It's a subtle point but it's definitely Mania's key weakness. Sonic 3 is very much designed with Knuckles as hard mode. Knuckles even has slightly harder bosses than Sonic does. I think a lot of fans forget that Knuckles' alternate paths are often harder than Sonic's main path. It wasn't just more paths to take but a more difficult run. I think this aspect of Knuckles' story mode is forgotten because a lot of fans who play the Classics keep promoting alternate paths without much thought beyond replay value. I think Mania unfortunately falls into this trap. Knuckles doesn't have many alternate paths and the ones which he does have only really show his abilities instead of being challenging. The only times Mania does do so is when it's copying the design of 3K.
Knuckles in Mania is absolutely wretched in places, Titanic Monarch 1 boss I'm looking right atcha. In S3K, Knuckles's story being after Sonic's plus the higher difficulty in general couldn't have been a coincidence; it's literally "you beat the game as Sonic/Tails? Now try this!".
Reminder that Archie dedicated a whole issue to Sonic using a Super Emerald to loop around the world and reverse time (and gave him like... 3 alternate super forms in the process too) to explain why he has longer quills, green eyes and... buckles on his shoes from then onward?
Oh Archie’s explanations for Sonic, Amy, and Robotniks redesigns were fucking nuts. And then the rest just kinda happened one day
Imo Archie’s Eggman redesign explanation was “fucking nuts” in a fun way. Since Robo-Robotnik was an already established character I think this was a good way of bringing Robotnik back without devaluing Sonic and Robotnik’s final fight in issue 50. On the other hand, the explanation for Sonic and Amy’s design changes were incredibly stupid. When I was a kid I thought that the colored irises were a stylistic thing (classic sonic was a style, not a younger/alt dimension version of Sonic). After all, the cover of Sonic Mega Collection Plus, had the characters’ adventure-era designs. Creating an explanation for Sonic’s green eyes ruined that perception and confused me as a kid. Especially since, as DarkSonic pointed out, there were a bunch of other characters who did not have colored iris in pre-SA1 Archie, but suddenly did without an explanation. Then there’s the whole can of worms opened by Amy’s magic aging. Yikes. Did the archie comics ever explain how Tails evolved from his dumb SATAM iteration to his smart-game personality? There are bunch of archie comics I haven’t read post-issue 50 and pre-Ian Flynn’s run. To move the topic back to Origins Plus, I think it would be cool to include some of the IDW classic one-shots as unlockables in the museum
They also seemed to make a point of showing Amy screwed over the Acorns by wasting that magic ring on such a stupid wish while their mother lay comotose and, you know, GLOBAL WAR ACROSS THEIR GLOBE, and she didn't even seem to care remotely. It was like even then they were instinctively trying to make you HATE her. Even under Flynn's run they felt the need for pointless details at selective occasions. For example the infamous brain damage excuse for Charmy's personality change that even Flynn himself admitted was a bad idea in the end, while Vector and Espio just kind of switched to their very different games personalities at some point without anyone really questioning it. In fairness though Mania was also designed with multiplayer in mind. Enforcing different routes on certain characters rather than as tactical short cuts would have led to an unfair advantage.
I feel like no one cares that Archie was a licensed comic that had to change designs when told wether they like it or not. Also the fact that years actually did pass in the comic (Sonic was 18 when the comic soft-rebooted). Yes. It happened way before the SA redesigns though. I think he ate something or something dumb like that. Another quick fix thing like Amy's redesign explanation. Because their designs didn't need to change. Vector simply exercised and Espio never had a backstory in the comics so it was easy to say he was always an undercover ninja in the first place. No comment on Charmy though. The Egg Grapes served their purpose to kill off a bunch of characters for Eggman's fuel.
I thought Knuckles's campaign was cool but thought that the story of it was dumb as hell, a contrived reason to go through already-existing zones and fight the same bosses. Having a story parallel to Sonic's would have been really difficult to implement but would have been totally genius if done right.
