Sonic Frontiers Story Dicussion (Full Spoilers)

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

18 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

I better not ever hear you criticize Shadow or his fanbase ever again. 

Who knows? Maybe at some point we'll have a club for these kinds of characters.

[Kuzu]

The "Sega has no idea what to do with me, but keeps me around for marketing reasons" club?

 

Population: every character added past 1992.

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

2 hours ago, Kuzu said:

The "Sega has no idea what to do with me, but keeps me around for marketing reasons" club?

Population: every character added past 1992.

I suppose that's the cynical way to look at things. XD

Moreso the "Popular Apparently Dead, But Not Really" club was what I had in mind.

Granted, SEGA seem to have learned their lessons from Shadow and gave an out for Sage.

While it seems that bringing her back may have always been the idea, I'm sure we wouldn't be as certain about her getting a relevant role in future games, if Sage wasn't as well-received as she ended up being.

[The Deleter]

SAGE and Infinite fans when they realize they're in the same room as each other and noticed a red glow coming from Eggman's robots:

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

9 minutes ago, The Deleter said:

SAGE and Infinite fans when they realize they're in the same room as each other and noticed a red glow coming from Eggman's robots:

Oh, don't even begin to remind me when fans were desperate to think that Sage WAS Infinite, just now as anime girl.

[Kuzu]

24 minutes ago, Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon said:

I suppose that's the cynical way to look at things. XD

Moreso the "Popular Apparently Dead, But Not Really" club was what I had in mind.

Granted, SEGA seem to have learned their lessons from Shadow and gave an out for Sage.

While it seems that bringing her back may have always been the idea, I'm sure we wouldn't be as certain about her getting a relevant role in future games, if Sage wasn't as well-received as she ended up being.

Shadow's problems didn't start until after he was brought back. 

And even then, brining him back wasn't the issue. It's that what they did with him afterwards that was problem. 

 

Not that Sage will fall into the same pitfalls given their characters are different, but I'm not really confident she'll be treated any better. At best, she'll probably just play a secondary role with Eggman's group so she doesn't overstay her welcome, but can still show up. 

Y'all love it when characters just show up regardless of the context or role they play, so just appearing will be enough to satisfy some of you. 

[Razule]

2 minutes ago, Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon said:

Oh, don't even begin to remind me when fans were desperate to think that Sage WAS Infinite, just now as anime girl.

There's no proof Infinite wasn't absorbed into Eggman's systems through the Phantom Ruby, and Eggman used that data to create Sage. She could be his reincarnation

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

9 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Not that Sage will fall into the same pitfalls given their characters are different, but I'm not really confident she'll be treated any better. At best, she'll probably just play a secondary role with Eggman's group so she doesn't overstay her welcome, but can still show up. 

The main bout of why people have faith, is that, as far as we know, Ian Flynn is still around as writer. Flynn, left to his own devices, for the most part, doesn't have characters waste away or become flacid versions of themselves.

Now, a worry could arise that SEGA might pull some buffoonery on him, but given the freedom he had with Frontiers' story, and the positive reception that move got, even for them, it would be crazy to suddenly backtrack on all those moves that have netted them good will.

[Kuzu]

3 minutes ago, Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon said:

The main bout of why people have faith, is that, as far as we know, Ian Flynn is still around as writer. Flynn, left to his own devices, for the most part, doesn't have characters waste away or become flacid versions of themselves.

Now, a worry could arise that SEGA might pull some buffoonery on him, but given the freedom he had with Frontiers' story, and the positive reception that move got, even for them, it would be crazy to suddenly backtrack on all those moves that have netted them good will.

It's important to keep in mind that despite the improvement in Frontiers' writing, it still suffers from many pitfalls of Modern Sonic games. Namely any character that's not Sonic doesn't get much to do, and the flaccid presentation of certain story beats. No writer can fix those fundamental issues, just work around them. 

Now if Sage is integrated into the comics eventually, then I can see her being used to a much better effect there. 

