What the Hell are Chao?

ciao what are they what are they for what do they do what do they taste like questions we've all wondered at one point or another i'm gonna be honest with you i was never a chow guy i just didn't see the appeal of raising some weird little blue baby plus it seemed to take forever so i never really touched this part of the game i mean sure i would check it out every now and then but i wasn't one of those weirdos who would spend hundreds of hours raising these things i was one of the normal people who spent dozens of hours replaying the game regular style i mean don't get me wrong i always wanted to like raising ciao i just never really did but i always wondered what is it about these little monsters that people found so captivating kind of bothered me there was this huge part of the game i barely knew anything about so i decided to finally bite the bullet and learn about chow how complicated could it be right oh it's complicated so what are chow well there are these little creatures first introduced in sonic adventure 1. they have some minor relevance to the plot but who gives a [ __ ] i'm not here to talk about that i'm here to talk about the chow garden a feature that was in both adventure games and then never seen again while the child themselves continue to make various small appearances throughout the franchise basically the ciao garden is a kind of virtual pet simulator where you can raise your chow by giving it items to improve its stats and change its appearance and you can enter these chow in a series of races that get progressively more challenging there's also a ciao karate mode exclusive to sonic adventure 2 battle the shao garden is a completely optional feature in both games however some emblems are locked behind ciao races so if you want to 100 either game and get to play that sweet bonus level and sonic adventure 2 then you will have to raise some chow that's the super basic overview but where did the idea for chow come from why is it even in the game at all in the credits for sonic adventure 2 they have ciao programmers and artists listed but there is no ciao section listed in the sonic adventure 1 credits instead there's an a life section a life short for artificial life is actually a refinement of an idea they first had for a game called knights into dreams which came out in 1996 this is the game sonic team worked on for the sega saturn instead of you know a sonic game it also had a remake come out on pc in 2012. knights is a game about running around as a boy or girl and then turning into an androgynous purple dream clown and then flying through rings or something what nights is about isn't really important to this video so don't worry about it what we're going to be talking about are these guys the little background npcs of the game they're called knightopians and this is what the original knights in the dreams webpage had to say about them nytopians are carefree happy inhabitants of nytopia they're born every time balls of light called idea collide the sole reason for their existence is to have fun because they are incapable of doing anything else they've no need to work together to cooperate towards a common goal as a result they have no leader and no language what they do have is the ability to see the consciousness of each visitor dreamers from our world through idea when visitors arrive the nytopians can see their consciousness and recreate the happy world that is hidden deep inside that's why nytopians who don't have the capacity for intelligent thought can sing dance and even go fishing that's pretty [ __ ] weird but okay these odd little cherubs aren't quite as cute as chow but they're all right so what's the deal with these guys the levels are populated with these little dudes and they go about doing various different things they can be happy or sad they can create tiny changes in the landscape and certain things like background music or even alter depending on the overall mood of the stage much like ciao you can easily play through the entire game completely ignoring them if you want but they're actually not just a static background element or whatever you can interact with them if you drill dash near one it will become frightened lowering its mood you can even do a pair loop to kill one if you want although much like real life this is considered a social faux pas and it lowers the mood of every other nytopian in the level depending on the mood of the nytopian will either follow you remain indifferent or run away if you hit the patience you can lure two nytopians together and when two nytopians touch there's a chance an egg will appear the happier they are the more likely they are to breed after a few playthroughs of the same level known in game as days it will eventually disappear starting with the oldest ones first in addition to nytopians you can also create mepians which are hybrids between the nytopians and the enemies of the game you create a mepian by grabbing a nightmare in minion and releasing it as it bounces around the level if it collides with the nytopia and there's a chance an egg will be created containing a mepian mepians will have the head torso arms or legs of the enemy type which was used in this creation so there's a wide variety of possible outcomes mepians can also raid with nytopians and other meat beans to create interesting body part combinations from multiple different enemies if you have a lot of meat beans in your level and a high overall happiness rating there's a small chance a kingpin will appear also known as a super pian the exact mechanics for spawning one are still not fully understood some french sites says there's a one in four chance that happens when a mepian with the head of a minion breach with a mepian that has the head of a regular nytopian for a long time it was thought by many to be just an internet rumor before pictures of it eventually surfaced online to this day there is a shockingly small amount of documentation of this character posted online so what happens after the