The Sonic the Hedgehog Continuity Thread of Love and Timelines

We already saw this 8 years ago.

Spoiler

 

Not entirely sure where you got the crystal ball from: wherever it's from, bar one source, the Sonic the Hedgehog CD Japanese Manual mentions she is a card reader and went to the Little Planet after following a message from the cards, so the card aspect came first.

Unless you mean the Sonic the Hedgehog Manga where she was first introduced before the games version? I don't recall her divining, but I simply might not recall...

 

Yeah, it's from the Sonic manga in a CD adaptation they did. Could be that they just took some liberties with her abilities. Though, the manga does have some stuff from the lore/games so maybe it could've come from Sega themselves.

I did forget the manual was specific about her using cards though.

 

The Sonic Channel comics also have her using a crystal ball: http://web.archive.org/web/20160728...a.jp/SonicChannel/comic/25th/20160715_001086/

He's not in charge. He's one of many people on the lore team, and everything has to get approval through Sonic Team before being finalised.

If you listened to the show in context you'd see that there's more to his answers than this quick summary. But these questions are deep in the weeds things that wouldn't be a high priority for Sega.

It's because they cannot touch upon Sonic Pocket Adventure for legal reasons.

 

I was under the impression that post-Frontiers he was given more power but I guess I was mistaken.

I wonder how they're going to canonize the mass character culling that happened for the first half of the boost games. Sonic's openly cooperating with everyone in 06 then suddenly only Tails and Amy exist for a while. Has anyone asked a similar question or is it even correct to view the timeline as successive with the games like this? I'm just really curious for how these lore people are going to reconcile the meta era which was all about how the lore doesn't matter.

 

I don’t see why the difference in storytelling trends requires in-universe justification or explanation. Circumstances were such that Sonic happened to come together with a number of other characters in some games and not others. These aren’t even strictly divided by era: Teams Dark and Chaotix don’t show up in the Advance or Rush titles, while they do make appearances in Generations and Forces, for instance.

 

Well Team Dark was in Sonic Battle which is a prequel to Advance 3 so kinda bad example there considering the interconnection. In that case they're clearly a part of the same universe despite circumstantially not being around sometimes. Unlike Unleashed which goes out of it's way to not even acknowledge the games that directly preceded it and IIRC has no series interconnection whatsoever beyond Tails and Amy existing. If lore is now a consideration and applies to all games then yeah this is an issue.

 

It most definitely is, since one of the tenets of the Adventure Era is the explicit existence of a geodesic cast that (almost) always gets involved in each other's affairs, which couldn't be any other way anyway because these affairs always involve an impending apocalypse. The shift towards Sonic being the only one with agency was very clear and there's no endogenous explanation for that. They never tried, and the question of "what was Knuckles/Shadow/Amy doing when the world literally shattered in pieces" didn't really need to be answered because everyone knew the extra-diegetic reason for that, but now they will have to.

 

I mean we can hazard a good guess as to what Knuckles was doing.

That aside, I'm not sure what anyone would expect beyond a TailsTube episode or something saying "they were fighting Dark Gaia mooks somewhere offscreen". It's sufficient and wouldn't take a lot of brainpower for them to come up with.

Well, the stakes in Advance 3 start off much higher than in Battle, and yet less of the cast is around in the former, for some reason. Advance 3 even has the world being shattered just like in Unleashed. So I think the Advance games are a great example: we have just as much reason to question the absence of major players in Advance 3 as we do in Unleashed.

 

Advance 3 acknowledged recent past characters and events and even has a story that's directly based on its predecessor. Unleashed has none of this.

 

I know. But my point is that "this game had Sonic cooperating with a big bunch of characters, but the next game doesn't" isn't a feature exclusive to post-06 stuff. The causes of it might be, but the consequences of it aren't. They're in just as much need of 'reconciling' "why, in-universe, was Shadow not present for Unleashed?" as they are of 'reconciling' "why, in-universe, was Shadow not present for Advance 3?"

 

Why, in-universe, was Shadow not present in Forces while the Phantom Ruby's Shadow was there and everyone thought this was the real one?

 

There was a period of my life in which I was very nostalgic, hanging out with lots of old friends and talking about the past. Then there was another period where I mostly spent time with just very close friends and didn’t reference the past so much. Is this a contradiction of my existence that requires an explanation? I don’t think so.

There seems to be this bizarre belief that, once Sonic has met a person, they need to run into him constantly from then on, otherwise there’s a plot hole. Can’t these people simply conduct their own lives independent of Sonic? If anything, the fact that Sonic constantly and coincidentally runs into the same pool of characters is a repeated feat of good fortune that is in more need of explanation. If one cares that much, one can make fairly well supported inferences to explain their absence - Teams Dark and Chaotix were probably addressing the Dark Gaia threat in their own way that didn’t happen to intersect with Sonic’s adventure. Interestingly, this point never seems to arise when going backward into the timeline - where were Rouge/Team Chaotix pre-SA2, for example? Doing their own thing, nuff said, no further explanation needed.

 

No, because you are a person. Sonic isn't. Sonic is a character. Plus, if you and your old friends had once saved the world from total oblivion, but the next time the world was in danger of total oblivion your non-very close friends weren't there, and this is all the information I could have about you and this group and I could only know about the world through the stories of you and your friends, then there would sure be questions.

