How Canon Is Chronicles?

[UnknownByME]

How canon is said DS RPG game? it's never mentioned again, but I don't think it ever goes against canon, and even if it ended on a cliffhanger, so did Sonic 4, and yet that's still considered canon by us.

[Sonictrainer]

12 minutes ago, UnknownByME said:

How canon is said DS RPG game? it's never mentioned again, but I don't think it ever goes against canon, and even if it ended on a cliffhanger, so did Sonic 4, and yet that's still considered canon by us.

Who said what now?

Real Talk: Sonic Chronicles' story is a cluster of the games, the Pre-Ian Flynn Archie Comics, & SATAM. To call this game canon would have consider every other universe besides the games canon, which is not true.

[Big Panda]

It was a lot simpler to place into canon before the two worlds nonsense came along, since this is the only game ever to explicitely have “human” and “mobian” locations inhabiting a single world.

Aside from that, I say there’s really nothing lore wise that rules it out of canon.

The fact it’s supposed to be set two years after an Eggman defeat would be good grounds to think of it as a “possible future”, or as something that’s always going to be at the end of the game timeline.

Another interpretation often thrown about is that the ending indirectly leads into Unleashed’s opening.

In terms of how Sega see it; they’ve been avoiding the game and any of its lore like the plague ever since the legal storm it triggered, so they’re probably none too keen on it being anywhere within an inch of game canon.

[Diogenes]

0% canon. Weird spinoff by a separate company introducing a lot of strange elements without a firm conclusion and has never been referenced by any known-to-be-canon game and almost certainly never will be.

[thumbs13]

It specifically takes place in the not too distant future. If it is canon, than it takes place after every other game, even the ones that haven't happened yet. 

[DabigRG]

Interesting to note how, despite Bioware's likely considerable involvement and the lawsuit it brought upon them, SEGA apparently gave Archie the okay to include Shade among other things in the reboot if they wanted to use.

[Blue Blood]

I don't think that SEGA will ever regard it as canon ever again, but it came from a time when the series wasn't bogged down by issues of what was and wasn't canon, different universes and whatever else. You just had the games, a few separate TV series and a couple of comic series. This is where games like the Advance series, storybook series, Rush series etc still preside. Are they canon? It doesn't matter. However you choose to answer the question, it doesn't actually have any impact on anything else. They're self-contained stories that don't tie into the existing games at all. At best you could point to a few issues with Advance 3 and Battle concerning Shadow, but even then they're not major issues. You don't even need to try to rearrange the games into any order other than the order of their release dates for the vast majority of it (if not all of it). 

Chronicles was, at least when it was made, considered to be a canon entry that ambiguously took place after every other Sonic game that already existed. It didn't encroach on any other storylines, but took a few threads from SA1 and Battle to weave a new title. The storyline can still be considered canon if you want to do so because it still doesn't contradict anything else in the series (and if you think back to 2008 when Chronicles was new, barely anything new has been added to the series' lore and narrative since then). It had a few oddities like SatAM/Archie-style roboticisation of wild animals and SWAT Bots, but I don't think that either of those things stick out as more than small oddities. They're certainly not plot holes or contradictions. Because of the legal issues involved with Penders, a sequel never being developed and the game being swiftly forgotten by all involved parties (apart from the Nocturnus Gate appearing in the second Olympics Games entry because it was before the trouble ensued), it's probably officially considered non-canon now. But it's just... not very important. 

Just for the sake of discussion, I unapologetically love the story in Chronicles. The game may have been pretty crap as a whole, and the story way too close to the Archie comics, but I don't care a great deal. At the time, I wasn't very familiar with Archie comics and I'm still only vaguely aware of their stories now. However, the way that the game handled everything was interesting to me. Especially weaving Gizoids and Battle into the plot. Yes, the Knuckles' tribe was virtually wiped out following the events we bee in the past in SA1, but the enemies that they alluded to were able to thrive. That was, until, their technologic prowess and in particular the Gizoids saw them deemed too powerful and they were banished to another world. Just about the only thing I didn't like was Shade herself.

[DabigRG]

Weren't the SwatBots in that game just a name reference?

[Blue Blood]

14 minutes ago, DabigRG said:

Weren't the SwatBots in that game just a name reference?

SatAM:

Archie:

Chronicles:

They were established in Chronicles as some of Eggman's older machines. Whilst the design varies in all cases, there are obvious similarities and they serve the same purpose as Eggman's common ground troops (like Egg Pawns or another basic robot does in most games post-Heroes). They're clearly supposed to be the same thing with a dit of a redesign. It's more than them just being a name reference. 