kingpin shows up well most pins go away after a few days but the king will stick around your level for up to 9 days they'll fly around at first and survey the area then eventually you'll begin constructing a little castle that will appear over the course of several days eventually you'll leave but after it's done you'll still have the castle permanently added to the background of your level now after all that you might be wondering what exactly was the point of all this what does the castle do nothing it just looks cool let's say you want to check the status of your opinions see the overall happiness and maybe your nitopians to mepian ratio well the thing is there's no way to do it with a game by itself but if you have the demo disc christmas nights there's an unlockable feature called nytopian collection which is the only way you can see information about your nytopians by looking at your save files from the main game christmas nights is quite a fascinating little oddity it's a little too much to get into now but i would be remiss if i didn't mention it contains the first playable appearance of sonic in a 3d game predating both sonic r and sonic jam's museum mode there's even an inflatable dr robotnik for the boss but that's for another time there's a great interview that's been translated over on shmuplations.com about the design philosophy behind the a life system at nights but it's too long to get into here so i have a link to in the description anyways let's get back to talking about ciao but the first question is which version of the ciao garden should you play there's two games or rather be more precise there are four distinct iterations of the ciao garden there are some features only in sonic adventure 1 and there are some features only available in sonic adventure 2. and there are some features only available in the dreamcast games and there are some features only available in the gamecube games now technically even these gamecube versions have a few differences from the pc versions but for the most part these are essentially the same experience obviously taking an in-depth look into every single one of these would take too long and be redundant luckily it's pretty widely agreed that adventure 2 battle has the most robust and complete ciao system so for the most part this video will be focusing on the ciao system from battle but i'll bring out the relevant differences between versions when necessary before i begin i just want to say there's no way in a thousand eons i could have possibly divined all this arcane knowledge on my own credit where credit is due i learned most of what i know from chow island the internet's premier resource on ciao knowledge so to start raising ciao first you need to go to the chao garden in sonic adventure 1 these are physical locations you visit in the adventure field although you can teleport between them once they're unlocked in sonic adventure 2 you need to find a ciao container and break it to collect a key which will transport you to the ciao world upon completing the level from this point on you can access the ciao world with this character at any point from the level select screen so when you first enter the ciao garden there will already be two eggs waiting for you when presented with an egg you three possible options wait patiently for the egg to hatch on its own which takes about five minutes or you can pick it up and shake it gently for a few seconds and then put it down and it should hatch immediately and of course the proper way smash that sucker into a wall although of course they don't like that chow can have a number of different facial expressions and contrary to a popular rumor the method of hatching doesn't even have any bearing over which expression you get one of the more striking features of chao is the little floating ball above their head this is called their emotion ball and they can change shape to communicate how they're feeling at the moment once your child was born the first thing you should do is take you over to the chow kindergarten once here go to the fortune telling house upon arrival the first thing she says is welcome to the fortune telling house you won't get your fortune told here huh seems like you might want to consider a different name then what she will do is allow you to name your child she'll also suggest a random name some of her names are pretty good papoose quincy chaz chaggy jojo bruno honey dixie elvis woody soul in all caps look proof the game is soulful guys smile b in all caps this is actually a reference to the sega studio smile bit the guys who made jet set radio in fact i think a bunch of the all cap names are sega references rosso is a name she can suggest and that was also the name of a sega development studio and hitm refers to hitmaker also known as sega am3 wow refers to sega am1 formerly known as wow entertainment nigoshi probably refers to toshihiro nagoshi the ceo of sega another area in the kindergarten you can take your child to is the classroom you can leave your chow here and they'll be taught a lesson either how to play an instrument how to do a dance how to exercise how to sing or how to draw you can place up to four child in the classroom at once it takes 30 minutes of playing the game outside of the child garden in order to complete the lesson there are five different levels of singing ability the child learning a new song each time he completes a level similarly there are five levels of drawing with a child learning a new picture each class chao can actually draw without lessons if it wins the crayons as a prize from one of the chow races with the crayons it can draw a chow when any player character has a close bond with if you're kind to a chao with a specific character it's bond level will increase and it will become friendly and come towards you when you approach whereas if you abuse a child will grow to hate that character and will run away from them there's also a black market area in which you can buy various items from a cool shady chat with rings you've