Review: Sonic Movie Special

(This is the review for the tie-in special published on the same day the movie came out. For the review of the movie itself, please see the previous post.)

I actually won a pair of early screening tickets to see the Sonic movie in San Francisco two weeks before it came out. Unfortunately…San Francisco is a bit too far of a drive for me to make right now. So I had to pass up that opportunity. (Believe me, I was jealous of Sonic that entire movie for that exact reason.) But for one fleeting moment, I was indescribably excited, not just for the novelty of seeing a movie before anybody else can, but because I could’ve used that information to write an absolutely perfect tie-in episode with zero dodging of unknown plot points and zero contradictions. That’s always the hardest part about making these specials. The more closely I can tie the episode into its source, the more relevant and interesting the episode can be—but the less I know about the source, the less accurately I’m able to do that. In my original Sonic Forces special, I had to dodge the question of whether or not Sonic even knows who Infinite is, because we knew that little about the game’s plot. Technically speaking, that was much less of an issue here. With dozens upon dozens of trailers and preview clips available, and a much more straightforward, predictable plot to begin with, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I could’ve predicted the entire movie on a moment-to-moment basis with roughly 90% accuracy. But that last 10% was still bothering me immensely. If I just had that last 10%, I could’ve written a completely different episode, one that dives deep into the lore and events the movie may have glossed over, without any worry of contradiction. But unfortunately, I couldn’t go to the early screening, and so I had to play it safe.

Was that really Teen Sonic’s home Green Hill Zone that the episode took place in? Dodged that question, because I figured the odds were high that that place was somehow destroyed or taken over, that being the reason why Teen Sonic had to leave in the first place. Does Teen Sonic know what a Chaos Emerald is? Dodged that question, because I figured the odds were high that they would be teased in the movie in some way, which would most likely preclude Sonic from knowing about them beforehand. (Technically, I’m still in a bit of a pickle there, since we have no clue what any potential sequels might bring.) Did our Sonic even end up remembering the events of this episode? Dodged that question too, even though it seems pretty irrelevant to the movie, because if our Sonic remembers, then Teen Sonic would remember as well, and there was no telling how many countless tiny contradictions that might’ve caused. (In fact, there’s a chance it did—he never says it directly, but Teen Sonic certainly implies in the movie that he hasn’t had a friend since Longclaw—and I giving him a new best friend in our Sonic flies pretty harshly in the face of that.) Does Sonic know who wants his powers, or why? Dodged that. Do those individuals belong specifically to this world, or is he being chased across worlds? Dodged that. Who the heck is Longclaw? Dodged that, too. (Admittedly, I mistakenly had our Sonic call her a “guy,” but Sonic knew little enough at that point in time that it was probably justified.)

Despite my fear of getting contradicted, there were plenty of risks that I chose to gamble on. I chose to establish concrete proof that Sonic spent some amount of time, however little, as a world-traveller, visiting many different worlds before finally ending up on movie-Earth. The trailers gave us no such evidence, instead suggesting on quite the contrary that Sonic went straight from Green Hill to Earth, and stayed there. If it weren’t for Baby Sonic, I probably wouldn’t have taken that risk. But getting that major piece of evidence that Sonic left his world at a very young age leaves lots and lots of time for him to do things offscreen in between. For all we knew prior to that, there might not have been any time at all—we might have seen, moment-for-moment, Sonic, as a teenager, leaving Green Hill, getting to Earth, and either getting stuck there or choosing to stay there right up until the inciting incident of the movie’s main plot. But—lucky me!—Sonic not only was given plenty of time where he could have been off Earth, but it was downright shown that he had a map of worlds to travel to, with multiple of them crossed off, all but confirming that he has been to them. (Interestingly enough, one of those worlds was denoted by a stylized Sun—could that have been representing the Sol Dimension, or “Sun World” as he called it…just like he called the other one “Mushroom World”? Then again, Sun World wasn’t crossed out, which would be an odd error for him to make if he had already decided against staying there—but then, if he had only decided that because there was too much water, and not because someone saw him using his powers, that might mean he decided to potentially try it again later—and yes, Eggman Nega saw his powers, but as I mentioned earlier, he may not necessarily remember that part. What was I talking about again? Oh, right gambles.)

Another gamble I took involved how Sonic uses those Rings. For one thing, I just assumed that’s what his little brown sack was for—got that one right. But then, I also had him put duct tape in there, which…now that I know where the sack came from, might seem a little bit disrespectful. Oh well, he needed to tape up that shoe somehow—another accurate prediction on my part, as a majority of pre-release clips showed him with his “canon” shoes, even though he didn’t actually have them yet (lucky me). But yeah, Rings. I made a pretty big stretch of the imagination by suggesting that he has no problem at all with just using as many rings as it takes to help his friend out. In fact, you might even call that a contradiction—in the movie, there’s a “for emergencies only” sign taped to the sack, not to mention the fact that I presented him as having very few of them, despite having very many in the movie. But then, right there at the beginning of the movie, Sonic uses up a Ring just for the heck of it, because he feels like getting a look at the Mushroom World. But anyways, I think I covered my bases there. Even though there was absolutely zero mention in the trailers or the movie of where the Rings actually come from, I went ahead and presented a means of having Sonic able to collect more of them. So, after the episode, he would’ve had plenty of time to tour around, find as many as he needs, and head back to Earth with more than he even knows what to do with—so in that way, I even provided an explanation for why Sonic was able to waste one so nonchalantly at the beginning. Lucky me! I just have to hope that future sequels don’t imply that…I don’t know, Sonic produces them from his body or something crazy like that. As long as the possibility is left open that Rings can somehow be found somewhere in the nature of some world, I think I’ll be fine. I figured that applying the rules of Special Stage Rings to them wouldn’t be too much of  a risk, anyways.

I did gamble a little bit with how Sonic’s powers work—I clearly didn’t catch on to the fact that they are so directly linked to his emotions, but I wouldn’t call that outright contradiction. But here’s something that was absolutely not intended to be a gamble—at the end of the episode I had Sonic absorb his powers directly back from Fang. I made that up, I swear! And yet, at the climax of the movie, an absolutely identical scene happened, where Sonic absorbed his powers back from Eggman. (Yes, I’m calling him Eggman, because that’s what Sonic ends up calling him. Same rules as the games.) So…lucky me, I guess!

So, what contradictions did I fail to avoid? I already mentioned calling Longclaw a guy, missing the mark on where Sonic’s powers come from, and…that might be it. Oh, right, I also said that Sonic isn’t prone to motion sickness, which was definitely contradicted in the movie. That’s definitely not one I was expecting, given that Sonic is, you know…fast? And the loop-de-loops? But you know, it was a funny joke, and…you could argue that Sonic was intentionally exaggerating when he said that, and the fact that he did get motion sickness might even be enough to say that I’m supporting the movie, rather than contradicting it.

