The Classic/Modern Character Embargo

[Blue Blood]

5 hours ago, Razule said:

But Modern Sonic has had 2D games, so what would really separate them if Modern-exclusive characters could crossover into the Classic-style? Literally just their designs? Just make them alternate skins in a "modern" 2D game at that point. 

Modern and Classic incorporates two things; artstyle/presentation and gameplay style. I don't like recognising Classic Sonic and Modern Sonic as two distinct characters. They were always the same character represented in different ways until recently. It's just Sonic. If a game has Classic gameplay and Classic presentation, just use Classic styled character designs. And if it's got more Modern stylings, use Modern character designs. 

I don't think that there should be hard distinction about which characters can appear where.

[Salamander]

The Classic/Modern embargo forbidding characters in one side appearing on the other side is incoherent, because:

1. It doesn't apply to Sonic, Eggman, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Metal Sonic, Chaotix, Green Hill Zone, and any number of badnik designs;
2. The moment the split was introduced they started crossing over the two sides every few years anyway!

There is no split, Sonic Team just has a confused attitude to their own history.  Just designate the two sides as past and present, and if there's no plan to use a character again, let the comics and spin-off material do what they like with them.

[KnuxDLX]

I’m just laughing at the timely use of the term “embargo” and I can’t even disagree that that’s what this mandate technically resembles.

[Blue Blood]

32 minutes ago, Salamander said:

It doesn't apply to Sonic, Eggman, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Metal Sonic, Chaotix, Green Hill Zone, and any number of badnik designs.

The Badniks are weird case. When S4E1 reintroduced a bunch of Classic Badniks, it gave them all Modern Metal Sonic-esque designs, which basically amounted to adding superfluous details like lines and screws, to make them look more believably robotic. Then Colours and Generations rolled along a little while later and completely redesigned the Badniks to look more aggressive and detailed without sticking as close to the original designs as S4 did. It applied these designs to all eras represented in Generations, but particularly the Classic era as thats where Badniks are mostly seen. S4E2 then went back to the S4E1 style. Lost World eventually changed things up again by taking the S1 artwork style and using that to redesign all the Classic Badnik designs in an even cartoonier, more simplistic style.

And you know what? That's fine. That's all good. If they can change up the designs of recurring enemies to suit whatever game they're in, they can do the same with the characters. They happily change up the artstyle of pretty much everything, but for whatever reason the character designs are now untouchable.

[Iko]

6 hours ago, Pengi said:

As The KKM said, the divide between the Classic Series and the Modern Series has always existed. In licensed products for example, it's forbidden to mix and match the classic and modern characters, logos etc. It's why Jakks Pacific has two different packaging styles for their toys.

It existed in the form of a different art style, and when product designers work on a specific product, they must be consistent with the chosen art style: offcourse you can't make a box bundle of Sonic figures where you put modern Sonic, classic Tails and movie Knuckles randomly together without a logic.

This is unrelated to the point of some characters being part of one continuity or another.

Not just the Chaotix, also other characters such as Metal Sonic crossed over from the classic series to modern and it was perfectly fine until very recently. I don't know if badniks and mechs such as the Death Egg robot count as characters too, though those are constantly taken from classic and shoehorned in modern without any hesitation. In Sonic Adventure, Amy references the events of Sonic CD, and there is an easter egg of several different models of Sonic-robots in Eggman's base, as a reference to Mecha/Silver Sonic; Flickies are also in the game, despite the modern redesign has brought a more realistic look to the tiny animals. Lost World brought back the classic animals in the modern universe, and Lost World happend way after Heroes.

6 hours ago, Pengi said:

Iizuka immediately says that characters like Fang, Ray and Bark are "from before Sonic Adventure", "we don't really use these characters anymore" and that the posters in Sonic Generations were only there because it was the 20th anniversary, they were celebrating the entire history of the series and wanted to put a smile on people's faces.

"We don't use these characters anymore" is a bit different than "Those characters are stuck in the classic continuity and we don't make classic games anymore". It just says that they are simply neglected, not stuck in a separate universe. They said the same of Big the Cat a few years ago.

[Kuzu]

As mentioned, the embargo is even weirder since they're selective with who it applies to. The Chaotix are "modern only" characters due to their redesigns and therefore cannot appear in Classic products.

But that rule apparently doesn't apply to Sonic, Tails, Amy, Knuckles, Eggman, and Metal Sonic despite all of them receiving redesigns too. They're all used interchangeably, yet the Chaotix have this weird "modern" designation.