collected during the main game but i'll talk more about him later you can also take your shout out to the health center if your child is feeling sick the child doctor will give them medicine and make them healthy again there are a number of sicknesses your child can get but none will have any serious lasting effects and they can all be cured by a trip to the doctor the doctor will also comment on your chow on modern games you can view the medical chart which displays your stats but in the dreamcast versions the only way to check your stats is with the vmu minigame you can also view your child's record page which keeps track of their minigame performance and their personality page which has information on their personality type as well as age and favored fruit ciao personalities are not fully understood specifically it's not known how exactly they affect a child's actions and behavior or whether they're genetic traits or not personalities also don't work quite how you'd expect even though the doctor's office can only display one personality a child can have up to three personality types at a time a child can even have zero personality types the child personalities are gentle naughty energetic quiet big eater chatty easily bored curious carefree careless smart crybaby lonely and naive the last main area of the kindergarten is the principal's room he just gives a variety of tips it's some pretty useful information if you know absolutely nothing about chow there are two different types of trees in the chow garden one grows in the garden and never dies other types of trees grow from the seeds that you can buy from the black market these trees grow and later die cool good to know now how do i plant the seeds how to plant the seeds well that's a secret gee thanks a lot [ __ ] actually i'm the chow doctor okay wait what i saw the ciao doctor he's over in the other room and you're not him he's got those crazy eyebrows so why the hell would he say this well as you may suspect it turns out it's just a simple translation error the japanese word hakasey can be translated as either doctor in an academic sense meaning someone with a doctorate not necessarily a medical doctor or as professor or expert so with the actual child doctor one room overs clearly should have used a different word but hey that's far from the only issue with sonic adventure 2's translation anyways let's head back to the actual chow garden now once you get bored of watching your child crawl around and flail about in the water it's time to start raising their stats you do this by playing through the stages and defeating enemies collecting animals and sonic adventure 2 chaos drives and then giving them to your chow the four main stats are swim fly run and power these are all fairly self-explanatory your chav starts off crawling but after 50 points and run he can start walking the higher the stat the faster he goes once your chat reaches 100 points and swimming it'll stop splashing helplessly and begin to actually swim for flying well they don't really fly exactly but the fly stat determines their speed and distance traveled after jumping off a big ledge power is probably the least obvious but it affects both the chow's climbing speed and how fast they can shake the nut down from the tree as well as how fast they can push the beach ball in sonic adventure 1. the fifth stat stamina is a little different from the first four it doesn't affect the child's appearance or evolution at all and is not raised through animals or drives you have to feed the child fruit that grows from the trees in the garden or items bought directly from the black market with rings it is nonetheless quite an important stat there's a stamina bar that slowly drains while a child is racing and you have the option to cheer the show on for an additional speed boost at the cost of using some stamina once the chow runs out it will begin to move extremely slowly so efficient use of stamina is crucial however there are actually two more hidden stats intelligence and luck intelligence increases the speed and accuracy they complete the puzzle portion of the race as well as increasing the speed at which they open the jack in the box all animals and drives increase intelligence a small amount a higher luck stat decreases both the chance for your chad to trip and the odds will get scared by the jack in the box it's also believed to increase their chances of picking a route that avoids traps during the ending area of the diamond and onyx courses the status also raised slightly by all animals and drives but chaos drives increase it twice as much as animals the mushroom item from the black market also increases luck if i to rank the stats in terms of importance it would probably be in this order running is always useful nearly every single race has a considerable amount of traditional running on land stamina is also incredibly helpful allowing you both speed boosts on demands as well as simply being necessary to complete the longer races swimming is probably the next most important there's a considerable amount of swimming sections in the races more swimming than flying or climbing that's for sure a good swim stat can help compensate a lot assuming the race is a water section of course similarly there aren't that many flying sections but when they do happen they can be a great opportunity to get ahead power i just really can't say is terribly important at least for racing but there are a few power oriented races so it's not like you can or should completely neglect it luck and intelligence are both fine but i mean you can't see them in game where there's not really much you can do to go out of your way to specifically focus on them i guess luck is a little more important since you're always at risk of tripping when you're running and it's very very annoying when you lose a race you otherwise would have won because of it whereas intelligence only affects two very specific puzzles which aren't even in most races okay so now that you understand what the stats are let's