I have to give the 16bit Triple Trouble fangame credit for pulling this off. In fact I have to give that entire game credit for being awesome! Hopefully in Origins Plus, Knuckles’ story in 3K can be fleshed out with a new opening and closing animation. This still isn’t ideal… but at this point I don’t want 3K’s story drastically retconned. Plus, I’ll take any animation from Tyson Hesse that sega is willing to fund. You jogged my memory enough to help me find more info. In issue 14, Tails ate an apple from Rotor’s tree of wisdom. This TEMPORARILY made him a genius for 24 hours. According to Sonic News Network, when Ian Flynn wrote the archie sonic encyclopedia he partially retconned this. While the full effect of the apple wore off after 24 hours, tails’ intelligence was permanently boosted. This boost + tails aging and additional experience, explains how archie tails became a tech wizard. Stuff like this is why I loved Flynn’s run at archie. https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Tree_of_Wisdom#cite_note-SCE-2 Excellent point. Archie didn’t have a choice, they had to update the designs. That said the fact that the characters aged in the comics highlights how stupid the explanation was for Sonic’s green eyes. The comics had already made Sonic taller. I honestly think it would have made more sense if they just gave everyone colored irises and chalked it up to a change in art style. EDIT: I was looking through the Sonic Cosmo Fighter thread and it had me wondering if Sega still has the rom for Cosmo Fighter and the other ride/entertainment Sonic arcade game. If sega still has the rom, I would love to see this included in origins plus. Especially if Sega got Jaleel White to record lines as Classic Sonic for an updated vocal track for Cosmo Fighter. This is real pie in the sky stuff but sometimes its nice to dream
Oh, we know that. But they went about it in a ridiculous way, which is what people are saying. Another option instead of that weird messing with time: a time skip and say the cast grew up to their modern redesigns. Flashback to the older comics? Just draw in the eye colours and say they were always like that. Or if they wanted to, pull the same thing as Sonic the Comic and say Sonic's eyes were dyed green by Chaos Energy (though over his years using it rather than getting stuck in Chaos), while the rest just have coloured eyes now. Eh, I honestly saw it as him purging the island of Robotnik's influence for the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 portion, at least. He does flood Launch Base Zone, for example.
The story as it is is simply not something I really like on a conceptual level. It's not really something I'm interested in seeing rewritten (I don't want to fundamentally change the game) but I'm certainly interested in seeing a unique animation for the opening and ending. I never did. In both Sonic & Knuckles and Origins he's just... chilling out until he's provoked by some random Egg Robo that for some reason is given the same kind of prominence as the real Eggman, leading him on an adventure that's 70% a retread. At least they fixed the use of Eggman's sprite in Flying Battery 2 (a boss sequence so bad that being able to kill the laser thing in Origins doesn't even help) so there's no room for confusion at that segment. I was never really a headcanon kind of girl. If the game doesn't show or allude to anything I'm not going to just fill in the gaps for them. My imagination is always going to give me something more agreeable than a flawed product would, because it's a solution catered specifically to my own liking. There are weirdnesses in the game's storytelling that I disagreed with even as a child, regardless of any retconning or changes made in later releases.
The thing is, they do allude to it. Again, Knuckles floods the Launch Base after traversing the foundations: it's something completely exclusive to his story and Sonic doesn't raise the water level in his version of the level, so they brought it back specifically for this instance. 6:08 And one must remember that Mushroom Hill takes place after this level, so that cutscene of Knuckles relaxing is taking place, if at all since it only comes up in Sonic & Knuckles alone, after Launch Base was flooded and blown up.