 

You can probably internalize it as "well Sonic and co are thr main characters so they're exempt" but then they defeats the whole purpose of the split if some characters are interchangeable and others aren't. If they're alternate counterparts, then does that mean every Modern character has a Classic counterpart and vice versa? There's no distinction between what separates Classic and Modern besides the weird arbitrary standards that Sega established.

[Mauro Fonseca]

No, AAUK said the same of Big the Cat a few years ago. Different from Iizuka saying it.

 

At this point you're basically arguing "there was never a division because Sonic got to exist". Yes, the flickies made it through, Mecha Sonic (not Silver Sonic, forget Archie, forget old localisation, Silver Sonic was never a thing) made it through, Amy made it through. Obviously it's not hermetical that "nothing whatsoever from classic games can make it to modern" or there wouldn't be a modern at all, the franchise would've ended at Sonic 3d Blast Saturn.

 

Luckily, that's not what we're having to repeatedly explain over and over. What we keep saying is, any classic game material not by Sonic Team or people who by the Dreamcast had become Sonic Team is useable by them but willingly chosen not to. Sonic, Tails, Eggman, Amy, Charmy, Espio, Vector, Knuckles, Death Egg Robos, Death Egg, all that was created by Sonic Team (and again, by Sonic Team here we understand people who would become Sonic Team, so yes, STI counts here since we mean "people at STI who later joined Sonic Team", so Sonic 2-3-K count here), all that made it through. Fang was created by Aspect, an external company- goes unused. Mighty was created internally at Sega but by someone who ended up not joining Sonic Team- goes unused. Bean was created by Sega AM2- goes unused. And these characters have been unused for decades now, and they've been considered forgotten characters, and classic-specific logos and art styles are forbidden from being mixed with modern, and this has been the status quo for longer than some people participating in this discussion have existed. And no, they don't care about continuity, because continuity is secondary and if you want to bring continuity over then that's even more reason to not use those characters- Sonic the Fighters has 8 emeralds, 8-bit games have 6 and are always set in South Island, etc. If anything, the characters now being able to be used in Classic-specific products is in spite of continuity.

Your mind is stuck in the notion of "stuck in a separate universe", not wanting to understand that their status quo before was "stuck in nonexistence".

 

tldr- again, forget Archie. Archie got its own standard and rules through contractual shenanigans over decades. It's gone. Those aren't happening again.

Everything else in the franchise has worked under this logic. Classic things can be brought back, but are intentionally chosen not to. Now that there's a revived Classic-specific brand, all those things that would've been banned otherwise, get to live there instead.

8 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

As mentioned, the embargo is even weirder since they're selective with who it applies to. The Chaotix are "modern only" characters due to their redesigns and therefore cannot appear in Classic products.

But that rule apparently doesn't apply to Sonic, Tails, Amy, Knuckles, Eggman, and Metal Sonic despite all of them receiving redesigns too. They're all used interchangeably, yet the Chaotix have this weird "modern" designation.

 

You can probably internalize it as "well Sonic and co are thr main characters so they're exempt" but then they defeats the whole purpose of the split if some characters are interchangeable and others aren't. If they're alternate counterparts, then does that mean every Modern character has a Classic counterpart and vice versa? There's no distinction between what separates Classic and Modern besides the weird arbitrary standards that Sega established.

The Chaotix weren't just redesigned, they were outright recreated. Amy in Classic or Modern is the same character, same with Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles. Classic Vector is a religious man looking for an island after a vision from god, Classic Charmy is a brooding teenager who runs fast and runs the world for flowers to smell, Classic Espio has nothing to do with ninjas and is a hardboiled detective. They're irreconcilable with the Modern versions.

 

Now, could they just choose to ignore the classic personalities? Sure, same way how they could choose to ignore all this. But they clearly don't, and there's a clear logic to it. The characters of the Chaotix, the detective agency, their relation to each other, their personalities, are fully modern characters. Yes, they're based on existing Classic characters, but their situation would be more comparable to making a Classic Shadow.

 

I'm not saying you can't complain about these rules, I've even agreed myself that I'd enjoy seeing Classic characters in Modern. But acting like they're new, or inconsistent, is just plain wrong- there's a clear thoroughline to it that becomes clear when you accept 1- Sonic Team didn't create or oversee all of Classic Sonic and thus they don't see a lot of it as their own, and 2- Archie is an outlier that should not be used as the example of how anything works

[Wraith]

13 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

As mentioned, the embargo is even weirder since they're selective with who it applies to. The Chaotix are "modern only" characters due to their redesigns and therefore cannot appear in Classic products.

