Knuckles' Chaotix is Fundamentally Flawed

today I'm gonna be talking about why I do not think knuckles chaotix is a very good game if for some reason you clicked on this video and have never heard of knuckles chaotix it's a game that came out 1995 for the 32x a piece-of-shit ad on the nobody bought for the Sega Genesis the game stars knuckles and a bunch of new characters known as the chaotix and the core gameplay revolves around controlling two characters with an elastic qualify to magic rings it was not a particularly popular game the racists over at Wikipedia have even dubbed it a black sheep of the Sonic series and let me start off by making one thing clear if you like knuckles chaotix that's fine this video is not a personal attack on anyone who likes the game you are allowed to like a game even if it isn't perfect God knows I do I just want to explain my own personal feelings on why I don't think the game is particularly fun or well designed so let's start with the absolute most important part of any game in the boxart let's look at the cover of the Japanese game damn just look at it so stylish it cool just look how confident this text sounds featuring Knuckles the Echidna welcome to the next level it's super 32x world Wow this cover is so cool as looking at it gives me goosebumps why don't we take a look at the u.s. covered what is this look at this [ __ ] what though [ __ ] this is not how the rings look in the actual game it looks like they're holding [ __ ] exercise equipment I get that they're trying to visually convey on the cover of the game central mechanic is the rubberband physics but it just looks so stupid I mean look at it also it's just a perspective thing but vector kind of looks like he's two feet tall in this picture which is very misleading because he's a tall boy look at this guy look at this Marvin the Martian looking [ __ ] with this little spaceship why does he get to be on the cover this game is about the chaotix why not feature SPO mighty or charming in Japan they were continent enough to just call this game chaotix but in the US release they felt they had to specify that this was knuckles chaotix as if having a giant picture of him front and center wasn't going to be enough to let people know that knuckles is in this game and it's not enough to just include knuckles in the typo they had to make it possessive so it's his chaotix now like it belongs to him or something this implication is totally absent in the glorious nihongo version of the title which of course would have to be the canon version this title also led a lot of people to believe that knuckles was like the leader of the chaotix or something which is how they ended up portraying in the comics when japan was clear this was a game about the chaotix featuring knuckles and the chaox are mostly their own thing which is of course how they would go on to be presented in their future appearances they are not knuckles chaotix in fact I can't recall a single instance of knuckles ever even interacting with a member of the chaotix again even though they've appeared in several games together since let's take a look at the manuals to oh my god just look at the Japanese one it's beautiful how colorful and vivid it is look at the little sketches to help illustrate gameplay concepts as well as just for flavor check out these character profiles look at all this great information that I can't read about all my favorite characters like knuckles Espio and my Eevee what a complete and total masterpiece of an industry manual let's look at the us booklet Wow boring black and white no style or flair at all no flavor sketches just shitty microscopic black-and-white screenshots check out the Japanese badnik page and look at the u.s. one Wow don't strain yourself coming up with these creative localizations like piranha they couldn't even spell my Edy's name right the story isn't even the same between the Japanese and English manuals as always a good sign but they couldn't even bother translating the actual Canada story so they just made some [ __ ] up that sounds close enough what a disgrace who did this who is responsible for this manual Wendy didn't s'more you should be ashamed of yourself okay enough [ __ ] around let's get into the actual game already start off with everyone's favorite [ __ ] the cut content and obscure lore unused in the game are these two very interesting sprites one of tails in the tornado and the other of super sonic we don't know exactly what they would have been used for although their proximity to other sprites related to the good ending make it seem fairly likely they're associated with a scrapped good ending cutscene it's also worth mentioning that while the supersonic sprite is in the game there's no associated color palette with it so the person who ripped the sprite just created one to show what it probably would have looked like also unused are these strange dizzy sprites for each character where there's wobbling around like they're drunk not sure what these would have been used for I really loved watching them go and I kind of wish they were used in the final game there's also a bubble and a splash animation although there's no water anywhere in the final game looks like there may have been an underwater section planned at some points there's also this unused robotnik post believed to be part of a scrapped version of the free final boss cutscene looks pretty good here's what I can only assume as a test sprite it's literally just the word test also cut from