I know I haven’t really said much about the episode itself yet, but I don’t think there’s a whole lot to say. It was a comedy—much more successful, I think, than my previous attempt with the Heavy Magician episode. I put a lot of effort into building up punchlines, and just having an actual comedic chemistry between these two characters. I’m a little bit disappointed in myself for trivializing Fang literally immediately after his dramatic character conclusion, but…I actually love Fang and Eggman Nega as a ridiculous comedic villain duo, and I hope to use them in that role again at some point in the future. Fang certainly wouldn’t have much else to do in this series otherwise. As for Eggman Nega…the thought actually occurred to me after I had already started writing this episode, and I was desperately trying to figure out a halfway decent conclusion to this otherwise relatively boring story about trying to clear the Special Stage. I realized that, now that I had a Riders special under my belt, Eggman Nega was literally the only Modern Sonic character that I had yet to reference in any way, shape, or form. (Unless you count the non-Zavok members of the Deadly Six, but I certainly don’t.) Anyways, given Nega’s role of travelling between dimensions, and his hatred of Sonic, he certainly seemed like the right fit for this episode. I was a little bit dubious about using Nega as a character before even properly using Blaze, but I didn’t want to let that get in the way of a good story. But still, him alone just didn’t quite feel right. I wanted to use the Special Stage story first and foremost, but Eggman Nega has zero association with that concept, so using him as the villain in that context would’ve been very strange. But then, who does have an association with the Special Stages? The answer was staring me in the face. Supposedly, it is canon in Sonic Triple Trouble that Fang actually lives in the Special Zone. I intentionally tried to avoid that weirdness, given that the canonicity of Special Stages is dubious to begin with, by simply offhandedly mentioning once or twice that Fang had to take “a long trip” to get to Eggman from where ever it is he came from. Throughout this series, I had definitely considered exploring the concept of Special Stages more than once—including an early prototype plot for the Dawn of Chaos arc, and again as a potential way to flesh out Fang’s character—but it always just felt too weird. Teen Sonic and his use of Warp Rings worked as a phenomenal bridge into that weirdness, finally allowing me to delve into it—and so, to include Fang as well. The rest practically wrote itself. And that’s the basic story of how this episode came to be.

-Too bad I wasn’t able to do any rock-connaissance on the movie.
(Okay, that was terrible, I’m sorry.)

Review: Season 1, Episode 18 (Finale)

Another kicker, this one was. I shouldn’t be surprised by now, the most important episodes are always the hardest to write, because everything needs to be absolutely perfect. As an episode…I’m a little bit hesitant to pass judgement on this one. I felt hyperaware during the writing process of how awkwardly paced this whole thing was, with lots of standing around and talking during what should have been intense and dramatic moments—it’s just hard to do otherwise when there are so many important things that need to be said—in addition to lots of sudden breaks between action sequences that were necessary in order to keep a wider view of events that doesn’t leave any one topic forgotten for too long. But as a conclusion to the season…I’m pretty happy with how everything turned out. I was worried about the daunting task of topping part 1 in terms of drama, and while it did take some doing, I think that I at least accomplished that much.

Not everything turned out exactly how I envisioned it. I originally imagined that the raid on the Death Egg would take up a more solid chunk of the episode, as Shadow grudgingly worked together with Sonic to overcome the station swarming with traps and guards and lots of thing to blow up. In general, the big question mark surrounding whether or not Shadow is able to trust Sonic was intended to play a much larger role in the episode. But then I threw Knuckles into the mix. Right up until the day I wrote the conclusion of Part 1, my intention was for that to be the last that was seen of Fang—he shoots Knuckles, takes the Emeralds, turns them over off-screen, and that’s the end of it. I soon decided that it would be too unceremonious of an end for a character who is effectively the main villain of the Season, so I decided the easiest way to get him to a more proper conclusion without changing plans too much would be to throw him on the Death Egg. At the time that I made that decision, it was actually supposed to be Tails who went up along with Sonic and Shadow—Knuckles was intended to be put out of commission for this episode when he was shot. So I figured that Sonic would be the most reasonable candidate of the three to have one final fight with Fang, and then Tails could even have a nice little growth story where he shows that fighting Eggman on his own is no longer proof of anything, but instead is now simply what he expects of himself as a hero. There were a few obvious logical issues that came out of all that. While Fang has certainly mentioned his hatred for Sonic quite frequently, Sonic as a rival for him hasn’t really been built up at all—they only met face-to-face once this Season before these episodes, and they only exchanged a few words. Knuckles, meanwhile, was specifically being built up as a rival (pretty much just for the purpose of taking his hat in the end), so having that final confrontation not include Knuckles would just be strange. Meanwhile, Tails, the medical expert of the Rebellion, abandoning Rouge when it’s being clearly established that she’s dying wouldn’t make any sense at all. And even then, Tails’ growth isn’t really something that’s been focused on this Season, it’s been deferred to next, so having him on the Death Egg wouldn’t really accomplish much. And so, even though it required a lot of rearranging and rethinking of this episode, I chose to swap Tails out for Knuckles. I’m definitely happy with that decision. Though I do wonder if that’s part of the reason writing this episode ended up taking so much longer.

Oh! Right, I was in the middle of something. Adding Knuckles (and Fang, counting those as one complicated decision) meant significantly increasing the amount of time that would be spent on these big boss confrontations, and so the idea of a Death Egg filled with traps and guards became not only unnecessary in terms of balancing the amount of action, but would’ve basically just wasted time. And I figured a completely empty, abandoned Death Egg would’ve added a layer of mystery to hint at Eggman’s true intentions…although I see now that may not have been clear enough, besides the part where Sonic and Shadow overtly discussed it.

There is one thing that did turn out exactly as I’d envisioned it. The simple ending scene, where Shadow learns of Rouge’s condition, and lets out all of his emotions at once on Sonic…that was a scene planned nearly word for word since before I even knew what this season was going to be about. I believe I’ve mentioned previously that the idea of Rouge turning spy for the Rebellion was one of a huge slew of ideas that were all bouncing around before the seasonal structure of this series was solidified, back in the very early phases of Season 0. Analyzing the emotional consequences of various dramatic scenarios was how I first populated this hypothetical series with episode ideas—so naturally, the scenario of Rouge seemingly turning traitor had to come with the weight of how Shadow would respond. That series of ideas eventually led me here.

And did I mention that hat? Why, yes, it was meant to be a reference to the Sonic OVA, thank you for asking. With another Sonic movie coming up, I suppose that’s pretty good timing. In fact, there may have been a couple of new Sonic Movie references thrown into this episode, if you were paying attention. But, anyways, the hat. I admit it. The idea of bringing Fang into the series wasn’t particularly appealing to me…until I realized that I could have Knuckles steal his hat. Yes. That was what sold me on the idea. That was what drove me to write basically this entire season. I regret nothing, and also everything. Usually, I pride myself on remaining vehemently game-canon, and I often have to go out of my way in order to not reference something like the Archie Comics. But if you ask me, Knuckles with a treasure hunter’s hat is the single most memorable thing to come out of that entire movie, and I just couldn’t resist the reference once I’d thought of it.