But that rule apparently doesn't apply to Sonic, Tails, Amy, Knuckles, Eggman, and Metal Sonic despite all of them receiving redesigns too. They're all used interchangeably, yet the Chaotix have this weird "modern" designation.

 

You can probably internalize it as "well Sonic and co are thr main characters so they're exempt" but then they defeats the whole purpose of the split if some characters are interchangeable and others aren't. If they're alternate counterparts, then does that mean every Modern character has a Classic counterpart and vice versa? There's no distinction between what separates Classic and Modern besides the weird arbitrary standards that Sega established.

The purpose of the split was a merchandise line for Classic Fans. Classic fans like Sonic, Eggman, Tails, Knuckles, Amy and Metal Sonic because they're the focus of the whole core of the brand IE: the classic games. They demonstrably don't like/don't know Shadow, Blaze, and Silver, so they're out. They probably figured that the Chaotix's reintroduction in Heroes/X superseded that 32X game nobody played in terms of the popular perception of them, so they're modern characters. I think this was mostly the right call and am thankful for it because the alternative is them validating Knuckles Chaotix and locking the funniest Sonic characters in the classic box.

Anyway, my point is that this is a business decision, not a creative one. They're picking and choosing based on who is most associated with classic games/art so they can profit off of people's positive memories of it.

[Dr. Mechano]

Just now, Wraith said:

They probably figured that the Chaotix's reintroduction in Heroes/X superseded that 32X game nobody played in terms of the popular perception of them, so they're modern characters. I think this was mostly the right call and am thankful for it because the alternative is them validating Knuckles Chaotix and locking the funniest Sonic characters in the classic box.
 

I just wish they could be in both, and that both appearances "counted" for the characters.

I'm glad the Chaotix exist in the modern games. They're extremely likable characters and I'd love to see the games do more with them. I'm not glad that Iizuka doesn't consider the original Knuckles Chaotix canon though; the Chaotix having some history with Knuckles (and Mighty, who's consigned to classic-only appearances) is a cool aspect of their team, and it's a little disappointing that it's been abandoned. 

[Wraith]

3 minutes ago, Dr. Mechano said:

I just wish they could be in both, and that both appearances "counted" for the characters.

I'm glad the Chaotix exist in the modern games. They're extremely likable characters and I'd love to see the games do more with them. I'm not glad that Iizuka doesn't consider the original Knuckles Chaotix canon though; the Chaotix having some history with Knuckles (and Mighty, who's consigned to classic-only appearances) is a cool aspect of their team, and it's a little disappointing that it's been abandoned. 

I wish they would loosen up too, but I feel like I haven't agreed with anything they've done with this universe since 2010. It is what it is.

[SBR2]

I honestly kinda wish the Chaotix didn't fall into this. It'd be kinda fun to see the Classic Chaotix and try snd give them distinct characteristics from the modern counterparts. 

Honestly if they're going to insist on this split universe thing I honestly think they should have the Mania Classic Universe be filled with the Game Gear games and stuff like Knuckles Chaotix. Whatever isn't considereda part of Sonic's past pre-Time Eater basically. 

[Kuzu]

21 minutes ago, The KKM said:

No, AAUK said the same of Big the Cat a few years ago. Different from Iizuka saying it.

 

At this point you're basically arguing "there was never a division because Sonic got to exist". Yes, the flickies made it through, Mecha Sonic (not Silver Sonic, forget Archie, forget old localisation, Silver Sonic was never a thing) made it through, Amy made it through. Obviously it's not hermetical that "nothing whatsoever from classic games can make it to modern" or there wouldn't be a modern at all, the franchise would've ended at Sonic 3d Blast Saturn.

 

Luckily, that's not what we're having to repeatedly explain over and over. What we keep saying is, any classic game material not by Sonic Team or people who by the Dreamcast had become Sonic Team is useable by them but willingly chosen not to. Sonic, Tails, Eggman, Amy, Charmy, Espio, Vector, Knuckles, Death Egg Robos, Death Egg, all that was created by Sonic Team (and again, by Sonic Team here we understand people who would become Sonic Team, so yes, STI counts here since we mean "people at STI who later joined Sonic Team", so Sonic 2-3-K count here), all that made it through. Fang was created by Aspect, an external company- goes unused. Mighty was created internally at Sega but by someone who ended up not joining Sonic Team- goes unused. Bean was created by Sega AM2- goes unused. And these characters have been unused for decades now, and they've been considered forgotten characters, and classic-specific logos and art styles are forbidden from being mixed with modern, and this has been the status quo for longer than some people participating in this discussion have existed. And no, they don't care about continuity, because continuity is secondary and if you want to bring continuity over then that's even more reason to not use those characters- Sonic the Fighters has 8 emeralds, 8-bit games have 6 and are always set in South Island, etc. If anything, the characters now being able to be used in Classic-specific products is in spite of continuity.