the game is this [ __ ] stupid looking bad Nick whatever who cares enough of the cuts price there's a theory that at one point in development sbo may have been considered for the role of main character we can see in this pre-release screenshot that the title screen said featuring SPO the chameleon instead of who's the echidna and if we look at the list of characters on the start of act screen you'll notice that spos name is actually listed first SPO is also your partner during the tutorial this theory makes a lot of sense to me I mean SPO is obviously the coolest member of the chaotix I mean go on dude he's a [ __ ] chameleon it's [ __ ] sick bro just look at his [ __ ] spin - I mean damn that's cool SPO was also the only member of the chaotix to be featured in Sonic the fighters I'm not sure how many people are even aware of this game's existence but there was an actual sonic fighting game in arcades I had the luxury of getting to play this on an actual cabinet years ago the game works in Seattle used to have one it was re-released in 2005 on GameCube and ps2 it's part of the Sonic Gems Collection and an HD port came out in 2012 for ps3 and xbox360 there's some evidence that this game was originally called knuckles ring star but they changed it because that name is a piece of [ __ ] [ __ ] hopefully was just a working title in these screenshots you can also see heavies original name heavy which is most likely to change in order to make the character more relatable to the fatter American audiences something fairly well-known nowadays is that knuckles chaotix began development as an internal demo called sonic crackers also referred to as Sonic's studium in the ROM header this playable proof of concept features Sonic and Tails demonstrating the main mechanic of chaotix the ring system and just like in chaotix you can also pick up your partner and throw them around to reach higher places it's just a prototype so it's pretty glitchy but it's still fun to mess around in a few playable stages the levels and music seems similar to chaotix although there are no sound effects whatsoever nor do any of the stages have badniks there are spikes and you do lose rings when hitting them even if you don't have any there are four playable stages of sonic crackers to attraction levels and to field levels yes like chaotic sea calls as levels attractions instead of acts or zones but I'm still going to call the max razones because who gives a [ __ ] totally unique two crackers are these top-down filled levels these are large empty areas where you can walk around but there's nothing to interact with while it seems like pathways were planned there's no collision programmed in so you can just walk anywhere so obviously at some point they decided they gave to start Knuckles and a bunch of new characters rather than Sonic and Tails well remnants of Sonic and Tails can still be found in the final game if you go to the color test screen and send it to these exact values you can unlock debug mode and the character list in debug mode is very interesting the first character listed is mighty not Knuckles and the second character is just a bunch of asterisks now clearly you don't have to be Sherlock [ __ ] Holmes to figure out that they converted sonic into Mighty so it makes sense why my tea would be in the first slot because early in development he was just Sonic if we try to load a game with this character from the second slot they appear as a knuckles sprite with my teas colour palette resulting in what looks like a white echidna the community has dubbed this wets Nia because of course they have to give a unique name to a [ __ ] palette swap glitch that's what Sonic fans do anyways as you might expect this dummy character at the leftover remnants of tails people had just assumed this for years but it was basically conclusively proven when the prototype of chaotix was dumped online where this character still retained the ability to fly and it wasn't flying like Charmy this was tail style flying complete with getting tired and having to land after a little while a lot of people seem to think a Onix is the first game to feature mighty he's actually been around for even longer than knuckles in 1993 an arcade game came out titled Sega Sonic the Hedgehog which starred Sonic mighty and a character named Ray the squirrel who has never been mentioned again apart from this Easter egg in Sonic Generations poking fun at how he has never been seen since this game came out this game actually used a [ __ ] trackball of all things four controls which means it's not exactly easy to properly emulate something kind of interesting found in the files of Sega's Sonic are a bunch of unused sprites and remnants of a planned English localization including an entire alternate sprite set based on the Robotnik's design from the Saturday morning cartoon [ __ ] I need to stop any sidetracked obscure Sonic games nobody cares about and try and focus on this obscure Sonic game that some people actually do care about one last piece of trivia is that if you enter the following code on the color test then go to the sound test you can see a hidden Amy cameo she dances around saying cool sweet and catchy which is actually a pretty good description of this game's music all right it's time to discuss the gameplay of chaotix the first thing you'll notice about the game is how heavily vertical movement is emphasized with every single character having a vertical movement ability the levels are tall and huge and usually start