Dr. Mechano

I feel like they should have gone all in and had Classic Sonic talk or had every classic counterpart mute. They didn't need to have Classic Tails talk on his behalf, I think they were just afraid of telling a story solely with silent acting and chickened out.  Either that or they were afraid of defining an official voice for Classic Sonic. The result is a bit lacklustre.

bEcAuSe ThE pHaNtOm RuBy PuT iT tHeRe

Well he is an evil doctor with a mad genius and rad minions

Does it count if it's a remix of an already existing lyrical theme?

If it's got new lyrics, yeah.

The original Metallic Madness Present and Bad Future had lyrics too - which were also mostly about Eggman - but Mania's version was the first new one of those since SA2. (The E.G.G.M.A.N. remix in Shadow - by contrast - is just a remix and not a new composition with new lyrics in the same way.)

I always assumed Sonic Tails and Knuckles making a mess of things on Sky Deck is what caused the crash

They retcon Cream in for the drops but that just shifts the question slightly.

I'm going to headcannon it and say Tikal is the one that had Cream drop the Ice Stone and Wind Stone. The Japanese strategy guide for Sonic Adventure says this about Tikal:

@Wraith, it's the most likely explanation. You can even see the damage that you did to the Egg Carrier during Sky Deck in the cutscene it explodes in:
(1:35 - 3:20)

I do like the idea that DX retcons it so that Tikal was actually guiding Cream too through a bunch of odd little tasks but we just don't get to play as her lol.

But hey that Sky Deck thing is pretty cool - come to think of it, considering how janky and simple the game can be in some places (I mean, without this video to clear things up, the scene-changes between acts in Sky Deck come off as completely random), it's actually pretty wild that they programmed entire portions of the stage to be as solid and consistent as any other stage as you travel across them but then break apart like that.

All the things should have fallen out of the sky with that weird Atari sound that Sonic has when falling from... I think it's after the first Sky Chase section?

I always took Gamma in Knuckles story as when he was in his Tikal flashback. So he was running along after catching Froggy but his mind was sent to the past, he was literally in autopilot.

Yeah, but where did Gamma fall from?

At that point, he didn't have the jet booster yet, and the Egg Carrier had also not taken off.

Autopilot is buggy, for some reason it lead him off a cliff. No idea honestly.

In hindsight, Chaos probably rivals GUN as the biggest karma houdini in the franchise.

M-Maybe.

Chaos calmed down and stopped wanting to hurt people after Super Sonic directly rammed through his brain a bunch of times, after all.

I thought it was chaos that killed off the echindas in the first place?

He couldn't have killed all of them. Otherwise, how was Knuckles born as recently as he was?

The echidna extinction had to have been within the last couple of decades.

You got it wrong dude, it's more like 

Chaos: Damn, I missed one. 

In hindsight, it would have been real neat touch if Chaos singled out Knuckles in particular while working for Eggman. 

@Pelvic WOO! engine

Not all of the echidnas were wiped out, as explained in the Japanese Strategy Guide for Sonic Adventure.

The Knuckles clan took a devastating blow from Chaos's attack, and their power weakens significantly. The surviving Knuckles clan suspended the Emeralds' altar area into the sky by the Master Emerald's power and lived there, bearing the duty of observing and protecting the sealed Master Emerald, so that an incident like this never happens again. They also left murals and inscriptions in the temple to communicate this incident to future generations. The Chao were also on the verge of extinction with the Chaos Emeralds lost, but mere numbers have managed to find lands with suitable environments and barely survive.

Totally agreed, Chaos having a specific grudge against Knuckles would have felt more personal and would have been really appropriate for the story.

SA1 already focused on Knuckles' connection to Chaos's backstory, giving him three Tikal segments instead of one like everyone else had, so it definitely feels like a missed opportunity.

who doesn't consider mania a mainline game?

I kind of seperate them into "Mainline Handheld Games" in my head, as their continuity sometimes snarls a little at the inarguable mainline console games (especially when it comes to cases like Sonic Colours or Generations where the events of the handheld version directly contradict the console version).

Having said that, games like Generations or Advance 3 (and therefore by extension, Sonic Battle), depend on the mainline games to make sense narratively, so it's thorny either way lol.

Battle, The Rush Games, and Chronicles kind of put the handheld games on their own track, but I'm able to rationalize it if I stretch things. 

I just put Battle after ShTH since Shadow has all his memories back in that game.

Yeah it's more the 8-bit games that bother me in terms of inserting them into main canon.  These random little inconsequential adventures kinda muddy a nice narrative flow of Sonic 2 into Sonic 3 into Sonic & Knuckles into Sonic 4 (or Mania, depending on timeline).  I guess 2 and Chaos can easily take place before 16-bit Sonic 2, but Sonic Triple Trouble and Sonic Blast using Knuckles and yet still 6 chaos emeralds feels weird.  But I guess it's easy to handwave the emerald stuff by just making a mental retcon that it was 7 but... old game weirdness who cares etc.