Your mind is stuck in the notion of "stuck in a separate universe", not wanting to understand that their status quo before was "stuck in nonexistence".

 

tldr- again, forget Archie. Archie got its own standard and rules through contractual shenanigans over decades. It's gone. Those aren't happening again.

Everything else in the franchise has worked under this logic. Classic things can be brought back, but are intentionally chosen not to. Now that there's a revived Classic-specific brand, all those things that would've been banned otherwise, get to live there instead.

The Chaotix weren't just redesigned, they were outright recreated. Amy in Classic or Modern is the same character, same with Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles. Classic Vector is a religious man looking for an island after a vision from god, Classic Charmy is a brooding teenager who runs fast and runs the world for flowers to smell, Classic Espio has nothing to do with ninjas and is a hardboiled detective. They're irreconcilable with the Modern versions.

 

Now, could they just choose to ignore the classic personalities? Sure, same way how they could choose to ignore all this. But they clearly don't, and there's a clear logic to it. The characters of the Chaotix, the detective agency, their relation to each other, their personalities, are fully modern characters. Yes, they're based on existing Classic characters, but their situation would be more comparable to making a Classic Shadow.

 

I'm not saying you can't complain about these rules, I've even agreed myself that I'd enjoy seeing Classic characters in Modern. But acting like they're new, or inconsistent, is just plain wrong- there's a clear thoroughline to it that becomes clear when you accept 1- Sonic Team didn't create or oversee all of Classic Sonic and thus they don't see a lot of it as their own, and 2- Archie is an outlier that should not be used as the example of how anything works

See, I find that logic faulty since Amy, for all intents and purposes, is an entirely new character from Adventure onwards. It was Adventure when Sega started treating her like a major character and they never looked back. So I was just wondering why the same didn't apply to the Chaotix.

 

But as @Wraith said, its just a marketing ploy I guess. Amy is a more important character for the brand, so she's exempt along with the other major characters. Its just really annoying from an artistic standpoint than from a corporate one.

[Mauro Fonseca]

Her character before Adventure was "fangirl of Sonic with hammer who chases him around and is the cute girl of the group". Her character after is the same. There's different nuances, mostly due to Classic not having much way to show nuance to begin with, but it's overall the same thing and nowhere near "Is Charmy a 6 year old hyper kid living with two detectives or an edgy teenager running around the world".

 

This is if anything the one time it's not a marketing ploy. Tons of Sonic is marketing. The choice to not use these characters is clearly personal to Sonic Team instead. Compare to Miyamoto not using Wario since he didn't create Wario. It legit just boils to "we don't want to use the stuff we didn't make".

[Diogenes]

If people are looking for some kind of perfect objective rubric for who is allowed in which dimension...it doesn't exist. Sega/Sonic Team picks and chooses which characters they want to use in which version of the series, guided strongly but ultimately only in part by which era they were created for. Yeah, they specifically redesigned the Chaotix as "modern" characters and there's yet to be any sign of classic versions still existing, but that's not some kind of fundamental breakdown of the whole classic/modern divide, a flaw revealing the whole thing as a sham...because ultimately they can just do whatever they want, make whatever exceptions they feel are justified.

[Kuzu]

Amy was also way younger too, which is kind of a big deal :V

 

But whatever, I don't feel like trying to listen to justifications for creative decisions that I don't agree with. It what it is at this point. 

[Pengi]

54 minutes ago, The KKM said:

It legit just boils to "we don't want to use the stuff we didn't make".

Yep. In addition to the characters being too similar to Sonic, or not very well defined in general.

http://info.sonicretro.org/Takashi_Iizuka_interview_by_EGM_(February_3,_2004)

 

Quote

EGM: Team Chaotix's gameplay is quite different than the other three teams'. Why did you decide to bring back these characters and give them fun, silly goals like rounding up hermit crabs?

