With the Year Of Shadow being a thing, a lot of people have been asking for stuff like a Year of Silver, or a Year of Amy, so these characters can get their own side-stories like how Shadow did with Sonic X Shadow Generations, but I personally think the character that probably deserves their own spin-off or side-story the most is Tails. Especially considering we literally have the best setup for it with Tails' whole arc in Sonic Frontiers talking about "Going it alone for a while". I can personally see the game itself being kind of a modern take on Tails Adventure, using Classic Sonic-like platforming and physics, while giving Tails special upgrades and gadgets to use in stages for certain stage elements, and maybe some puzzles here and there. Along with pathways and secrets in previous stages that use gadgets that you get farther into the game, letting the player replay the stages a few times to get a bunch of goodies. Will they do this? probably not.
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 personally think that doing this would, if anything, take away from Knuckles' character in a sense. It would make everything we've seen him do so far completely pointless if he could just revive the clan and get off Emerald duty. It would probably make him irrelevant to the plot as "The chaos emerald guy", since there's now an entire clan of NPC-like characters to fill that role instead. Open world Angel Island does sound super cool though.
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.
That's true, I do agree that he definitely needs more things to actually do, but you could say that about a lot of the characters in this series. The most development he's gotten is becoming less gullible towards Eggman, so It'd be nice to see him tackle other things. I think a game of him properly learning of the echidna tribe's history would be cool, because we only really know surface level stuff about the echidna tribe. I think exploring them would be super cool and could give Knuckles' a character arc to go through since he doesn't know much about the tribe himself or why it's his duty to guard the emerald in the first place.
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".
Assuming you're talking about Shadow. There's a difference between utilizing the emerald's energy and power and actually understanding the emeralds' limits and boundaries and such. If utilizing the chaos control suddenly gives you extensive knowledge on the emeralds then nearly every character in the series must be experts on them by now. Knuckles' entire life has revolved around these rocks, so I don't think it's crazy to assume he knows a bit more than the average schmo does.
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.
