The Sonic the Hedgehog Continuity Thread of Love and Timelines

Giant thing crashes onto your island and you find someone wandering, it would make sense to hide the gem of infinite power from said wandering person.

But Sonic Origins says no, so...

 

It also would make sense if that’s not what happened and after half a year of posts like this I think everyone on this site is aware of your crusade against Origins and does not need to hear about it anymore

 

I was simply pointing out Sonic Origins disputes it, since that's the new canon and had the Master Emerald in the Hidden Palace before Robotnik even got there, in opposition to rapheal_fc's idea that Knuckles moved it there when Robotnik arrived.

I hate it, but I can point to it without going into a diatribe against it, despite your accusation I was trying to raise a crusade against it.

 

can you please not tack something like this onto every post

 

What did Origins change? Narratively, Eggman tricks Knuckles so I don't see why he would move it from Hidden Palace until he moves it to Sky Sanctuary where it is in his Sonic 3 campaign.

Or is Mania somehow messing with this?

 

Amazing, I can't even point to Sonic Origins without everyone losing their goddamn minds.

I only brought it up since Sonic Origins contradicts raphael_fc's thoughts about Knuckles moving the Master Emerald after the Death Egg crash, since it shows it there from the start in the cutscene. That's all.

Most of Sonic the Hedgehog 3's plot, but key point is that Robotnik didn't know where the Master Emerald and Hidden Palace were located at all. He knew there was a large signature underneath the surface, but not specifically where and was digging around for it, but this was changed to him falling into Hidden Palace outright. I won't go further.

 

^^^ nobody is losing their minds. By all means mention that Origins’s take is different from your own. But if you can’t mention Sonic Origins without making snide comments or sarcastic complaints then please don’t do it at all, because it is obnoxious and repetitive at this point and makes it so people dread engaging with your posts. I really do appreciate that they’re not as incendiary as back when Origins first came out and you were chastising Tyson Hesse over this specific change, though.

You’re not missing anything. It didn’t change anything in the actual game itself, just the old outdated Japanese manual stories.

In regards to the emerald being in Sky Sanctuary, I was always under the impression that it was moved by the Egg Robo at some point in Knuckles’ story before he got to Hidden Palace. The island is falling in the background of the final fight. Sky Sanctuary for whatever reason seems to float independently from the rest of Angel Island.

 

Tyson Hesse? I don't recall faulting him, I thought he just handled the animation and designs. I always fault Ian Flynn for the actual story, since he was the writer if I recall correctly. The animation work, I'll praise constantly and wish they'd get hired to do more Sonic stuff.

Indeed, though I figured it was Mecha Sonic who stole the Master Emerald while EggRobo had Knuckles distracted on Angel Island.

 

In the end, we're in the middle of a tremendous clusterfuck. That's what.
My current opinion of the whole franchise is that ST screwed up in almost all (if not ALL) games, continuity-wise.
It's been (and still being) discovered most relevant games had stuff cut or revised during production, messing things up to a point SEGA now has to revise and/or retcon stuff to better streamline the continuity.
Even the classic games' synopsis seem unable to help much nowadays...

 

In what way were those stories, the ones written by the teams who actually developed the games they are accompanying, “outdated?”

None of the changes Origins made were outright improvements, just alterations and cuts made to keep then short and cheap enough to be feasible. If they expanded upon the original stories in a way that was true to the manuals and didn’t cause contradictions, then maybe the manual stories could be considered outdated. But at this point, they’re just different.

 

I meant outdated as in no longer relevant to the games today. Maybe I should have used a different term. I actually prefer the stories in the old manuals as well (though I’m not sure if they were actually directly written by the dev teams like you’re suggesting), but the only time they were referenced in the past two and a half decades was in Sonic Adventure, and even before then it wasn’t like the Sonic 3 manual fit with the game itself’s story particularly well unless you stretch things: The emeralds are on Angel Island then disappear when the Death Egg lands in the manual, while in the game they’re the same ones from Sonic 2 and Knuckles steals them. There’s also the whole concept of the emerald “pillar” which was controlled by the seven emeralds and kept the island afloat, which never really jived with what we saw in the games.