Takashi Iizuka: In my mind, I didn't bring back the Team Chaotix characters from the past -- instead, they're new characters who happen to fit into the game. I wanted to create at least one team that was totally different from how Team Sonic talks and acts. Those three characters, Charmy, Espio, and Vector... they're so unique in their actions, personalities, and goals. They add a lot of flavor and variety to the overall picture. There's also the fact that those characters have never been used by Sonic Team -- we weren't involved with Knuckles Chaotix; some other internal sega Development team did that. So it's not a matter of bringing up old characters... we recreated those characters from the ground up. We want Sonic to be Sonic, and for the others to be supporting characters. I'm very happy with the way Team Chaotix turned out, so I hope they'll be brought back to another title in the future. You'll see more of them!

 

Quote

EGM: Now that you've brought back some neglected characters (like Big the Cat and Vector the Crocodile), do you plan to bring back even more obscure Sonic characters in the future? Like maybe… Mighty the Armadillo?

Takashi Iizuka: Those old-school characters are all somewhat similar to the way that Sonic is: they're fast-action cool characters. Even Charmy and Espio used to be like Sonic…for this title, though, we brought them back in a very different way.

https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2017/06/10/more-burning-questions-about-the-sonic-the-hedgehog-franchise-answered.aspx

Quote

Has anybody noticed that Mighty the Armadillo is missing?

Iizuka: Mighty is a part of the Classic world and the Classic group of characters, and some of the Chaotix did get interpreted for the Modern vision of the games. However, Mighty still exists in the Classic world, so maybe we'll see him in the future in some Classic iteration.

Hoshino: How popular is he? [laughs]

http://web.archive.org/web/20180502185355/https://www.siliconera.com/2018/05/01/sonic-mania-plus-producer-mighty-ray-made-no-plans-sequel/

Quote

Did you personally want to do something for Mighty, Iizuka-san?

Iizuka: If anything, to me personally Mighty and Ray were “sealed characters” that would never see light of day in a video game. However, this time around we wanted to make a title packed with all kinds of references for all the special manias [fans] out there, and the stage was set to have those two make an appearance. So I figured we could unseal them [laughs].

 

If I recall correctly, at a Summer of Sonic many years ago, Iizuka said that if any of the old characters were brought back, then they'd need to be reimagined like Team Chaotix were, which is consistent with all of these comments.

[Razule]

How much of the original Sonic Team is even left? It must mostly be new people at this point.

I didn't know that aspect of it before, so that explains some things. Not using them because "Sonic Team didn't make them" still falls flat when they aren't the same Sonic Team anymore.

[Pengi]

They didn't want to use them, for all of the reasons stated above.

But now they are being used, as part of the Classic Sonic brand.

 

This is an improvement from where things were in 2011, when the Sonic Tweet Twitter game completely excluded SegaSonic the Hedgehog, Chaotix and Sonic the Fighters from its card sets. The Sonic & Tails 2 and Sonic Drift sets included every character except Fang, making it clear that these characters (Mighty, Ray, Bark, Bean, Fang and the classic versions of Vector, Charmy and Espio) were intentionally being buried.

[Domino]

On 6/27/2021 at 8:40 AM, The KKM said:

The Chaotix weren't just redesigned, they were outright recreated. Amy in Classic or Modern is the same character, same with Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles. Classic Vector is a religious man looking for an island after a vision from god, Classic Charmy is a brooding teenager who runs fast and runs the world for flowers to smell, Classic Espio has nothing to do with ninjas and is a hardboiled detective. They're irreconcilable with the Modern versions.

I'm gonna have to stop you there. I get that the JP character profiles from the Chaotix manual aren't a perfect match with the characterizations of the crew we've known since Heroes, but I think "irreconcilable" is a stretch.

Vector's love of music and dancing is both listed in his bio and shown in his debut game's idle animation. Lo and behold, the first thing we see Vector doing in his reintroduction in Sonic Heroes is, once again, headbanging to music with his headphones. His optimism isn't played up quite as much as it was originally, but he still kept that jaunty vibe to him. His modern tendency to take on work for free out of the goodness of his heard lines up with the "strength and kindness" described in his classic profile. His love of basketball and sports drinks never came up again, but neither did Tails having a favorite car.