I suppose I can get into more random stuff now. The “Death Egg Emperor” was a rather last-minute addition. In the early planning phases (back when Tails was still going to be the one to fight it) a simple, perhaps slightly upgraded Death Egg Robot was what I assumed would fill this role. When you bring back the Death Egg, putting a Death Egg Robot on it seems like the next logical step. It only occurred to me as I began writing this episode that Sonic Generations, Mania, and Forces had really gone to great lengths to…I guess, normalize the Death Egg Robot. I realized that it wouldn’t make much of an impact if it were just another one of those things. The plan wasn’t necessarily to “merge” the DER with the final boss of Sonic Heroes, the whole Egg Emperor thing was just…an unfortunate(?) result of the fact that this completely new step up from the DER needed to reflect Eggman’s status as Emperor.

There were plans to have an extended ending scene where everyone meets back up, celebrate their victory, ponder the nature of Eggman’s pre-planning, and so on, but I ended up merging that all into the Daily Log addendum, mostly just for time. The episode was very ready to end, and I didn’t see much reason to drag it on longer than it had to go. I also skipped out on a scene where Eggman would be seen in his base, complaining about how much he hates that hedgehog, but it was cut for similar reasons.

Probably the most last-minute thing of all was Knuckles’ role specifically in the climax. Obviously everything about his role in the episode was last-minute, put this part was actually something that didn’t even occur to me until I wrote the words “What can I do to help?” When Tails was the plan, Sonic’s response was still going to be the same “Wait in the safety bunker” answer, and it was supposed to be a bit more touching with Sonic trying to protect his little bro. But Tails, instead of doing as he was told, would’ve instead gone out searching for a shuttle (planned before I I decided to mention that there were no shuttles) and, when Sonic realized that he was marooned and requested help, Tails would’ve swooped in at the perfect time to pick him up. That whole “I think I might need a little help here” joke was honestly just a hold-out from that otherwise-scrapped plan. The Death Egg room built over the Master Emerald Altar, then, was entirely unplanned until I realized in that moment that I needed something for Knuckles to do that didn’t involve flying. But I figured it would make sense that Eggman would “preserve” that particular location when building over Angel Island, given that Prof. Gerald proved with his replica on the ARK that the structure has a functional significance. Knuckles bringing the Master Emerald back to the closest thing left to “home” worked wonderfully to connect back to a comment he made in part 1 (not intended to be related at the time), as did his conjoined role with the Controller as mentioned by Tikal. Eggman putting a throne for himself on top of the monument that symbolically represents the people he’s conquered was a nice little cherry on top. I’ll admit that part of the inspiration behind that room, and even the throne on top, hearkens back to an issue of the new IDW Sonic Comics, in which, on a mechanized Angel Island (I had that idea first, I swear), Neo Metal Sonic awaited Sonic and friends in a throne room built out of the very same altar. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a reference, just inspiration.

A question I was sort of asking myself by the end was…”Why did I split the Death Egg in half?” Something I originally had in mind was that the Death Egg would naturally start falling apart in that way as it fell through the atmosphere, forcing Sonic and Shadow to each take a separate half. But…for some reason, that just didn’t make sense to me. But the image of the two halves falling one after the other into the ocean, like a literal egg cracked open, was one that stuck with me even as my other plans changed.

Well, I think this has gone on just about long enough. So what’s next? Well, I’ll properly announce here and now that there will be a Sonic Movie Tie-In Special published on February 14th, the day of the movie’s release. After that, we move into Season 2. Season 1 was nice and all, but…for me, it was really just a proving grounds. From here, I start telling the stories that I’ve been anticipating since I first envisioned this series, stories that could only be told on top of the strong foundations that I’ve spent all this time building. Even though you’re probably not, I hope that you’re as excited as I am.

-So until next time, remember to live and learn every day!

 

Review: Season 1, Episode 13 (Sort of)

Normally, I’d write reviews on an episode-by-episode basis, but I didn’t write this episode, and the author, Yuni, has chosen to wait to review both parts at once. So I suppose I’ll talk a little bit about the history that led up to this unusual episode. It’s a bit more personal than what I typically talk about here, but this event was a very personal one. Yuni has been an inspiration to me for a very long time. And I’ve been giving him plenty of inspiration as well. By that, I mean that we’re literally family, and we’ve been telling each other stories for as long as I can remember. Sonic was one of many such topics we liked to discuss. And while I had ideas such as Blackice, who would become Nova, who would become Blacklight, Yuni had ideas such as Shinobi the Hedgehog, now known as Shino. Another of his ideas, Hyper the Hedgehog, served as significant inspiration for who we now know as Chaos the Hedgehog. But while I was always drawn to these Sonic ideas, Yuni was just as interested in Pokémon, and invented a good handful of “Fakemon” from a very young age. I participated as well, but I was never quite as into it as he was.

Somehow, after years of these Sonic and Pokémon ideas, it was a rather sudden Yu-Gi-Oh concept that ended up spawning the first ever written work between the two of us. It was me who offhandedly brought up the fact while watching the “Waking  the Dragons” arc of the original series that it seemed rather odd that the characters Yugi and Kaiba seemed to reincarnate precisely every 5,000 years, even though no attention was ever drawn to it. If I remember correctly, it was a matter of days after that that Yuni came back to me with the idea for Yu-Gi-Oh! Millennium, a story taking place 5,000 years in the future of the original series, and drawing the origin back 5,000 years before the earliest known incarnations. He was prepared to share this story with me verbally as we had always done, meticulously planning out and describing every turn of every Duel. And he did try it that way for a while. But once he brought up how difficult it was to keep track of all the little number values like ATK and LP, I suggested that he type it out like a book, and have me read it. He felt that would be a waste of effort to be read by just one person. So that’s when I said, “You know, I’ve heard of this website called FanFiction, which is meant specifically for publishing and sharing that sort of thing.” It took some convincing, but I got him to do it. He wrote out the entire first Season over the course of a year or so, then published it all at once in August of 2013. Of course, I was tasked with carefully proofreading every episode before publication.

Yuni enjoyed writing his first story so much that he published his second less than a year later. Recycling and updating many of his earliest Fakemon ideas, he created Pokémon Cosmic Quest. I drew up a sprite of one of his Pokémon on a whim one day, and ended up becoming his permanent sprite artist. It quickly began to consume more and more of my time. And as he prepared to move across the state, I felt like without him, I…didn’t really have anything satisfying to do with my life. Sounds a little grim, but I wasn’t in the best mental state at the time. And while any Pokémon idea either of us could ever dream of was easily expressed in his story, all those old Sonic ideas were still sitting stagnant. I’d been doing all this work for him for so long, I decided I wanted something that’s mine. So I decided to write The Chaos Project, without informing Yuni until it was much too far into development for him to take it over.