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

1 minute ago, Kuzu said:

It's important to keep in mind that despite the improvement in Frontiers' writing, it still suffers from many pitfalls of Modern Sonic games. Namely any character that's not Sonic doesn't get much to do, and the flaccid presentation of certain story beats. No writer can fix those fundamental issues, just work around them. 

I'd say Ian did the best he could within those parameters. However, that's usually to do with his allies. If Sage toes the line between ally and enemy, she could possibly avoid that.

Of course, the most ideal scenario is that, in fleshing out this formula that finally has things working for them, Sonic Team implement other playable characters. And lord knows, the Frontiers system really does lend itself to multiple playstyles.

3 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Now if Sage is integrated into the comics eventually, then I can see her being used to a much better effect there. 

Given that Ian more or less officially merged the comic book canon in with this game, I suppose that's liable to occur as well.

[The Deleter]

Even at the highest level of control for the story specifically, Ian doesn't have say over what the next game will be or focus on. That comes down to the directors themselves and the gameplay concepts they have in mind for the future of the series. Multiple playable characters or serious storytelling tone have to come from them first before anything can move forward on that front.

There is nothing wrong with Ian writing Frontiers to be self contained, and it definitely doesn't count as backtracking when it ends up that way. That's on fans instead if they get their hopes up for a scenario that was not guaranteed to begin with.

[Kuzu]

Its important to note that Ian has no say in the game's concepts whatsoever; if Sega wants to continue with only Sonic being the only playable character, then Ian has to abide by that regardless how he feels about it. 

I feel the fandom has it backwards; Ian wasn't the one who pitched the more serious story, that was Sega. They chose that and just commissioned Ian to come up with a scenario around that. That doesn't mean Ian has full creative control over the series and that he can just do what he wants. 

I know some of you balk at the "THE EVIL MANDATES" but they exist for a reason, and any writer who works on a licensed product has to abide by them. 

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

6 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Its important to note that Ian has no say in the game's concepts whatsoever; if Sega wants to continue with only Sonic being the only playable character, then Ian has to abide by that regardless how he feels about it.

Well, if you paid attention, you'll recall that I did take that scenario into account.

7 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

I know some of you balk at the "THE EVIL MANDATES" but they exist for a reason, and any writer who works on a licensed product has to abide by them

Oh, most definitely. Annoying as they may seem, tons of fans conflate how much the mandates actually negatively affect things and tend to exaggerate their potency.

8 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

I feel the fandom has it backwards; Ian wasn't the one who pitched the more serious story, that was Sega. They chose that and just commissioned Ian to come up with a scenario around that. That doesn't mean Ian has full creative control over the series and that he can just do what he wants. 

Actually what happened was that Sonic Team created the world and such, and drafted Ian Flynn to create several scenarios. Upon which, they selected a scenario and let Ian do his thing.

So, to the fandom's credit, they're not wrong in reveling at how much say Flynn did have in regards to the story.

[Kuzu]

The point is; what the story does or doesn't do, is entirely on Sega, not Flynn. He's just a hired gun essentially. 

Say for instance if Sega decided "Hey, Sonic is going to be the only playable character, and Tails, Knuckles Amy will be NPC's again" he can't object to that. Can probably suggest "hey maybe we can follow up those character arcs from Frontiers by having them playable?" , but Sega don't bite, can't do much about that. 

[Sega DogTagz]

Sage isn't even remotely as limited as the rest of the cast just by virtue of what she is. She's a digital construct employed by Eggman. She has free range to appear anywhere he does - and even beyond that - anywhere his tech has touched. If there is a Motobug blocking your path in a level, she can commandeer its speakers to throw a one-liner at you. If your walk past a monitor, *bzzt* Hello Sonic, Leave Immediately.

 

The same limitations you have to consider with Knuckles or Amy don't apply to her. The Storytelling framework and  Mandates we know about do very little in terms of limiting the role she is capable of playing.

