Sonic the Hedgehog Explanation

Introduction

This page is designed to cover the general mechanics of Sonic the Hedgehog's series of games, from the main cast's physical power and speed to the Super forms granted by the Chaos Emeralds, to abilities, items and more. There will also be addressing various arguments and how they are handled on the site. This page will be updated overtime so certain mechanics and the like won't be seen here initially.

American Sonic vs Japanese Sonic

For a while there was an immense difference between American Sonic and Japanese Sonic. A video made by Cybershell establishes the sheer number of differences between the series' portrayal from "minor" dialogue changes in recent game Sonic Forces to major changes such as the main antagonist, Dr.Eggman, never being called "Robotnik" in the Japanese series. For this reason, this information blog will prioritize the Japanese dialogue over the English text as much as possible. Though this does not mean English dialogue is not usable at all, just that the Japanese dialogue tends to be the more original intent.

For more recent Sonic games where they have an English scriptwriter, English can be considered an equivalent to Japanese. Examples can be found with Sonic Frontiers and Sonic x Shadow Generations, where english writers such as Ian Flynn behind Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) are main scriptwriters.

Mechanics

Rings

To start out, rings allow the user to survive lethal attacks from far stronger characters they couldn't normally. While one could assume it to be a game mechanic, rings directly play a role in staged battles between characters like Shadow, are seen in cutscenes in the games, and allow items present in the series to work off the rings in-verse. Rings are effectively a canonical part of the series.

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Physical Power

Super and Hyper Forms

The Super and Hyper Forms have many cases of people arguing them around levels of Tier 2, though there are some issues with these.

Egg Salamander

The argument here is that Super Sonic and Burning Blaze fought Egg Salamander who drained the power of the Sol Emeralds, which their presence with the Chaos Emeralds caused both of Sonic's world and Blaze's world to merge and collapse thus it's a universal feat.

Issue:

Here is the problem, both sets of emeralds cannot exist in the same dimension since they are tied into their respective dimensions that are linked with their own chaos energy, Chaos Energy has influence over the universe, so their co-existence caused a rift in the space-time continuum that is slowly expanding overtime.It should be noted that Sonic, Blaze and Eggman mentioned how the emeralds are like magnets that attract and repel each other.

This proves that the feat is literally just Chain Reactions so by proxy it doesn't scale to physical.

Examples of similar feats:

Bill Cipher made a rip in the dimension was going to eventually destroy the very fabric of existence.

The co-existence of two Fredbears at the same time caused the end of the universe.

Egg Wizard

The basis of the Egg Wizard being Multi-Universal comes from what Dr.Eggman Nega said and these scans.

Issue 1:

Not only those screenshots are from a fan-site (namely Sonic the Hedgehog fanon wiki), but they also have no source backing them up in the game itself. Along with this, the wiki has since updated to not have the same information as written in the screenshots, on top of this Eggman Nega directly uses an attack called "Planet Busting Laser" to kill Super Sonic and Burning Blaze, with Marine needing to save the day by distracting them so that Super Sonic and Burning Blaze could finish them off.

Issue 2:

Let us re-check what Eggman Nega said:

“

'This world and Dr. Eggman's world exist in "'separate dimensions". Each of us can think of the other as what is known as a "parallel universe." What makes this possible is this so-called "Power of the Stars."

„

Dr. Nega never said the power of the stars created those universes but actually said "What makes this possible" especially when he said "separate dimensions", that just means the power of the stars ensures that Sonic's world and Blaze's being separate from each other considering how they're linked with each other, making two universes separate from each other can be done with creating dimensional barriers between the two universes, which is just Space-Time Manipulation and Quantum mechanics aka abilities, another thing is that the power of the stars are called dimensional energy between Sonic's world and Blaze's world so that further proves it's through abilities.

Solaris

The Argument here is that Super Sonic, Super Shadow and Super Silver defeated Solaris was going to destroy the whole multiverse hence they're multiversal.

Issue 1:

The Super Hedgehogs aren't stronger than Solaris neither they scale to him at all, because they cannot damage him at all, as stated by Eggman, the only way to defeat Solaris was to target his armor firstly which is something that is anchoring his existence just to defeat him. So it shouldn't even the same durability as the true form/body of light from just the fact the Super trio cannot lend a single damage to the true form period especially since Eggman's statements about being super-dimensional was specifically for his body of light and not his armor, After that they need to attack his core aka his consciousness, it was specifically noted in the guide that the core is Solaris' Achilles Heel. The story of Achilles is that it was impossible for him to be harmed significantly in any way. However, he was killed when a arrow struck his heel (the back part of the human foot below the ankle) because it was the only part of his body that wasn't dipped in the River Styx so it was vulnerable. The selectivity of the analogy alone debunks any assumption that the core isn't weaker than the rest of his body. Also they're specifically targeting his mind to just hurt him, meaning they're inflicting mental damage (which is also durability negation) and not physical.

