The Sonic the Hedgehog Continuity Thread of Love and Timelines

Counter-point: Griff and Pontac have no idea what the fuck they're writing about

 

True dat. Didn't Generations have Blaze recognizing Crisis City? Not to mention Tails wondering where Sonic keeps all the rings he grabs.

 

Well maybe her memory triggered back when Crisis City was brought back, it would make sense I guess.
Even Eggman had to remember Crisis City somehow, as he was the one responsible for bringing it back using the Time Eater.

 

The NPC dialogue in the overworld in Generations is basically just fluff anyway, I wouldn’t read much into its canonicity.

 

No way Blaze would remember Crisis City. The way 06 ended, everything that ruined Silver's world never happened, so Blaze would have no idea Crisis City even exists.

The only person who would have any idea that 06 even happened would be Robotnik, since IIRC the Time Eater could pull from deleted timelines. Even then, he never even went to the future in 06, so he would have no idea what happened.

 

I would assume they didn't write the overworld dialogue and only the cutscenes but IDK.

 

IMHO, I treat Generations as a fanservice anniversary story, only accountable as a mainline story due to it connecting to Colors. And even that's debatable to me.
You can jump from Colors to any following game other than Generations without losing much (other than Forces, due to trying to be another type of fanservice anniversary story).
I also believe Griff & Pontac just went with the flow in the games which plot they wrote, without worrying too much about continuity and consistency, so... ^^"

 

Sonic Forces has a nod to Generations when Tails and Sonic meet Classic Sonic. It definitely counts, but it's not worth losing sleep over the logistics of the minutae.

 

Regarding Sonic Generations, Silver is also operating in Crisis City. It can be inferred, but has not been canonically stated one way or another, that characters regained memories of those events due to Sonic rerunning his timeline, and later relose those memories as evidenced in Team Sonic Racing, when Sonic references Silver's personality in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), to Silver's confusion.

 

Which only causes confusion and pointless back and forth just because.
I stick to my opinion SEGA really stuck their foot in their mouth with Generations... ^^"

 

I take Silver in Generations Crisis City just being "Silver from Sonic '06", he's been taken along with the rest of Crisis City and doesn't regain any memories at all from the game.

Sonic '06 itself, on the other hand, explicitly shows us that at the very least Sonic and Elise have some lingering memories of the events, as Sonic still visits Soleanna despite Eggman no longer attacking.

I think you've inferred a much more complicated scenario than necessary, it's simply "Sonic and Elise remembered '06 because they extinguished Solaris, everyone else forgot". Why Sonic and Elise were there to extinguish Solaris and not also Shadow and Silver is another question...

 

I’m not sure that this is the case. Silver’s text prior to his battle (“Sonic? Is that really you? Or are you some kind of fake, sent for the Chaos Emeralds?!”) suggests that he is contemporary to and familiar with Sonic as an ally - as do his later appearances in the game, cheering Sonic on and attending his birthday party. It’s certainly a contrived excuse for them to fight, but for a variety of reasons I suspect the developers wanted to have most characters simply originate from the “present”.

 

I always found it funny how Shadow and Silver were not invited to Sonic's birthday party, so they just invited themselves by beathing the shit out of Sonic

 

That's pretty much the headcanon explanation I go with. But I'm positive it's not what the writers intended. Otherwise Blaze's dialogue would have implied it, saying something like "For some reason, this place seems oddly familiar" instead.

That's how I see. The Modern characters were all pulled from the present, aside from Chaos. That's why Shadow and Silver talk like they're from the present, and are in the birthday party in the ending. If they were from the past, the ending would mean that they ended up in a different era from their own.

I think Londinium's point is that those might have been just throwaway gags/references by Pontac/Graff that don't reflect the official canon. Just like Tails' meta reference to rings, which we know goes against Sega's stance on their canonicity.

 

Also the Japanese has Classic Tails questioning why he would put legs on a plane. Which I find far more funny.

 

No, I mean that they literally don't know what the fuck they're writing about. They had no prior experience with Sonic at all, they didn't understand his character or the lore, they literally didn't know a thing about Sonic until they started writing for it.

 

That's also true about Shiro Maekawa, who has reinforced multiple times that he didn't like or care about the classic games stories. The only difference is how good a job you think one did over the other, and that's not how we define canon. Text is text. Paratext can play a role in text. A writer's experience or opinions on a work do not effect the canon status of a text by themselves.

 

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. Maekawa might not have been a fan of the classic stories, but unlike Pontac and Graff, he had prior experience working in a Sonic game, and wrote the characters consistently with SA1.