Sonic 3 Development Lore: Unused Zone ID 0D, Prototype Sound Cue 2E, Concept Art Discussion

Well in Sonic 1 Sonic didn't even know what the emeralds were doing, does this look like a face of awareness? The emeralds just flew off themselves.

It wouldn't be that surprising that after recollecting them and getting a new Super form out of it he'd want to hold on to them.
Also "West Side's set"? There's only the Chaos Emeralds. They just flew over to West Side at the end of Sonic 1. They're the same set throughout the whole series.

 

As commented a few posts earlier, I think there's a misalignment between the manual, representing the story as would have been if Sonic 3 had been a full game, and the game after splitting in 2 parts, in which the events of Sonic 3 happen immediately after Sonic 2. This is maybe my interpretation and be wrong, but it's a presentation resembling exactly the same picture as how the previous game ended, and I believe this was their intention. Becoming super just for traveling seems a bit overkill otherwise, as it's supposed to draw power from the bearer within time, so I think they didn't touch West Side Island at all. Maybe I'm a bit too biased because of western manuals with inaccuracies and beta stuff not found in game.

That's the current revised canon. At the release of Sonic 2 and 3, their manuals mentioned that they were different.

Manual of Sonic 2:
"In the distant past, the people of the island used mysterious stones to develop their civilization and achieve the prosperity they desired.
However, all of that prosperity came to nothing overnight when people tried to use the stones incorrectly, and the stones were sealed away somewhere on the island by the gods."

Manual of Sonic 3:
"After escaping from the crashed Death Egg, Dr. Eggman noticed that there are Chaos Emeralds on the floating island.
He noticed a huge Chaos Emerald signal that can be caught from the cracks in the earth opened by the Death Egg. Using that energy, it is possible to make the Death Egg fly into space again.
In order to obtain the Chaos Emeralds, Dr. Eggman is building a base on the floating island at a rapid pace."

 

Neither really imply that they're separate sets. This only merely states that West Side's ancient used the Chaos Emeralds to develop their civilization. And I think something was lost in translation on the 3K portion as it suddenly switches from Eggman finding the Chaos Emeralds themselves to huge Chaos Emerald energy cracking through the ground. which is obviously the Master Emerald.

 

The problem is that the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive) Manual says the Chaos Emeralds were sealed away on Westside Island since ancient times, which they couldn't have been if they were on South Island a short time ago and Angel Island when the Death Egg hits it after. Also Flickies' Island and Cocoa Island.

Meanwhile, Robotnik didn't find the Chaos Emeralds on Angel Island: he figured out there's Chaos Emeralds somewhere on the island, but he's detecting a massive Chaos Emerald reading underground through the cracks from the Death Egg's impact.

 

I always thought the "sealed by the gods" on westside was just a bit of folklore world building and not to be taken literally, I'm not sure we're able to deduce at what point it was decided there was only 7 or if there was ever supposed to be more than 7 by the manuals. Dispelling sorta inconsistent manuals and just using the games, there isn't any evidence to suggest there's multiple sets apart from the sprite redesigns. By that logic is Sonic a different character in each game? It also makes no sense to open the game with Super Sonic loosing the emeralds only for that set not to matter and collect a different set. The intro serves as an explanation of why you need to collect them again after you already did in Sonic 2. If multiple emerald sets was ever a thing it stopped being so before Adventure. Judging by the fact that there's an unfinished tornado intro cut-scene in the Nov 1993 proto, it was changed during splitting the game or before. I really hope at somepoint we'll get our hands on an earlier sonic 3 proto to shed light on this.

 

We also don’t know if the stories as written in the manuals are even by the dev team or not, or if each one was written by the same person. I could easily see whoever was in charge of each manual being told the overall plot of the game and just writing a story based on the description, which would account for some stuff like emerald discrepancies.

 

But then you've got their appearances, where the Westside Island appearance looks very different to the South Island and Angel Island appearances.

Spoiler

But then Sonic Jam seems to retcon them into the seven we know, but the yellow Chaos Emerald turns orange for some reason with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles?

Spoiler

And even their Angel Island appearance isn't consistent. They go from hexagons to pentagons to octagons in the course of cutscene > Special Stage > Tally Score screen...



And yes, the Chaos Emeralds are miscoloured in the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 No Chaos Emeralds end shot, but I assume that's due to the rush. Unless Knuckles is corrupting Chaos Emeralds...