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

5 minutes ago, Sega DogTagz said:

Sage isn't even remotely as limited as the rest of the cast just by virtue of what she is. She's a digital construct employed by Eggman. She has free range to appear anywhere he does - and even beyond that - anywhere his tech has touched. If there is a Motobug blocking your path in a level, she can commandeer its speakers to throw a one-liner at you. If your walk past a monitor, *bzzt* Hello Sonic, Leave Immediately.

The same limitations you have to consider with Knuckles or Amy don't apply to her. The Storytelling framework and  Mandates we know about do very little in terms of limiting the role she is capable of playing.

Yeah, that's pretty much my main point. Even if SEGA forced Sonic Team to keep the gameplay Sonic-only, that wouldn't really impact Sage's capacity for story participation.

[The Deleter]

1 hour ago, Sega DogTagz said:

Sage isn't even remotely as limited as the rest of the cast just by virtue of what she is. She's a digital construct employed by Eggman. She has free range to appear anywhere he does - and even beyond that - anywhere his tech has touched. If there is a Motobug blocking your path in a level, she can commandeer its speakers to throw a one-liner at you. If your walk past a monitor, *bzzt* Hello Sonic, Leave Immediately.

The same limitations you have to consider with Knuckles or Amy don't apply to her. The Storytelling framework and  Mandates we know about do very little in terms of limiting the role she is capable of playing.

At this point Knuckles and Amy have the same degree of framework and freedom to be Sonic's buddies through the story as SAGE does to be Eggman's Henchdaughter; all of that is beside the point. If SEGA wants to make the next story about how complex and interesting a revived SAGE would be in a new Sonic game as an enemy, that's up to their end of conceptualization. If SEGA wants to make her just a cameo for winks and nods, that's up to them. If SEGA doesn't want characters to show up, that's up to them. From the top down, it entirely depends on the next game they want to make. Even for this game, Ian didn't have control over which characters showed up; only Sonic Team did.

It's in response to the backtracking comment that this applies to, because like every other Sonic game, Frontiers has told a story built for itself, albeit with slightly more nods to other games than the Pontaff games ended up having. Having SAGE show up for one game and one game alone wouldn't be backtracking, it would be entirely within reason of how Sonic games are made and likely the intention to begin with, knowing Ian's new stance on storytelling for the series. It also extends to the other characters, because like SAGE, their development occurred on screen, and they could either show up immediately in the next game, or several games from now. Will the development satisfy fans if they are basically the same characters they claimed they were at the end of Frontiers? Probably not, with how high the fanbase's expectations are, but that's not a backtracking fault of Frontiers' storytelling either. It's set up to have that development be all those characters needed, and that's fine; that's within reason of how Sonic games are made.

[Natie]

I've been musing on the Chaos/The Emeralds Origins confusion. Going over the Egg Memo that says the ancients were mutated into an unrecognizable species by some kind of radiation that obviously implied to be Chaos Energy ('twas what happened to Chaos if I'm correct), I don't think a race that could wield that power well enough to create Chaos Emeralds themselves would just be at their mercy like that. I think this might just be something the emeralds do to creatures given enough time. This isn't even mentioning the Master Emerald being on earth. If they weren't created by the ancients, and if we still want to believe the classic era manuals and internal pieces about the emeralds being in "ANOTHER DIMENSION" (Special Stages) that can be accessed through "energy disturbances" haven't been retconned to all hell yet, then I think I got it mostly figured out:

> Portals to the Special Zone can open anywhere regardless of planet, emeralds occasionally emerge/fall out (honestly their travel habits are all over the place)

>The Ancients discover the emeralds exist, collect and keep all 7.

>They harness their energy in all their technology, making it a huge part of their lives.

>After several generations, the chaos radiation poisoning has set in and they've become water beasts.

>The End gets hungry and decides to eat their planet. They flee.

>The Master Emerald had fallen onto Earth already by chance, it calls the nearby emeralds in spaceship engines to it.

>They die again, their alters and sanctuaries for the emeralds are left behind.

>Long exposure mutates a chao over time into the same kind of water creature.

>The Echidnas find and appropriate the infrastructure and the rest is history.

