Time for your daily dose of Sonic GP lore!

Chaos Energy, Chaos Emeralds, and Chaos Radiation

Chaos Energy is a form of powerful supernatural energy that flows throughout Gaia Prime. Chaos Energy itself however has a rather tragic origin, you see, Chaos Energy is actually created from the souls of dead Mobians, and knowing that humanity was kinda partially if not entirely to blame for the extinction of the Mobians, it doesn’t take a genius to imagine the sheer amount of Mobian lives had been lost in order to make Chaos Energy as powerful as it is today. 

Arguably the most powerful sources of Chaos Energy are a set of seven legendary gems known as the Chaos Emeralds. These are a set of highly sought-after relics said to grant limitless power to anyone who possesses them, a single emerald can supposedly turn thoughts into power, allowing the user to draw from the stone’s seemingly limitless energy and preform incredible feats such as warping reality to their will and producing powerful blasts of energy. Gathering all seven emeralds is said to cause miracles, and some individuals (specifically Faunoids) can use the Emerald’s power to achieve a higher state more commonly known as a “Super form”, allowing the user to achieve godlike powers including but not limited to flight, enhanced forms of their natural abilities, unlimited access to reality-altering power, and the ability to share this incredible power with others. Thankfully for us one cannot reasonably remain in a Super form indefinitely, as this power requires a significant amount of the user’s energy to maintain, the form can be maintained by absorbing rings and using their energy, but constantly collecting these rings is often unreasonable for most. When one exits the Super form, the seven emeralds will disperse again, restarting the hunt for these mystical jewels, though seeing how Chaos Energy and by extension the Chaos Emeralds are formed from the souls of millions if not billions of dead Mobian souls, use of this energy unsurprisingly has a few, side-effects…

Chaos Radiation is a strange byproduct of Chaos Energy usage, known to have strange effects on all manner of beings. In humans Chaos Radiation causes disturbing hallucinations, those exposed to it often describing these delusions as “a horrifically mangled and disturbing hellscape of anguish, ungodly suffering and unfathomable malice and spite”, which is honestly not too surprising considering the fact that humans were at least partially responsible for the Mobian’s extinction. Faunoids and Chao seem to take the Radiation a bit better, and often seem to absorb at least trace amounts of it into their bodies, though this Radiation will oftentimes, change them…

buckwild that they keep discovering new islands on sonics earth

there’s gotta be lore about this like how fucking active are these tectonic plates. do they not have GPS technology. we know they’ve been to space how have they not explored the planet yet. how many of these are magically cloaked and why are there so many.

is sonics earth just a fucking dumping ground for random dimensions to exile islands and people to

Do you believe that the Sonic framework is totally incompatible with open level design (like say, Super Mario Odyssey or Zelda: BoTW)?

Nope! About a month ago I kind of wrote about a revelation I had regarding that. To reiterate and maybe clarify a bit, something kind of dawned on me about the boost Sonic games.

At least for me, Sonic Rush was a terrible game my first time through it. A lot of the fun of a game like Sonic Rush, and later Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Generations, is the “mastery” aspect. Errant Signal once likened it to pulling off a perfect combo in Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

And this is the same fun you get with racing games. You don’t just race on a track once, you race on it dozens of times, practicing your driving line and trying to figure out where you can save 0.4 seconds. That is explicitly what I found so fun about Sonic Unleashed, and is a driving (heh) reason why I wish they’d embrace 3D gameplay more instead of giving up and having big side scrolling segments.

Sonic games have been chastised for having padding, where you’re forced to revisit old levels two, sometimes three or four times in order to gather enough of a resource to progress forward. Sonic Rush Adventure was particularly egregious with this, because it had a very rudimentary crafting system and you earned materials based on your stage ranking. So in order to build a boat to reach the next level, you had to replay the previous two levels multiple times to farm up the resources.

In one context, that’s awful, because that’s content you’ve already finished, but in the context of the racing game, that’s just more practice towards the eventual goal of mastery. That’s not to say such a design decision can be excused and that it’s Good, Actually. It isn’t.

But it does raise a question of how you can build a game where that’s a more natural part of the gameplay.

And this is something that was a strength in those early open world games. Back when you’d play GTA3, that game didn’t have turn by turn directions yet. There was a blip on your minimap and had to figure out how to get there, which created an intense, granular familiarity with the city that modern GTA games don’t have anymore, because you just follow the dotted line on your GPS.

That familiarity lives on in games like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. You spend so long in one space that you learn everything there is to know about it. All the routes, all the secrets, and that ties in to finding a way to make players naturally learn a race track. Suddenly, open world racing games like Need for Speed and Forza Horizon make sense in a way they didn’t.

