Knuckles' Chaotix
Blue Hedgehog, Red Echidna, Black Sheep
I love Sonic the Hedgehog. Been a fan of his for almost as long as I can remember. When I first got access to the Internet at home, I'd spend hours upon hours looking at Sonic stuff. Flash games, crusty YouTube videos, Sonic Retro articles, anything and everything that I could find. And I haven't been the same since, for better or for worse.
Anyways, I especially loved poring over the articles on Sonic Retro that talked about ROM hacks, prototypes, bootlegs, and other odd games. I wouldn't figure out how to run emulators on my own for a good few years, though, so these things remained something of an untouchable enigma to me for a long while.
There are a number of "weird" Sonic games that I first learned about at that time, but Knuckles' Chaotix might just be the most noteworthy of them all. It was the only Sonic game to release on Sega's new 32X hardware, and one of the only major Sonic games from that time (besides a few even more obscure Japan- or arcade-exclusives) to not get any sort of official rerelease. Like, ever, to this very day. Besides apparently being available on this old GameTap service thing. I don't know what that's about.
For those who aren't already aware, the 32X was an add-on for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game console that made it 32-bit. What does this mean, exactly? Well... I'm not really the best guy to explain the finer technical details, but in layman's terms, it upgraded the console with additional computing and rendering power. It could do even cooler stuff than the Genesis Does.
I don't think it's necessary to go too deep into the 32X's backstory here, so I'll keep it fairly brief: Sega's American and Japanese branches were like parents that only stayed together for the kids. But in the case of this metaphor, I don't really mean the kids. I mean the money. Lots of money. However, while Sega of America found greater success with the Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog IP, Sega of Japan was engaged in many other endeavors, like licensing merchandise and dominating the arcade scene. You ever see those Club Sega arcades in Yakuza? They're real. well... they were real...
In any case, the American branch wanted to keep the Genesis alive as long as possible (and be ready to compete with the Atari Jaguar, of all things), while the Japanese were getting ready to move on to the upcoming Sega Saturn, something more in line with their current arcade hardware. Thus was born the 32X, an underwhelming add-on that had... like, no games, and didn't sell. Nobody wanted to work on it while the Saturn and PlayStation were on the way, so the poor thing only ended up having 40 games released, with only about a dozen of these being original titles.
Of course, Sega doesn't seem to want to acknowledge the thing in any serious capacity or put any effort into developing a proper emulator for it after so many years. They've committed to the bit for the better part of thirty years, so why stop now? Especially when there's only one game for it that most people can name offhand. It would be like if Nintendo finally decided to dump the Virtual Boy onto their online service just so people could play that one Wario Land game it had. And uh... Jack Bros.?
Well, I think that's enough of a history lesson for today. Let's talk about the game itself. The game's story isn't very important, or explained super well within the game itself, and it's fairly different depending on whether you're reading the American or Japanese manuals. That isn't exclusively this game's fault, though, that's pretty much just par for the course with Japanese-made games of this time.
The Japanese manual's story goes something like this: a mysterious island has risen up from the depths of the ocean recently, and it has a connection to the ancient Chaos Rings. They're like the Chaos Emeralds or Time Stones but ring-shaped. Dr. Eggman discovers it pretty quickly after it appears and immediately starts work on building another one of his amusement parks there, this one named Newtrogic High Zone.
Knuckles (of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles fame) also happens to learn about the island and decides to investigate. He encounters the other playable characters: Espio the Chameleon, Vector the Crocodile, Mighty the Armadillo, and Charmy Bee, who have all been kidnapped by Eggman for trying to infiltrate the park.
It's worth noting that these guys aren't the Chaotix team that's established in the current continuity yet, though. They all came to the island individually and just happened to team up. Like, Espio has an interest in ancient civilizations like Angel Island's and wants to study this new island, Charmy just wants to look for new flowers because he's, you know, a bee, and Vector has taken the island's miraculous appearance to be an act of God that he must go and see. The group just happens to meet and team up to thwart Eggman's plans.
