Chao Gardens are tied to Chaos lore, which is now retroactively relevant to Precursor lore as of Frontiers.
It's weird how if they reincarnate several times after raising their stats to a certain baseline, they will grow into a Chaos Chao, which seems to be a genetic throwback to their Precursor roots and grants them biological immortality.
Chaos seems to have been a Chaos Chao that was empowered by the Master Emerald and the Seven Chaos and given additional powers that younger Chaos Chao have yet to develop.
The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!I may need to ask Flynn that in a Bumblekast - were the Ancients practically immortal? Since their descendants, the Chao, could be reborn with the right care.
I guess not truly immortal, they still went extinct, but did they have a rebirth potential similar to the Chao before their demise?
Edited by Tomodachi on Jun 25th 2024 at 9:45:12 AM
To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.According to this Bumblekast
the Ancients were not originally related to Chaos/Chao and them being their very very very distant ancestors was something Ian came up with just to make the lore more cohesive, and this Bumblekast
clarifies their genetic lineage led to the Chao in the same way humans came from apes—and he wasn't anticipating them to be made exactly like Chaos. Chaos himself is a Chao whose mutation simply made him look more like their distant ancestors.
The Koko also throw a wrinkle into this as they are engrams of the Precursors at least. A record of their minds and memories that seem to act of their own.
Both However seem to be ships of Theseus. In different ways. The chao are more blatant about it though.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 25th 2024 at 10:01:01 AM
One of the weirdest things I found out about was a collision detection bug with the Chaos Chao models in Adventure 2 during the karate minigame, where getting floored under certain circumstances would cause you to clip OOB and lose to a ring out immediately.
The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!I personally like the Chao because they're cute and make me nostalgic for a time in my life when I could sit and imagine and devote time to researching how to play a minigame in a much larger video game. Though the Guide Dang It! to raising them could have used a vast improvement. They get extra appeal to me because they kept getting replaced by a new cuddly companion as the franchise moved on.
The Wisps. I didn't like Colors and the Wisps were from that game, and far more enduring than the Chao were. When you already had cute companions to raise, I didn't see the point in having new ones all of a sudden that provide "powers" for Sonic like drilling through things, moving really quickly, becoming a block, etc.
Chip. He didn't really work for me either. It's like they distilled the cute part of the Chao into one character but gave him no gameplay relevance outside of the final boss battle. Again, a replacement for a cute companion.
The Koco. I actually like them. They're useful and while they do improve Sonic's base abilities, they do it in a way that feels non-intrusive. The little bell noises they make remind me of the Nightopians from Nights Into Dreams, they haven't reappeared outside of Frontiers far as I know, and by this point it feels like Sonic just befriends whatever tiny adorable critters happen to be in the setting that year.
Poglings is probably the only full Chao Garden remake we'll ever get. Sonic Team has weird committment issues for different elements of the franchise, so I'd rather have this.
Edited by FOFD on Jun 26th 2024 at 9:24:34 AM
Yeah, same. After a certain point I cared much more about my Chao than the rest of the emblems. <3 Without them I don't think I'd have played SA2 half as long as I have.
Edited by lalalei2001 on Jun 26th 2024 at 10:40:33 AM
The Protomen enhanced my life.That was my goal with getting as many as I could, too! (Plus I really wanted the Amy theme.)
The Protomen enhanced my life.They should have just let you select what special ability you wanted as part of a loadout alongside the wispon, so you can customize however you want. Even if that leads to Complacent Gaming Syndrome, that's already in play, so it wouldn't change much unless they adjusted the levels to compensate.
"That we continue to persist at all is a testament to our faith in one another."In order for such a feature to be necessary, they would have needed to make a game where the ability you pick actually makes a difference first.
Your melody still remains in this room and it ringsHonestly the Emblems I disliked getting the most were all related to the chao gardens.
It just felt so bad to be going through these levels to improve my skills and my understanding of the levels, making sure to regularly visit the chao garden after every level just to get their skills up bit by bit, only to be finished with that and have to deal with an extremely slow slog of just giving the chao more and more stuff to buff their stats enough to even have a chance at racing and karate.
And this was WITH me using that infinite animal bug to cut down on the amount of raw time I had to spend raising them.
I don't have an issue with the chao garden in and of itself (albeit it's not my cup of tea), it's just the sheer grindiness about it.
They could do smth like Rush Adventure handled its mandatory grind, where getting good ranks cuts out some of the grinding time, since then that would mean that not only are you incentivized to play the stage for animals, but also incentivized to get good at them to improve your chao faster, and that would make it a lot better - since for the more skilled players, the chao grinding would be less of a grind, but for less skilled players, they're chiseling away at their skills in these stages while also progressively getting more stuff for their chao - a win-win.
(Sidenote: Rush Adventure making "replay the levels repeatedly" a requirement to just merely beating the stage is absolutely stupid, replaying the levels should be smth done based on the individual player's preferences, not a gatekeep towards the rest of the game)

I mean no feature is going to please everyone, so you don't have to.
Fucking page topper...
Edited by Sid-Starkiller on Jun 25th 2024 at 12:29:12 PM