at the bottom left and finish on the top right just look how [ __ ] vertically oriented these levels are these maps are insanely big by the time you get to an act 5 the level is [ __ ] enormous you want to see something kind of funny look at the four tutorial stages from the start of the game the first one doesn't look too bad in fact it seems kind of like a normal sonic stage the second one adds some vertical space but nothing too crazy now look at the third map yeah this point is to make sure you definitely have a grasp on how to move upwards the fourth map isn't quite as ridiculously tall but as you can see it's still very large any more closely resembles what the actual levels look like this game is also really puppy easy there are no bottomless pits or anything particularly dangerous at all did you pick charming you've been literally just [ __ ] fly through the entire game you want to trivialize this already incredibly easy game you just have to pick Charmy and like I said earlier this isn't the weak-ass Tales version of fly you [ __ ] blast through the game okay to me the fundamental flaw of chaotix is that the rubberband system the game is based around is just not good the entire game you feel like you're being hamstrung by dragging around this other character it was always weighing you down getting in your way and when it's not making the game too slow it's making it way too fast using the hold mechanic you can generate an insane amount of speed from a standstill it can lead to you literally [ __ ] flying through the levels in this game so they had to make the levels big and vertical since if they didn't people could just fling themselves across the stages to beat them in like ten seconds but because they had to make the level so big they end up huge and totally samey and it's so easy to get lost in them and since you can fly around so ridiculously fast you can't have particularly dangerous badniks because it would be really [ __ ] annoying be constantly getting hit by things you couldn't react to so all the paddocks are [ __ ] weak and uninteresting I just feel like from the one bad central design choice that is the ring system a catastrophic fractal of bad gameplay consequences emerge now flying around like this is kind of fun the first couple times you pull it off but it gets old fast and the reality sinks in that you have 25 barren unremarkable levels to trudge through you have no choice but to use this slingshot mechanic to generate speed because the Spin Dash has been nerfed to [ __ ] in this game it is literally garbage absolutely [ __ ] useless it's like they threw it in as a joke like the shitty useless shield and blood-borne I will say they do make a solid effort to make sure you understand the rubberband mechanic it has a fairly in-depth tutorial and the very first area of the game is completely devoid of enemies and hazards while you get used to it I should mention that I've only ever played this game single-player and you can do it as two player with one person controlling each character but frankly that sounds like a [ __ ] nightmare to me but maybe it would make the game more fun your nose there's even a button dedicated to getting your partner unstuck but they don't want you to abuse it or anything so every time you want to use it you have to lose ten rings you might think that means if you don't have ten rings that you can't unstick your partner but it actually allows you to go into negative rings like now there's a [ __ ] concept negative rings how the [ __ ] does that make any sense like I can see my guy picking up the Rings but as soon as I touch them they disappear going pay off my ring debt just something so [ __ ] weird about this to me negative [ __ ] rings the kid I used to love spamming this button over and over to rack up crippling ring debt and there's no way to declare a ring bankruptcy if you get hit with 0 or negative rings all that happens is you lose your partner but not permanently or anything we just wait a short while they'll come back however if you do get it without your partner you can die this is a minor issue but if you somehow do manage to die the death animation is weird not good I mean you know what dying in a Sonic game is supposed to be like it's supposed to be like this or this or this not this [Music] the [ __ ] man what is this [ __ ] this game actually doesn't have a live system at all you die or just sent back to the hub and you know I'm actually totally okay with this it's pretty surprising to see a game from 1995 willing to remove lives as it was a fairly deeply ingrained part of video games at this time something I always [ __ ] Havens they don't even get to choose your goddamn partner to play this stupid [ __ ] mini game and just hope you get the partner you want and there are literally bad partners which are detrimental to get bomb can blow up and hurt you and heavy is just a giant heavy piece of [ __ ] one of my biggest problems with this game is that there are five acts for a zone five acts is too [ __ ] many I thought we figured have back in Sonic 2 that two acts per zone is the perfect ratio not to mention these levels are already [ __ ] boring barren and repetitive especially when you compare them to the main Sonic games instead of having a set order for stages you randomly select the level you're gonna play next every time you beam actor died or kicked back to the hub and select a new random zone this idea of randomizing level select is kind of interesting and some people might enjoy