Sonic’s only foray into the RPG genre, Sonic Chronicles, famously ended on a cliffhanger, one developer Bioware had plans to resolve in a sequel. Nearly 13 years later, that sequel seems extremely unlikely to happen, but we at leas finally have some idea of how it’s plot would have played out, thanks to research done by Did You Know Gaming.
In a new video released earlier today, DYKG dished on the canned sequels plot. The previous game ended with the defeat of Ix, the Nocturnes echidna clan chief, in the Twilight Cage pocket dimension. Upon returning to Earth, Sonic and friends found that their world had been conquered by Eggman. Sonic Chronicles 2 would start with Sonic’s friends being separated and forming separate parties in different parts of the world. The world has now been remade in Dr. Eggman’s image: people have been rounded up and enslaved, with world landmarks like the Pyramids of Giza and the Eiffel Tower remade in Dr. Eggman’s image.
This all came from DYKG’s interview with Sonic Chronicles Lead Designer Miles Holmes. In the video, Holmes compares the game to Terminator’s future on a few occasions, saying Eggman’s machines have created a very dystopic “Terminator future.” Eventually, the aforementioned different parties will start freeing populations from around the world, so that they can “build a multinational army to storm Eggman’s base and restore world order.”
Just before Eggman’s defeat, a God alluded to in the previous game, Argus, shows up, forcing Sonic and Eggman to team up to defeat him. Even Super Sonic isn’t enough to defeat Argus. During what is presumably the game’s final boss fight, Eggman has to fire Super Sonic out his “mega death laser” to even beat the boss’s first phase. This weakens Argus enough to allow all of the races imprisoned by Argus to escape, and engage in a climactic final battle to defeat the god.
The aftermath would apparently re-establish the status quo (echidnas aside), with Dr. Eggman running off again. DYKG also says that Shade and Knuckles will be able to “continue Knuckles’ bloodline.” The game would end with a final teaser that would set up future plot points: the reason Argus imprisoned races in the Twilight Cage to begin with. An oracle told Argus that one day, he would die at the hands of a mortal, so Argus trapped the universe’s most powerful races in the Twilight Cage.
In reality, however, the oracle was tricking Argus into building a team that would eventually destroy him. The identity and motivation of this oracle, or as Holmes calls them, a “trickster god,” was something that could be explored further in future games. Any future games would not have been made by BioWare, however, since they considered their obligations finished after the first game.
The video also reveals that Takashi Iizuka expressed interest in using Shade and Argus in other games, meaning that Chronicles could have had a larger impact on the franchise had it been allowed to continue. Unfortunately, the video doesn’t really give us any new insights on why a sequel never happened, though they speculate that it might have been due to the Ken Penders lawsuits. They interview both Penders and Holmes on the lawsuit, but we aren’t really given any new insights.
You can find the full video here. The video also reveals new info on Sister Sonic and Sonic Day, which we will cover later!
