It does make sense if you consider how ambitious if incompetent and sloppy their operations can be. In SA2 they show a blatant disregard for collateral damage such as with the GUN Truck in city escape & proved a poor match for Eggman since he snuck into their base twice, releasing a top-secret military weapon the first time and utterly destroying it the second by detonating an explosive planted on the contents of their armory (which should be one of the most heavily guarded places on that base). In Shadow the Hedgehog they were being led by a leader who was more obsessed with killing Shadow than repelling the alien invaders, and even then they would have been completely outmaneuvered if not for Shadow's intervention. I don't think it's that big of a stretch for Eggman to quickly overpower and defeat them within a month or less using the phantom ruby.
Also in Chronicles, even if non-canon, GUN was present in that game and Eggman managed to conquer the world when Sonic and his friends went to that other dimension.
Technically, Sonic the Fighters, Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow the Hedgehog's CGI Cutscene and Sonic Riders are consistent, if only because they use Earth maps.
tbh I don't even think the implication is that Eggman took over the world, just that he rebuilt Metropolis.
You're conflating maps with realistic depictions of planets. SA2 has a map for its level select screen, that doesn't match up with any real place on Earth. Shadow the Hedgehog has a map in its cut-scenes, that clearly isn't Earth. Same for Sonic Unleashed. Those maps were drawn with the knowledge that the players would be able to see them clearly. The realistic planet models/images in the CGI cut-scenes are not maps. They're heavily obscured by cloud and usually only shown from one angle for a brief amount of time. They're not designed for the player to see clearly or focus on. When Marza or whoever were animating the CGI cut-scenes, they clearly weren't told to create a planet that was consistent with the in-game map—and it would have been a waste of time if they did, because the geography wouldn't have been legible. They almost certainly just pulled a planet Earth from their asset library. It's a weird thing to hyper-fixate on, as though it means or proves anything when they use Earth for a realistic planet shot.
Most fantasy-esque series rarely use the specific outline of places while using Earth's outline. Pokémon, for instance, is set on a fantasy Earth: Last I checked, New York doesn't have an ancient desert with ruins running through the middle of it. Spoiler And Sonic Adventure 2 is based on San Francisco, which also has a Prison Island, so... Spoiler This is, of course, assuming the Level Select is accurate: if so, it suggests Prison Island is really close to the city in Sonic Adventure 2, to the point I would assume it's visible on the shoreline. The actual in-game depiction doesn't seem to show any cities peaking over the horizon, so I'd wager the level select map is taking liberties. tl;dr: fantasy worlds use Earth but not the specific locations, which are often redesigned.[
The only games with full and prominent world maps/globes are Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Forces. They intentionally drew them with fictional continents. All three are inconsistent with each other. They're the ones they made for the player to look at. The cloud covered realistic Earths used in CGI cut-scenes and background shots weren't made to be inspected and scrutinised.
Two of those are based on Earth, in the same vein as Steven Universe's Earth, and the third is a singular island, South Island I would assume due to Green Hill, not a world map. Unless they're retconning Sonic's World into a single island now? Then again, that would be the least of Sonic Forces' problems with continuity...
That's all irrelevant to what I was saying, which is that the realistic cloud covered planet shots we see in backgrounds and CGI movies weren't meant to be screeenshotted, studied and scrutinised. They don't prove anything about anything. They're almost certainly just stock assets most of the time. There is no deeper meaning or intention to them. It doesn't matter if you can see Africa, because you're not supposed to be looking for Africa. The world maps in Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Forces were all made to be seen. And they're all inconsistent with each other anyway, so it's largely moot. Sonic Forces' level select is a globe. Eggman has conquered the entire planet, that's the plot of the game. It's clearly not just an island.
This is exactly what I was talking about. It doesn't matter that the planet's geography looks different in Marza's cut-scenes, compared to Sonic Team's in-game world map. The CGI cut-scenes aren't intended to be screenshotted and scrutinised. This doesn't mean that the large land-masses on the level select screen are an island somehow, it just means that the geography of the planet is inconsistent.
That's not a cutscene, that's the background of the Egg Gate that Sonic focuses on while expressing "Whoa! We're off planet!" If it didn't matter so much, they could've just used Earth, or Sonic Unleashed's Earth, akin to Sonic Colours: that one has you outright facing the planet below rushing towards it, so it's even more focused on. Instead, they went ahead and made a new planet, so either it's so low effort to make a planet background they can casually throw a new one in the background, or they spent a massive amount of time and energy on something that is focused on breifly. I also think it might resemble the planet seen in Sonic the Hedgehog 4, but I don't have the textures to compare. The island Sonic Forces takes place on. It's not present on the globe above, yet consists of the entire world.
Actually, it's only ever stated that South Island is a moving "floating island". As far as the maps go, it is a detail that one can't expect to be upheld throughout 20 years of the franchise's history. Honestly, if not for the two worlds thing, I doubt most people would care about the placement of the continents. It's not that important a detail for the games to remain consistent with it and you have to suspend disbelief there. All that really matters is that in the one world continuity the islands from the classic series were hard to locate and no exact location could be pinned down and they were a distance away from human cities like Station Square. Angel Island did rise from the Mystic Ruins several thousand years ago after Chaos' rampage and has been floating around the world wherever the winds take it. We know that Station Square is close enough to the Mystic Ruins that you can reach it by train (not unlike Shibuya's station connecting to a lot of rural areas in Japan), and that seemingly Cream's house is somewhere in the mystic ruins. Beyond that, it doesn't particularly matter. If they wanted to keep Unleashed's continent placement, it would be ideal, but it's not that important beyond Unleashed's story and the Shadow map is literally just set dressing.
Honestly, I kind of wonder if South Island is a chunk of Angel Island that broke off and floated away.
So the background artists didn't communicate with the world menu map artists. There's no deeper meaning to it. It's inconsistent because it's inconsistent. It's an absurd leap of logic to conclude that Sonic Forces takes place on an island. It's obvious that wasn't the intent. What's the evidence for this?