Sonic Forces: After the Fight was the first episode of mine that he ever read, though it had been over a year since I told him about the story by that point. He was impressed enough to go back and read from the beginning, though it took quite a few months before he found the time to do so. In fact, at the time he started writing this very episode, he had only just caught up a few weeks earlier. But I’m skipping ahead a bit. He had only just started his readthrough when he brought up the possibility of a writer’s exchange. Seeing how Blacklight had come of the Nova idea he was so fond of, and how Chaos was inspired by Hyper, he was disappointed that one his favorite OC’s, Shinobi the Hedgehog, hadn’t found its way into The Chaos Project (even though Zero, in as much as he is a Chaos-user from the past, was technically inspired by Shinobi). I told him that I had no specific plans to do anything much like Shinobi, but that having the character available to me could be beneficial later in the story. After a bit of discussion, we agreed. He would write in his own character in as close to its original form as he desired, and I would get some free advertisement by writing an episode of Pokémon Cosmic Quest in exchange (his story is a lot more popular than mine). I just had to figure out what to write. And if you want to hear more about that…I suppose you’ll just have to stay tuned to Yuni’s website, where I’ll continue this conversation as I discuss the Cosmic Quest episode that I wrote. Other than that, that’s the entire story, full-circle.

-So until next time, remember to live and learn every day!

Review: Season 2 Preview – Team Sonic Racing Special

Bum bum bummmm! Bet you weren’t expecting a Team Sonic Racing special to have such a big impact on the series, were you? Well, there’s a reason I chose to make this a Season 2 preview episode, instead of just fitting it in where we are in Season 1. Much like with my Sonic Forces special, the deadline crept up on me just a little bit too quickly, but I knew this episode had to go here, and nowhere else.

Really, this was a Riders episode with a few tiny references to other racing games. Team Sonic Racing was more my excuse to write this episode than it was the inspiration for it. And…having now played and completed Team Sonic Racing, I’ll admit that this episode would have gone down much differently had I known what I’d have to work with. If this were Forces, I would proceed to write a second, more direct Special Episode that actually is based on TSR. But this is not Forces. It’s a random racing spin-off, and one episode spent celebrating it is probably more than it deserves. But don’t get me wrong. I’m sure I’ll be properly canonizing this game eventually, just as I did Riders. It just won’t be today.

Working with the Babylon Rogues was a dream. They’re such well-defined characters that their dialogue practically wrote itself. And yet, their motivations are so ambiguous that I was able to do practically whatever I wanted with them. And the Babylon history is much-needed fresh element of Sonic world-building when it often feels like the Echidnas are the only bit of real history I ever have to work with. Naturally, I tried to make storytelling and character building as accurate to the original Riders games as possible, with the unintended side-effect of basically turning this episode into a plot for Zero Gravity 2. Giving Jet a reconstructed Ark of the Cosmos was a bit of a last-minute decision, and the whole “rebuilding Babylon Garden” thing was even more last-minute than that. The original plan was simply to have Jet in it for the money and protection from Eggman. But I felt like in the circumstances I provided, with such a heated clash of wills against Sonic, that simply wasn’t a strong enough character drive.

On one hand, it was a bit of a shame that Wave and especially Storm were so left out in favor of a focus on Jet, but on the other hand, the fact that the three are usually a package deal made exploring Jet as an individual far more interesting to me. So, will they appear again? Definitely. Will it be soon? …Probably not. Honestly, no plans until Season 6 at the earliest. But you never know.

Now I suppose it’s time to talk about the evil robot in the room. Metal Sonic. After receiving my first question from a reader almost a year ago about what my plans were with Metal Sonic, following his surprise appearance at the end of S1 E1, it felt so good to finally address it. Or at least, start to. Big plans this season for Metal Sonic, for Omega, for Sonic, even for Tails. But, I’m quite literally getting ahead of myself. Need to wrap things up with Rouge and the Anti-Rebellion first. This episode was packed with out-of-context spoilers for the finale of Season 1 and the premiere of Season 2, just to anger you and amuse me.

-And until next time, remember to live and learn every day!

Review: 50th Episode Special

As if it weren’t obvious, this episode was not exactly normal. I’ve mentioned multiple times before, both here and in the author’s notes of the actual story, that I had in mind the possibility of rewriting Crisis of Chaos, the four premiere episodes of the series. Besides just being generally poor in quality compared to my current standards of writing, those episodes had simply grown out of date as the series continued to grow. Being designed to come before the prequel, I of course did everything in my power to make sure that everything I would write thereafter would fit in correctly, but some inevitable contradictions and oddities popped up, especially in regards to Sonic Forces, which hadn’t even been announced at the time of those episodes being published. Eventually, I wanted to fix those problems, to address those conspicuously missing elements. But I’ve been focusing so hard on moving forwards that it always just seemed like a low priority. Then suddenly, I looked up from writing the Sonic Adventure Special, and realized that my next episode would be my 50th. Meanwhile, there were some unexpected delays in the episode that I had been planning on coming next. The secret Ninja Episode.

So, I realized that there would be no better time to go back to where it all began than for such a great milestone as a 50th episode. I figured that writing a new episode, rather than editing the old ones, would give me a lot more freedom to include things that would be considered spoilers if they’d been placed in those original episodes. Things like Fang, or even Infinite. It would also give me freedom in general, to write scenes which would have made for a very odd story flow if they’d been added before. I also figured that making a separate episode would attract a little more attention, and ensure that the new content would be read by people who already read the old episodes. So, with effectively no restrictions, I wrote.

This episode was dedicated to tying. Tying loose ends together, but also tying together the series as a whole. There are so many little things with considerable impacts that it would be hard to list them all. Probably the most important part, as mentioned above, was reconciling this story with the aspects that were introduced along with Forces (and Mania. I forget sometimes that that’s where the HBH’s come from.) It was addressing the questions of where Hero, Infinite, and of course, the Hard Boiled Heavies, were during this big war. I tried to write Hero’s introduction episode in this Season such that it didn’t matter too much, but still it left just a few questions hanging, which I hope have been answered. Infinite, on the other hand, benefited greatly from his one short scene in this episode. Where he was left at the end of Season 0, he had been given this odd sort of relationship with Blacklight which was left extremely vague, and next time we see him, Blacklight’s been dead for months and Infinite doesn’t say a word about him. I originally planned for him to at least say something at that point, but it just didn’t work with the episode. So finally, with this one, I was really able to show exactly what was going on between them. Infinite…had a friend…sort of. And that has a pretty significant degree of meaning for both of their characters.

The HBH’s are a little bit different. Technically speaking, there was nothing that really mandated their appearance in Crisis of Chaos, it would be very reasonable to say that, since they weren’t part of the big plan, they were just out fighting all the various offscreen battles. And technically that was true, though this episode actually retconned Heavy King into the ending scene of the original. But, just like Hero, it was nice to simply prove that they were there, and that they weren’t just sitting around and doing nothing.

