Modern Tails Spin-off?

I had a either a dream or a premonition about this the other day! I hope it's true.

 

I wouldn't mind that, Tails Adventure was a surprisingly fun and well-designed spin-off. Although it would have to be handled carefully to balance the classic physics and speed with the puzzles and gadgets.

 

Well, everyone in Frontiers mentions wanting to go off on their own. Were I to choose anyone from the game to get an expansion in that area, it'd probably be Knuckles. "Open Zone Angel Island" seems like a pretty obvious idea when you think about it, and the series is clearly hamstrung by Knuckles, Blaze and Silver all being tied to specific locations that stories then have to mangle reasons to concern themselves with. Now is a better time than ever to relieve Knuckles of his emerald duty, revive the echidna race, or both.

 

I don't mean that he'd just...make it happen. I want all sorts of things to change and cause problems, not for it to just end. My point is his status quo has gotten completely stale and needs a shakeup. Frankly I don't think there was much to do with Knuckles's character. He's the last echidna and...that's it. He seems fine. He's the guardian and...that's it. He'd like to get to do other stuff sometimes, but he seems fine. It's hard to have a character conflict when there's no other characters. I think Dream Team with Ariem, or maybe the Trip story in IDW are good examples of this, the most you can do with Knuckles is have him relate to people in similar situations...but then Trip's situation isn't the same. And Ariem's is just a very abstract notion of responsibility. Knuckles doesn't have big enough successes or failures to really change him at all, and SEGA only ever seems interested in him as a supporting character to Sonic's stories, so you might as well shave off the blemish of always being stuck, nailed and riveted to his home and his job and use that as an opportunity to give him some other traits.

 

I also support radically-changing the status quo for Silver and Blaze, and other characters.

Those don't really feel like interesting questions to me. The significance of the Master Emerald is that it's a big powerful dangerous magical object, and used to house a big angry water monster.

As for the echidnas...yeah, I want to know more about them and their history, and I want to explore that in-part by having echidnas exist again. Chronicles had the right idea, chronologically displacing a tribe from centuries prior. If it were me, I'd have whoever the Knuckles tribe's biggest enemy were exist in the present, and have Knuckles need to save them from the last remnants of his own tribe. Some old guy kept alive by magic or whatever, who can't move on from the war.

 

I mean, there's still the question of where it came from, its relation to the Chaos Emeralds, etc, but honestly I don't want to know about that. I like when there's some level of mystery that no one will ever really know: the only ones who'd know are decamillennium gone, if they even knew and didn't just have the Chaos Emeralds drop onto their homeworld before they developed as a species as what seems to have also happened with the Master Emerald and Earth.

While I don't want the echidna back myself, I am curious about the enemies that Pachacamac mentioned during the assault on the Altar of Emerald. Were they also destroyed in Chaos' rampage? Did some survive and hold the Echidna accountable for what happened, even 3,000 years later? Considering how often Time Travel is employed, perhaps have Knuckles actually go back and see these enemies fighting the Knuckles tribe?

As for a Tails game, Tails is a bit of a funny one since his entire thing is technological know-how and following Sonic. You could do another Metroidvania like Tails Adventures, but I feel that would be a better fit for Knuckles: they're about exploring the area to find new abilities, whereas Tails would be more likely to build a new ability, which would be backtracking like crazy.

Perhaps an open-world survival game like Subnautica, Minecraft, etc, where Tails ends up stuck on another world for X reason and uses his technological wits to survive and get back to Earth? But that would be a bit ambitious, but would be a way to bring Cosmo to the Game Canon since alien world...

 

My point wasn't that we already know everything there is to know about these magic rocks, just that Knuckles's role as guardian doesn't need further justification.

Obviously this wasn't necessarily the plan and Chronicles isn't canon, but I was actually still assuming they were at war with other echidnas. Frontiers Prologue Divergence mentions that there were clans other than the Knuckles living on Angel Island (which maybe you coulda figured from Sonic 3, but still), which suggests to me that infighting was part of what finally did them in. That's why I wanted Knuckles saving an enemy tribe from the last of his own, he'd be righting the wrongs of the past that tore his people apart by putting the other echidnas over himself.

 

I want Tails’ Adventure — remade as a proper 2D Metroidvania.
It doesn’t need a massive budget.
It doesn’t have to ride on nostalgia.
Just give it a beautiful hand-drawn art style — like Rayman Legends.