Having larger, more open-ended Sonic levels could be a good way to build that kind of familiarity naturally, just by having a space to play around in. A game that’s fun without needing to have a goal, where the act of going fast and jumping around is good enough just by itself.

I think Sonic games might be built from the perspective of trying to emphasize the mastery element, which, much like resource farming in Sonic Rush Adventure, could be used to explain some pretty poor design decisions. But anything can have that mastery element as long as you structure the goals properly; all you need to do is look at the wild Super Mario 64 speed runs or crazy sequence breaking stuff in Metroid.

So I imagine a Sonic game could have levels where each stage is like, an island. And on this island is, like, one really big looping race track, or even a couple smaller race tracks that connect via intersections. But instead of being purely just race tracks, you would be encouraged to hop off the road and go exploring, where it would turn in to more of a 3D platformer.

In the traditional collect-a-thon mold, you’d get stars or chaos emerald shards or whatever for completing specific missions. So maybe there’d be a mission to race on the road under a time limit, or navigate a tricky platforming section to reach a high point on a cliff, kind of like what Odyssey does. And just by the virtue of being in this big space long enough, you’d gain a familiarity with it and develop your mastery of it.

I think Breath of the Wild would be too open, though. I think Odyssey keeping things broken down in to giant playground-style levels still works best rather than turning the player loose in a directionless world. For Zelda that works, because that’s a game that’s way heavier on exploration and lore and talking to people. Half the fun is not knowing where you’re going. Mario and Sonic need to be a little more focused than that, but still offer up a big space to cut loose and play around.

But yeah, that’s definitely in the direction I’m starting to lean.

More Sonic GP lore for y’all, this time about the now-extinct aliens that I talked about in the first of these lore posts!

Mobians

The Mobians were a race of aliens who hailed from the planet Primorus, which is currently fused with the earth as the planet Gaia Prime. They were a mystical race of psychic beasts that came in a myriad of forms that some may consider strange. A few traits that all Mobians had in common include the ability to communicate via telepathy, the presence of multiple eyes (Mobians typically had 3 or more), the ability to absorb mystical energies as sustenance, and a “Void Pouch”, a specialized pouch-like part similar to that of a Kangaroo that leads to a sort of pocket dimension that the Mobian would use to store things, in most Mobian varieties the Void Pouch was typically situated on the belly.

So how did the Mobians go extinct? Exactly how you’d think they would. Humans were being humans and liked to wipe out anything that didn’t either look like themselves or looked “cute”, unfortunately most Mobians didn’t fit either of those 2 criteria so the humans ruthlessly hunted them down. The ones that did survive slowly evolved to repress their more alien aspects, in the process slowly evolving into beings that resembled humanoid versions of familiar earth animals, eventually these Mobian descendants became their own separate species that we now know today as Faunoids.

Ok nobody has asked me anything about Sonic GP so you know what I’m just gonna dump the lore I made here anyway because I want to. starting with probably the most important thing to establish here with the rewrite (at least in my opinion), the world it takes place in!

Origins of Gaia Prime

In the universe of Sonic GP there were 2 worlds, key word were. there was earth which was full of humans, and Primorus, the home planet of a now-extinct race of aliens called the Mobians. One day these 2 planets collided with eachother, and literally everyone there would’ve died, but the only reason they didn’t was because of a young female Mobian named Gaia who sacrificed herself in order to have both planets fuse together without causing 2 planets worth of mass-extinction. This new Franken-Planet is now known today as Gaia Prime. (BTW the GP in Sonic GP stands for Gaia Prime)

This is a pretty rough draft which I’ll probably flesh out later but this hopefully should give you a basic understanding of things, if you have any questions feel free to ask, my askbox is open and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions!

Sonic and Knuckles witness a stage 3 Chaos Mutant for the first time, horrified by the fact that Chaos Energy can make someone so unrecognizable from their base species.

Is Sage canon to GP?

I honestly haven't really fully decided on how any of the Frontiers stuff is gonna fit into the GP lore yet, all I do know is that those “The Ancients” guys are not just gonna all be basically just Chaos and instead they’ll be Mobians since if you guys remember, the Mobians in GP are vastly different than in most Sonic things (they're literally just weird psychic aliens that basically all went extinct in GP lore, the funny animal people are the Faunoids which are actually the direct descendants of the Mobians.), so if anything the GP!Ancients would probably look more similar to GP!Silver (albeit much less fluffy than my beloved Boi) than Chaos. Anyway as for Sage I genuinely don’t know what I’m gonna do with her as of now, but I can imagine her going through a phase where she realizes her “Father” Eggman is a narcissistic piece of shit who doesn’t truly love her and she decides to rebel and either succeeds and finds a better life for herself or she dies/suffers a fate worse than death (this is not me throwing shade at Sage BTW Eggman is just that cruel to those who rebel against him).