this aspect of the game but this also means that all the zones have to be around the same difficulty since there's no way for the developers to know what order you're gonna be playing them in so there's no real opportunity to develop a meaningful difficulty curve and since the levels come at you in a totally random [ __ ] order it does not feel like a cohesive adventure the game just feels like an endless slog there's no satisfying feeling of progression there are some interesting items in this game like the grow and shrink monitors interesting in theory but in practice they kind of feel like [ __ ] [ __ ] thing huge just makes you fly around even faster and more uncontrollably which is at least sometimes fun but being small just means you have to stand around doing [ __ ] nothing for like 20 full seconds because you can't do [ __ ] when you're small one of the new items in this game is the combine ring there's actually a pretty alright idea and a modified version of its gonna be appearing in Sonic mania basically if you get hit instead of dropping a ton of rings in all directions that you have no hope of recollecting all of you drop one giant ring and if you can collect it you get all your rings back one interesting thing about this game that I rarely see mentioned is it actually has a kind of day/night system this level can be one of four times a day morning daytime evening or night which is determined by the amount of time you spent in the previous level and it affects enemy placement and boss difficulty which is actually kind of cool the bosses are well they're not very good I mean you're not the worst bosses in the entire series they're anything they're not Sonic CD level but pathetic but they're not great and they're definitely not very memorable the ending boss looks kind of cool I guess but he's weird and not very satisfying to fight this game has an extremely memorable bad ending [Music] I always found it very ominous and slightly unsettling as a kid I mean it's not on the same level as the infinite fun screen from CD but the fact you're forced to stare at this putter destruction and ruination during the credits it really makes it feel like a bad ending in Sonic games the bad ending is supposed to be basically the same as the good ending only with an added like three second shot of Robotnik juggling the chaos on wolves or something those kids are gonna see this immediately after that satisfying feeling of beating the game for the first time and then they're treated to this the other Sonic games seem to understand this they gave you happy triumphant endings with short little stingers at the end enticing you to play again immediately rub it in your face that your failure results in an entire city getting Jenna cited for something that is [ __ ] up dude why are you trying to make children think about war crimes these sick bucks that said the bad ending is actually better than the good ending because at least it's something the good ending is [ __ ] ridiculous it just cuts to a white screen all the Chaos Rings and the word cool then you get to stare at the title screen while the credits go by while being with the Sonic and Tails cameo like congratulations for beating this game your reward as you get to look at Sonic and Tails wonderful auste the plane is just hovering in place that is not how planes work boy I sure up someone got fired for that blunder one thing I think that most people can agree on said this game has some great [ __ ] music in particular the hub world track door into summer is phenomenal and I can see why they brought it back for the collection of the music in Sonic Generations so at least chaotix holds up the sonic game tradition of having incredible music every boss in this game has its own theme - which is pretty cool and something you don't usually see in games like this anyways I've been using chaotix music with this whole video so you'll just have to decide for yourself whether or not you're into it the color palette in this game is just so insanely vibrant and colorful it's almost hard to look at I mean maybe you like it I don't know it's just a matter of aesthetic preference I'm actually kind of ambivalent about it sometimes the game looks pretty cool sometimes it's just way too much at least it does a good job at showing off the power of the 32x to display a shitload of colors at once the special stages are actually pretty good in fact I really like these we have to collect blue spheres across two sections that loot in the pseudo 3d space these are actually way better than the special stages in Sonic 1 or to type the special stages might be my favorite part of the entire game and they definitely do a better job at utilizing the 32x as power than just displaying a million different colors on screen at once there's something about this game that's always bothered me but I don't really know how to properly explain it knuckles just looks weird to me like this is how he's supposed to look and this is how he looks in chaotix I really don't know how to put this but he looks like some kind of fat gay pregnant dog or something it's really described I just do not like the way he looks in this game and some poses he's alright but his neutral standing animation is gliding animation I hate them we look at his sprite in Sonic mania it actually looks kind of like a combination of his regular sprite and his chaotic sprite well let me be a little closer to his original sprite I like it a lot I think this is a good look for knuckles and look