Then, there were other things to reconcile. Things that, technically speaking, I could have planned for, but wasn’t able to anticipate, things that I would write of my own accord, knowing that they ran a bit against what the original Crisis seemed to suggest. One of the big ones there was Lumis. At the end of the Dawn of Chaos arc, Lumis was redeemed and welcomed back into the Realm of Chaos. But in the original Crisis, he was treated, both by myself the narrator, and by Chaos, as a villain, simply because all I had planned for Lumis at the time of Crisis was that he would be the future villain, with no details about how that story would end. That was reconciled in this episode by showing that Chaos was simply holding an unfounded grudge, with the added benefit of serious character development on both sides with the realization of similarities between them, and the fact that even the so-called-gods cannot be perfect.

And of course, there are the things I added simply to improve the depth of the story and characters, without any necessity otherwise. Little bits showing the relationships between Chaos, Sonic, and Shadow I found to be important because that dynamic was never really touched on outside of the original Crisis. And probably the part that added the most meat to this episode, the Commander subplot. At the time of the original Crisis, I had no idea how important the Commander would become in the grand scheme of the story. I knew I’d use him eventually, I just didn’t realize to what extent it would be. Naturally, I had to tell his missing story here after how much focus he got in Season 0, and even in the flashbacks of this season. Him combined with Hero was a fantastic way to show this war’s effect on the common man, something that was completely overlooked in the big robo-kaiju battle focus of the original Crisis.

And let’s not forgot the straight-up plotholes of the original that I had to fill here. Things that were pointed out me long after the original was published, such as “Why couldn’t the Hedgehogs just escape with Chaos Control?” and “Did Chaos die, or did he just go back to the Realm of Chaos?” and “Where did Tails get GUN technology from?” all got at least one dedicated scene to explaining. In regards to that last one, that “technology exchange” brought up for the first proper time in this episode was actually something I had planned on being discussed in a very, very similar scene in the original, and I’m not sure if I simply forgot to write it at the time, or if I actively decided to address it in what would become Forces of Chaos, and forgot once that came around. Either way, it never got addressed, so I had to fill it in here.

I’ll try not to drag this one out too much longer. I want to mention how I was randomly inspired to use the GUN Truck while watching a Sonic the Hedgehog Official Livestream a couple of weeks ago, and I’m very glad that I was. An action movie car chase scene just felt so right to use as the way that the Commander and Hero connect. To a certain extent, I was also inspired by a scene from the movie Captain America: Winter Soldier, in which Nick Fury, leader of the acronymed military organization SHIELD (I’ve drawn comparisons with the Commander before), was seemingly killed in a big, explosive car chase sequence. So what does that mean for the Commander? Is it possible that he’s still alive after being trapped in a sinking truck like that? Well, no one knows for certain. And eventually, that will become perhaps the single most relevant takeaway from this episode.

On a related note, this episode featured the second appearance of the mysterious “J. Naka”. Eventually, we will get to meet him in the present. But for now, his backstory just keeps getting built up little by little.

So what’s next after this big special episode? Normally, I’d say we’re going back to right where we left off in the main story of this season. But the specials aren’t over yet! Something important is happening in the next few days! The release of Team Sonic Racing! You didn’t think I’d let that slip by, did you? (Apparently I’ve never mentioned it on this site before. Wow, I really need to step up my game.) So does that mean we’re getting a Team Sonic Racing special episode? Actually…even better! This isn’t just any special episode. This is a very special preview at a full-length episode vital to Season 2, which celebrates all things Sonic Racing, and then some! Green Light Riders is coming very soon!

-And there’s no better feeling than to be here with you! Look out!

Opinion Piece: Sonic the Hedgehog (2019 Movie)

Edited to include an unofficial re-upload of the first trailer (after the second trailer was released), because apparently Paramount Pictures wants to pretend the first trailer never happened, and removed it from Youtube.

Gee, just what we needed. Another laughable Sonic installment with no subtitle to identify it by. All jokes aside, hi. It’s been a while. My last opinion piece of any kind was my Sonic Forces review, well over a year ago. Come to think of it, and speaking of missing subtitles, I guess I was supposed to write a Sonic ’06 review somewhere along the way? Did I never publish that? I’ll look into it.

But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here for my take on the Sonic Movie. So I’ll warn you right now. If you’re looking for someone to share your rage and disgust with, you’ve come to the wrong place, and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of that elsewhere. I intend to look at this from as objective of a standpoint as possible. With that out of the way, let’s get started.

Obviously, no one’s seen the actual movie yet, so this is more about my opinions on the trailer than on the movie as a whole. So let’s start from the beginning. Sonic is fast. Even I, as a writer, have a hard time making sure that fact remains important, so I’d call it a good thing that this is what they decide on as the very first thing to show the audience. Human cop. So what? I prefer Sonic’s world with a human population, or at very least, I prefer the games that do so. Given the human inclusion, filming the movie in live action makes sense enough to me. Would I have preferred a completely animated film? Yeah, probably. And it certainly would’ve alleviated a lot of the movie’s fundamental issues as I currently see them. But they’re trying to sell a movie to the masses, and an animated movie about a videogame character just isn’t going to sell as well in that context.

References. I approve of references. It’s the one easy way to appease fans in a way that makes no impact on the general audience. Not sure why they went with “Green Hills” instead of “Green Hill,” but that’s hardly worthy of complaint. And if you’re going to complain that Green Hill Zone is overused, you can leave now. Obviously, this isn’t Green Hill Zone, visually, musically, or otherwise, it’s just a reference to a memorable location. And speaking of references, sound effects. The use of classic sound effects for rings, for spindashing and jumping, goes a long way in helping me personally connect this movie to the franchise that I grew up with. And it’s not just Classic, either. I could be mistaken, but I believe at about 1:32 in the trailer, as a harpoon is being shot into the truck, a jump sound effect out of the 2000’s era games can be heard.

Apparently, Sonic now generates electricity when he runs, which sticks to his quills even after they fall off. This is a fact that is constantly brought up throughout the trailer. Not exactly consistent with Sonic’s representation in the games, but I’d call it well within creative liberty. If you’ve ever had experience with “The Flash,” a DC Comics character, you may recall that this speedster does the same thing. In fact, The Flash learns to harness this power to throw lightning at his opponents. And while it’s not exactly good realistic physics, there is a certain understandable logic to the idea that static electricity could build up on someone who runs fast enough as they rub against particles in the air. But that might not even be the answer here. As demonstrated a bit later, this could very well be the origin story to Eggman’s use of animals to power his robots, a central element to the original Sonic games. It could be that, by this movie’s explanation, all animals from Sonic’s world (or planet, or dimension, or whatever they’re going with, more on that later) generate this natural energy regardless of whether or not they can run fast, and Eggman learns to use this over the course of the movie. After all, even combined with a sonic boom, static electricity would hardly be enough on its own to knock out power to a whole quadrant of a country. It would seem there’s more going on than just that.

