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Let's Make Sense of Sonic Geography!


Natie

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This series has never shied away from changing and making things up, in fact, now we have a series that has changed planets. Most of this stuff is simply the devs changing their minds/forgetting things, but I wanna take on the challenge of unifying and mapping out this mess of a universe. I'll present my layout of the AS CLOSE TO CANNON AS POSSIBLE geography of Sonic's world(s), using as much official evidence as I can, and I'd like to know everyone's thoughts on anything missing or incorrect. Plus, your opinions! I'll be using {these brackets} for statements based only in theory or headcannon, usually to connect unexplained threads.

Let's start at the beginning.

Fantasy Earth

Spoiler

 

Image result for sonic unleashed earth 

Sega's fictional Earth, a planet similar to our own, but with many alternate features. It features not only humans, but anthropomorphic cartoon animals, living in a time period that seems a bit more futuristic and advanced than ours, judging by the fantastical machines that have been shown. It houses several countries that mirror those in the real world, but bear different names (China>Chu-nan, Europe>Spagonia, ect.). It has one moon, and an abandoned space colony in its orbit and a series of small, yet very significant islands floating in its Pacific Ocean.

 

The Chaos Isles 

Spoiler

 

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{-or, that's what I call them at least...} A series of islands within decent distance to each other, some normal, some artificial, some otherworldly and magical. Several of them are known for their connection to the Chaos Emeralds, being so close to their energy that many dimensional disturbances occur. Portals to the Emeralds' realm, The Special Zone, open up constantly, bizarre alien land forms and intelligent animals form there, even entire small planets warp in and out within its sphere of influence. {I would wonder, with their disconnected and warping-based properties, if these places even naturally came from earth at all. More on that later.} These are the primary locations of the classic games.

South Island

The stage of Sonic 1, disconnected from the earth, drifting about in the ocean. Small and humble, but containing lots of dimensional rifts and ancient ruins of thriving cultures of the past, it is rocky, jagged, mountainous place with lots of water, caves, and lush valleys. Its energy is only strong enough to reveal portals to 6 of the Chaos Emeralds.

West Side Island

A large, heavily populated, and ancient island that is is characterized by it's smooth and rolling hills. This place has tons ancient baggage, with ruins abound, and enough energy to easily access all seven Emeralds. Its caves run deep and its mountains run high enough to pass the clouds. Currently filled with lots of cities and industrial areas too, thanks to Eggman.

Angel Island

A massive, yet isolated land with a spotted history. Broken off from its former continent due to an incident with the Master Emerald, the island continues using that surge of energy to float in the air and preserve itself in safety. Tunnels, traps, ruins, and all sorts complex mechanism show a once thriving civilization. Population is limited to small, regular animals, and one last descendant of the Echidnas. Outside of its dense jungles, it has many strange, bipolar properties, as both a scorching desert and a frozen wasteland exists within the same island.

Flickie's Island

A similarly bipolar environment on an even smaller mass of land. It's used as a sort of hub for magical Flickies to travel between dimensions using giant rings.

Isolated Island & Newtrogic High Zone

A strange, small island that rose out of the sea, sparking the events of Chaotix. The place was uninhabited, leaving Eggman to coat nearly the entire place in his amusement-park-like Newtrogic High Zone. It holds a unique dimensional signature which leads to the "Chaos Rings" instead of the Chaos Emeralds. "Isolated Island" is the sole untouched area in that vicinity.

Mirage Island

{The partially-official name for the island in Sonic 4} A small island with so much similarity to South Island and bits of West Side that it's honestly unbelievable.

Eggman Island

A somewhat drab and tiny island that Eggman has all to himself, seen only when he captured and imprisoned Sonic, Ray, and Mighty on it. Very rocky and volcanic, with no know magical properties.

Cocoa Island

A small, rocky, but otherwise pretty place that Miles Prower is know to have lived on before his tenure on West Side. It sits atop a coral reef, and has enough connection to the Special Zone to attract the Battle Kukku Army.

Christmas Island

The birthplace of Sonic the Hedgehog. I hesitated to put it with the rest of these fantasy places due to it being directly based on a real life island. There's no knowledge of it having magical properties or simply being just like the normal Christmas Island (the only lead being it was described as "strange"), but nevertheless, it deserves mention for not only being the start of Sonic, but his rivalry with Eggman as well.

 

United Federations 
 

Spoiler

 

image.png.d704da94c3d16956b8ab1dfa0d5b1105.png

The Urban, North America-type country where many of the Adventure Era games take place, once Sonic and his friends decided to explore the humans' territory. There are several cities, a government, a military by the name of G.U.N., and many questionable architectural choices. {I'm going to posit that Sonic Heroes just had the characters visiting their Island homes again, as those environments are much different from the human lands and much more similar to the classic games' environments}

Station Square

A peaceful, New-York-like city on the eastern bay of the continent. It's a cheerful city with many attractions such as casinos, amusement parks and beach resorts. It become completely destroyed by Perfect Chaos.

