The Sonic the Hedgehog Continuity Thread of Love and Timelines

An assortment of takeaways from the timeline:

• It's a shame most of the classic era wasn't included, but the difficulty in placing the classic games is quite probably why the timeline elected to exclude them for the time being, along with their general lack of brand relevance.
  
  
• By including Sonic Mania Plus as a distinct entry from Sonic Mania, it seems establish that the game is indeed the canonical continuation of Sonic Forces as opposed to Sonic Mania Adventures. Not the most surprising revelation, and it's entirely possible Adventures will be considered part of the canon in the future, but for the moment it's nice to have what seems to be a fairly definitive answer to the question.
  
  
• Advance 2 is placed between SA2 and Heroes. Fairly understandable placement given its release order, but I know at least some have considered placing the first two Advance games prior to Sonic Adventure, both for their plot simplicity and in consideration of Cream's cameo in SA DX.
  
  
• Placing Rush before 06 is consistent both with what has been previously conveyed and with release order, but I don't really get it. Yes, it's been said that Blaze in 06 has indeed experienced Rush and apparently remembers Sonic (though I myself am not convinced of that fact), but it seems so much cleaner just to accept the not uncommon head canon that Blaze in 06 precedes her debut in Rush. Is it really any different from placing Battle after Shadow 05, another widely accepted placement to account for discrepancies which this timeline does follow?
  
  And if you do want Blaze to have met Sonic and remember him, it's still possible with 06 before Rush! She can easily have been sent to Silver's future after Rush from her perspective, with the present day events occurring before Rush from Sonic et al's perspective. That would also negate the messiness of Sonic ignoring Blaze in 06 which Blackhole pointed out. I mean it's possible he interacted with her offscreen; showing them meeting would require answering (or at least acknowledging) these very questions about Blaze that would throw 06's already convoluted story completely off the rails. Much like this bullet point.
  
  
• I appreciate having an official order for some of the 06-08 games (Riders, Sonic Rush Adventure, and Riders: Zero Gravity). The period of games released between 06 and Unleashed is a bit of a wild west in terms of chronology since it can fit together in so many ways. Obviously Rivals is the big missing piece here, but even knowing Zero Gravity is after Rush Adventure is an appreciated bit of information.
  
  
• Interesting that Free Riders is placed after Generations. As far as I can see there's no continuity issue to account for, and it's strange to move a game out of release order like that. I've got no issue with it, but it's a question mark.

 

I miss doing this sort of stuff.

Spoiler: big image

 

That assumes that Blaze originated in Silver's future. Which has been stated by Iizuka isn't the case.

Blaze's presence in 06 post-Rush isn't THAT big a continuity issue if you just assume that she got there somehow between Rush and that game. Sonic Channel even states that the Sol Emeralds can take one across dimensions and time, and the wallpaper cover stories show that they occasionally take her to seemingly random places where she's needed (just like the Chaos Emeralds did to Sonic and Tails in SRA), providing a viable explanation.

 

In some regions Sonic Free Riders was released slightly before Sonic Colors, in other regions (including Japan) it was released slightly after Sonic Colors. But if it's after Sonic Colors then it has to be after Sonic Generations also, since Eggman encountered the Time Eater in outer space shortly after his defeat in Colors.

 

I know that Iizuka says that, I just don’t understand why. Maybe he feels compelled to maintain Blaze’s origin as a dimensional counterpart to Sonic rather than muddying her backstory with brand-unfriendly 06 lore. And while the mechanism of Blaze going to another dimension is explicable enough, it’s still a weird fit. Neither she nor Silver mention her being from somewhere else, and she seems to be comfortable in Crisis City (well, as comfortable as you can be in a post-apocalyptic hellscape). And again, her interactions with Sonic don’t quite line up. It can still work after Rush if you squint, but it’s a bit too complicated for my taste.

Interesting, I didn’t realize its Japanese release date was after Colors’. That would explain things.

 

I feel Blaze being from the future of Sonic's dimension is much harder to reconcile, considering she's consistently treated as belonging to the Sol dimension, what with being a princess there and having royal duties like guarding the Sol Emeralds and the Jeweled Scepter.

06 on the other hand doesn't particularly tie Blaze to Silver's setting; she's just there. Well, aside from having known Silver for some unspecified time. Which can be easily explained by her having become acquainted with him after meeting him and joining his fight against Iblis.

I know there is that fan theory that the reset at the end of 06 changed Blaze's history so that she was always from the Sol dimension, but that never sat right with me. Like, how can Sonic and Elise destroying Solaris 10 years in the past possibly cause Blaze to be born in another dimension and time? Not to mention that the Blaze from the Sol dimension should already have been born by the time they destroyed him, being 14 years old in the present.

As for there being no mention of Blaze being from somewhere else, that's likely because the 06 writers were ordered to remove any references to Rush from the final script, as stated by one of the devs.

 

They should make me SEGA so that i can canonize the story that I believe took place with Blaze before 06 and also so I can make Blaze a good character.

 

Blaze's (recently replaced) Sonic Channel profile was put online shortly after Sonic 2006 released, so the bit that said "The power of the Sol Emeralds allows her to travel back and forth between Sonic’s world and her own, but it seems that she sometimes travels through time and space in doing so." was probably their quick continuity patch to explain away why she was in the future with Silver.

In the 7 October 2022 episode of Bumblekast, Ian Flynn said that he got an official explanation while working on something, and that it was "frustratingly simple" and that "it works" and he "kind of feel(s) dumb for not even thinking of it".