talk about how to raise them as stated need to bring the chow in animal or chaos drive let's start with the chaos drives because they're simpler these dropped from the gun robots in sonic adventure 2 opposed to eggman's robots would drop little animals in a nice little piece of lore consistency there are four different colors each one correlating to one of the four main stats the color drives dropped when you destroy an enemy is random in the dreamcast games giving a chow a driver animal would directly increase its status set amount in the later games it doesn't quite work that way giving a driver animal to a child will not directly raise its stat number instead it increases the child's progress bar once you fill up a child's progress bar it will level up and the stat will increase a random amount determined by its stat grade chaos drives increase the progress bar 24 the progress bar is actually percentage based system but the game displaces ten little rectangles which round to the nearest ten percent for example anything between fifteen percent and twenty four percent would just show up as two filled squares it should be noted that this helpful little stat window that pops up when you pick up a child was introduced in sonic adventure 2 battle for the dreamcast games the only way to see their stats was with the vmu so as stated earlier they're not like tamagotchis in the sense you have to feed them for them to survive the fruit is simply for raising stamina technically you could have a child for its entire lifespan and never feed it once but uh wouldn't be very happy about it plus they'll eat on their own if you leave food near them but they're not gonna die from you forgetting to feed them or anything like that in fact the only way for these guys to die is simply old age yep it doesn't matter how much you starve these guys kick them around smash them into walls dunk them into the dirt we can bash these guys all day long and they never die yep all day long well actually there's something kind of interesting about the dreamcast version of sonic adventure 1 you see it's the only game that has a different stat system than the one i described earlier there's no intelligence luck or even stamina stat instead there's simply the four main stats and another stack called hp unlike these games your attacks do decrease the stat and when this stat reaches zero the chow dies so you do know what this means right alright so step one is you're going to want to crack that sucker open like you're making an omelette you can do a short hop throw here to save a few frames if you want the next thing you're going to want to do is back that little sucker up into a corner and go to town with a spin dash i mean really nailed a little bastard but remember it's not about spamming it as fast as you can it's about consistency and rhythm hitting him as soon as he's vulnerable again now he's going to want to try and crawl away to avoid being killed by you but just keep on top of him with that spin dash and make sure you keep track of where he is with the camera because he can go flying all over the place we don't like that if you're having trouble keeping control of your spin dash you can always try picking him up and throwing him although this method is slightly slower and there you go that's my ciao murder percent run tutorial i'm currently the only runner of this category but i hope to inspire others to take up the challenge with this video i understand that some people really don't like seeing ciao abuse if you found the footage of me violently murdering that innocent baby chow as a joke to be offensive then you can jump to the following time code to skip it hey don't get mad at me for telling you about it get mad at sonic team for putting in the game and yes i understand the real ciao murder percent category would probably have to be time from the start of the game this was more of a proof of concept than a real run all right enough digital infanticide let's discuss the ciao life cycle in a little more depth each child is born from their egg lives in a child face for about one chao year which is three hours and 12 minutes long assuming your game is running at 60fps then enters a cocoon and evolves into an adult chow we'll talk more about this evolution in a minute for now let's take a look at ciao death a child's life lasts for about 5 years after which it will enter a second cocoon if you're neglectful or abusive to your child it will actually die disappearing forever however if it had a high enough happiness that it will instead enter a pink cocoon and reincarnate as an egg luckily happiness is pretty easy to raise so this isn't really that difficult to achieve just give them a lengthy head massage back in the dreamcast era all cocoons were the same color so it was a little more suspenseful now you know what's going to happen as soon as the cocoon forms upon reincarnating your child will keep the same name and 10 of their total stats interestingly a child from a new egg will be born at level zero but a reincarnated child will hatch at level 1. so what's the deal with the first cocoon well once a child has reached a certain age it's ready to transform into an adult show there are five different types of adult show swim fly run power and normal in addition to changing appearance when a ciao evolves its stat grade and the corresponding stat will increase one letter rank unless it's already the maximum rank of s if your child evolves into the normal type its stamina grade will increase during this first evolution is the only time a shaft can ever increase its stat grade so if you want your child to have all s ranks you're gonna have to go through the laborious process of raising it evolving it and having it die and reincarnate over and over again which is why the more common method to getting a child with all strengths is by breeding but i'm getting ahead of myself here so what determines which evolution the chat will undergo i mean it's just whichever stat is highest right well no it's not that