate the Sol Emeralds origin would be similar, though that isn't a guarantee. Didn't they just say the Time Stones were going to that Roblox Sonic thing? Get the feeling they might be trying to straiten things out now with all of the gems. Kinda hoping Frontiers is where it all comes together.
Okay but then you get into stuff like “But why was the Master Emerald like that? How? It’s never happened before or since!”. I think with something like that, best bet is to just to acknowledge the goof and retcon it, adapting the story to work around it.
You say that the Master Emerald didn't, but look how often various games switched the other Emerald colors around. I think there was 10 or more different colors being used across the classic games. There is definitely more than one chart out there about it. Let alone how the shapes of everything wasn't really standardized relatively until after 3&K. It was a general consistency issue thing. That's also not counting times like Sonic Battle where the emeralds were just all green even into the Modern period. I just gave up making sense of Emerald colors. Wouldn't mind seeing what the actual explanation is, because there is always a good chance that they get really complicated with it in the end and just so long as they straiten it out.
Was just noting that a lot of very similar ruins could have possibly one larger society and had a likely history with the Chaos Emeralds and/or Time Stones as well as that the emeralds themselves had a long and varied history changing hands multiple times. Getting more information on this or all of the alluded to Great Civilizations since at least the Fourth also had gathered Chaos Emeralds would help explain a lot. Simpler point, if we get origins to the Emeralds it would likely go really far back.
I don't know how are they pulling off an explanation for the origins of the Chaos Emeralds that doesn't involve Light Gaia. I hope it makes sense but I don't see how.
Oh, I have an easy answer for Spinball and Fighters that makes this the ultimate retcon or whatever: those were Chao Emeralds, not Chaos, but some jewels of that kind mutated into this "Chaos" form we see in other games, one of them instead becoming their ultimate (life?)form, the Master Emerald. So there's just one Master Emerald and seven Chaos Emeralds, but you kind find tons of regular Chao Emeralds, like the ones you collect in South Island in the 8-bit sequels.
*horrified you have somehow read some old notes for a story of mine, where I was planning to have the 8-bit Chaos Emeralds be weaker "Chao Emeralds", that are more akin to Chaos Drives in that they have finite energy*
I think in regards to stuff like the chaos emeralds’ number, shape, and colors you’re just supposed to treat it like you would gameplay stuff like springs and loop de loops or art style changes. Do people in Sonic’s world drive to work on highways like roller coaster tracks? Probably not, but it makes the game fun. In the same way, story-wise there weren’t more than 7 chaos emeralds in Sonic Spinball, but it’s more fun to have more goals than that in the game. The varying colors and shapes are like different sprites or (most) character designs: the way it currently is is how it always was canonically. At least that’s my read of it
I'm honestly surprised that Origins didn't simply retcon Sonic 1 to have seven emeralds, and would present the seventh emerald as just... joining the other six in their journey to Sonic 2. I don't think there's really a good explanation for something that was just a weird inconsistency in the old games and the fact that they mention at all is weird to me. Doesn't bug me as much as the super emeralds, though. This is how I always read the game environments. They're an abstraction for the sake of the audience's play experience, not a literal representation of some urban hellscapes that the poor defenseless humans live in.
I don't see the introduction of the 7th emerald in S2 as an inconsistency any more than the introduction of the Master Emerald in S3K. I see it as something done to avoid inconsistencies, as you couldn't go Super in S1 with the emeralds. "You need 7 emeralds to transform you see, too bad in the previous game you could only find 6" Same reason Tails couldn't go Super with the regular Chaos Emeralds in S3K, only with the Super Emeralds. It would bring the question of why he couldn't do that in S2. Of course, they threw the latter rule out the window with Mania, as it didn't have the Super Emeralds, making the regular emeralds his only possible means of transforming. But by this point it seems any non-Sonic Super forms in the classic-style games are treated as non-canon bonuses anyway, so...
Origins did let Tails turn super with just the normal set, adding another fun inconsistency. The emeralds are so wildly inconsistent that I just treat them basically as non-canon as game mechanics like rings and checkpoints.
I feel like you could easily have 7 Emeralds in Sonic 1, and just say something like, after more time spent with the Emeralds, and more times using them, Sonic learned how to transform with them. The same way that Tails couldn't originally go Super with the Chaos Emeralds in 3K, but could in Mania. Granted that's moot now, since Origins gives him Super Tails with Chaos Emeralds, and like you said it's a non-canon bonus anyway. But still, you could definitely write characters as being able to do new things with the Emeralds that they didn't know about before. In the modern games there's Chaos Control, which Sonic never knew about trying to use before SA2, or time traveling with Chaos Control, which nobody knew about trying to use before 06.
