The Sonic the Hedgehog Continuity Thread of Love and Timelines

As far as I know, no. Unless it is shown in some extra material I don't know of.

 

I think it’s safe to assume that the classic red Tornado is the same plane from Sonic 2 to SA, Sonic’s plane. The Tornado 2 onwards belong to Tails, right? But the classic-style Tornado that appears in Frontiers at the very least belongs to Sonic according to his dialogue with Tails. From this it’s easy to infer that Sonic’s Tornado got rebuilt at some point and that’s what we saw in Rush Adventure and Lost World onwards.

 

Ostensibly, yes. At the start of Sonic Adventure, Sonic explicitly says that the Tornado is his plane:


But the design is different from the classic games. At the time this was probably meant to be the same as the characters' redesigns: a real world design change with no in-story explanation. Even taking that into consideration though, the Tails insignias imply a new paint job, since they wouldn't have been on the plane when Sonic had it.

The Sonic Adventure design red Tornado also appears in Pocket Adventure (non-canon), Shuffle, Advance 1 and Rush Adventure.

I forget, what was the dialogue in Sonic Frontiers?

The Lost World Tornado design is a throwback to its original Sonic 2 look, and the Frontiers version is based upon Lost World's, but is now a two-seater. Rush Adventure used the SA1 design.

Depending on how literally we're to interpret all of this, it could be a Ship of Theseus scenario.

 

It's hard to know it these changes in Tornado's design are going to be interpreted as simply different art styles, or slightly changes, or different planes. At least in the current canon.

We could assume SA1's version is the same classic Tornado with a different art style, just like the characters themselves. But now we have modern games with a Tornado that looks like the classic plane. I don't think we have enough information to determine how the lore team is approaching the matter.

 

Also memory saving. I imagine if you compared the three Tornadoes (the Prototype, I and II), you'll find their models are the same or very, very similar, because why waste storage space with two plane models when you can just recolour the one?

 

This is pure speculation, but it could be that the Tornado-IISeater in Sonic Heroes is a modified design running off Chaos Drives instead. And I think at that point in Sonic Riders the Chaos Emeralds were elsewhere, so I don't think one is in the plane, but valid point about a potential fake Emerald in play.

But you also raised a certain point: those Tornados use Chaos Emeralds. Sonic Unleashed had the Chaos Emeralds depowered and Sonic Frontiers have them on the Starfall Islands: perhaps that's why he switches out the planes, when he has a Chaos Emerald he uses the Tornado III. When he has Chaos Drives but no Emerald, the Tornado II is used. And neither sees him use the original biplane.

This is speculation, of course, nothing canonical.

 

Man it'd be so cool if Tails had some form of air transport that was appropriately fitting for the amount of people he has to fly around. Crazy nobody's ever considered doing that.

 

It occurs to me Tails has Amy in a backseat I've not seen on the Tornado before during Sonic Frontiers...

Honestly not sure if there's a compartment that opens to reveal a second seat, Tails can move his seat forward to reveal a back seat, or if he's literally building entire planes to have one for him and one for him and a guest...

 

For the sake of accuracy, SA1's blue Tornado is called トルネード 2 in the Japanese script and Tornado 2 in the English script. The Roman numeral "II" isn't used. Same goes for the Sonic Adventure Navigation Guide: https://info.sonicretro.org/index.php?title=File:SonicAdventureNavigationGuide_Book_JP.pdf&page=58

Ditto for Sonic X's Tornado 2 profile card, which uses both "トルネード 2" and "TORNADO 2".

It sounds like the 号 suffix might be optional and not a proper part of its name? In that section of the Sonic Adventure Navigation Guide you linked it uses both トルネード号 and トルネード on the same page. Someone very familiar with the language would have to chime in.

The English Wikipedia page for the Nippon plane simply calls it Nippon (ニッポン, Nippon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_(aircraft)

The Japanese Wikipedia page calls it ニッポン in the article header, but uses the 号 suffix in the body of the text: ニッポン号 : https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ニッポン_(航空機)

Of course, given the name this could partially be for the sake of clarity.

For a less confusingly named plane, there's the Stork: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ストーク_(人力飛行機)

On that page both the header and body text use ストーク, but the header for the specifications uses ストーク号.

 

Yeah 号 isn’t actually part of the name. Think of it kind of like how we use “the” when referring to vehicles. The Titanic is often written as Titanic-gou, for example.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the Tornado II was used in Heroes, the Advance games and Riders, while the Cyclone appeared much more rarely in the series.

EDIT: I probably should have read more of the convo before posting.

No I think Tails does have multiple vehicles for different purposes like Iron Man. Sonic X showed Tails having lots of planes all the time. And the IDW Comics seem to be doing that too. And then Sonic Prime introduced another new version of the Tornado.

 

Spoiler: Frontiers spoiler

Sticks the Badger

is mentioned in Frontiers in Ian's script, but the Japanese version cut the reference out.

40:48

 

It's been shared around before by people looking at the English translations of the Japanese script. There, she just tells Sonic he'll be sorry the next time he sees her.

And god do I wish they would have just had those changes made to the English script too. I'm sick of having differences in the scripts and I just want these characters to act exactly the same between languages. I know that's why they brought English writers on board, because they were sick of people going "But I don't like how this story is written!" when they were translated just a little more literally, but I think it was better off that way if they're just gonna let someone write in references to ghosts that Sonic Team will ignore.

 

The Japanese script for Frontiers was bad enough that fans over there complained to the point that Kishimoto acknowledged it on Twitter. It’s completely neutered, doesn’t fit what’s going on, and is awkward sounding enough that many players assumed at first that it was machine translated. I’m not really sure how you can read the script and think it’s better than the original unless you’re one of those “Japan is always better” folks or the only thing you care about is the references that were removed. Then again there’s 06 and Forces stans nowadays so what do I know.

Only the main cutscene scripts that were changed too. The logs, idle quotes and menu dialogue are all faithfully translated from the original script. As an aside, I’m assuming Toyoda will be more involved in whatever comes next (he’s the one who localized the Pontac/Graff scripts and is the head of story for Sonic Team now, who I’ve heard was busy with Sonic 2 during development) and won’t ignore as much as Kishimoto’s hasty rewrite did.

 

I'm more saying that if they don't want references to certain characters, they should remove them. If they want Amy to still even talk about Sonic as if she's pursuing him, then they should tell the English writers to put that in too. While I do think the JP writing and characterization is better than the English stuff generally, what I mean here is that there should be decisive facts you can mutually state about each game's script. Not "character is mentioned here but not here." It's a criticism of how they handle things rather than how they are written.

 

Sorry, I was partially just soapboxing. I get what you mean though. It is a bit bizarre that they did all that despite the references originally being worked out with Sonic Team themselves. It makes me wonder if the original plan was to stick closer to the script and changing it for Japanese audiences was a last minute decision.

 

Yeah Flynn said when he put in

Spoiler

Sticks and Tangle

he properly ran it by everyone first. He did not try to sneak it in or anything like that. SEGA approved of them being mentioned in the game.

 

Tangle is still mentioned in the Japanese version!

 

I wonder if it may be down to a different perception of the two in the Japanese market. The IDW books are currently getting published over there and are for all intents and purposes part of the main setting, whereas Sticks originated in an alternate universe spin-off that was almost wholly conceived in the US and was aimed at western audiences. I can't say with certainty how popular "Sonic Toon" may or may not be in Japan, but I imagine it's not very.