simple it has to do with your chow's stat influence which is independent from its level and actual stat number it's essentially just two sliders the run power slider and the swim fly slider which can be represented as a graph you see these stat types are diametrically opposed as you give your child run drives and animals its power influence decreases and vice versa same goes for swimming and flying if you give your child a thousand green drives to make him a little speed demon than 80 red drives it will evolve into a power type despite run being a much higher stat as that's the stat with the highest influence at the time of evolution if you want your chad to evolve into a normal type then you have to balance it so none of the four stats has too much influence it takes about 20 animals or 40 chaos drives to max the stat influence out from the neutral position but what if the influence values are exactly the same in the case where the swim fly and the run power sliders have equal absolute values which can easily happen if you max out both influence stats then we have to take a look at stat dominance to determine what the evolution's outcome will be the hierarchy goes swim power or run and then flying stat influence continues to play a role in the life of an adult child you can continue to further affect the appearance of the adult child by giving them animals and drives this is informally known as the second evolution there's no cocoon for this evolution and merely refers to the natural growth of an adult child over time is to receive stat influence this is the chao island 3d channel viewer it's a program written by justin 11 3d and while not absolutely 100 game accurate it's very very close and an incredibly useful tool if you want to design a ciao i love messing around with this program but i just want to use it here to demonstrate the effects that stat influence can have on a child something interesting is that stat influence does not immediately have any effect on an adult child like if you immediately shove 100 chaos drives in his face the second he emerges from his first evolution he won't immediately change shape it's only as time passes that you begin to see the effects even if you don't give them any drives or animals adult child will still change over time although the effect can be quite subtle as seen in the normal chow for example this is a newly evolved run chow so as the running chow gets older he begins to turn more blue and his little head nubbins come up to form ears it's clear this is obviously becoming a little sonic chow that's cute it doesn't make sense that the run shot would look like sonic if we were to continue giving it lots of run drives and animals and max out his sad influence in it you'll see that it becomes even bluer and more sonic-like this is what the second evolution refers to so this would be called a run run chow but unlike the first evolution this is not a permanent change if you were to then max him out on power via drives his appearance would change to this and he would be known as a run power chow again the further an adult chow's life span the more prominently the effects of sad influence are displayed another cute little detail is the fly type chow looks similar to knights and indeed if you make a fly fly type chow makes the effect even more pronounced anyways i know it might seem like i'm over explaining this a tag but i just want to make it very clear how many different possible ways you can get your child to look it's very customizable and easy to make a fairly unique looking chow speaking of customizing your chat it's finally time to talk about animals animals are the other thing you give your child a boost their stats besides chaos drives and indeed animals came first as the drives weren't introduced until sonic adventure 2. it's always been a serious tradition to have little animals inside eggman's robots that pop out when sonic destroys them and it's kind of nice they progress this aspect of the series by giving them an actual gameplay use now the reason i chose to talk about chaos tries first is i wanted to keep things simple when explaining stats and evolutions and all that jazz but the truth is your channel aren't gonna look like this they're gonna look like this you see when you give an animal to a child not only does it increase their stats but the child also receives a physical attribute from the animal each animal will have a number of different possible attributes it could give for example if you give a child penguin there's a chance you'll replace the chow's feet or arms or give the child big-ass penguin eyebrows the body part you get will be randomized which can be a bit of a pain in the ass if you're trying to give your child a certain specific combination of animal parts it should be mentioned that the pool of animals is slightly different between sonic adventure 1 and 2. there's some overlap but each game has a few creatures unique to it sonic adventure 2 more so as it has a greater total number of animals as you may have noticed the portraits have a colored background as i'm sure you can guess yellow purple green and red backgrounds all correspond to their stat type as evident from the kinds of animals themselves birds for flying strong animals for power etc there are several key differences between chaos tribes and animals the first of which is that animals can and usually do affect all four bars instead of just one another major difference is they can actually decrease a progress bar an animal can never lower stats or remove levels all you can do is slightly decrease one of your progress bars and there's no effect if the bar is already at zero animals are typically much more efficient faster way to level compared to chaos drives as long as you're using them intelligently like look at the otter for instance he increases swim 44 compared to the 24 percent of a yellow chaos drive and on top of that he even increases run eight percent too the downside is he decreases fly by four percent and power by 16 so it increases