Alright, this was bound to happen eventually. Let’s talk design. To put it briefly…I’m very okay with this. To be fair, I did choose what is perhaps the most flattering shot in the entire trailer to put above. But I think that shot looks pretty darn good, actually. Sure, this new design doesn’t look flattering from every angle. And sure, I dislike that his stomach is a different color than his muzzle. And sure, I’d rather him have gloves to cover up those freaky hedgehog fingers. And sure, I don’t get why he isn’t wearing socks. But other than that…I don’t see much problem with this design. It looks like Sonic in live action. I’ve seen plenty of attempts to “fix” this design, but a vast majority of them end up looking even worse to me. Lets rewind a bit. A few months ago (and I’m actually kind of surprised that I never commented on it at the time. In fact, this movie’s been announced since before the Chaos Project even started, yet I don’t think I’ve ever once mentioned it on the site. Anyways…) some concept images for Sonic’s style in this movie were leaked out. Here, look for yourself.

Like anyone else, I was a bit shocked at first glance. But, to be totally honest, it was that depiction on the bottom left, which may look a bit familiar to some people, which really sold me on the viability of Sonic’s separated-eye, human-like proportions style. And since then…they made it even better. There is the issue of the stomach color, but other than that, I think they improved the shape of the eyes and muzzle, decreased the awkward prominence of the eyebrows, and just overall improved the body shape. Main point, the redesign is certainly shocking at first glance, but there’s nothing about it that makes it “not Sonic”. I certainly prefer this over certain fan interpretations I’ve seen of how Sonic might look in live action that came out before this movie was ever a thing.

Look familiar?

Gotta go fast. There’s the other thing about this particular scene in the trailer. Cringeworthy? Yes. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t laugh hysterically. Combine that with Sonic pretending to be a cat when discovered by a human, and the possible universe-crossing implications that the trailer gives off, and you’ve got yourself a nice pile of Sonic X references. And as I said before, I like references, especially when they’re in regards to my personal favorite non-canon interpretation of Sonic. I suppose we should also start talking about the voice here. I like it. It’s clear that they’re going for a much younger interpretation of Sonic, one who can be called a “child,” I’d guess perhaps 13 or 14. And, given that, this new voice works very well. It remains to be seen whether or not I prefer it to Roger Craig Smith, but I think that the potential is there. A bit hard to compare either way. Moving on…

Next up, Eggman. Or perhaps I should be calling him Robotnik? I actually find it rather odd that they never confirmed one way or the other in the trailer. But as the trailer goes on to show, it seems that this entire movie may be dedicated to the transformation of an eccentric scientist into the evil genius we now know as Eggman, so a name change to go along with that would certainly be fitting. How do I feel about him? Obviously, he doesn’t look much like Eggman in the picture above. But the end of the trailer shows how that changes. As I said, they’re starting him off as a normal, if eccentric, scientist, and I don’t mind that they put their own design to that. He’s practically a different person. But if we actually get to see this person become the Eggman we know, I don’t see that as anything but a good thing. At least he has a mustache. But what about his character? Well…to be honest, I personally see a little bit too much…Jim Carrey (the actor for the character) in it. It’s hard to explain exactly, but I just felt like a proper Eggman needs to be just a bit more threatening. Maybe threatening isn’t the word, because I felt like even Sonic Boom got it just a bit better. Hard to explain. But regardless, if that part of his personality is brought in more strongly over the course of the movie, I see no problem with it.

Alright, so let’s talk about the plot. It feels like very typical Hollywood-type reinterpretation stuff. Such and such magical or otherworldly creature winds up in a world that is otherwise identical to our own, the police/government/whatever wants to kill/study/whatever it, but the friendly human character teams up with the creature to get them back wherever they came from so they can be safe again. There’s obviously some sort of save-the-world plot going on behind that, but that’s nothing new. “Nothing new” seems to describe this movie in a lot of ways, actually. So there, putting it flat out, I’m not excited for this plot in the slightest. I don’t see anything wrong with it, you might even call it “tried and true,” but it doesn’t garner any interest from me. That’s probably the closest thing to hate you’ll be getting out of me today.

Okay, let’s see here, what else? Umm…Eggman’s got himself some boss mechs, that’s cool…wants to study Sonic, talked about that already…ooh, and he gets his tiny glasses for a hot second. He didn’t even have those at the end when he looked transformed into the proper Eggman. Then…Eggman licks Sonic’s quill, gets shocked, more eccentricity, then…ooh, here’s something.

Warp Rings! That’s what I’m talking about! For some strange reason, I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about how “that’s not what rings do in Sonic games,” or, even worse, “you may be surprised to know that Warp Rings are actually from the comics where people could use them to teleport between Zones.” Oof, that one made me groan. I’m not sure how people missed that Warp Rings are are a recurring element that played pretty important roles in the original Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic CD, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and even the recently acclaimed Sonic Mania. A giant floating ring that teleports you to Special Stages. They’re all over the place. They’re the origin of the even-more-frequent Goal Ring. Rings are not a single-purpose item in Sonic games! But what they are is an unexplored plot element. 20 years of 3D Sonic history, and the only mention of any kind of ring in a story was an offhanded reference to the regular gold rings in Sonic Generations. But now here this movie goes, apparently putting a story behind a gameplay element of the Classic games that even the real games haven’t dared venture into. That not even I have dared yet venture into. I’m very impressed, and I’m interested to see where they go with it. Could this be how Sonic got to this planet in the first place? Is our Earth actually just another Special Stage?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the whole “planet” thing. People seem to be taking it to mean that Sonic is a space alien, and…sure? I mean, it could be. But it seems much more likely to me that it refers to the typical Sonic X explanation of Sonic’s world being different from Earth (which is a planet that is not the planet that Sonic comes from). Either way, at least they’ll be putting an explanation to it, instead of randomly deciding that Sonic sometimes has humans and sometimes doesn’t.

And look at this! We have another example of Sonic pretending to be The Flash as he goes into “Flashtime,” slowing the world around him to a pace that even “the speed of sound” wouldn’t be nearly enough to justify. Either Sonic grows exponentially faster as the movie goes on, or they just randomly decided to get him moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light in one scene only. One is inclined to believe the second thing I said. But, on the brighter side, we have a nice nod to Classic Sonic’s idle animation. And I can’t deny, it looks like a pretty epic scene that shows off a lot of personality as well.

And finally, here’s that end clip of Eggman I kept talking about. Goggles on bald forehead, red outfit, long wiry mustache, this is plenty close enough to the Eggman we know. If they spend the movie building up to this, I’m good with that. But wait…that background…is he in Mushroom Hill Zone!?!? Probably not that specifically. But that would be a very satisfying reference if it was.

So, final conclusion? This movie’s not exactly my dream come true. In fact, it might even be described as a train wreck. But that won’t stop me from seeing it, and, most likely, enjoying every minute of it. There’s some weird stuff mixing around, but it can’t exactly be called “bad” just yet. So, in the surprisingly apt closing words of the trailer…

-“It smells like body spray and an old ham sandwich.”

Review: Season 1, Episode 10

I could’ve sworn that I pre-wrote this one as usual. But I couldn’t seem to find it. So I guess I’ll have to see what I can remember now.