What’s interesting is that, while most of the characters here (besides Knuckles and Mighty) make their first proper appearance here, all of them besides Espio have origins that date back even further than this. Mighty is (in)famously known for debuting in the Japan-exclusive arcade game SegaSonic the Hedgehog a few years prior, Vector was originally conceived as a member of Sonic's band before they were cut from the original game, and Charmy first appeared in the 1992 Sonic the Hedgehog manga.
So even in their debut appearance, these guys were a bunch of B-listers.
Anyways, the American story instead has Knuckles working as a guard on "Carnival Island" in preparation of its upcoming opening day. Robotnik hears about Carnival Island and decides to go after the "Power Emerald" which provides power to the whole park (something that simply does not exist in the game at all whatsoever) and kidnaps all of Knuckles' friends who happen to be visiting the island.
Use the Ring Power to free your friends and stop Robotnik before tomorrow morning, when Carnival Island makes its grand opening! (The game features a day-night cycle and ultimately takes place over the course of a week. Did they even play the game? are they stupid?)
The game itself doesn't really match either one of the stories super closely regardless, but I think it's worth noting how out-there the story is on both sides, something that shows in how experimental the game is overall.
Oh yeah, Metal Sonic (the one from Sonic CD) is also here. He'll be important later. but he'll be a total jobber as always sorry to get your hopes up
As for the gameplay, it is... very much affected by the tether gimmick. You and your partner character (either computer- or player-controlled) are bound together by rings that can only be pulled so far apart from one another, limiting your ability to build and maintain speed as well as you normally could. Thankfully, there is actually an in-game tutorial to help explain it to new players, which is kinda impressive for its time.
While the gimmick is mostly detrimental, it's not without its upsides. For starters, you can grab and throw your partner around to reach higher locations or quickly gain speed. Alternatively, you can have your partner either stay firmly in place (in single-player) or run in the opposite direction of yourself (in two-player) for a moment in order to build up momentum and snap forwards all at once, effectively working as this game's Spin Dash.
Because the hold-in-place system requires a unique button to be held, only one button is used for jumping in this game, a first for the side-scrolling Sonic games. take notes, yuji naka. The third and final of the controller's buttons is used to call your partner to your exact location at the cost of 10 rings; this prevents you from getting stuck, something that happens somewhat frequently. You can even do this when you don't have 10 rings to spare, and go into debt! Which is kinda funny to see on-screen, and definitely better than getting softlocked because you got hit by an enemy only a few seconds prior to getting stuck on fucky geometry.
If you go below -99 rings, you'll get kicked out of the level, but this is only going to happen if you keep mashing the button on purpose. Like my dad at the slots. And if you clear a level with a negative ring count, it'll count against your end-of-level bonuses and net you less points. So don't get hooked on gambling!
I should mention, however, that while the Spin Dash is still here, it actually kinda sucks in Chaotix. Worse than in the original version of Sonic CD, even. For some odd reason, when you're curled into a ball in this game, you don't build or maintain speed nearly as well as you would in the other games, so it's actually quicker to just keep running on foot 99% of the time. It almost acts as a sort of brake instead of a way of coasting off your existing speed, oddly enough.
Additionally, each character has a unique set of abilities that allows them to progress through each stage. Most levels in the game place a greater emphasis on moving vertically than many other Sonic games, so everybody has at least one way of moving upwards: Knuckles retains his gliding and climbing from Sonic 3, Mighty can wall jump, Espio can run along both walls and ceilings, Vector can do a brief air dash and climb walls similarly to Knuckles, and Charmy... flies. Charmy can't jump or Spin Dash or do anything else under most circumstances, instead having the ability to fly in all directions without ever running out of energy or speed. In case you want to avoid playing the game.
On top of that, there are two joke characters that you can get from the character select crane game. Did I mention that you can't even select your partner character manually? You have to play a crane game that fucks with you and sometimes gives you a partner that doesn't fully work. Heavy is... heavy. He can hardly keep up with the other characters, jump nearly as high, or get thrown around nearly as easily. Bomb explodes as soon as he gets hit once, so you get stuck without a partner for a little while. Neither of these two are worth picking intentionally.