[DabigRG]

2 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

SatAM:

  Hide contents

 

Chronicles:

  Hide contents

 

Archie (pre-reboot):

  Hide contents

 

They were established in Chronicles as some of Eggman's older machines. Whilst the design varies in all cases, there are obvious similarities and they serve the same purpose as Eggman's common ground troops (like Egg Pawns or another basic robot does in most games post-Heroes). They're clearly supposed to be the same thing with a dit of a redesign. It's more than them just being a name reference. 

 

Oooh, see that's not what I remember seeing on the wiki or whatever a while back.

[King Scoopa Koopa]

8 hours ago, Big Panda said:

Another interpretation often thrown about is that the ending indirectly leads into Unleashed’s opening.

This is what I prefer to go with. Ties things up nicely, if not especially neatly.

And hey, Nocturne was in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, so at least it made an impact outside of its own game.

Sonic News Network says "former Sega Europe community manager Kevin Eva states that fans should consider the game an alternate universe due to its troubled production, but notes that the canon is essentially in constant flux at any given time for Sega's convenience."

Hey, with multiverse theory, everything can be canon in some way, so that works for me.

 

[batson]

I feel that if Chronicles was released today, the whole idea about it not being canon wouldn't have gotten as accepted. This is because back when it came out, the fanbase at large was still under the impression that such a thing as a coherent canon could exist for this franchise, and so it didn't took much for a game like Chronicles, with it's nods to other continuities, to be considered suspicious in terms of canonicity. Today however a lot of people have more or less abondoned the idea of a clear-cut canon for this series, what with it's retcons and contradictions. The issues created by Chronicles, with it's inclusion of Swatbots and what-nots, seem downright quaint compared to things like the two-worlds debacle.

[Shadowlax]

The only thing canon from that game is a lawsuit

[SBR2]

In generally I try not to worry about canon and just enjoy myself...but seeing as this is about Chronicles and enjoyment's impossible I guess I will say I don't consider it canon. It's really just a mess and tried slapping on ideas from other media and pretending they fit.

I will admit the Nocturnus weren't a bad idea persay (just like the Dark Legion aren't a terrible idea just poorly executed) and Shade as a character was alright.

Honestly I hate that it seems to have ruined any chance at another Sonic RPG.

[Your Vest Friend]

10 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

I don't think that SEGA will ever regard it as canon ever again, but it came from a time when the series wasn't bogged down by issues of what was and wasn't canon, different universes and whatever else.

I was there and this is not true, otherwise Kevin Eva wouldn't have had to go on record to say that it wasn't canon in 2010, and that wouldn't have caused the outrage it did. I mean for a start this was when the debate about Battle's place in the canon after the release of Shadow was most hotly contested (not helped by Heroes either), and the Storybook games debate existed from when Secret Rings came out. 

[Blue Blood]

36 minutes ago, Your Vest Friend said:

I was there and this is not true, otherwise Kevin Eva wouldn't have had to go on record to say that it wasn't canon, and that wouldn't have caused the outrage it did. I mean for a start this was when the debate about Battle's place in the canon after the release of Shadow was most hotly contested, and the Storybook games debate existed from when Secret Rings came out. 

I remember Kevin Eva's comments and remember thinking "what a load of horse shit" back at the time too. What I meant was, it came from a time when the series actually had some sense of cohesive canon, where the games didn't seem to contradict each other so regularly and outwardly weren't split off into different continuities. So it really never mattered whether or not the storybooks were canon, they could just be taken at face value. It's different to what we've seen more recently with the likes of Zavok being Eggman's ally, Classic Sonic being a different character from the past and/or a different dimension, the Phantom Ruby having a dozen different origins and Wisps still being present with Nega varieties to boot. Granted I did forget about the nonsense surrounding where Blaze and Eggman Nega come from. They are also silly plot holes that have no good reason to exist. On the whole though, Chronicles doesn't really fit this bill. Nothing comes to my mind that means that the game is non-canon other than it randomly being declared as such. 

You're going to have to refresh my memory on Battle/Advance 3/ShTH/Chronicles. I never grasped what about them was supposed to be plot holes. Was it because of Shadow's memory and some of Gerald's journal? I know that when people try to create timelines, they tend to put Battle after the events of ShTH. I'm asking sincerely, because Google's not proving to be that helpful on the matter, and I don't feel like replaying all of those games.