As long as the question isn't raised in terms of a strict continuity that makes up Sonic's life described by a unique timeline, it really doesn't matter. But as soon as you do, they no longer can actually conduct their own lives independent of Sonic because their lives depend on Sonic. It's not so much a plot hole as much as it is a character hole. The fact that you must come up with an answer already makes it worlds apart from a narrative system in which that's not a question at all.

 

This topic has gotten me to consider just how Sonic and co usually become involved in game plots. Frequently, the core cast only becomes involved through sheer coincidence, not by purposeful decision or action. Sonic Adventure alone is filled with serendipitous occurrences that lead the major characters to run into each other.

Spoilered for size

Spoiler

Eggman has apparently been based in the Mystic Ruins for some time prior to the game. It is there that he discovers the ancient tablets telling of Chaos and inspiring his scheme. Coincidentally, both Tails and Amy are living close by: Tails also in the Mystic Ruins, and Amy in Station Square proper, a quick train ride away. Despite their shared history, there is no indication that any of the three characters are aware that the other two are also in the same general location.

Likewise, Sonic arrives in Station Square
with seemingly no other purpose than as part of his usual wandering. There is no evidence to suggest that he knows his friends Tails and Amy are there at this time, and he also happens to arrive on the very night that Eggman released Chaos from the Master Emerald. If he happened to be traveling elsewhere at this time, would he even have known of Chaos and Eggman’s plan? Probably not, at least until the Egg Carrier revealed itself to the people of Station Square.

Knuckles runs into Sonic because Eggman shatters the Master Emerald to release Chaos, and the emerald fragments land around Station Square. It’s arguably a coincidence that Eggman chose to release Chaos when Angel Island was directly above its place of origin below, but given that Eggman was based in the Mystic Ruins, it may simply have been a matter of convenience to wait for the Island to come to him.

Big just so happens to be living in the Mystic Ruins at this time as well, and he just so happens to be in possession of a Chaos Emerald. Perhaps Chaos detects this and takes advantage of this coincidence by separating its tail to possess Froggy and acquire the Master Emerald. Then again, given that the Chaos-possessed Froggy seems to move sporadically with no clear goal of reuniting with the rest of itself, it might also be a coincidence that a bit of Chaos happened to drip into Froggy at all.

Another series of coincidences occurs over the next few days that continue to bring the group together. Tails happens to crash land in Emerald Coast as Sonic is relaxing there. Most of the Chaos Emeralds, which hitherto this point were generally found in the Special Zone, are located in normal reality in locations surrounding Station Square, exactly where it is most convenient for Sonic and Eggman to collect them, and anchoring Sonic and Tails to Station Square. And Birdie happens to fly into Amy, entangling her in Eggman’s plot and leading her to Sonic.

If these fortuitous events didn’t happen, Sonic would not have encountered the rest of the cast of characters. This kind of happenstance bringing characters together occurs throughout the series. Knuckles happens to emerge from the Aquatic Mine precisely under Sonic and co’s location. Sonic and Shadow both happen to be in Westopolis when the Black Arms strike. Knuckles happens to be in Soleanna for… reasons.

This kind of writing continues even into the boost era: Sonic just happens to fall from space into Apotos, where both Amy and Tails happen to be nearby with no apparent explanation. Given that coincidence is such a large factor in Sonic running into other known characters, it seems silly to me to complain that it makes no sense he didn’t run into Shadow or whoever during Unleashed. It’s not as if up until now characters solely made conscious decisions to group up. Unlike in Adventure, there was simply no marvelous series of coincidences to bring them together.

 

Yeah OK this isn't about how cool it would be if Sonic found Shadow in Unleashed, it's about how Unleashed is an obvious retcon that doesn't fit in with this new timeline where everything's supposed to be interconnected. If the characters were off "doing their own thing" then the game would've acknowledged that.

 

I think Unleashed had bigger continuity issues than the absence of Sonic's friends. Like the world's geography looking completely different from the way it did in Shadow. Or Angel Island being nowhere to be seen. Or Empire City using a completely different flag from the United Federation's, even though logically it should be part of this one. Or GUN being MIA. And what was the deal with the Tornado-1? Was it a new plane, or a redesigned (upgraded? what with it having a jet mode now) version of the original Tornado?

 

In what way doesn’t it fit? Why is the game acknowledging offscreen characters a requirement for canonicity? Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) doesn’t acknowledge Big the Cat, does that mean it’s a new timeline?

I don’t really understand the mindset that canonicity requires X amount of continuity or character references. Yes, from a meta perspective we recognize a change in writing that refrained from making references to past adventures, or having the plot be connected in some way to previous games. In real life, the writers didn’t use other characters and likely didn’t worry about what they were doing. But from an in-universe perspective, what does it matter if there are fewer references to other characters or past events? Nothing in the games indicate the characters don’t exist, or that these past events didn’t happen, they simply weren’t mentioned by the characters we happened to run into. Therefore, there’s no conflict with the assertion that Unleashed exists on a timeline that also includes SA2, regardless of whatever the real world intent previously was.

 

Maybe it's like how the Xbox One isn't actually the first Xbox.

 

I think Robotnik lured him there with the letter for that trap to get Team Sonic all out the way? I don't think it's said though, so Not Canon as far I know.

Mistranslation. The Japanese just called it "my Tornado", no -1, and the plane itself sports "Tornado 03" on the side.



Which does conflict with Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog, where the Cyclone sports Tornado-III on the side. Perhaps they're the same plane with repairs and a coat of paint, in standard mode?

Unlikely, but eh.