Sonic Advetnure vs Sonic Adventure 2

[flamepanther]

Actually they're on Mobius the whole time. The Sonic comics explain all of it.

The ones that are written by the Archie staff and not by Sonic Team, STI, or anyone at Sega? Yeah, you could go with that. Or you could go with the early Sonic game literature in Japan that I've been told places him on Earth. Or the Sonic anime OAV/"movie" that happens on someplace called "Planet Freedom" which seems to be built above the ruins of Earth. Or the material from Sega from Sonic Adventure onwards that places the characters on Earth. ...and so on...

The current canon (it you could call it that) from Sega, per the materials that came with the Sonic 10th Anniversary golden disc set, places Sonic's birthplace on Christmas Island (which is a real place, and a territory of Australia) on Earth.

[Flake]

Ascribing any form of continuity to the game franchises of the late 80's / early 90's is pretty much a futile activity. Sonic suffers from the same issues that Zelda, Street Fighter, and Megaman does: Without laying out the rules of what is and isn't canon from the get-go you wind up with a mess that exists solely to give the fanbase something to fight about.

[flamepanther]

Ascribing any form of continuity to the game franchises of the late 80's / early 90's is pretty much a futile activity. Sonic suffers from the same issues that Zelda, Street Fighter, and Megaman does: Without laying out the rules of what is and isn't canon from the get-go you wind up with a mess that exists solely to give the fanbase something to fight about.

Pretty much true--although some of these franchises (Contra, Rockman) actually have pretty decent continuity in Japan. Continuity problems in those two serires in particular came from earlier Western attempts to re-write the original story--changes that were then either forgotten about, or could not be easily forced onto the sequels. Other series surely suffered this as well.

Mega Man continuity is pretty solid in the West as well, as long as you ignore the junk about human experiments and Mega Man being a cyborg from the materials included with the first game.

[Original_Name]

I personally always saw the environments as taking place on the ruins of some civilization gone by in the original games, a la Nausicaa. The totem poles and other tribal insignia speckled around the first game, along with areas such as Chemical Plant Zone and Oil Ocean which were metropolises rendered uninhabitable by... y'know, chemicals and oils, pointed towards a land that was once ruled by humans (as I don't believe that Flickies and the like were living in those sky-scrapers), but the humans had more or less fucked things up for themselves one way or the other, and the animals sort of took over their own way.

This was reinforced in some ways by the Sonic OVA and its Land of Darkness (I believe that's what they called it?) the story of which, to my understanding, was overseen by Sega to some extent, although I kind of wish they'd just left the president and his daughter out of it. I liked the idea of Dr. Robotnik being the last human being left. I mean, that's an incredibly good villain if you ask me... lots of people would turn into psychotic egomaniacs if they were the last human being on Earth -- and there's a really great little statement in that try as he might, he can never overcome nature with his machines, which leech off the energy of the natural world. And yet he continues to erect monuments "in his own image" anyway, as humans are prone to doing -- displaying, without having to explicitly spell it out, the precise cause of human beings' extinction in that world. I guess I applied sentiments from Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" to it a bit, if anyone's familiar with that series.

I was always really intrigued by Sonic the Hedgehog's world... it hit me the same way Panzer Dragoon's did... the place was full of this strange history, but the levels never got around to telling you, nor did they ever really intend to tell you, what exactly was going on in them. You just sort of fly by these little fragments of what the world is and study them, piecing the abstract bits together with your imagination. I was really let down by the way the Adventure games handled the environment, to me it was like how the environment of the Super Mario Bros. movie hit alot of people... then again, it's probably most likely that I just tried to make the original Sonic games alot smarter than they really were.

[flamepanther]

I personally always saw... [snip]

You're probably not all that far off from what Sonic Team had in mind. I recall reading that they wanted to set up a theme of nature conservation versus industrial expansion and pollution. However, most of that uninhabitable wasteland is probably supposed to be Eggman's doing.

Dr. Robotnik _loves_ machines. He loves them so much that his idea of a perfect world would be to have it full of _nothing_ but machines. He thinks they are beautiful and he likes that he can control them. A genuine genius megalomaniac, he spends all of his time trying to replace the natural world with his beautiful machines He is not very concerned about saving the planet (being a notorious polluter), and he particularly likes the idea of exploiting the oceans for their riches...

Maybe this wasn't Sega's intention with the earlier games, but really, to say that the Death Egg games and the Adventure games take place in the same time and place as the Death Egg games just seems like an outrageously sloppy retro-con if you ask me.

I was going to respond to how you said there weren't any Emerald Hill Zones on present day Earth, and I was going to point out that there also aren't any places like Windy Valley or Speed Highway either... but seeing how you erased that part, I guess you realized that.

Anyway, I don't see how you can say it's that outrageous. The first three Sonic games were located on only three small islands (South Island, Westside Island, Angel Island) out of an entire world we never get to see. We have no way of knowing what the rest of that world is like, nor any indication that it couldn't be like what we're presented with in Sonic Adventure. It's pretty clear from the story sequences in SA 1 & 2 that while the setting is Earth, it is definitely not supposed to be our Earth, or at least not present day. Past cataclysms on a global scale are still hinted at, so it's not that far off from the world you imagined before--there are just a lot more human survivors and habitable cities than you expected.

And that makes sense, doesn't it? Someone's got to be around to build and maintain the shiny new city/technological environments like Spring Yard, Casino Night, and Collision Chaos, right? Eggman can't be living in whole cities by himself, and shiny, clean environments really aren't his style.