I still find that comments about what is and isn't canon are really, really stupid. Unless something is clearly defined as a completely different canon (i.e. Boom), what's even the point? Chronicles specifically situated itself with a storyline that's set ambiguously after the events of past games. It bugs me to no end that something as innocuous as it or the storybook games get labelled as non-canon, when other games (Forces, '06, Rivals) come along and completely rewrite elements that had already been introduced. And then things get extra confusing when you add in moments like Sonic referencing SatSR in Generations (English dub only? I've no idea), where this title that was officially declared non-canon for no good reason suddenly gets launched into canon territory. Whether it's canon or not changes nothing, so why take a stance on it?

Complicated "timelines" where events happen off screen, where stories aren't told in chronological order but aren't clearly shown as such and where some stories just straight up aren't considered to be canon will always be a bug bear that I'll never get over. It applies to everything, not just Sonic. If the story creates plot holes or is going to be non-canon... just, tell a different story. 

[Diogenes]

19 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

You're going to have to refresh my memory on Battle/Advance 3/ShTH/Chronicles. I never grasped what about them was supposed to be plot holes. Was it because of Shadow's memory and some of Gerald's journal? I know that when people try to create timelines, they tend to put Battle after the events of ShTH. I'm asking sincerely, because Google's not proving to be that helpful on the matter, and I don't feel like replaying all of those games.

I think the main contradiction between Battle and ShtH is Shadow's memories; he has them in Battle but not in ShtH, but he's still concerned with Maria and Gerald and being a weapon in Battle even though ShtH ended with him supposedly moving on from his past. It's easier to say Shadow was still sorting out his feelings after ShtH than that he got amnesia twice, the second time entirely offscreen.

I'm not sure if there's any outright plotholes with those other games in the mix, but it's always bothered me that Chronicles says that its echidnas were technologically advanced enough to create the Gizoids, robots potentially powerful enough to destroy the entire planet, to fight...the Knuckles tribe, as we see it in SA, whose destructive might seems to amount to a bunch of buff dudes, possibly with spears. It's an attempt to tie things together and create more "lore" that strains your suspension of disbelief enough that it really just makes everything worse.

19 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

I still find that comments about what is and isn't canon are really, really stupid. Unless something is clearly defined as a completely different canon (i.e. Boom), what's even the point?

Whether it's canon or not changes nothing, so why take a stance on it?

The way I see it, trying to figure out what's canon is trying to figure out what's true, and figuring out what's true is the first step in figuring out what a thing actually means. Admittedly that's kind of a lofty way of approaching the story of a poorly-managed video game series about talking superhero animals (and the continued failure of it to actually add up and mean anything is why I don't bother much with it anymore), but if you care enough about a thing you often want to dive in deeper and find more about it to appreciate, and finding those connections and trying to spin it into some elegant, meaningful whole can be part of that.

[DabigRG]

1 hour ago, Diogenes said:

I think the main contradiction between Battle and ShtH is Shadow's memories; he has them in Battle but not in ShtH, but he's still concerned with Maria and Gerald and being a weapon in Battle even though ShtH ended with him supposedly moving on from his past. It's easier to say Shadow was still sorting out his feelings after ShtH than that he got amnesia twice, the second time entirely offscreen.

Honestly, Battle and by extension Advanced 3 can easily be subject to broad strokes.

But if it really entirely around Shadow himself, you can just say he was trying to figure out what he would do next.

1 hour ago, Diogenes said:

I'm not sure if there's any outright plotholes with those other games in the mix, but it's always bothered me that Chronicles says that its echidnas were technologically advanced enough to create the Gizoids, robots potentially powerful enough to destroy the entire planet, to fight...the Knuckles tribe, as we see it in SA, whose destructive might seems to amount to a bunch of buff dudes, possibly with spears. It's an attempt to tie things together and create more "lore" that strains your suspension of disbelief enough that it really just makes everything worse.

 

That's basically them realizing the plot point of Echidnaopolis getting rid of their technology after Dimitri and eventually Menniker pulled their stunts, if anything.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a manual for Sonic 3 & Knuckles that mentioned the Echidnas as an advanced civilization anyway?

[Diogenes]

21 minutes ago, DabigRG said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a manual for Sonic 3 & Knuckles that mentioned the Echidnas as an advanced civilization anyway?