Issue 2:

As we know, the primary reasons why Solaris is commonly viewed as tier 2 are from Eggman stating he will consume all timelines/time and can eat dimensions for lunch.

However, we have the power of context. This feat still very much is tier 2, but we need to establish how Solaris is consuming it.

According to Shadow and followed up by Eggman, this is being caused by a space-time intersection, which is eventually going to cause time to get destroyed. What this means is this was the cause of it. This is further backed up when Eggman established he can pull things from other dimensions within the warped space. Finally, to make things worse, putting away Solaris' true form within any point in time makes him gone from all points in time.

Story books

One of the arguments of Sonic being 2 are due to His Darkspine form beating Erazor who destroyed the reality of Arabian nights and to his Excalibur form who defeated Dark Queen/Merlina who warped the space-time of Camelot.

Issue 1: Alf Layla Wa Layla

Alf Layla Wa Layla is a reality warper, not doing this through physical energy or destruction, we know also things like space-time is still intact in this boss arena as Sonic can use Time Break Which slows down time . It's also implied that Erazor needs all the seven world rings to perform his massive feat, but in the boss fight he was only amped with 4 due to three of them leaving him and going into Sonic.

Issue 2:< Merlina/big>

The range of Merlina's feat isn't that large at all, it only covers the kingdom, and nothing implies it's universal in scale.

Issue 3:

Even Ignoring the first two points, the Arabian Nights & King Arthur and the knights of the round table are storybooks containing fictional stories where the very text is used to change the world and the stories along with the pages destroyed cause the world to vanish, with it further being shown that the stories are keeping characters from coming into the real world. So this world is effectively of a different nature then a typical world.

Time Eater

The basis of this argument this time around is that Time Eater destroyed all of reality and turned The world into White Space and he can erase time and space.

Issues

Time Eater never destroyed the entire universe at all, all he did was just traveling through time and sending areas into white space (another dimension, not the destroyed universe, notably when everything was restored, it's still there). Him being able to travel through time disproves time being destroyed, adding on that Tails implied that the world wasn't destroyed yet and that Eggman's intentions were never about erasing the world but rather dominating it.

Due to Sonic x Shadow Generations, there are further issues with scaling this to physicals. It is revealed by the Tails that Time Eater is jumping back and forth through time, consuming the dimensional energies where all that's left behind is a lifeless, white void.

Things for Chaos Emeralds

The 7 chaos emeralds together are narratively shown to reach planetary of feats.

Chaos with all seven Chaos Emeralds was going to destroy the world. Said emeralds were left completely drained of their negative power before Sonic and co restored them to fight Chaos.

The Eclipse Cannon was designed to destroy the planet with the power of all seven Chaos Emeralds.

It was directly stated by Dr.Gerald that all seven Chaos Emeralds could destroy the planet, and it is shown later that feats like these are done with most of the Chaos Emerald's power.

It took the combined effort of all seven Chaos Emeralds to crack the planet and unleash Dark Gaia from his slumber, leaving the Chaos Emeralds completely drained and needing to recharge.

Furthermore, once Sonic recharged all seven Chaos Emeralds, he barely beat a final form Dark Gaia, with the help of Chip/Light Gaia, who was directly stated to be planetary in power.

Super Sonic and Burning Blaze are threatened by Egg Wizard's planet busting attack.

Speed Scaling

Base Sonic cast Speed

No Sonic characters will innately have Speed of Light or FTL travel speed at any point without specific equipment or abilities.

Cyan Wisp

When Sonic first interacts with a Cyan Wisp it envelops his body and makes him move as a laser, that's outright stated to move at the speed of light, Sonic is completely shocked by the speed he gets when he uses it and it is way faster then anything he can do, they even acknowledge the Sonic Colors Ultimate Short Animation that it's far above his speed. Sonic Colors 3DS notes that the cyan laser let's Sonic fly through the air at "blinding speeds" already showcasing it's far above his regular speed.

An argument people try to make for why Sonic is comparable to the Cyan Wisp is that he caught up to it and claimed it's almost as fast as him. However, there is missing context to this, prior in the cutscene the wisp is shown in its normal body moving, when actually activating the laser there's a flash of light in the same cutscene Tails even notes the flash of light specifically is the power of the Cyan Laser with Sonic even claiming that he wants to see how fast it is. This string of dialogue showcases that the cyan laser itself is not what he caught, but the Cyan Wisp while it was still in its wisp form, which we see in Colors Ultimate that the cyan wisp will run from things without automatically turning into its laser form. Thus Sonic did not catch up with the cyan laser power of the wisp, but just the Cyan Wisp itself.

Official Statements

While many try to use official statements claiming he's the speed of light, these are always used in a hyperbolic sense.

