Oooh, forgot about that. I get the feeling Sonic Team rearranged the timeline so 1>CD>2>3K are as sacred as they can be. Nothing happened before or in-between and everything else just happens after them. I can see them taking this approach since those were worked on by the "founders" while the rest were by other teams or with some limited help from Sonic Team.
Currently my main source of confusion is Metal Sonic's first appearance after CD. Firstly he was retrieved from Little Planet in Sonic 4. Things changed, and he was actually retrieved in Mania, then he was left in Little Planet again and later retrieved again in Sonic 4. But now there's Triple Trouble, Sonic Drift 2, Knuckles' Chaotix, Sonic the Fighters and Sonic R as candidates. I don't know if things are going to make sense.
There's always been something fishy with what went down in the events in Sonic CD. I remember in one of the Sonic YouTube streams they were debating on saying something about it, but then they decided not to. Not sure if they were playing around or there is some kind of lore that it's not public knowledge. But I always assumed it has something to do with the Metal Sonic shells during Mania. Because of time travel shenanigans, there's always extra Sonics, Eggmans and Metal Sonics fighting through time. So who's to say he doesn't just retrieves some of those Metals like in 4? Or I always got the feeling that after the events of CD, Eggman recovered Metal's CPU and created replicas (like in Chaotix) and that explains how there's always a Metal around until Eggman decides to recover the original from Little Planet in 4. A more simple explanation is that Sonic 4 happens before all those games, we just saw the events that happened in the Modern timeline or dimension, but Classic Sonic went through a similar adventure.
Personal headcanon is that Metal was built using technology from Little Planet’s future. While Eggman was able to recover the CPU to create copies for Chaotix, Triple Trouble, etc., they just weren’t able to perform and match Sonic as well, hence Eggman retrieving the original when Little Planet appeared again naturally in Sonic 4. He *could* have done this in Mania but likely didn’t just due to his usual shortsightedness, choosing to sic Giga Metal on the heroes and expecting to win there and then, perhaps.
Which is stupid, considering Tails' Adventure, but hey, "streamlining". If Sonic Mania happened. Do remember most of the events are being powered by the Phantom Ruby, which causes illusions... Trying to take my headcanons, eh? Also, fun fact, Metal Sonic has 3 CPUs and 5 Sub CPUs:
Yeah, just wanted to cover my bases. Personal headcanon is that Mania did actually happen as we saw it on screen and the Ruby is a reality warper, but that's neither here nor there. At any rate, the official explanation makes my headcanon fit even more easily!
The 8-bit games were always their own separate continuity that doesn't track with the Megadrive games, simply by force of being made by a separate team and there not being much coordination between teams. It's clumsy, but shoving them all as a block happening after the MD games... well, you've wanted "lore" and "continuity" for years rather than a vague mishmash, that's what you're getting. Enjoy, all this is what you asked for.
Honestly I do think it's preferable, even with my own headcanons being collateral. I'd even make the case that Tails' Adventure works better coming after he's met Sonic since that would've helped give the kid the confidence to fight the Battle Kuku Armada himself and could be explained as Tails deciding to travel, inspired by Sonic's nomadic nature (the kid was always a native of Westside Island, right?).
Yeah Tails' Adventure is just weird to me. It's hard to judge which parts of the game should be considered canonical. Like there are powerups with Sonic, Knuckles and Fang's faces on them. Regardless the Encyclo-speed-ia says Tails' Adventure is still before Tails meets Sonic.
It's weird how people keep saying this, but can never really supply evidence toward that conclusion. Just saying "it's what Sonic Team always intended", like Iizuka saying "we inherited Two Worlds from Yuji Naka". Meanwhile, there's small plotlines between the games featuring extra characters, like Espio wanting to go to Angel Island and being jealous of Knuckles in Chaotix, to being on Angel Island for Sonic the Fighters instead of dumping him in a random location like Bean and Bark, which implied someone was keeping track of things. And before people try and bring up Team Chaotix in Sonic Heroes, bear in mind Iizuka said "in my mind", indicating this is not Sonic Team's call, but just Iizuka, so we do not know what Sonic Team's call was. Iizuka may have been director, but Yuji Naka was the one making the calls at that point in time. It's not lore and continuity, it's lazily shovelling everything into one block just to artificially supply the demand. It's akin to going to a five-star Michelin restaurant and being served a McDonalds Happy Meal after asking for their best meal. This is not what I've asked for in the slightest. I did not ask them to rewrite the stories entirely and unnecessarily. I'd accept a retcon there and here, but not this mess of a outcome, even if I should have expected it from SEGA. Considering Sonic Origins shows Tails 'learning' he can fly, I'm willing to bet good money it's not longer the case.