The Mystic Ruins

An ancient area off the coast of Station Square that's popular with archaeologists for it's dense history and proximity to the city that's close enough to have a train ride there. It has a mysterious connection to the Echidna lore {Either 1. Angel Island fell very close to the Mystic Ruins, as the pre-rendered cutscene makes it look, 2. The majority that you explore in the game IS Angel Island and the people of SS were really quick to jump on it's tourism, evidenced by the presence of Ice Cap, Windy Valley (a very Chaos Isles type of place), Echidna ruins and the Emerald Alter area and it's mountains seen in the cutscene when knuckles is guarding it in the sky being connected to the main area by a tunnel in the mountain, or 3. It's the continent that Angel Island broke off from before. #2 makes the most sense to me but we should discuss.} The desert areas in Sonic Adventure 2 have similar Echidna connections and {could be connected to the same lad mass as Mystic Ruins}.

Central City

The Capital of the United Federations, a large and prosperous place where the President and many government institutions. Multiple games occur here.

Empire City

A bustling metropolis, and another New-York-type city that's more accurate to reality and less stylized than Station Square. A single stage during Sonic Unleashed with huge bridges and tall skyscrapers.

 

Sonic's World 

Spoiler

 

image.png.cbb3392fe47a8fdbc93433a2ddd4de41.png

Suddenly, by the point of Sonic Colors, all the main characters now live on a world of their own, populated entirely by cartoon animal people, with Eggman as the only human, living in very "Sonical" environments that you'd see on the Chaos Islands. It has one moon and an in-atmosphere satellite planetoid called The Lost Hex. It could easily be seen as a retcon or reboot, but the past sonic games' events are still acknowledged as having happened and Iizuka said they were two worlds that both exist. {And if you wanna give Sonic IDW some cred, as it's taking place in the games' universe, they refer to earth as "An entire planet" instead of "The entire planet", and Eggman saying he'd evacuate to another planet easily after ravishing this one. It's slight implication there was a travel, rather than just a random retcon. Now, our imaginations could run wild on any sort of unseen event that led to this, such as a Sonic X-style Chaos Control accident. My current idea is that, with the Emeralds already ripping holes between space, time and dimensions on Earth that can even bring in a whole planet for a brief time, the Emeralds could have warped a multitude of disconnected land chunks from another point in space (Sonic's World) many many years ago, and let life evolve (or even get warped in with the land) under the same conditions. With the high concept sci-fi knowledge this series is known for, one of them (or Eggman) would have learned of their ancestral home at some point. The motivations to return there could have been anything from an Eggman plot to get rid of them that accidentally stranded him too, to Sonic feeling bad that their antics have led to Earth getting broken to pieces, and deciding they should go back to where they belong, with Eggman obsessively chasing them there.}

 

Others

Spoiler

Little Planet

Image result for little planet sonic

A very small planet with rich and twisted alien life. Populated mostly by plants and flowers, with some animals. It comes from an unknown place in space, notable for it's anomaly of warping into the atmosphere of Earth for a month each year, then disappearing to wherever it came from. Being another planet, it is appropriately bizarre, and has it's own pocket dimensions holding Time Stones.

Special Stage/Secret Zone\Special Zone

image.png.be19964d4ab72a9b8e3d2d6ddaa28b70.png 

 A chaotic, ever changing, nonsensical subspace dimension that houses the Chaos Emeralds as well as some other alternatives. They, {or the Emeralds themselves} create a wide variety of challenging terrain to hide and protect the Emeralds, granting access only to those who can overcome it. It's most notable for its abstract, colorful empty space, but it can easily spawn all sorts of things, such as tracks, blocks, planetoids, land chunks, even what resembles cities and civilization. It's hard to think anyone actually lives here. 

Soleanna

A beautiful traditionalist nation next to the ocean and intertwined with rivers. {Being based on Venice, it's possibly located in Spagonia}

 

 

Phew, whadya think? I will edit this when receiving info i missed or didn't think about. 

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I don't have anything to add, but I get a kick out of seeing people document and make sense out of geographical locations in games, so nice work!

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First off, you should recognize that the games prior to Unleashed weren't made with Two-Worlds in mind.

The Mystic Ruins' Echinda City Remains at the least need to be seperate from Angel Island since Eggman's base and Big the Cat are there.

There are Echidna statues in Sand Ocean (which is where Eggman's pyramid base is). Conversely, you can see humans in Sandoplis Act 2's background hieroglyphics.