Thankfully, you can just walk offscreen to leave the hub and reload your save file to try again for a real character. With zero consequence, at that! So it's not even, like, a good punishment, for better or for worse. Yeah. i guess if you're playing on the no-save mode you're kinda fucked for a level, but that's pretty much it. you can stick with the same partner forever once you get a good one, either way; it's not like the game forces you to reroll your partner every time you clear a level, so... idk. it's just not that well-thought out as a mechanic i don't think
I can't find any other place to talk about them, so let's talk about power-ups. This game has some pretty unique ones in addition to the usual suspects. Like, you can pick up 10 extra rings or a boost in speed for twenty seconds, but you can also break a monitor and turn HUGE or tiny or completely change characters mid-level. Growing larger increases your speed and jump height, but makes it harder to throw you around, and shrinking will do the opposite. There's also this other one that makes it so that, when you next get hit, your rings don't explode in all directions, but instead fall out of you as one single ring that you can recollect. Most of these more experimental ones are unique to this game, but the Combine Ring did get brought back in Sonic Mania a few years ago.
So while it's definitely a bit cumbersome to adjust to its unique control style and characters, it's still perfectly manageable. It honestly was kinda fun to piece together how this game wants you to play it after years of playing the core Sonic games, which generally handle pretty similarly to one another. Your mileage may vary, though, especially if you're not already into these games. honestly just don't play this game unless you already have the Sonic 'tism
The tether gimmick and the game's level design go perfectly hand-in-hand, for better or for worse. Most levels put a lot of emphasis on vertical movement, requiring you to either speed up ramps by snapping forward, or using the other tools at your disposal to climb walls and reach higher platforms. A lot of them have elevators placed around that will even do all that work for you.
Like, there aren't very many unique gimmicks at all here, level design-wise. You get elevators and moving platforms that transport you to different sections of the level, and... that's pretty much it? Amazing Arena, the "final" level (you'll see why I have the word "final" in quotation marks a few paragraphs down), has the most going on by far. The main thing is that you can't hit the goal plate and leave until you find and hit a button that's hidden somewhere in the stage to turn the power on and brighten up the background. But the buttons aren't at all hard to find, usually being placed on the main path you'll take, and the game literally points you in their direction as you get close to them. It also has wormholes, conveyor belts, bouncing pistons that require both players to be standing on them in order to be weighed down and pop back up, as well as mini-boss fights (which you can often avoid). But every other level? You'd be lucky to find anything more than moving platforms, transporters, and half-pipes.
There are some moving platform-type objects that are a bit more unique, like the flying boats in Marina Madness and the UFO-looking platforms in Amazing Arena that travel in all directions (making them slightly cooler than plain old elevators), as well as giant bells in the later levels of Speed Slider, which fall straight down to the bottom of the stage. But... like, I don't think there's a single traditional loop-de-loop or corkscrew anywhere in this game.
The best example of Chaotix's total lack of sauce is the game's closest thing to a water-themed level, Marina Madness. It doesn't even have a single segment where you go underwater... but this is actually kind of a good thing, honestly. I can't imagine having to deal with the bizarre tether physics while underwater and also trying not to drown.
The most unique mechanic I can think of otherwise appears only in the tutorial level, Isolated Island, to make sure you know how to use the tether and throw abilities properly. You just have to position both yourself and your partner on these holographic buttons in order to open the way forward, which isn't all that crazy or anything, but it's at least something. For better or for worse, the game stops using these and has very few obstacles that actively impede or assist you.
That, and if you take the secret alternate path on the last Techno Tower level, you can ride a drilling machine and a floating crane game claw that let you skip most of the level. But you have to go way out of your way for these and... honestly? It's almost more fun to play the level normally and experiment with the tether physics. It would be cool if these sorts of things were integrated more naturally into the main paths of the levels like you'd expect, to give a greater challenge and make the levels feel more unique. But as it is, I imagine a lot of players haven't even seen a lot of the seldom-used assets in Chaotix because they're so well-hidden.