These games weren't intended to work together and outright contradict each other at multiple points, if not literally then in spirit (oh Sonic's about going to multiple locations and finding emeralds? no it's about always the same six emeralds in always the same islands. Knuckles learned he was tricked? No he just got tricked again to trust Eggman. There's 7 Emeralds? No, there's 6- sorry, 8). Ancient and Aspect were working from the basic status quo at any given time but doing their own thing- think of it like the DBZ movies and how their canon doesn't work. Aspects of the characters are shown through the games but the specific events aren't planned to fit. So if you do insist in jamming it all as canon, big retcons will happen and people'll be unhappy about it. But hey, it's all in a timeline now and all makes sense and it's got lore and continuity, which is what Sonic needed, of course. And it needed to be done decades after the fact by people unrelated to the games originally, which is what the fandom's been demanding. You're getting accidental and intentional retcons, some due to modern devs and Sonic Team people wanting streamlining, some due to the people making this being old fandom heads who are taking localised manuals or old memories for granted. All this you're complaining about is the natural endpoint of things like this thread existing at all.
I'm just assuming all the branches of classic games (Genesis games, Game Gear games, arcade games, etc.) originally happened in different universes or timelines, but now due to Time Eater/Phantom Ruby/Time Stones/Solaris (you choose) shenanigans all these timelines combined to form one single timeline. So all those different adventures now happened in the same timeline; for that to happen, details and placements have changed, but the adventures didn't.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3's manuals indicate that there's more than one set of Chaos Emeralds on the islands, hence Knuckles having a set that disappear and Sonic approaching with a set. The only seven part was introduced with Sonic Adventure, so the 8-Bit Manuals are not contradicting the story there. Some of us seem to be labouring under the delusion that the world was always consistent, that there was always only seven Chaos Emeralds, despite the games showing six, seven and fourteen Chaos Emeralds sequentially. Even then, I respect their work on the series and choose to place them where they would logically be with the information they had at the time, and iron out the details later. The Death Egg was destroyed at the end of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive), not hurtling toward Angel Island, so I would say Robotnik was back on Earth 'at the time'. He needs to be back with the Death Egg to fall, so he finds out there's remnants and goes back up to try and stop it being lost to the ocean, getting a lucky break with Angel Island. I will admit, Sonic Labyrinth and Tails' Skypatrol are more likely after Sonic Blast, and SEGASonic the Hedgehog could really be anywhere since there's no story (though I'd keep it within the Tails' Skypatrol Tails-less timeframe, pre-Sonic Mania) but the rest I would keep where I figure they are. So why are there not multiple Sonics running around from each of these timelines? The only one that would "work" for is Sonic Generations, the game everyone is adamant split the timeline to cause Sonic Mania.
Because it's not split timeline, it's merged timeline. When one timeline branches into two, one character becomes two. When two timelines merge into one, two identical characters become one.
But they would not be identical, since they would have different personal timelines. It's the same base, but different people born from different outcomes. To use the MCU for an example, if a universe were Peggy Carter became Captain Carter merged with the MCU Prime Universe, who would Peggy Carter be? Peggy Carter or Captain Carter?
re: manuals vs Origins With multiple timelines, it's pretty easy to say that the games as the original manuals described them happened in one timeline, and the games as Origins depicts them happened in another timeline. If there's more than one timeline, there can be as many timelines as we want/need there to be. Wow, Spinball being canon is news to me. Guess its island being in Origins makes sense now. That said, the timeline of the classic games now seems to be: Sonic 1 Sonic CD Sonic 2 Sonic 3K Sonic Spinball Sonic 3D Blast Sonic R SegaSonic Sonic Mania (?) Curious if Ian's allowed to say when Generations split the timeline. Before 1? Between 3K and Spinball? After SegaSonic? I've jumped around on where I'd prefer it to have happened, but at the moment I feel like I'd prefer it after SegaSonic. An amalgam perhaps?
I have been considering reviving my Iizuka Canon idea to dump this tomfoolery into it and ignore it for the rest of time, while using Manual Canon otherwise... It's hard to imagine how that would work out. It's kind of a binary thing: 0 - Peggy Carter, 1 - Captain Carter.
Now that I am thinking about it. It kind of makes more sense for SegaSonic the Hedgehog to take place after Chaotix since Mighty was in Chaotix without Ray by his side. Maybe Mighty and Ray met during SegaSonic and became friends?
But that's the thing. In a split timeline, the same character becomes two and each one of them begin to experience new adventures from then on. In a merged timeline, the two characters from the same "base" already had experienced different adventures from each other, but after the merging they become the same character with the same experiences. You can't predict the outcome, only guess. Maybe in this new MCU merged timeline she was regular Peggy, and Steve Rogers was Captain America, and after some event she became Captain Carter. Maybe. In this brand new Sonic mess, Knuckles was a stranger to Sonic during Triple Trouble in the original timeline, but now the timelines merged and in this new version he was not a stranger but got tricked anyway.
As I stated before (if I'm not misremembering), Sonic Team screwed up BIG TIME with continuity since DAY 1. They weren't that interested in building one from the start, they just wanted to depict adventures of Sonic and others. The best thing one can do is align games that somehow manage to fit (mainline or spin-off) and all others be aligned in split timelines. I can see the Tails side-games and SEGASonic happening before Sonic1, maybe even Sonic3D and Chaotix after S3K, but that's all.
