He has literally caused more problems than not by making stupid decisions, but ok. Usually when a someone does stupid things, we call them stupid. You don't have to like it, but I didn't make these games. I call it as I see it, and when I see a character do stupid things, I call them stupid.
The point is that it's not an official trait, it's just flanderization. As in, a character is derailed from what they're supposed to be when their traits are exaggerated due to poor writing. You can see it all over the place in the series, like Tails becoming a scaredy cat, or Amy becoming a full-time stalker. In Knuckles' case he went from gullible and sheltered to outright dumb due to flanderization.
You could just as easily write your pist the other way around. " The official profiles descrive Knuckles as smart and clever but this has never been supported by his actions in the stories". I can only assume people don't want him to constantly make an ass out of himself or not know how to count, but it's safe to say he's an extremely poor judge of character, has trouble seeing through lies and gets confused with too much information, so he prefers heuristic approaches to problems. If you don't like that being called dumb, alright-- but why the adamant defense of an intelligence that I don't think has ever been shown?
You mean, aside from the fact he was always one step ahead of Sonic and Tails in S3K and Triple Trouble, repeatedly hindering their progress with his traps? Most of his actions there didn't involve using brute force, but his resourcefulness. And yes, you could argue "But he was still fooled by Eggman there!" Which is also in tune with his character profiles as gullible and sheltered. Anyway, the point isn't that Knuckles is some kind of genius. It's that having a low IQ was literally never an official, canon trait of his. His gullibility and naivety are addressed by his profiles, and are never attributed to his IQ there. This is pretty much the same phenomenon as Tails. In the noughties fans complained nonstop about Knuckles being flanderized into a complete buffoon. Nowadays they complain nonstop about Tails being flanderized into a complete wimp.
I mean IQ isn't even real anyway, but Knuckles making boneheaded decisions is a prominent recurring thing no matter what you think the "intention" is. Frankly, I think we're coming at this from too binary a point of view. Knuckles being naive or too trusting is not necessarily separate from him doing dumb things sometimes. He can think on his feet, but his lack of knowledge about the world outside Angel Island means that he'll not only be ignorant, but also become overwhelmed or flustered in an unfamiliar situation. Couple that with the quick temper, and it's not unreasonable to imagine that he's capable of being stupid sometimes. The much more important issue is how often that makes him annoying to experience as a character, which has way more potential as a discussion point than whether this was all theoretically allowed by the people who haven't worked on this series in decades.
Doesn't Knuckles' original ability to be one step ahead of Sonic stem from the original Rival conception, where he essentially knew all of Angel Island's shortcuts and secrets? Even then, the entire point of the game is proving that through your own skills, and thus Sonic's skills, you are just plain better at navigating the insane environment and prevailing than Knuckles is. The game runs on the notion that Sonic is supposed to win, after all. Even Knuckles' story takes place after Sonic's, and so we can imagine that even a Knuckles who can meet Sonic's level of skill is still left a little behind, which would fit the Vegeta-like rival conception in that he's capable and skilled, but is often just one step behind. It would therefore be a reasonable notion that Knuckles can be a little less adaptable to new situations and environments, though once he's acclimated he's pretty skilful. I will agree that the "dumb muscle" portrayal is massive flanderization however, but I would say that rightly or wrongly, it's borne of the fact that the story has no real overarching narrative and that Knuckles' initial conception as "rival character" fell by the wayside immediately after Sonic and Knuckles. They had to keep Knuckles, but he couldn't exactly stay as a rival character. One could argue that role was supplanted by Shadow the Hedgehog which was design-wise even closer to one of the designs for the Knuckles character as seen in S3 development material. They revisited their old idea to give Sonic a rival Hedgehog character, but again due to a lack of overarching narrative and story, with only occasional games to showcase what limited story they had, it was never developed to it's full story potential. Thus, with Shadow now in the role, what do they do with Knuckles? Remove Annoyed Rival from his character traits, and what do you have left? "Is strong" and "Is gullible", so "strong and dumb" is a reasonable reading of his character. Rightly or wrongly, it's a perfectly valid conclusion to come to about his character, which only seems strange to Classic Sonic fans because our first and greatest exposure to him was in Sonic 3, where he had all of these traits which was also filtered through our own reading of his character since the cutscenes were limited. Unfortunately "Cool but sympathetically misled Rival to Sonic who becomes a friend" was a narrative arc that was entirely wrapped up in the game itself leaving Knuckles nowhere to grow. And this is Sonic, where narratives always took the back-seat to "Let's collect rings, create a fun arcadey experience while selling our new hardware".
You do realize that for a trait to be "flanderized" it has to exist in the character to begin with right? So you're more or less admitting that Knuckles is in fact stupid (or prone to making stupid decisions), which is contradicting your assertion that it's a trait that never existed to begin with.