So basically we learned the origin place of the emeralds all the way back in sonic 1 :V

[Iko]

I refuse to think that the ancients "evolved" into chao, it makes little sense, and if the emerald themselves had the effect of devolving all the creatures into more primitive versions of themselves, other animals and maybe even humans would have been transformed into different things at some time in the history of the planet.

Either what @JezMM said that the chao evolved from the remainings of the wiped out ancients, or the chao were completely unrelated creatures which assimilated the ancient's DNA in some way, through chaos radiation (and I believe that if this is the case, it's not the chao in general but specifically only Chaos). In that second case, the ancient's DNA must have been stored somewhere, maybe even in the emeralds themselves.

The chao have a very similar shape to the kocos, and the kocos are 100% artificial sculptures meant to be lucky charms, not real life forms; so there's also that factor. Not even the characters in-game have a clear idea of how the koco went from lucky charms to "soul holders" or whatever they do with dreams, ambitions and such: there could be a piece of history that's still missing.

Not directly related, but I didn't get the feel that the ancients were creatures made of water... it looked like they were made of energy in my opinion. The texture they were represented with, had a more "ghostly" feel to it than "watery". They're visions from cyberspace, so there's also the possibility that it wasn't their real appearance, but only a loose recreation of those scenes by using kocos instead of the actual persons, while the persons' detais are lost in history.

[StaticMania]

10 minutes ago, Natie said:

So basically we learned the origin place of the emeralds all the way back in sonic 1 :V

I guess this is another reason as to why it was..."more interesting" when the games weren't too interested in lore dumping.

The Chaos Emeralds just going through dimensions accessed via different islands is pretty neat.

[The Deleter]

23 minutes ago, Iko said:

The chao have a very similar shape to the kocos, and the kocos are 100% artificial sculptures meant to be lucky charms, not real life forms; so there's also that factor. Not even the characters in-game have a clear idea of how the koco went from lucky charms to "soul holders" or whatever they do with dreams, ambitions and such: there could be a piece of history that's still missing.

It could be that the Koco as lucky charms were created as a way of reflecting who the ancients once were, to remember their roots and the significance of their evolution. Maybe not the exact same, but similar in a way a stone carving of them can't fully represent?

Also agreed on their forms not necessarily being made of water. The floating bubbles inside of their bodies might indicate that it's something similar, but there's also a pulsing "shine" that appears on the bubbles intermittently, which makes it feel like the substance is a lot more cosmic than just water bubbles; that and the neuron bone structure of the head and the feet go a long way to feeling distinct imo

Though Chaos himself has been retconned into new designs in the past, considering Generations, so I dunno how much stock I should put into that as intentional lol

[Razule]

Special Stages might not be canon, according to Ian. Lame, but to be fair, they've never been said to be a thing in the modern games' stories, they just find them lying around.

The forms the Ancients were mutated into over time are considered unrecognizable, in addition to them being related to Chaos. For the longest time, and still on Sonic Channel to this day, it's been confirmed that Chaos is a "mutant Chao". A basic Chao would fit the bill for "unrecognizable" better than Chaos, who just looks like a small version of them. It's weird that one Eggman log is the only place that any similarity to Chaos and the Ancients is brought up. It's like they were trying to be ambiguous, but also giving so much away that the conclusion is obvious, so it just seems non-committal. 

Maybe the Chaos Emeralds mutated the remaining Ancients into water babies because they were too advanced for Earth. They needed to be taken out of the equation to ensure that the native beings would grow on their own terms.

[StaticMania]

32 minutes ago, Razule said:

Special Stages might not be canon, according to Ian. Lame, but to be fair, they've never been said to be a thing in the modern games' stories, they just find them lying around.

The Advance games, Heroes, Rush, Generations 3DS and...Lost World 3DS.

They aren't addressed.

[Razule]

8 minutes ago, StaticMania said:

The Advance games, Heroes, Rush, Generations 3DS and...Lost World 3DS.

They aren't addressed.

Yeah, but it could just be a gameplay element in those appearances. 

[StaticMania]

That's the part that would be lame...