at this [ __ ] pony's Dre's hanging off the wall oh my god that's a good ass pose ok I'm getting distracted again but the sprites in this game are extremely well animated I don't think anyone would deny this game has some excellent character animation I especially like the idle animations for each character I mean obviously you gotta give your characters a good idle animation that's a key part of making a Sonic game there's also a similar Easter Egg to one from Sonic CD or if you remain idle for too long Metal Sonic will show up to attack you in fact this game is a lot of similarities to Sonic CD now that I think about it their levels are both way more vertically oriented compared to the main series it would have multiple versions of each level day cycle chaotix and time periods is seedy we both have good special stages but both feature Metal Sonic and some graphics bad makes and sounds are actually reused between games between the same weird and long jump sound effect that makes sense because I was never a huge fan of Sonic CD either in addition to the special stages that are also these bonus stages not horrible or anything just kind of pointless the main thing you can get from these are rings and points but since there are no lies in this game there's really no reason to try and get a hundred rings or more I mean one ring provides just as much protection as 100 rings and there are plenty of rings outside of these bonus stages I don't know why anyone would ever give a flying [ __ ] about points the only thing worthwhile you can get from these bonus stages are items that affect the hub world one that lets you choose your partner and one that lets you choose your stage so I guess these aren't totally pointless but I don't really want to have to go into a goddamn fire stage just to get a powerup that lets me do something there should be a basic feature of the game in the first place also what on earth is going on with these zone title screens it's [ __ ] crazy why is there a bar code why is there a bar code look I really wanted to like this game this is a game starring knuckles this is the only game starring knuckles ever why don't we look at the mario series for a second and see if we can draw a few comparisons so obviously sonic would be the mario of the sonic you he's the main dude that the games are about and tails would of course be the Luigi sure maybe they start a couple of games you don't want to make too many games about this character we want to focus on the main dude now let's think about knuckles is there anyone in the Mario universe that knuckles is like is there anyone that was introduced fairly early on it was originally an antagonist but maybe became more of a self-interested hero the character who's known for being a strong dude maybe a bit dimmer than the main character someone like oh I don't know Wario noun utmost isola never starred in one game I'm gonna games his Wario started - oh well two's not that many games what's that not two games but two series of games and they're both cool and good you don't sing well what's so good about these Wario and games huh is it because they take the basic formula of their parent series and design a game around the different abilities that make this characters unique and interesting as well as we're fighting these abilities to make them extremely satisfying to use or they based around a stupid [ __ ] gimmick the place like absolute [ __ ] that has nothing to do with your characters abilities hmm can only imagine the [ __ ] Sega executives train of thought well this one knuckles game that was released on our [ __ ] add-on that nobody bought somehow didn't end up selling - whoa I guess there's just no potential for a game starring knuckles I mean the market is clearly indicate that people just don't want a game about knuckles so I'd agree for the next 20 years there could be no cool side series of knuckles games like god dammit why does this game have to be so [ __ ] bad there are some things about it that I really like but when it comes down to it it's just not fun to play at least not for me anyways I could go on but I think you guys get the point I was recording gameplay for this video and I actually forgot how much I hate playing this game it's just a constant fluctuation from being bored out of my goddamn skull just mindlessly running around literally nothing capable of stop me or I'm frustrated because I can't figure out where to go on these massive maze-like levels which have no distinguishing features so it's impossible to tell where you've already explored god this game [ __ ] sucks good music though anyways I'll let you guys vote on Twitter on what you wanted to see me make a video about and hey Alex narrowly beat out sonic mania so I'll hopefully be making a video about that pretty soon too follow me on Twitter and YouTube and vote on what topic you want to see me have an autistic meltdown about next [Music]

Channel: Cybershell

Views: 1,413,414

Keywords: Sonic, Sonic the Hedgehog, Knuckles, Knuckles the Echidna, Knuckles' Chaotix, Chaotix, Sega 32X, Chaotix Beta, Chaotix Pre-Release, Chaotix Review, Chaotix Secrets, Sonic Secrets, Sonic Beta, Espio, Vector, Review, Sonic Review, Mighty, Mighty the Armadillo, 32X

Id: cVPmSf6QgPI

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/illossolli]

I remember having this as a kid in the late 90's. All I remember is getting annoyed at my friend who couldn't stay on the screen as we both just rubber banded back and forth between one another.