I could go on a bit more about the intricacies of the individual levels, but I think the most important thing to mention here is this: the levels aren't even played in a set order, like most Sonic games, or platformers of this style in general. Instead, you have to stop a roulette to choose which area you go to next, with each area having five levels to progress through each time you land there. (No, they aren't called Acts or Zones here.) The levels don't really get any harder as you progress further in the game because of this, they just get larger and longer.
If you find a hidden bonus stage while you're inside a level, you can collect power-ups that let you slow the character and stage select screens to a crawl in order to choose whatever you like, but... there's really no need. You're already decided to play Knuckles' Chaotix, why pretend you're playing something else? or anything better?
Thus, there is almost zero difficulty curve in this game, with the only spikes in difficulty coming from the Sonic CD-esque bosses that show up in the final level of each area. They're clunky pushovers, but they're the only thing that has a chance at actually killing you in this game.
Thankfully, you don't even have to worry about running out of lives, as you don't have any lives at all! Very ahead of its time. When you die... wait. I forgot you don't even get to die like normal in this game. Your character just stops moving while a black hole appears from the background and whisks you back to the hub world with zero consequences. (This is the same animation that occurs whenever you clear a stage, too, so it's not like it's even that special.) On top of this, you have to get hit twice while you're out of rings for this to even happen; the game is generous enough to temporarily knock out your computer-controlled partner on the first hit.
And because the levels are so bland and un-dangerous, there's next to no chance that you ever die in them. You won't find a single deadly spike trap or set of blocks that crush you instantly here. Chaotix... is incredibly bland and unchallenging to play through, especially once you know how to get around the janky mechanics.
I don't think I'm really doing this game any favors here, unfortunately... don't worry, though, I saved the best stuff for last.
One thing Chaotix has nailed is the aesthetic and presentation. If nothing else, this game looks and sounds really great. While the level layouts themselves are pretty lackluster, the visuals are really eye-catching. The funky colors feel like a proper evolution of the more surreal aesthetic that the earlier Sonic games would often shoot for, especially in 1 and CD. Take a look (click on the images to see in better quality):
I didn't notice this until one of my most recent playthroughs of Chaotix, but a few of the areas actually evolve over time as you progress through the levels! The skyscrapers that are under construction in Techno Tower gradually reach higher and higher, and the foliage in the background of Botanic Base slowly grows larger and larger, until it overtake most of the greenhouse; even some of the tiles and decor in the foreground are gradually overgrown.
Combine that with the day-night cycle, which changes the levels' palettes to match the time of day (Morning, Day, Evening and Night), you'll rarely have a playthrough of the game that feels the same.
I should also note that the enemy and boss designs are also very reminiscent of CD's, probably due in part to sharing some of the same staff. Both have a more "cutesy" approach to their badnik designs, with few being based on common animals like the core trilogy (primarily featuring googly-eyed insects and vehicles as a base for their appearances). Between all of this and the reappearance of Metal Sonic, this game is almost like CD's long lost brother or something.
Overall, the game's aesthetic feels the closest to CD's. The way the UI, areas, badniks, bosses, and even the characters are designed (mostly visually speaking, but to an extent mechanically as well), the way that all the level names are alliterated, the unique setting and focus on Metal Sonic, everything comes together to make this the closest thing to a CD follow-up.
And the music! While the game's primary composer, Junko Shiratsu, seems to have largely retired from the industry, her work here is very good. It takes full advantage of the 32X's hardware, making great use of the enhanced percussion quality and additional sound channels. I don't know enough about music theory or composition to thoroughly praise it, but... it sounds really good. Even though they usually don't like to reference much from the game proper in later installments, they'll still call back to the soundtrack on occasion.