They’re nice stories and I truly miss that air of mystery and adventure they had, but they haven’t been relevant for years, and outside of some parts of them being reflected in SA1 (while others excluded), the contents were never actually present in the games themselves.

 

It must have been stolen very shortly before Knuckles reached Hidden Palace Zone, since Knuckles can access the emerald shrine via Super Rings all the way up to Lava Reef Zone.

 

You're assuming they're the same set of Chaos Emeralds.

And Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles did introduce a second set of Chaos Emeralds (the Super Emeralds) in-game. Even if, y'know, it wasn't the intent at the start.

The "Crystal Pillar" is actually resolved by Chaotix, where it refers to the Master Emerald as the pillar. And since we know the Master Emerald (or at least a giant Chaos Emerald) was planned before even Knuckles was fully developed, ironically via Sonic Origins in the concept art...

 

I am so very tiered of the Origins discussions. It's 2023 now. Can we please not get into it anymore? I'd rather talk about Blaze in 06 again.

 

Ugh, that is really one of the biggest bummers in the franchise canon. That period of Rush/06/Rivals/etc., just plays so fast and loose with the characters that it is almost impossible to reconcile those games with the greater continuity. I'd love a truly consistent canon but it'd likely take a reboot at this point and I also wouldn't want that lol.

 

Frankly, the Blaze thing is worse because it's a problem within the text of the series itself rather than aged supplementary material, and thus actually matters. I think part of 06's legacy as a bad game is that it so handily managed to screw up other Sonic games by its very presence. If you acknowledge it, it not only makes Sonic Rush a pain (either you headcanon that 06 is before Rush and ask how the hell everyone's memories changed, or you bend over backwards as to how Blaze from the Sol Dimension is in Silver's future), but also fucks with every other game in the series by ostensibly implying that the blue chaos emerald has been in Elise's possession for the last decade leading up to that point. It makes you want to ignore the game entirely since it rewinds its own events, but if you do that you're stuck wondering why Sonic knows who Silver is in Sonic Rivals. You can't win.

I guess that's the folly in designing a continuity around a bunch of ideas and visual icons that you aren't certain are going to actually be good. Same reason the wait between Forces and Frontiers was so bad. We had to deal with the military aesthetic and theming for years and it was already tired by the time the game came out. 06 itself established a precedent for self-important stories about Sonic running around with sad pink/red haired girls and ignoring most of his friends. I'm glad that so far Frontiers has given us nice nature environments and Sonic's friends having a place in the actual universe.

 

I've come to see this as less of an issue as time goes on. It basically just unintentionally implies that there's been (at least) a ten year gap between it and the last game to have someone else in possession of the blue Chaos Emerald. Which might not be any better. Given that this is a series of games whose stories' central conflicts typically involve Eggman trying to get the Chaos Emeralds, the question then becomes why he never got it from her sooner.

 

The Blaze/Sonic 2006 issue actually came up on today's Bumblekast. Ian said that he can't get into the details of what the official answer is, but he did confirm that Blaze is originally from the Sol Dimension.

 

I really don't know why they can't go into detail. Like, if something like the Encyclo-Speed-ia were coming out to reveal it, then fair enough, pump those sales numbers up. But unless there's a Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) remake or Sonic Rush 4, I dunno why that info is being kept secret.

 

No, that would be demonstrably worse in just about every way. SEGA is already on thin ice with a realistically-proportioned human teenager romancing a cartoon hedgehog, we don't need there to be a ten year age gap on top of that.

Also, the idea of Sonic and Eggman butting heads for a decade in-universe when Eggman doesn't have total global control like in SatAM/Archie crosses the line from fun to depressing. It's like going to a high school reunion and seeing that none of the people you knew have grown or changed at all.

Probably because nearly every official attempt to explain plot inconsistencies across games has resulted in someone putting their foot in their mouth and giving us the dumbest shit in the world to complain about. They had to say something with Blaze since she's still a significant recurring character, but between her and the crap with the moon I think they took the lesson of "don't dwell on it" (missing the obvious other lesson of "don't write stupid bullshit you have to walk back later", but I digress). I doubt we're likely to see any lore reason for why Sonic from the past was referred to as being from an alternate dimension in Forces, because there's nothing they could say that wouldn't sound like a load of contrived trite. Best they can do is pretend it never happened.