More or less, and there is some advanced technology tied to the Knuckles tribe (the teleporters in HPZ/SSZ, the anti-gravity panels in SA's Lost World), but the actual first-hand source we've got (Tikal's memories) doesn't present them as being some kind of powerful magitech-based society; the story in Sonic 3's Japanese manual is ultimately more legend than fact.

[DabigRG]

19 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

More or less, and there is some advanced technology tied to the Knuckles tribe (the teleporters in HPZ/SSZ, the anti-gravity panels in SA's Lost World), but the actual first-hand source we've got (Tikal's memories) doesn't present them as being some kind of powerful magitech-based society; the story in Sonic 3's Japanese manual is ultimately more legend than fact.

Huh. Perhaps it was an attempt to make that legend true as well.

[Moose the Cat]

On 4/6/2020 at 7:29 PM, Blue Blood said:

SatAM:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Archie:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Chronicles:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

They were established in Chronicles as some of Eggman's older machines. Whilst the design varies in all cases, there are obvious similarities and they serve the same purpose as Eggman's common ground troops (like Egg Pawns or another basic robot does in most games post-Heroes). They're clearly supposed to be the same thing with a dit of a redesign. It's more than them just being a name reference. 

The Chronicles ones look to me like the Shadowbots from the mid-100s Archie years. It would make sense that these are some of Eggman's older machines, as they are (as you point out) just different versions of the same robot, just now it's v3.5. 

This incidentally fits with the timeline I posted in the One True Blue Canon (Everything Happened) thread... which isn't particularly clever on my part as I think the "big story" of the franchise has been told mostly in order of release (with exceptions). One creator influences the next; everyone is building from what's come before. From the perspective of "canon", imo if you can forgive/squeeze past some inconsistencies, especially from the Western media pre-Adventure, it's easy to see how all these things fit together and trace the evolutions of certain ideas, whether they were intended or not, and view Sonic's progression as a character in-universe as roughly parallel to Sonic's progression as a franchise.

For better or worse, Archie was ahead of the curve on a lot of things SEGA later did (evil twins, darker stories, Robotnik takes over the world, organized furry rebellions, kissing princesses to bring someone back to life, etc). I'm just saying that as a fact. It makes sense, as they were producing more volume of Sonic stories than any other media, and they didn't have a lot to go on at the time, so they just wandered and sometimes stumbled upon some interesting concepts. In Chronicles, it's really really clear, to the point of the Penders lawsuit. And he's not wrong in this case, at least not wrong in the sense of what was happening in terms of Sega viewing the licensed media as a farm team for ideas. That's kind of the whole point of them, aside from being another extension of the brand to profit from. Nobody was getting filthy rich from the Archie Sonic comic books, that's for sure, but they sold well enough to continue, and it kept the Sonic brand alive (for good and bad) between game releases. 

Archie was serving as an ideas factory for Sonic Team to pick and choose. We know Sonic Team in Japan weren't paying close attention and obviously didn't care to sync the games with the Western canon other than to include the name Robotnik in SA1 and SA2 as canon. But at the same time, even with the differences between East and West, there are still a bunch of ideas that are getting tossed into this gigantic pot. 

And a lot of the best Sonic games were produced in the West, anyway, with Japanese and American teams collaborating at STI... Sonic 2 and Sonic Adventure 2 were both made in California, and those are two of the most beloved entries in the entire franchise. They're also the two that feel the most suitably epic in proportion to the gameplay. They hit the same sweet spot as Star Wars, blending Japanese and American concepts into something unique yet familiar yet strange.

All that is to say, the concept of a dark brotherhood of ancient echidnas with crazy technology is still a fun one, even if the actual executions have been lacking.

On 4/7/2020 at 8:45 AM, Diogenes said:

More or less, and there is some advanced technology tied to the Knuckles tribe (the teleporters in HPZ/SSZ, the anti-gravity panels in SA's Lost World), but the actual first-hand source we've got (Tikal's memories) doesn't present them as being some kind of powerful magitech-based society; the story in Sonic 3's Japanese manual is ultimately more legend than fact.

Alternatively, this can be explained by the idea that there was more than one tribe of echidnas. Or, the advanced technology was developed in the generations after Tikal's memories and before Knuckles' time. The teleporters in Sky Sanctuary are connected to the Hidden Palace, so this was probably developed by the echidnas who lived after Chaos wiped out the Pachamac/Knuckles Clan and Tikal sealed him in the Master Emerald with him. Over time, the echidnas who lived between Tikal and Knuckles created the Hidden Palace and incorporated magic into their technology, learning from the Emerald and some subtle guidance from Tikal. After the events of S3K, Knuckles returned the Emerald to its original alter as seen in Adventure, but just because the M.E. isn't in the Hidden Palace in Knuckles time in SA or Tikal's memories doesn't mean it was never there. 