[Original_Name]

Haha, you'll have to forgive me, I'm not used to people on forums who are quite so thorough as yourself -- I really enjoy it, this has made for a far more enlightening conversation on Sonic the Hedgehog than I ever thought I'd have with a sane, rational person. Anyway, the "outrageously sloppy" part is that the first level of Sonic Adventure 2 is pretty obviously supposed to be San Francisco, which is why I assumed it was supposed to be set on actual, at least near-present-day Earth -- it seemed to me that they halfway decided to make it on present-day Earth, but decided to carry over junk from the earlier games such as floating islands and whatnot. I guess they don't say specifically that it's San Francisco, but I mean come on... it's freakin' San Francisco. Haha, and YES, that's exactly why I edited my post.

Anyway, I'm really glad that that actually was their original intention with the storyline. I'd always gotten a really great, non-pretentious environmentalist vibe from the games, but people just looked at me like I was crazy when I would stay stuff like that.

And honestly, I see the logic in there being other humans about who created cities like Spring Yard Zone and whatnot -- in my young mind I just assumed Robotnik hadn't fully gotten around to converting them into factories of just plain crazy amounts of destruction yet. The fact of the matter is that the idea of a post-apocalyptic "Mobius" with the last remaining human being on the planet being a raving fucking lunatic who plasters his face on everything as he rampantly destroys what's left of the natural world is just so fucking rad I have a hard time giving it up. I suppose that'll just have to be my private interpretation born from the selective omission of completely canon details until I take over Sega.

[Jrecee]

Sonic games have been made by a bazillion different people over 20 years, not to mention the different takes from cartoons/comics/etc. There's no logical basis behind most of it so there's no point in trying to figure it out. Even the 6 star wars movies are filled with innacuracies and plot holes, and those were created by one guy who likes to pretend the entire story spontaneously formed in his mind as a whole.

As for the music, I think all past sonic music is brilliant when compared to that god awful pop/punk/more pop/autotuned crap from the Sonic Colors trailer.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Actually they're on Mobius the whole time. The Sonic comics explain all of it.

The ones that are written by the Archie staff and not by Sonic Team, STI, or anyone at Sega? Yeah, you could go with that. Or you could go with the early Sonic game literature in Japan that I've been told places him on Earth. Or the Sonic anime OAV/"movie" that happens on someplace called "Planet Freedom" which seems to be built above the ruins of Earth. Or the material from Sega from Sonic Adventure onwards that places the characters on Earth. ...and so on...

The current canon (it you could call it that) from Sega, per the materials that came with the Sonic 10th Anniversary golden disc set, places Sonic's birthplace on Christmas Island (which is a real place, and a territory of Australia) on Earth.

Sega/Sonic Team has observed the Sonic comics continuity as the official continuity since about '97-'98 to present. It's always been Mobius in the original games, and in all the official literature with the current main titles.

Think of it like Batman. He lives in Gotham, but Gotham always looks slightly or radically different based on each individual incarnation of the character and the era in which it is either created or takes place.

[flamepanther]

Sega/Sonic Team has observed the Sonic comics continuity as the official continuity since about '97-'98 to present. It's always been Mobius in the original games, and in all the official literature with the current main titles.

Source? 'Cause everything I've read pretty much anywhere except Sonic fanfic sites states otherwise. I believe Sega of America used it as their official story to a loose extent for a long time (hence the references in some STI-developed Sonic games) and the same was probably done in Europe by extension, but I've seen no indication at all that Sonic Team or Sega in Japan have done so.

Think of it like Batman. He lives in Gotham, but Gotham always looks slightly or radically different based on each individual incarnation of the character and the era in which it is either created or takes place.

The difference there is that nobody ever refers to Gotham as "New York" inside the comics. "Mobius" has never been cited by name inside the games as the setting--only in comics, animation, or other peripheral materials not made by Sonic Team. Earth has been named in present tense inside the games and by Sonic Team--not some used-to-be-Earth place, not Mobius, not Planet Freedom, Earth--requiring the comics to backtrack and explain that Mobius used to be Earth. Even then, that still doesn't mesh with the games very seamlessly. The games trump the comics. Sonic Team's Sonic materials even sometimes reference specific Earth locations such as Christmas Island.

I don't think Sonic Team has been very uptight about this, since up until Sonic Adventure I think the story has always been deliberately... flexible. Plenty of things originating from non-Sonic Team sources have been referenced or included in Sonic Team's games, but not just from the American comics by Archie. In fact, we never see important things like Sally Acorn and the Freedom Fighters in a Sonic Team game, but we do see Amy Rose and Charmy Bee, who originated in an old Sonic manga from Japan. That doesn't inspire any confidence that Sonic Team uses the Archie comics as their official story (now that they finally even have one).

Mind you, I'm not discounting the U.S. comics as official. There are MANY Sonic continuities that can be considered "official" by Sega, but that doesn't mean Sonic Team follows or contributes to any of them in particular besides what they put in their games. The Archie comics incorporate Sonic Team's stories, but not the other way around.

[GSZX1337]

Sega/Sonic Team has observed the Sonic comics continuity as the official continuity since about '97-'98 to present. It's always been Mobius in the original games, and in all the official literature with the current main titles.

Source? 'Cause everything I've read pretty much anywhere except Sonic fanfic sites states otherwise.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic has tied in to both the Sonic Adventure games.