Tails already has the perfect toolkit for this:
gadgets, gear, bombs, flight, exploration.
So why not build on that?
To keep the game from being too short, make it a semi-remake —
expand the original island, and add a brand new one to explore.

I mean…
Nintendo gives us spinoffs with Wario, Luigi, Yoshi...

What did we get?
Shadow the Hedgehog and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.

Come on, Sega.

Give us something like “Tails: Re-Adventured.”
You know we’d play it.

 

Was there any notable thing that really happened in 2022? I remember hoping for some sort of Tails related event since it was the 30 year anniversary of his appearance in Sonic 2.

Really any year of Tails event would be nice but realistically I'm imagining Sega would make some sort of mobile spin off game that's fun enough to keep a player base for a few years and then shut down the servers after like 4 years

 

The idea of a modern Tails Adventure reminds me of Toki Tori- a 2d metroidvania that focuses more on puzzles than combat or platforming.

I think the ambiguity of what the Master Emerald does hurts the games narratively and makes situations involving it feel more contrived..
What actually is the Master Emerald in relation to the chaos emeralds? Does it control them? Can it negate their effects? Is it just really big? Who knows! Which wouldn't be so bad, being mysterious and all, but when so many of the games revolve around trying to stop the bad guy from getting the seven globe-spanning magic mcguffins, I wonder why eggman isn't solely going after the master emerald. It's not like Angel Island is that hard to get to. The only time eggman ever seems to go after the master emerald is when someone of the team remember Knuckles needs a reason to be in the story.

I have more to say about how I don't like the way the series uses it's artifacts / ancient civilizations, I feel like it's very wishy washy on a lot of it which makes it lose impact, but it was starting to get a little ramble-y.

 

I think that's a separate problem. The Emeralds can be mysterious and the writers can refrain from using them as a deus ex machina crutch to solve every problem in the universe. I'm not particularly interested in further exploring them, but that's mostly because you only really get one shot at a thing like that, and if they screw it up and make their true nature completely boring or vapid, that retroactively colors almost every other story in the series with whichever problematic brush they end up using.

 

Unironically, Tornado Flight Sim.

Travel around Planet Hedgehog, collecting random crap like souvenirs that come with a bit of lore, since that's the big thing with Sonic right now. As you fly around, there are little missions you can do that reward you for finishing pilotwings-style courses with money to improve the Tornado and customize it to your liking. You could even have the different models available, like that hideous one from Sonic X. There wouldn't need to be some big epic story, but you could have the various other characters hanging out around the world to chat with, which would be novel since it's not like Tails gets a lot of time talking to characters that aren't Sonic.

If you absolutely needed combat you could even bring back those birds from Tails' Adventure to wreak a little havoc here and there. Maybe you could have friendly competitions with Robotnik over who can design the better flying machine, or make deliveries, or whatever. That'd be fun.

I hate to say it, but I think that already happened when they introduced an infinitely more prominent and popular second "chaos emerald guy".

 

I'm assuming this is something he talks about in Frontiers. I'm far from a Sonic expert but I don't really remember Knuckles talking about this kind of thing outside of a few moments in the Adventure games.

 

He knows that the Master Emerald can shut down the Chaos Emeralds in SA2, I assume that was the thing being referenced.

That said, I always found it weird how he cares about the Master Emerald, but doesn't seem that bothered about the Chaos Emeralds. Whether Eggman or Sonic has one of those isn't a big deal to him in SA1, at least.

 

Especially since he's noted as the Guardian of the Chaos Emeralds in the Japanese manuals and was otherwise alarmed when the Chaos Emeralds were under threat.

My best guess is the intention is he's more interested in guarding the Master Emerald, but the Chaos Emeralds were acting in proxy before Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles so he was guarding those to guard it. Now that the Master Emerald (and Angel Island in general) is a known entity, he's shifted focus to the Master Emerald while Sonic handles the Chaos Emeralds.

 

Fuck Knuckles.

When I was in elementary school, I always wanted a Star Fox game with Tails instead of Arwings. But I don't think that's appropriate for the character anymore. Nowadays, when I close my eyes, I see him using Flowmotion (Kingdom Hearts series), take part in all sorts of turn-based battles (e.g. such as in the Mario & Luigi or Advance Wars series), etc., but when given more thought, I'm not sure Tails would approve.

Long story short, if I were Tails and about to get my own spin-off, I would want it to be just as cool and fast as all the other Sonic games. Maybe there's a new power-up or companion that allows Tails to transform his tails.