And of course parts of manuals and interviews mention Earth with elements like McDonalds and Christmas. 

 

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Thanks for writing all this out. It's very close to how I imagine things to be, likely because you were careful to base it on the games. Dang, I really wish the whole "two worlds" thing had never happened...it makes such a mess of things.

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If you’re looking for some more inspiration on how to chart these places, the Archie comics (primarily post-reboot) are a good base imo.

By the way, Unleashed’s Empire City probably belongs within the UF.

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Aren't isolated island and newtrogic high different locations?

You can see newtrogic high on the background of isolated island so i always thought they were just close.

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2 hours ago, Danzer said:

Aren't isolated island and newtrogic high different locations?

You can see newtrogic high on the background of isolated island so i always thought they were just close.

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from the few art we get, it seems to be a base he attached to the island by a road/bridge and so i assumed they were connected enough to count as one island. Though i could very easily be wrong and Isolated Island was the place they were hanging out on at the start. I'll address this.

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I think that the Mystic Ruins area is partially separated from Angel Island, but most of what you explore in the game is on Angel Island. The echidna city especially. Eggman's base is far in the background and connected to the area with a very long bridge; there is a huge cliff where the bridge is connected, and I think that's where Angel Island ends. Though I agree that some parts of Mystic Ruins may be pieces of Angel Island that have fallen from the sky in ancient times.

I also think that some places such as Angel Island and maybe some of the other Chaos Islands are parts of Sonic's world warped into the human world by chaos energy and portals. Angel Island may very well be able to travel between both dimensions randomly, or controlled by the Master Emerald.

Additionally, I think it's probably worth mentioning the Moon as a location. I know about the whole mess that SA2 introduced, but there are some (minor) events that happend on it, such as the extra final boss of Sonic Advance 1 and the mind controlling ray ending on it in Sonic Colors (something that was probably going to be used in a sequel but was forgotten for some reason). I have my theory that the broken moon fixed itself like Earth did after the events of Sonic Unleashed (planets are sentient and their "souls" are Gaia-like creatures), but that's just my headcanon (else, I'd take that thing that the broken half is hidden to the other side).

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Big the Cat's (who lives in the city area) intro cutscene (which has to be right after Chaos is unleashed) has Chaos falling from the sky as a twinkle. As in, he was high up on Angel Island and later then jumped off it or the Egg Carrier. Not near by in height. And there's Gerald knowing what the altar looked like (pointing to first-hand knowledge, something he can get if the city is down on the ground).

Point is, taking the game at face-value (and also Knuckles' cut dialogue calling the city area "nostalgic" like he had no familiarity with it even with living on Angel Island all his life) points to the city being separate from Angel Island.

 

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12 hours ago, Iko said:

Additionally, I think it's probably worth mentioning the Moon as a location. I know about the whole mess that SA2 introduced, but there are some (minor) events that happend on it, such as the extra final boss of Sonic Advance 1 and the mind controlling ray ending on it in Sonic Colors (something that was probably going to be used in a sequel but was forgotten for some reason). I have my theory that the broken moon fixed itself like Earth did after the events of Sonic Unleashed (planets are sentient and their "souls" are Gaia-like creatures), but that's just my headcanon (else, I'd take that thing that the broken half is hidden to the other side).

the official excuse was that the moon was simply rotated on the not-broken side in other games, so I guess I would have to add it to the lore that their moon spins on it's own axis? lol, that has got to make for some wild tides.

9 hours ago, Almar said:

Big the Cat's (who lives in the city area) intro cutscene (which has to be right after Chaos is unleashed) has Chaos falling from the sky as a twinkle. As in, he was high up on Angel Island and later then jumped off it or the Egg Carrier. Not near by in height. And there's Gerald knowing what the altar looked like (pointing to first-hand knowledge, something he can get if the city is down on the ground).

Point is, taking the game at face-value (and also Knuckles' cut dialogue calling the city area "nostalgic" like he had no familiarity with it even with living on Angel Island all his life) points to the city being separate from Angel Island.

 Oh yeah, Big was one of the major things that really confused my theories, given why i just listed 3 possibilities lol.

5 hours ago, MetalSkulkBane said:

Brave attempt. At least third on this site

Yeah, I was noticing some fan made maps and threads in my research, but I didnt want to rip anybody off so I just wanted to but the locations together in a simple list and connect them from scratch.

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The jungle area with the temple and Big’s hut is absolutely part of the Mystic Ruins itself and not Angel Island. I believe the overall implication is that Angel Island was a part of MR’s landmass in ancient times before it broke away and rose into the sky (leaving the temple behind in the process), ergo when it landed next to MR in SA1 it basically returned to its original spot.

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