I'm reading this thread and scratching my head at some of the analyses made here. Some of these I never even considered would be interpretable...
Sorry for the late replies, been busy. I'm not. Memorizing things helps, sure, but so does getting a feel for how to take advantage of directional inputs and learning how to get yourself out of tight spots, knowing when to shoot for a rotation block and knowing when to wait it out till the maze rotates back around. Minor pedantry: I would say that what most people are calling "memorization" is just accumulating knowledge. Such as when to jump to hit the UFO in CD's special stages, or which path to follow in them in the first place. Which, yeah, is something I think actually most games ask of players. I'm not sure I'd call that itself a skill, but maybe the ability to recall accumulated knowledge is the skill you refer to here, something we can get better at the more we practice it.
Really I think the issue with the Special Stages in Sonic 1 is that there are a lot of different variables that completely impact how the player controls Sonic in the Special Stages themselves, which no other Special Stage in the series really does (at least, ones I've played...). It also throws a lot of them at you without the ability to really test them in a super safe environment. 2 eases you in by giving you a chance to learn how to control Sonic and you're straight up told your overall goal (get those Rings!). I don't think the first Special Stage even introduces the bomb hazards until the final third segment (though I feel I'm incorrect on this). Sonic's speed is also constant and never changes, so as long as you know how to control Sonic, you're good to go! 3 also has a similar concept (GET BLUE SPHERES) and you're given a small space to learn how to control Sonic. Your goal is immediately made clear thanks to the text telling you straight up what you need to do, and things are eased onto the player a bit nicer I think. It's a super minor detail to have the text, but I think it goes a long way at forcing a new mindset onto the player. You do eventually speed up, but it's slow and gradual without any sort of extra element that really 'plays in' to the change like the 'UP' and 'DOWN' bumpers Sonic 1 provides. Once you hear that music speed increase after the first time, you know what to expect! 1 just kinda plops you into it and sorta doesn't communicate to the player anything like 'FIND THE EMERALD!' flashing on the screen. You can bump into these 'UP' or 'DOWN' bumpers by pure accident and they completely change how you have to think about interacting with the world around you. And it's the same across every Special Stage in the game. It feels like you're fighting a lot of elements you really have no direct control over or nothing that feels like it slowly gets harder. It's weird too because yeah Sonic 1 also has those dead ends you can accidentally fall into and it's frustrating to fail just by wandering the stage thinking you might have been on the right track, but there's also no chance to really correct yourself like Sonic CD/Sonic 2 give you a small chance to. CD does have the Time UFO (which I do have issues with), but you are given a chance to save your attempt there. 2 gives you a chance to collect some Rings if you blouse a pass and a bomb hits you. Sonic 1? Nah. You're done, buddy. I recall a couple of Sonic 1 ROM hacks placing a bunch of the breakable Diamonds right in front of the 'GOAL' spheres and I wish the vanilla game did this, as it would give the player a chance to correct a bad jump.
Even having the knowledge from the manual or prior experience, I guess my issue with it is that it's still pretty easy to fall into the Speed Adjusters/Reverse Bumpers just by trying to navigate the maze and just feel like you're losing control. It's not very constant when you'd want it to be. The other Special Stages from Origins/Mania are considerably more static in these areas, and I think it's for the better.
A reminder that the Sonic 1 special stages of the remake aren't an indicator of the original ones at all. They're based on different logic despite looking like nothing should be different. In the original, you're easier able to hug the walls, the natural slowdown gives you more reaction time for stuff like the 6th stage, and the rotation not being smooth is a better indicator of where you're likely to go next. The remake throws all that out of the window so you'll get into Stage 6 and then just get flung into the Goals with no chance to recover after destroying like 1 crystal at best.
Not enough people talk about this. The remake's Special Stages are way more hectic than the Mega Drive original's, and it's not just a placebo effect caused by the smooth rotation. Use the exact same button inputs in at exactly the same points in both versions and the difference is night and day.
Sonic 1's special stages are the best of the classics by far. And yeah, I really hope people aren't using the awful Taxman version as their benchmark. As long as you follow the rings it isn't hard to deal with those stages most of the time.
It seems like since Origins came out, people have kind of turned on the Whitehead versions of Sonic 1 and 2. Tbf they were never 100% accurate. Physics are a bit different due to them basically being ground-up remakes as far as I'm aware.
In Origins you can use coins to do the special stages over and over. In the mobile port you can just quit before you get to the SPECIAL STAGE recap screen and do it over. So for me if they were fair or accurate or not never really mattered much or hold any effect on how I feel about Whitehead or the Sonic 1 special stages in general.