...I forgot about the Special Stages. They might actually be among the best in the series, if not the best. Most of them start out simple, running along the inside of this giant hexagonal tube to collect blue spheres, but they gradually shift towards autoscrolling 3D platforming challenges as you progress further into them. The rings you have at the end of the level prior carry over into the Special Stage and act as your timer, so they even give you proper incentive to collect as many rings as you can. It's almost kinda risky to go into some of the later ones with only the minimum 50 rings if you haven't played them before, as the timer can get pretty strict and hard to replenish.
Falling out of the level or running out of rings kicks you out, but you're given plenty of chances to try again; there are only six Chaos Rings to collect, and twenty levels that allow access to a Special Stage at the end. You can't turn into Super Knuckles if you get them all or anything, though, you just get the "Good Ending".
So, after you clear all the attractions, you get to fight Metal Sonic. The first phase is kinda stupid, you just spin the stage select roulette over and over, hoping to land on the big "X" and avoid his attacks if you mess up. But then the second phase is actually kinda cool, you fight a much larger, powered-up version of Metal, now named "Metal Sonic Kai". He's not very hard, but his design is sick. You can see how it influenced his power-ups in Sonic Heroes and Mania Plus years later.
After Metal is defeated for the second time, the game is over. If you got all the Chaos Rings, the game calls you "COOOOL" and rolls the credits over a picture of the Chaotix, alongside... Sonic and Tails? This is the only place that these guys properly appear in this game. And they couldn't even color Sonic's legs properly. How embarrassing. The soundtrack medley that plays in the background is nice, though.
However, if you didn't manage to collect all the Chaos Rings, Eggman laughs at you for not getting all the macguffins (like usual) before cutting to a different credits screen, where ominous music plays over Metal Sonic Kai wreaking havoc on a flaming city. Which is kinda nuts? I don't think any other Sonic game has such a dire bad ending. "oh oh oh what about the 8-bit sonic 2 where tails is dead" tails can't die. duh
And that's Knuckles' Chaotix. It's... alright. More interesting to think about than it is to actually play, at least for me, but if you're already into Sonic and haven't played it for yourself yet, give it a shot! The game's only a couple hours long at the most. It's a relic of a time where Sonic was just starting to get more experimental without leaving its roots too far behind.
I've thought for years now that it would be really cool to see the game get a proper remaster like the usual bunch. Give it widescreen, higher quality audio, the works. I don't think it'll ever actually happen at this rate, but a guy can dream.
But in an ideal world, I'd give the game a full-on remake. Change the mechanics and progression entirely to make it more like the other classics, but with a totally fresh coat of paint. As cool as that sounds in my head... that just isn't Chaotix. Chaotix is weird, like, it's entirely confused about what it should be doing, and I like it for that.
If you wanna read/investigate more about the game, check out these articles. I didn't touch too much on the game's development (I've wasted your time enough already lol), but a lot of people find that to be one of the more interesting things about Chaotix. It bounced between consoles, and got rushed out in hardly a couple years' time by a Japanese team for American-focused hardware. The whole situation's pretty weird.
- The Cutting Room Floor - Articles about the game's unused content and various prototype builds. One of the best sites on the net in general.
- Sonic Retro - A forum post discussing the game's development. A fair bit of this is conjecture, but there's some interesting evidence for a lot of OP's points. Some of the more interesting ones tie to the game's development timeline and characters; were Espio's abilities based on Knuckles' original design document? Were some of Knuckles' sprites and abilities developed here before he was made playable in Sonic & Knuckles? Interesting stuff.
- Mega Drive Shock - Parts of a translated lecture given by former president of Sega, Shoichiro Irimajiri, discussing the 32X and his relations with the American branch of the company.
WAIT! It was while I was working on the latter half of this write-up (a few months ago... *cough* *cough*) that they practically acknowledged Chaotix as canon after decades of not giving it more than a passing mention. No way? No way!
i mean, i think they're trying to make just about everything canon nowadays besides, like, the older comics, pocket adventure, and the dark brotherhood... but still! it's something