Either way, back to the subject of the thread and Development Lore, I'd argue the manual stories are legitimate, since that was how they told their stories and it's not like they were just random plot threads that were forgotten once the story could be told by the game itself: Sonic Adventure later takes elements from the manuals and uses them, such as the civilisation getting wiped out even if some of us might feel it might have been recontextualised. So they are more likely to have been of some level of importance and governance by Sonic Team, I feel.

Until someone can ask the development team about the manual stories, who actually handled them and how canonical they are, we'll have to take it as is because at the very least SEGA printed them with the games. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Mega Drive)'s manual says Angel Island had a set of Chaos Emeralds until they disappeared and suddenly Knuckles is seeing the "egg of the Legendary Dragon" on his island, meanwhile Sonic brings along a set of Chaos Emeralds in-game, so presumably they're separate.

We don't know what happened to the Chaos Emeralds on South Island, but the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive) manual notes the Westside Island Chaos Emeralds were misused, wiped out a civilization, and were then sealed away by the Gods somewhere on the island, so I doubt they were the same in the manual's lore.

And then Sonic Adventure retcons them to the seven, but until then, at the time they were likely just separate sets on separate islands.

 

Well, they are named Chaos after all

 

The Master Emerald in this concept art looks exactly like the jewels from Ecco the Dolphin.

 

Text from image:

This text comes from the Sonic Wiki page for Sky Sanctuary Zone:
https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Sky_Sanctuary_Zone_(Sonic_&_Knuckles)
The citation it uses does not provide an exact link to the mentioned Beep MegaDrive issue as it instead just links to a Wikipedia page for Gemaga, the name of the magazine that it is currently under:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemaga

I went to see if we had a scan for the November 1994 issue and thankfully we do. Here is the page:

https://retrocdn.net/images/9/98/BeepMD_JP_1994-11.pdf
(Page 34 on the PDF)

I underlined in red, for convenience, the text「天空の城」which does translate to "Castle in the Sky"

Thanks for providing that screenshot of the Wiki text as it was a good pointer to find out more about this. I was not aware about this so it was great to discover this.

 

I'm also enjoying "Rings and Diamonds Land", which turns out to be the glowing sphere bonus stage.

EDIT: On further listening, it's a medley of both bonus stages and the special stage.

 

it looks more like the emeralds in Sonic Spinball:

 

Even in game itself emeralds are inconsistent, what are you talking about.
At one point it looks like Sonic 1 set, at other it looks like Sonic 2 set.. why would Eggman fight for concrete set if he can.. idk.. collect set from another island, where Sonic doesn't own them? Or, maybe collect emeralds from separate islands? Or emeralds work only on their island? Then why they're work in sky and space? Does all of islands has their own set? Can space has it own set? What happens if you collect all of existing emeralds? Why they have different designs, but same abilities? Why somewhere there 6 emeralds, somewhere 7, and somewhere 8? Why I am even spend my time to think about it? What the meaning of our existence???

I think there is one set that comes time to time.
Also we haven't seen how story after S2 gone. Sonic and Tails couldn't fly from ending cutscene of Sonic 2 to opening cutscene from Sonic 3! Why? Well, because Eggman needed.. uh.. you know, some time to build all these things. Idk, maybe he just took all of his robots from unused zones from previous games, a bit recolored it and randomly sent, but idk.



I'm trying to find too much logic, probably.

 

Pretty sure I covered that in that same post:

I didn't write the stories, so I can't advise why certain choices were made.

The Sonic the Hedgehog 3 JP Manual confirms that: Sonic and Tails were on an island for an unknown length of time, until their attention is drawn towards the situation. There is a few days between the "last megatsunami" and the duo setting off to Angel Island, and an unknown length of time before that for the Death Egg to crash.

 

Could you not fix the problem of 2 sets of emeralds by just saying that one set became the super emeralds, which are then expended and shown cracked in mania, thus leaving one set by the time of adventure. Seems pretty easy to retcon to me if they decide to.

 

It's 30th anniversary of Sonic 3 & Knuckles this year. So I decided to restore some artwork. Because the originals are still not released. In comparison, concept art for Sonic 2 was published by the time of that game's 25th anniversary.



In this video (at 7:01) you can see the original concept art that I used as basis for drawing. There are also various examples of how "Castle in the Sky" could have possibly inspired Sky Sanctuary.

 

While I was (re)watching some old documentaries trying to find some instance of a Sonic 2 art commented on its thread, I stumbled across some minor curiosities in the video "Careers for the 21st Century: Sega Technical Institute".

At 4:09 appears what seems to be a prototype board of Sonic 3C.


Also a clip related to Astropede/Segapede.