Yeah, no. The same issue that Amy uses the wish to grow up is the same issue that Chaos breaks out of the Master Emerald. So unless Chaos was on the loose for months this wouldn't work out. I don't really know what this means. ...This is basically what happened in Archie. The Super Emerald that Sonic had strapped to his back changed his eye color. I will once again state that actual years pass in Archie with on-panel birthdays for Sonic, at least. And for Sonic Adventure specifically they were told to change the designs, given art, and then that was it. For Archie, they imported a Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure from Japan and had to translate the cut scenes on the fly while taking notes to do their adaption. For Sonic Adventure 2 they didn't get anything but a synopsis (The cover for the issue is that of the SA2 Trial) where SA2 just happened off-screen because because they literally had to squeeze it in between issues they were already making which made issue #100 end up becoming issue #101 and I guarantee had STC still been making new issues the same thing would have happened. My ultimate point is Archie did what they had to do. Amy was basically a background character and then you get told she's a main character and to change her design. For Sonic, a Super Emerald. Robotnik? He's a cyber being that can switch bodies. He does so. All of these changes happened because Sega required them and they needed to be immediate, basically, and comic stories are done some months in advance.
And my interpretation is that it's a pipe in his way that he had to clear to proceed, no different than Sonic did, only this time it just happens to flood the place and create a tense new gameplay segment exclusive to Knuckles. No different than Carnival Night's flooding to me: it's just a gameplay thing. I have a feeling I've seen a conversation on this exact subject before. I'll just leave my piece here and dip out, because I'm just not interested in keeping up a conversation on something like this, and in this thread of all places.
But Sonic's redesign came first in Issue #71, while Amy got hers a full 9 issues later, 9 months later in life. They could have set aside, like, two issues to wrap up some things, then do a timeskip and set up everything for Sonic Adventure in the remaining 7, to do a blanket age up redesign excuse for everyone who needed one. Does Archie ever establish the ages pre-Issue #71? They sometimes remember events like Endgame, where Sonic retains his black eyes: I'm saying just colour them and pretend it was always like that. The Super Emerald changed Sonic's forms as he ran, it was when he was hit by the Time Beam of that issue that he got the green eyes, buckle, etc. So, technically they did do a time skip, they did a localised time skip on Sonic instead of in general. We're not arguing against the design change, we're saying they did three left turns to make a right. It already did. Why do you think the Sonic Adventure arc was so radically different to the actual game? I can only imagine how they'd have handled Sonic Adventure 2. Again, we're not arguing against the changes. We're just saying there's a far simpler route to said changes. I would accept that if it lasted longer than 20 seconds. But Knuckles goes through a single hallway and there's the way out of the water. We have, so I'll leave it there as well.
I know that Sonic has some birthdays before the Sonic Adventure adaption but I don't know if ages are stated or not. The pocket of time around Sonic was only three hours.
I thought that was only Knothole's state at the time, being stuck out of time three hours apart from the rest of the world, which was what was attracting the time beam in the first place, and the risk of the time beam was making that worse/reversing Knothole's time entirely? Honestly, at times it feels like Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie) is set in Sonic the Comic's Special Zone... Perhaps we should revive the Archie thread or make a new thread "On the Subject of Transition Between Classic and Adventure" to continue this discussion. This is the Sonic Origins thread, after all...
The funny thing about the Archie adaptation about SA2 is that the backstory for Gerald they created helped me fill in some of the plot holes in the game's actual canon when I finally did play it. I've always found the game's story 'easier' to understand because of how those events were depicted (though it's obviously not an exact match for the game canon, nor did I assume it was). I literally grabbed that issue a few hours before waiting for the post office to deliver SA2 DC to my local Gamestop. They didn't even have games arrive early back then. Fun times.
Funny thing, back when i was little, i always considered Knuckles story to be easier, in fact i finished it BEFORE Sonic&Tails Why? Because of the DAMNED BARREL Knuckles didn't have to deal with it, also the fact that it was shorter in the end and just end with Sky Sanctuary, in a way, it felt more natural to go from Knuckles short campaign to Sonic's complete campaign with a whole new zone right where i left as knuckles