So since last episode was the “Episode Shadow based introduction,” that would make this one the rest of Forces from a different perspective. With this one, I was finally able to give an answer to that question that was bugging me so much in the last review. That being, “WHERE THE HECK WAS SHADOW OVER THE FOLLOWING SIX MONTHS!!??”  In essence, that was the main reason I bothered with this episode in the first place. I hated that no answer to that question was ever given in the game, so I knew I had to answer for myself at some point. The other major reason had to do with the original “After the Fight” Forces special episode, in which I had Rouge state that she had to steal her Chaos Emerald off of the Death Egg. I figured I had to put a story to that, as I intend to do for most of the other Emeralds shown in that scene as well. But in general, there are a lot of questions regarding Rouge that I felt the need to answer as well. The first hint of her existence in the original game was when Knuckles stated that “his spies” found Sonic on the “orbiting prison.” I was really, really hoping when I first saw that that he was talking about Rouge, and as it turns out, I was right. At least…I’m pretty sure about that. It was all left a bit vague. When Rouge finally made her first real appearance, everyone was weirdly acting as if they hadn’t ever discussed the Death Egg before, even though Knuckles and the others were already on their way there to get Sonic. I mean, did they think that “Orbiting Prison” meant something else? Anyways, Rouge continues to make appearances just like that for about two thirds of the game, dropping in to leave some vital bit of information over the radio, but throughout all of that time, she never made a physical appearance. At first, I believed that she only finally appeared on screen at the final Eggman Empire Fortress battle, which would be ridiculous. Turns out, I had missed the fact that she was standing there silently in the background while the Death Egg was being destroyed. That was her first appearance. A silent role, standing there, watching something. You’d think, if they spend two thirds of the game suggesting that she’s off doing something important, that would be building up for something, right? Well this is Forces we’re talking about, so no.

So anyways, the main question was, “Why does Rouge spend so much of the game apart from the rest of the Resistance, only to reappear at a seemingly random time?” I felt like there was only one reasonable answer. A deep-cover mission. Rouge was acting as a double-agent in the enemy camp, gathering vital information to pass along to the Resistance, culminating in their destruction of the Death Egg. That was the basis for this episode’s plot. But wait a minute…there’s something else about that scene of the Death Egg’s destruction that’s been nagging at me… Oh, yeah! WHAT THE HECK ARE KNUCKLES AND VECTOR DOING IN THERE!? When you’re playing as Classic Sonic in that level, it is very, very strongly implied that Knuckles and Vector are right in there with you. But then, cut to Resistance HQ, and Knuckles and Vector are there too! And yet, almost as if they cared about continuity, Classic Sonic is not there. I guess they just ditched him early and left him to die in the Death Egg’s explosion. And here I thought this was a children’s game. So the only reasonable answer that I can come up with is Chaos Control, as you saw in the episode. Except, Shadow wasn’t there. So, the best I could do was have him hang out with Classic Sonic in the back of the room, just behind the camera. It’s a lame solution, but I didn’t exactly have much to work with.

There was one other major problem I encountered in writing this episode. Remember when Sonic and Shadow finally met after Sunset Heights? Once Shadow finally started explaining what was going on, he practically started with “According to Rouge…” Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up a minute there. Rouge has been in steady contact with the Resistance for the entire game up until now. And the Resistance has been having some serious problems with fake Shadows rampaging through cities and tearing down their forces. Are you telling me that Rouge not only knew that these Shadows were fake, not only knew that the real Shadow was out there alive, not only has been in direct contact with him, but also has been sharing extremely important Phantom Ruby information with him, and didn’t bother to tell ONE WORD OF IT to the Resistance!?!? No! Just no! This is one of the most pathetic plot holes I’ve ever seen, not just in a Sonic game, but ever! There is no sane excuse for this! Often times when I encounter a problem like this, I look to the original Japanese script for help. But there was no help to found there, this was one of the more literal translations in the game! So here’s my answer. If you want to take what Shadow is saying at face value, there’s no way to make it work. But if he were lying, we’d be good. So I’ve determined that when Shadow said “According to Rouge,” what he wanted to say was “According to that Replica I destroyed,” but he figured that the Resistance wouldn’t want to trust intel from the mouth of the enemy, so he lied and pretended that Rouge said it. That’s the best I’ve got, take it or leave it.

What else can I say here? A lot that I’m forgetting, I’m sure. This episode marks the first instance in The Chaos Project of a Sonic character being able to breath in the vacuum of space. The Chaotix were on the outside of the ARK, but you could make an argument for some kind of…atmosphere bubble or something. This time, it was clearly a vacuum. It’s pretty much a canon fact that Sonic characters can do this, but it’s not exactly scientific. In other news, the appearance of “Splash Fortress” at the beginning of this episode was a reference to some unused Forces concept art, of a very similar-looking fortress in Green Hill. It was a very interesting aesthetic that I wish they’d used, and I was glad to find a place for it. Why move it to Splash Hill? Because Green Hill is severely oversaturated in Forces, and I figured I might as well take the opportunity to make my first ever Sonic 4 reference.

I think that’s all I’ve got for now!

-So until next time, remember to live and learn every day!

Review: Season 1, Episode 9

Well…I’ve dedicated about six straight, no-distractions, nearly-uninterrupted days into writing this episode. I reached 14,000 words before I realized that there was simply no reasonable way I could publish this as a single episode. Even though I really wanted to. Seriously, this season doesn’t have room for any two-parters. So I guess I’m just expanding the season. Needless to say, this episode wasn’t exactly supposed to end where it did. It wasn’t exactly a cliffhanger, we all know what happened to Shadow in the end. But, eh, it was dramatic, and roughly in the middle. It is sort of nice now that I have the two separate “Episode Shadow from another perspective” and “the rest of Forces from another perspective” episodes. This episode was originally supposed to be just the latter with a brief Episode Shadow based introduction, but, much like Vector, I guess I just got too caught up in the story. So that “brief introduction” basically became an entire episode of its own.

I suppose I should probably explain the whole “Tales of the Resistance” thing. Sonic Forces is…incredibly unique in the way that it handled its story. Yes, I know, that’s a pretty funny way to say “terrible”. But that’s the thing. Generally speaking, Sonic game stories tend to fall into two categories. Either you have something like the Classic games or Lost World or Colors or something, where there’s a very loose, simple plot that is presented as it is with no questions to be asked, or it’s something like SA2 or ’06 where the plot is complicated and presents lots of questions, but is still designed to be self-inclusive and answer those questions for itself. But Forces is different. Forces presents this grandiose plot, one of the biggest in the franchise, but then leaves 90% of it up to your imagination. And when it comes to Sonic, I have a very active imagination. So that’s why I’ve decided to work on this sort of…subseries to take place within The Chaos Project. The idea is not to rewrite Forces, but simply to tell the stories that Forces left out. In fact, the Forces special I wrote nearly a year ago, After the Fight, would probably be considered a part of this subseries as well. I did consider writing this as its own separate story, instead of making it a part of The Chaos Project, but…why should I leave these things separate when they stand to benefit from the context of each other? Plus, as you may know from Shadow of Time, I don’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to reliably working on non-Chaos Project content. I’ll probably compile it all on the website with C.P. content removed anyways.