And if we go outside the core games to accept some ideas from Chronicles or Archie even partially, then there's even more background context to support the idea that the rustic tribal Pachamac/Tikal society and the advanced magitech Echidna society aren't mutually exclusive. Both are true! 

And the best reason to support the idea of both are true is... it makes the main characters more interesting, more three dimensional. To be clear -- they are rarely written to be three dimensional (though there's a handful of talented writers who've passed through the franchise who have written the characters with depth, notably obviously Flynn and the writers of Movie Sonic) but if you imagine all of the Sonic adventures combined have made an impact on Sonic, like as a person, that the tolls taken by the overall franchise are within the backlog of his soul, even if his memory is too short-term to remember it all.... it just adds some nice depth and a feeling of being lived in.

The IDW series is doing really great in this regard, although it will be interesting what direction Flynn will go (if any) if he decides to start incorporating Echidna Clan stories. I suspect that Flynn would do what he usually does which is try to bridge a bunch of disparate ideas into something cohesive that becomes more than the sum of its parts. I wouldn't be surprised if Flynn combined the Pachamac society and the Techidnas (ha) like this or another way but did a version of both are true.

[Bowbowis]

Sonic has been in a coma since the Cyclone crashed. The games from 2010-present have all been a fever dream.

Seriously though, I think of Chronicles and its lost sequel as a sort of capstone to the 1991-2009 era of Sonic. Yeah, Unleashed and Black Knight released later, but I think of them like the Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel to The Dark Brotherhood's Infinity War. The way it draws in bits of lore from a bunch of previous games and weaves them together into an epic story with rampant mythology gags, alongside its placement at the end of the timeline make it feel like a sort of grand finale to a Sonic the Hedgehog series where continuity, however loose, still mattered and the universe was governed by an established lore instead of whatever Takashi Iizuka pulls out of his ass on any given day. At least, it feels like half a grand finale, since it ended on a cliffhanger and the sequel never materialized, so it's kind of like if Endgame was never released, to continue the Infinity War parallel.

[expansivelovestories]

On 4/7/2020 at 11:45 AM, Diogenes said:

More or less, and there is some advanced technology tied to the Knuckles tribe (the teleporters in HPZ/SSZ, the anti-gravity panels in SA's Lost World), but the actual first-hand source we've got (Tikal's memories) doesn't present them as being some kind of powerful magitech-based society; the story in Sonic 3's Japanese manual is ultimately more legend than fact.

it is really interesting, in a fun way, to wonder about how Adventure did basically bring in an additional realm of the Echidnas' civilisation rather than display anything that was seen in S3K.  i think prior to writing this post I used to consider them to be loosely parallel universes, and to some extent I still do.

Yet I am also sort of realizing that S3K was implying that there were several waves of Echidna cultures who had different building styles and technologies.

these posts by Mr. Lange are very satisfying in referencing to the overall concept of the earlier civilisations and reminding us how much room there is to learn about them in future games!  (Any new game either official or fanmade in which the Time Stones could be brought to the Master Emerald to become Super versions, and allow time travel to occur outside of Little Planet, would be exceptionally wonderful!!)

https://twitter.com/GreatLange/status/1229477367422173184

https://twitter.com/GreatLange/status/1229478289460187140

https://twitter.com/GreatLange/status/1229479034075021312

[Almar]

The Genesis Angel Island had either humans on it or knowledge of them going from Sandoplis Act 2's hieroglyphics.

[Bowbowis]

On 4/7/2020 at 9:00 AM, Diogenes said:

I'm not sure if there's any outright plotholes with those other games in the mix, but it's always bothered me that Chronicles says that its echidnas were technologically advanced enough to create the Gizoids, robots potentially powerful enough to destroy the entire planet, to fight...the Knuckles tribe, as we see it in SA, whose destructive might seems to amount to a bunch of buff dudes, possibly with spears. It's an attempt to tie things together and create more "lore" that strains your suspension of disbelief enough that it really just makes everything worse.

In fairness I think Chronicles says, or at least implies, that the Nocturnus actually were way more technologically advanced than the Knuckles Tribe and part of why Pachacamac went after the Master Emerald to make up for that. At least that's how I always read it.