A thought on that: In Mania, Heavy Magician disguises herself as Fang, Bean, and Bark - so I think it only makes sense that Triple Trouble and Fighters had to have happened for those disguises to have any meaning for our heroes. 

Otherwise she's just pretending to be characters who have no connection to Sonic at all, which would be kinda weird.

Yeah that's very true.  Although in that case, saying just The Fighters happened is easier than saying the whole Game Gear arc did.

I won't lie, I want the 8-bit games to be canon!  Sonic 2 8-bit was my first Sonic game and still one of my faves.  I just hate how they have a bunch of inconsistencies lol.  I guess once the emerald thing is ignored, they don't have that much trouble fitting in though.

There's just something funny about how much importance is put on the main saga of Eggman's schemes when he also had these other 8 or so times where he just built generic bases and did his usual "steal the emeralds, make badniks" shtick lol.  But then I guess that's just the minimalist storytelling of the handheld games making me put less importance on them when really there's no reason to!

I feel like the Game Gear games could probably easily fit in between S3&K and Sonic 4/Mania, since I don't think those games take place immediately after 3.

The heroes have some downtime between the first Death Egg plot, so Eggman decides to go back to the drawing board and commits smaller schemes like... kidnapping Tails, replacing Sonic's shoes with slow-down boots, making a... pinball fortress? Turning beans into robots? I think a witch showed up somewhere?

Sega never advertised them as "mainline" games though; I never saw a single commercial for Sonic Rush in 2005 and I found it completely by accident; all of the marketing went into Shadow at the time. 

They feel more like "Companion" games; games that are just kind of their own thing, but don't directly impact what's happening in the main console games. Which is what makes Battle and Rush so damn weird because they have events taht directly reference the console games. 

So heh, Sega was never too consistent. 

Because they essentially "lost" Western Sonic fans have been shafted for over twenty years, and Archie ending was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for them. 

So they just went and made their own series. 

Archie gradually became more and more Japanese-influenced over time even before its cancellation too.

Even before the Super Genesis Wave, I'd argue Ian Flynn made it a solid point to mold Archie into being more in line with the games. Which I personally enjoyed, but I can understand why some people felt like they were losing something unique when it happened.

Sonic having such a diverse and varied franchise is both a blessing and a curse; sure, you got many diverse avenues to explore...but then you have people starting civil wars claiming "their" version of Sonic is superior to the other versions.

As someone who grew up with Japanese Sonic thanks to starting with SA2, to the point that I watched Sonic X subbed (to my cluelessness as a child), it's obvious where I would lean towards.

I have great respect for American Sonic, but Japanese Sonic always felt so much cooler and cuter.

For me, the debates that were loudest for me were the "Adventure Cast vs 4Kids" along the ones that rant on how 4Kids somehow were responsible for dumbing down all the dark stuff in entire franchise (Heh, if only they knew) with Robotnik becoming Eggman, being a less menacing villian and all. All while at the same time people complained Sonic were getting too dark for its own good.

It was around Sonic 4 that I learned people had preferences for design; I've never really notice these redesigns until that pointed it out to me.

I could've gone my whole life without seeing anything in general and thinking how they're put through prejudices if I had never learned what prejudice and discrimination was in the first place.

Imo, what he lost with the cape, he made up for with the goggles

I for one hardly notice that cape, or at least I unconsciously don't see it as one. It's shorter than capes that go down towards or pass the thighs, like SATAM's cape, so to me it usually looked more like some kind of bib or collar.  It's not often the games show him from the back where I could've gotten a better look at it.

Artist's twitter: https://twitter.com/DreaminErryDay

Well the movie should be interesting if this mindset applies to that 

At this point I'm half-expecting the movie to have no dialogue and just be a bunch of shots of Mario jumping.

is this the Mario equivalent to Sonic's "two worlds" and "classic and modern are different dimensions" thing in terms of how much it destroys the world/continuity? because from your emotional response, that's what it sounds like (since that's basically my own response to those awful bits from Sonic)

i don't really see why there's so much fuss out of losing, like...a small handful of different body types and accessories. there are still unique toads, they're just differentiated by clothing and actual characterization.

The world feels less alive and less diverse. Major plot-relevant characters can't even get actual names anymore.

I don't know, man. Imagine if they introduced a new animal sidekick in the new Sonic game and they were just called "Cat the Cat" or "Dog the Dog." Maybe some other character nicknames them, but they only ever refer to themselves by their species name. It'd be really dumb.

I feel for Intelligent Systems and Tanabe. They are trying their best to make engaging Paper Mario games, but Nintendo isn't helping. Those last interviews sound like a very sad cry for help...

Origami King's story and characters are far from perfect, but it's almost a miracle what IS was able to do with them if we consider Nintendo's dumb restrictions...Some parts of that game are almost on par with some moments from Super Paper Mario.

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The world feels less alive and less diverse. Major plot-relevant characters can't even get actual names anymore.