One of the reasons I love this part so much (and why it dragged so much longer than expected) is because I couldn’t pass up the chance to reimplement some nearly-canon yet lost material of Forces. To most of my readers, half of the dialogue during the Virtual Reality novelization was probably completely unfamiliar. But all of it (right up before the end) was actual dialogue programmed into the real Episode Shadow, but left inaccessible for unknown reasons. I might’ve mentioned this before, but Shadow’s line “I thought you said he was destroyed three months ago…” was one of the most spectacular deliveries I’ve ever heard from this voice actor of Shadow. But they cut it out. So to spite them, I put it back in. Even at the end, once Shadow started talking about “Showing them Ultimate Power,” those were cut lines as well, although they seemed to be intended for Eggman’s Facility (possibly implying a cut Jackal Squad fight, curse you Sonic Team). In general, Tales of the Resistance is expected to be full of such references to cut content, little-known trivia, and even some unused concept art, as you will be seeing right at the beginning of the next part. In terms of the “little-known trivia,” I should probably mention that the first flashback scene, of Rouge coordinating Shadow’s run through Enemy Territory while Omega deals with Infinite, was actually, for the most part, straight out of one of the official Sonic Forces prequel comics. But that’s not the trivia part. What’s interesting is that that particular comic, “Looming Shadow,” ended with a brief exchange between Rouge and Shadow which was entirely missing from the original game, despite the dialogue otherwise lining up perfectly. That would be because that ending exchange was, you guessed it, made up of lines that are programmed in but cut from the final game. It’s hard to say whether the comic writers actually saw a beta version of the game where those lines were used, or if they were simply given a bulk script to work with before anything got cut. But the way I see it, I’m simply doing the comic’s work. Only better. Eat your heart out, Ian Flynn (not really I love your work plz don’t be mad).

Coming back to the episode as a whole, I would say this one in particular was inspired by a few very specific questions.
1) What the heck happened at the end of Episode Shadow that made Rouge call Shadow over?
2) Why the heck did Episode Shadow end showing Sonic being defeated by Infinite without any additional context of any kind? What was the significance of that scene?
3) WHERE THE HECK WAS SHADOW OVER THE FOLLOWING SIX MONTHS!!?? Seriously! They dedicate an entire prequel story to Shadow, and they don’t even bother answering the one question about him that was actually posed by the main game? What were they thinking!?

Over all, the ending of Episode Shadow was severely, severely lacking. It’s almost like they decided to cancel the second half so they could get it out in time for day-one DLC. IT’S ALREADY DLC!! YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST TAKE THE TIME TO PUT ACTUAL WORK INTO IT!! Sorry. Anyways, two out of three of those questions were definitively answered by this first part. And that brings me to the Battle of Lost Valley. Green Hill was one of the many, many things in Forces that everyone reacted to, but never actually talked about. Why is it covered in sand? Why is it inhabited by an alien worm from the Lost Hex? Why is it littered with the scattered remains of Death Egg Robots? These are things that everyone points out, yet no one ever bothers answering. For these questions, I got one out of three. It’s a start. Writing the Battle of Lost Valley was immensely satisfying, just because it answered so many questions. It explains what Rouge saw at the end of Episode Shadow. It explains where the Death Egg Robots came from. It even explains where GUN went for the duration of the game. To top that all off, it gives the sand worm an actual purpose, and ties Episode Shadow quite neatly into the main story of Forces.

And I suppose that’s all I’ve got for this part!

-So until next time, remember to live and learn every day!

S1 E9: Fate of the Dark Part 1

The first in a new Chaos Project sub-series is here at last! Tales of the Resistance begins right here!

Rouge has joined Infinite and the Anti-Rebellion. Three years ago, she once did the same. How did Team Dark survive the War to Take Back the Planet?

And by the way, today’s a special day! Sonic Adventure, Sonic’s first leap into the world of 3D, was first played anywhere in the world 20 years ago today! Happy Anniversary, Sonic Adventure! (I was planning a special episode, but…stuff happens. The episode is still coming, but…it may not be for another month or two.)

Review: Season 0, Episode 8

And it’s done! The mid-season finale of The Chaos Project Season 1! Yes, that means this season’s going to be quite a bit shorter than the last, but Season 0 was always supposed to be a special case. And actually, I’m really liking this 16-episode format so far, it gives the perfect amount of focus on the episodes that matter, while leaving just enough room for the occasional fun filler episode. But, on to the episode itself.

Obviously, I’ve been waiting to do this one for a long time, it being a turning point for the season and all. But that really only applies to the second half of the episode, as the event that would lead up to Rouge leaving was always left vague in my plans. It was by a series of coincidences that I ended up going with the 4th of July date. During early planning for this Season, this episode was actually going to be in early June, but about four episodes in, I decided to accelerate my plans for Sonic’s Birthday episode so that I could get Big in a bit earlier, which meant this one had to be at the end of June or later. I decided early July would leave a good amount of time between this episode and the last, and the 4th, obviously, was the first early July number that came to mind. Before I discarded the date for that reason, it occurred to me that I could have some irony, having the Rebellion take such a big loss on a day of independence. It was around that time, on an entirely separate train of thought, that the timeline of Sonic Forces came to mind. Six months Sonic was out of commission, plus three days for Eggman to execute his big Sun plan, applied to the start date of this new war, January 1st, makes July 4th. It was too perfect. So I went all-out with the Empire Day thing from there. Even so, the details of the big fight weren’t set until well after I had written this episode’s opening scene. Which means, Sonic’s fight with Infinite on top of the balloon floats was actually inspired by my own showcase of a balloon float on the news report at the beginning. I had only done that for something that makes sense to see, I was only planning fireworks at first, but you obviously wouldn’t be able to see those before the actual event. Of course, I was also inspired by a Spider-Man movie, which had a similar balloon float fight scene that I always thought was really cool as a kid. I think I captured that kind of action really well, even for the relatively short fight sequence.

I should, of course, mention the fact that I’m perfectly aware 4th of July is a specifically American holiday. There’s not much reason for anyone else in the world to celebrate it, and there’s even less reason for it to be celebrated in the Sonic universe. That’s why I had to be very careful in the way I phrased things. It was never stated in any way that the date had any significance beyond what Eggman had given it. But if you should happen to celebrate the holiday, then you’re very likely to agree with Sonic’s sentiment of it making you sick, just for considerably different reasons.

And…I guess that’s all I really have to say. Surprisingly short for such a long and important episode. From here, I may be going on a brief holiday/mid-season break, but then again, there’s a certain date I’m trying to make for a special episode coming soon, so episodes may actually be coming out even more rapidly than usual. We’ll have to wait and see.

-So until then, remember to live and learn every day!