What's your source for that?

Shiro Maekawa said that he wrote Silver's ending scene in Sonic 2006 hoping that it would feel connected to Sonic Rush, but that it's not official, and is open to interpretation.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/d6pIM
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/gYOTD

 

I can't find it right now, but I recall that a few years back a quote from a female? 06 dev was posted in this forum (I want to say this thread) saying that she wanted to tie the game to Rush but Sega said no.

 

There are literally multiple unused sound files in the game of Blaze mentioning Sonic by name and she’s shocked about the Iblis Trigger being a blue hedgehog in at least 2 lines that made it into the game. 06 being after Rush hasn’t really been a question for a while now. “But why didn’t she and Sonic acknowledge each other?” Because that wasn’t the purpose of the cutscene and the game is sloppily written head to toe, that’s why.

I do think that they planned on making her world turn out to be Sonic’s future the whole time, but backed off on the idea. Eggman Nega also got retconned to be from the future at the same time, and they very briefly seemed to be backing off of that too, but doubled down when Rivals 2 came out.

 

I mean ultimately what drives people to the theory is that the theming just feels more right. Sol Dimension, Soleanna, Sol Emeralds, Solaris. Elise is a princess with flame magic, Blaze is a princess with flame magic. Silver has psychokinesis and the OG manual said psychic powers are common in the future, Blaze has pyrokinesis and appears in Silver's future. Blaze was from "another dimension" and then turned up in the future, Eggman Nega was from the future and turned up in an alternate dimension. The narrative has been clear for years that these places are not one and the same, but there's suggestions everywhere that they could or even should have been at one point. It's entirely possible that the reason for Blaze making so little sense in 06 is because they didn't have enough time to smooth out the removal of this element. It doesn't fix Silver's ending, but it does make that nonsensical "I have flames in my heart too" justification make a bit more sense if you assume that originally it was supposed to be her as a member of the Soleanna royal lineage way in the future, and thus possesses the same bloodline to contain Iblis that Elise does.

Though 06 certainly didn't need any more interspecies romance, and if this were true it would mean somewhere in that lineage a guy fucked a cat.

 

Maybe, just maybe, the Soleanna Kingdom was going to be Blaze's kingdom, she would have been the princess in the story, and Solaris would have been connected to the Sol Emeralds ala Chaos and the Chaos Emeralds? But then Sega said "No Rush references", and they made them all separate from Blaze, created Elise to fill her role, and shoved Blaze into the future as a way of keeping her in the game, especially if work had already gone into her model/gameplay?

May explain why she controls better and feels more polished than other amigos -- she was going to be a major character, so she was the first amigo implemented on and the one the most work went into. Might even have been intended to be a main character at first, rather than an amigo.

 

No, I don't think any of that is true.

 

Solaris should have originated from the Sol Dimension. From one kingdom to another.

 

I dunno. I think with all the similarities, there had to have been some kind of connection between Soleanna/Solaris and the Sol Kingdom/Sol Emeralds/Blaze planned at some point.

The sol word. The fire theme. The kingdom theme. The fact 06 came out right after Rush. Blaze being in 06 with with no in-story explanation given as to how she got from the Sol dimension to Sonic's future.

If Blaze had been intended to have Elise's role, then the whole "princess who was raised since young to be strong and never cry to avoid releasing Iblis" would even have gone with the former's characterization as a "tough princess who acts aloof and self-sufficient yet deep down is lonely and insecure". As well as the whole thing of her being the guardian of the Sol Emeralds (assuming Solaris was going to be connected to them).

 

I agree that there was probably a connection, but I don't believe there was at any point a version of 06 where Blaze replaced Elise, and I certainly don't believe that has anything to do with her gameplay, which is only "better" than anyone else by process of elimination. Blaze being in the future makes sense if you look at the other thing we were talking about, which was the prospect of the future and the Sol dimension having been one and the same at some point.

 

First Great Civilization: the Ancients
Second Great Civilization: the "Gaians"






EDIT: I guess this post will fit better in the Timeline thread, if a moderator could move it, please.

 

Waiting for the dreaded day they replace any idea that the Fourth could have been the Nocturnus Clan.

 

That never made much sense to me anyway. It doesn't make a lot of sense for Battle to say the Fourth were wiped out by the Gizoid if they were actually the ones that created the Gizoid and also were alive and well inside the twilight cage. There's some giant gaps in that explanation that needed filling. Frankly I don't know how the Knuckles clan were ever even supposed to compete with the Nocturnus before they got desperate enough to abuse the Master Emerald's power. I want new echidna clans, and those can still theoretically be the Nocturnus, but they shouldn't go with the explanation from Chronicles on its own, even without Pendejo's interference.

 

The timeline coming out has kind of emphasised one thing I never really understood. So the Knuckles Clan was wiped out by Chaos and eventually Knuckles would become the last of his kind. Yep, that checks out. Except this happened over two thousand years ago. Thing is, if you look at the human race, two thousand years ago we were a population of 170 million, having grown almost fiftyfold in that time. So what happened with the Knuckles Clan that they couldn’t recover in that timeframe? What number of echidnas must there have been to be able to persist for another two thousand years but not to repopulate? How much of this is really attributable to Chaos? Granted, none of this breaks the setting for me and is secondary to what’s happening in the here and now, but it does make my brain itch.