In Espio's case, I find it strange that you'd list "hardboiled detective" as a difference, since he never really stopped being that. I wouldn't be surprised if that trait of his was what inspired the detective angle for Team Chaotix as a whole. And while his association with Ninjas was something introduced in Heroes, he did have "combat training" listed as one of his hobbies originally. "Combat training" to "ninja training" isn't a big leap, if it's even a leap at all. And that suspicious side-to-side look he gives in his Chaotix idle animation doesn't feel at all out of place for his cautious modern characterization. Out of the three of them, I'd say Espio changed the least.

With Charmy, yeah, this one's got discrepancies. Charmy's modern incarnation certainly isn't mature, nor is he really all that prideful. Not sure if your "brooding teenager" description is accurate, since his JP Chaotix profile doesn't give an age. The speedster traits described in his classic profile do somewhat line up with his modern-day hyperactivity, though. Somewhat. Come to think of it, the only one of classic Charmy's listed traits that actually shows through his in-game animations is his speediness.

So, yeah, it's not like they threw everything out and started from scratch when modernizing the Chaotix. Some stuff got added and changed, but I don't think their old three-sentence character bios totally fly in the face of their modern characterizations.

[batson]

On 6/27/2021 at 3:47 PM, Wraith said:

The purpose of the split was a merchandise line for Classic Fans. Classic fans like Sonic, Eggman, Tails, Knuckles, Amy and Metal Sonic because they're the focus of the whole core of the brand IE: the classic games. They demonstrably don't like/don't know Shadow, Blaze, and Silver, so they're out. They probably figured that the Chaotix's reintroduction in Heroes/X superseded that 32X game nobody played in terms of the popular perception of them, so they're modern characters. I think this was mostly the right call and am thankful for it because the alternative is them validating Knuckles Chaotix and locking the funniest Sonic characters in the classic box.

Anyway, my point is that this is a business decision, not a creative one. They're picking and choosing based on who is most associated with classic games/art so they can profit off of people's positive memories of it.

I'm honestly not so sure about Amy regarding that idea. A lot of classic fans did not grow up with Amy since, similar to what you mentioned regarding the Chaotix, her only significant apperance back in those days was in a game that hardly anybody played because it was on an add-on that hardly anybody owned. And she was also litteraly non-existant in terms of merchandising. As far as Sega of America were concerned, Amy did not exist. The same could be said for Metal Sonic, but honestly, I think a lot of casual fans who grew up in the classic era straight up confuses him with the two robotic Sonic's featured in the main Mega Drive series. It's all "that Sonic-robot" as far as people know. But as for Amy, yeah, I think a lot of first generation Sonic fans who are now in their 30's and 40's percieve the character as "one of those annoying modern Sonic characters" similar to Shadow or Big.

[Pengi]

Amy got merchandise in Japan. Sonic CD was also available on PC from 1996, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that version outsold the Mega-CD release. They would want a girl character in their Classic Sonic merchandise regardless, even if Amy is less popular than Sonic, Tails and Knuckles.

[Your Vest Friend]

Amy actually had surprisingly a lot in the Classic era, we didn't really see it because most of it was obscure in the West, moreso the US (either through non-translation or it not being promoted).

Man, I don't see any reason why SEGA of America would want to hide Amy's existence, it wasn't like they were trying to push anyone else as the lead heroine of the Sonic franchise at the time.

[Dr. Mechano]

7 hours ago, Your Vest Friend said:

Man, I don't see any reason why SEGA of America would want to hide Amy's existence, it wasn't like they were trying to push anyone else as the lead heroine of the Sonic franchise at the time.

I have to wonder how many people were actually fooled by that "Princess Sally" localization in Sonic CD's manual.

[King Scoopa Koopa]

8 hours ago, Dr. Mechano said:

I have to wonder how many people were actually fooled by that "Princess Sally" localization in Sonic CD's manual.

Or the magazine ad:

[Dr. Mechano]

23 minutes ago, KingScoopaKoopa said:

Or the magazine ad:

60 levels?

I guess... if you really stretch the definition of "level," you could get 60 by taking the...

• Number of zones: 7
• Multiply that by 2 for each zone's first and second acts (boss acts will be handled separately for reasons I'll explain). So 7 x 2 = 14 so far.
• Multiply those 14 by the 4 possible time periods in each stage (past, present, good future, and bad future). 14 x 4 = 56
• Now take the 7 Act 3 stages for each zone and multiply that by 2 for the good and bad future variant of each (boss stages don't have past or present variations which is why they're handled separately); 7*2 = 14
• Add the 14 possible boss stages to the 56 possible stage acts: 56+14 = 70 stages, I guess. 

Still somewhat misleading advertising.