One comes from a Sonic Adventure interview where they note that he zooms all around at light speed, but this is in context talking about how large the levels are and how they don't think most players will notice the details as they will be zooming through the levels. They're not saying that you're literally moving through the levels at light speed, this is especially apparent with famous parts of levels such as the orca chase in Emerald Coast, the avalanche chase in Ice Cap, not running down a large building instantly in Speed Highway, getting forcibly pulled into a tornado in Windy Valley, the boulder chase in Lost World and more. If one wanted to argue that this statement isn't hyperbolic, this is a developer interview before the game officially released thus these level locales would clearly show they don't actually intend for Sonic to be running through them at light speed.

Another comes from a statement from a Sonic Unleashed guide, where it states his usual self runs around at the speed of light, however this is another hyperbolic statement. For one the guidebook is claiming Werehog Sonic is slow, this is only true in gameplay, in actual cutscenes Werehog Sonic is shown to move around fast. On top of that the very game itself also showcases scenes that go against this statement, Sonic and Chip take all day to see if anyone knows who Chip is, he notes in cutscene that he can sprint to a neighboring continent if the planet wasn't broken, he takes a bit of time to catch up to Eggman whose flying away, has to run around a building for a bit rather then instantly. On top of this Sonic Unleashed entire plot is due to the chaos emeralds being drained of their power Sonic must travel to each continent and restore the chaos emeralds power, restoring the continent back, something to where if he was as fast as the guide is claiming, wouldn't have even taken multiple days, even if the continents are broken apart. Examples can even be seen in the story, he starts a day time stage here then another daytime stage in the same area with both of these taking until night time in one city.

Another claim is from the Sonic the Hedgehog Super Interactive Annual 2014 where it claims he runs faster than the speed of light and is the fastest video game character of all time according to Guiness Book of Records. To start with, the Guiness statement seems to be a hoax, no matter where one tries to search up this claim there is no actual record currently sourced for it. Secondly, this is another hype statement that comes from a European guidebook, it's a tertiary canon that does not line up with the portrayal of Sonic's speed in the mainline canon. Due to the usage of using a known hoax for the argument and coming from a tertiary canon that's not the main source, this statement is not very usable.

Another statement comes from Takashi Iizuka claiming "We aren't aware how fast Sonic the Hedgehog is. In some games, he is able to go beyond the light barrier. We don't really know, the best way we can say it rivals the famous comic book hero, The Flash.". While this seems clear cut, there is a massive issue. This interview does not exist. If one tries to look it up and use the exact wording as shown in the picture it will only take them back to a singular blog that has a cropped screenshot of it made for the sole purpose of pushing FTL Sonic. Thus this statement is not usable until an actual legitimate source confirms the legitimacy of this interview ever existing.

Light Speed statements are even noted by Ian Flynn to be characters being arrogant and they are not actually able to move at the speed of light.

It should also be noted, Eastern media uses speed of light a lot as a method for saying "very fast" rather then literally being the speed of light. It boils down to even doujins using it as a way to claim certain things and one getting home fast.

Omega statement

The Omega statement is a pretty popular one where one attempts to use Omega stating that light speed would be surpassed, though the full context of this is somewhat ignored.

For one, in Sonic Colors DS continuity Sonic doesn't even have boost until the Wisp give it to him. So collecting wisps make him move faster.

Secondly, Omega's statement in context is talking about Sonic's immense growth and how he keeps getting faster and faster each time he's doing the challenge, where if he keeps it up then light speed will eventually be surpassed due to breaking unprecedented growths.

SPD from Unleashed

Many try to use the SPD due to the boost SPD being rated higher then the light speed dash, however the SPD isn't programmed in a lineal way. Along with this it's clear by the context of the game that it's just apart of Ludonarrative Dissonance to get players excited by seeing how high of a value they're going. For note, the light speed dash's SPD isn't even consistent which already poses a problem since light speed is a static number, it doesn't get faster or slower.

Other Speed Issues

There are a couple of plot points in various Sonic games that greatly mess with the idea that Sonic is light speed or even faster than light.

In Sonic Adventure 2 Sonic and Shadow need to escape the island before it blows up, both needing actually being worried and needing to hurry out of the forest. The time limit for this stage is 8 whole minutes.

In the plot for Team Sonic in Sonic Heroes, they have three days to stop Eggman from his plot, with the three levels you do taking two whole days before getting to Casino Park and then by Rail Canyon they only got until sunset.

In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) there are times Sonic has to enter his "super-speed speed" state, where he will not stop running and is going at top speeds.

• In Wave Ocean, it's to catch up with Eggman's airship, which flew there overnight.
• In Radical Train, it's to catch up with Elise's train that's about to crash.

Super and Hyper Forms

Super Sonic's flight speed is listed as near light speed. Hyper Sonic is faster then Super Sonic to an unknown extent. Super Sonic's Arrow of Light is debatably Speed of Light as it is called a literal "arrow of light".

References