I don't know, man. Imagine if they introduced a new animal sidekick in the new Sonic game and they were just called "Cat the Cat" or "Dog the Dog." Maybe some other character nicknames them, but they only ever refer to themselves by their species name. It'd be really dumb.

sonic and mario have always handled their characters differently so i don't think this is entirely a fair comparison. but if there was some minor sonic character like, a cat called doctor katt or something...i honestly wouldn't be that bothered? i mean hell the avatar character never got a name and that's not really been a problem aside from the minor awkwardness of how to refer to them. and it's not like mario is doomed to never have anything but nameless toads; origami king also gave us the origami siblings, with their names and unique designs and all. and they've got captain toad out there having a whole game to himself, even without a "real" name, and i don't feel like that made him any less of a character.

i just feel like 99% of toads were already samey and forgettable and only the few that actually mattered stood out, which hasn't really changed.

While that's fair, "Katt" is at least a proper name that's spelled differently from the species name. Like, it wouldn't take that much to make me happy. If Bob-omb's actual name had been Bobby or Bob or something other than just "Bob-omb" it'd be fine.

What this stipulation means, though, is that many of those few Toads who stood out can't really appear anymore. Toadsworth - despite debuting in a mainline platformer game - has an appearance differentiated by his age, and he's been conspicuously absent for a while now, the M&L 3DS remakes aside. He doesn't fit the "standard Toad mold" and ergo he's likely been axed. 

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While that's fair, "Katt" is at least a proper name that's spelled differently from the species name.

origami king's got a "Captain T. Ode". that much, at least, is within the rules they've set.

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What this stipulation means, though, is that many of those few Toads who stood out can't really appear anymore. Toadsworth - despite debuting in a mainline platformer game - has an appearance differentiated by his age, and he's been conspicuously absent for a while now, the M&L 3DS remakes aside. He doesn't fit the "standard Toad mold" and ergo he's likely been axed. 

i think it's a little early to assume that. i mean, to my knowledge toadette hasn't stopped appearing and she's clearly gendered and has her own name.

Yeah, T. Ode is fine.

I still wish they'd let the designers have more creative freedom with appearances though.

Like, I get that it's hyperbole and a joke, but I will say that's not entirely fair. Color Splash and Origami King had a little more variety than Sticker Star but it still pales in comparison to the older Toad designs.

Where's SPM in that pic with its "One" Toad?

Man, it really stinks to have to go through with this yet again with Mario. First it was the retconing of the Koopalings so they are now just minions of Bowser instead of his children, then it was Miyamoto's desire to remove as much story from the games as possible starting with Super Mario Galaxy 2 which would of course influence the direction of Paper Mario Sticker Star, then we got another pointless retcon that changed it so Mario and Paper Mario are now two completely different characters from different dimensions...and now this.

We may never get another epic story in a Mario game again. But the memories we have, of what once was, will likely last us a lifetime.

Timpani...do you remember the promise we made to each other that day?
Yes, I remember...if there was a place we could be happy together, we would find it.
Will you come with me to that place now?
Blumiere...Of course...I will always be with you...

And people complain Sonic's cast is littered with recolors. Those biggest "offenders" are merely a few of several other characters of proportional and characteristic variety; no two Sonic character look and act the exact same. Where as the best Mario can afford anymore for supporting characters is Blue Toad, Green Toad, Orange Toad, Pink Gold Toad, Toad in a cowboy hat, a crayon box, hyperrealistic NPC man, and Mr. Mook. And having characters appear from spinoffs outside of sports games is out of the question.

It's clear who the victor is here.

His stories may be hit and miss, be the key thing is that he tries.

The Nintendo higher ups have let their Mario in RPGs bias get the better of them, and overriden Paper Mario to steer away from those aspects while leaving M&L in the dust. Especally baffling when most every other spin off Mario seris gets to do what they want without issue.

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i think it's a little early to assume that. i mean, to my knowledge toadette hasn't stopped appearing and she's clearly gendered and has her own name.

@Diogenes

From the beginning Toadette's entire purpose is to be the female counterpart of the main Toad character, and consequentally be the token Smurfette in a society of Smurfs, making her the sole excuse to the Toad mandate. You're unlikely to go as far with someone like Old Toad vs Girl Toad. 

I'm pretty sure they're not that restrictive. Even for Nintendo, that would be ridiculous.

*looks it up*

...fucking lmao

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From the beginning Toadette's entire purpose is to be the female counterpart of the main Toad character, and consequentally be the token Smurfette in a society of Smurfs, making her the sole excuse to the Toad mandate. You're unlikely to go as far with someone like Old Toad vs Girl Toad. 

toadette is girl toad, toadsworth is old toad, i don't see what the difference is.

anyway this is an actually-accurate comparison of toad designs between games; clearly the guidelines changed between them but it's not "literally nothing but red toad" as people pretend.

This is bigger than what types of Toads we're allowed to see and anyone who's played the older games would know that. A Toad never actually made it into the party in the first 2 games specifically.

Goombella is one of my favorite Mario characters. She would literally not make it past the conception stage under Nintendo's current restrictions, which is pretty frustrating to think about. 

Diogenes, which design conventions do you personally find more interesting though?