What, you mean you don't love accidentally kicking/punching your chao because the action popped up unexpectedly?
Kicking and slapping the little shits is the most fun I get out of the Chao Garden. I just think the Chao Garden is pretty boring and simply don't feel like investing my time in it. I could never get myself to become invested in raising a Chao. I don't really like to chill out while I'm playing Sonic games gameplay-wise; I just want to blast through levels arcade-style. I don't think including the Chao Garden was ever a bad thing but it's not something I particularly value.
Did Surge and Kit make a vow their mother will be found? Exactly Sonia and Manic > Surge and Kit confirmed
I spent a lot of time with the Chao in Sonic Adventure, mostly by having them in my Visual Memory. The only emblems I have yet to get are the ones you get by racing Chao, despite raising mine to have stats in the hundreds. I don't fancy going back to the game for that as winning fruit for them was repetitive. But I didn't spend any time with the Chao in Sonic Adventure 2. Having to play through a stage to unlock the Garden made it just inaccessible enough that I ended up not bothering.
I never had a Dreamcast, but I imagine the Chao Garden was a better fit that way. I like blasting through levels arcade-style too, but this is a little pet raising offshoot mini game you can take with you on a different device. (Yeah, I know the Tiny Chao Garden was in the GBA games, but that didn't have the adventure aspect where you'd actually make progress.) If they ever bring it back, I hope they tie getting more Chaos Drives/animals/whatever to how well you play through the stage, instead of requiring you to approach the levels in a completely different way that's not as enjoyable.
Did any Dreamcast owner ever actually take that battery-decimating VMU anywhere? I sure didn't! It's clunky power-sapping nature made even trying to play the minigames confusing and obviously-not-worth-it as a kid. Chaos drives and animals are mostly found just killing enemies. Raising a specific kind of Chao efficiently of course requires knowing where to find all the right whistle pipes etc but I think ST expected you to raise your Chao more incidentally. Like with the stuff you'd just happen to find while playing normally. It does work kinda poorly in SA2 but I think a simpler solution would just be to make individual drives/animals more effective and nix the whistle pipes. I personally loved the childhood "aha" moment I had figuring out I could abuse the restart button in Wild Canyon to farm speed animals but yeah that in of itself shows that something's broken.
I'm surprised they've never made Chao into a mobile app. As much as I don't care for Chao, I think it's impossible to deny it'd be extremely popular. I don't even want to imagine how much money Sega could make off of microtransactions through that thing.
Haven't they basically retired chao? Which would be like their stupidest move ever, but have we even seen them since like 2004?
Sonic Frontiers Prologue: Divergence Sonic Team Racing Sonic Runners in the "Buddy" system Sonic Speed Simulator
I think Sonic Chronicles might've had the Chao Garden? But yeah otherwise they haven't been a big part of a Sonic game for a while. If not Sonic Chronicles I think one of the GBA games would've been the last time.
The Chao aren't retired, Sega/ST just aren't willing to do anything more with them than wag their image in Adventure fans' faces for easy positive attention.
The point of Chao isn't to sit there and wait for them to grow up. The point of Chao is to give you incentive to kill enemies and (in SA2) look for hidden items, and also to give you a breather after each level. You're supposed to drop your animals in, give them to your Chao, feed your Chao, and leave. That is the point. They're not the gameplay loop, they augment the gameplay loop. The cake icing as opposed to the cake itself. ...I have played through the Adventure levels so many times just to get animals for them ahahaha I don't think I would've even come close to the number of hours I'd spent on replayability if it weren't for how it hooks into the chao garden.
A shame too, because these are either extremely minor games or minimal parts in bigger games. This might not be unpopular, but I think they're the best kind of familiar or little mascot in the series. There was a proper analytical term for whatever Koopas, Chao, Flickies, Chocobos et al are called and what their role is, but I don't remember what it was.
I've never touched a virtual pet simulator (outside of the SA Chao Gardens) and I would play the hell out of a Chao mobile app.
The last time we've had a "real" Chao Garden (pet simulator) in a Sonic game was with the Tiny Chao Garden on GBA. Every time Chao have appeared as part of gameplay since, they've been power up items with set appearances. The only thing offered in Chronicles' Chao Garden is the ability to trade with other players. Now, of you want to be technical, we've had 2 pet simulator A-life system follow-ups, one with the Nightopian Garden in NiGHTs Journey of Dreams in 2007, although it's very stripped down, and the other in Balan Wonderworld, with the Isle of Tims, which is the main hub world of the game, but it's similarly stripped down but has at least a little more impact on the rest of the game because the Tims have special abilities that will help you attack enemies or break the "unbreakable" spikes in the levels.
For me the payoff to raising Chao is the crazy variety of different sorts of appearances you could cultivate through careful breeding and stat combinations. They didn't need to add so much hereditary depth to it, but the fact that they did has somehow kept me coming back for two decades at this point. I'm not sure if you're referring to this aspect, or to the handful of Emblems you get for beating the Chao Races. But not everyone is going to thrill in breeding and raising to get cool appearances, and that's understandable. And when we're talking about how long it takes even one Chao to go through its full life cycle, I'll agree that the reward is vastly disproportionately small compared to the time it takes to get there. I've burned through two GameCube lasers in my time (leaving the game on all night so they would age; do not do this! ). Being able to hold a button down while in the garden to speed up time, or having time pass while you're outside of the garden, would have gone a long way to mitigate that, and if this stuff ever came back in a mainline game I'd hope to see this sort of quality of life improvement to it. But I'm hesitant to wish for it, because I'm not optimistic that a new Chao Garden would retain (and/or expand on) the "hereditary depth" of Adventure 2's that I love so much.