progress bars by 52 total but it also comes with a decrease of 20 for a net total gain of 32 percent again that already alone makes it better than chaos drives but if you can get a shitload of otters then once your power and fly progress bars hit zero they can't go any lower so every auditor getting the full 52 stat bonus without any downsides it doesn't necessarily have to be a bunch of the exact same animal either just pay attention to which bars are getting downgraded and make sure the animals are giving your chow have stat boost synergy some animals only decrease one progress bar instead of two and some don't decrease any at all these are the most valuable animals they're the ones without a stat colored background in sonic adventure 1 there was just the blue background animals known as the random type they increase every stat group and don't decrease any song adventure 2 also has these animals but it introduced two additional types of rare animals mythical and ghosts these are even better than the random type on average but they're harder to obtain because animals are just so much better than using the chaos strides for raising stats you basically have no choice but to use them and like i said actively curating your child's appearance can be an annoying degree of micro management when you're just trying to get your stats up so most of the time your chow is just gonna have to look like this or this or just some other ungodly combination of animal parts you're basically always going to be maintaining a balancing act between leveling up your chow and making them not look like [ __ ] the only time you can really totally stop worrying about this is once you've reached max level and can no longer improve its stats then you can focus entirely on the appearance but by that time they're probably near the end of their lifespan and ready to reincarnate and start the process all over again god you're an ugly little bastard here put this on yeah that's much better so yeah it turns out the true utility of chaos drives is that they don't turn your chow into a freaky little monster in sonic adventure 1 nearly every enemy in the game contains an animal each stage has a pool of 5 different animals you can find inside enemies which change depending on the level in sonic adventure 2 chaos stripes are more common to find in enemies than animals however each stage will have hidden animals scattered throughout it there are 10 in treasure ending stages 15 and mech stages and 20 in running stages and collecting them all will even grant you an extra life in addition to these hidden animals you can also find bonus animals in the second and third chao key containers once you've obtained a key from the first one the second one will contain an assortment of that stage's animals and the third one will contain a mythical or ghost animal children just inherit body parts from animals they also gain abilities for each animal there's an associated action with it that the child learns once they perceived it and they will remember how to do it for the rest of their life regardless of whether or not the animal part gets overwritten some are pretty obvious for example if you give a child a gorilla it will occasionally beat his chest a penguin causes it to slide on his stomach i'm not going to go over every single one but some of them are pretty amusing in sonic adventure 1 giving the lion dear ciao teaches it how to break dance for some reason and the sheep causes it to do somersaults and the skunk will make it fart wonderful the dragon even lets it breathe fire some of the effects are a little more drastic particularly with the three ghost type animals giving the child a bat will remove its legs making it float around like a little ghosty and the half fish animal which i'm pretty sure is actually just a kappa replaces your child's emotion ball with a little flame that's pretty neat let's say you don't like the way your chow looks maybe you just want his legs or a motion ball to come back or something or you just want to remove all the weird animal tumors that have grown all over its body well if you're playing sonic adventure 1 or dx you can't you're [ __ ] out of luck however there is a way to remove animal parts in sonic adventure 2 but how you might wonder is there something you can do with the kindergarten maybe talk to a doctor or get an item from the black market nope the way you remove animal parts is with the third ghost animal the skeleton dog each skeleton dog you give your child will instead of adding a new body part actually remove an animal feature at random as stated earlier the skeleton dogs are a ghost animal which are much rarer than normal stage animals which is shall we say less than convenient luckily due to something i'll be discussing shortly this is really not a deal breaker major issue just a questionable design choice so as i alluded to earlier with my hilarious paperback joke you can give your child hats to wear which cover up their head they can wear part of an eggshell as a hat or if you're playing as knuckles or rouge you can dig up a pumpkin or skull hat for them to wear but most of the hats can simply be bought from the black market but if you just go get a hat and give it to your child he's just gonna look confused and throw it away doesn't matter how many times you shove it in that little bastard's hands he will refuse to put it on you see this week's tower not born with the ability to wear hats so how do you unlock it what weird solution is it this time well in order to give your child the ability to wear a hat you need to give it a skeleton dog yep in addition to removing body parts once your child has been given its first skeleton dog you permanently gain the ability to wear hats there isn't any sort of visual indication or notification that your child can now wear hats nor does it mention this anywhere in the game to my knowledge especially not that useless [ __ ] principle oh and in song adventure dx there were no ghost dogs so they had to give this property to the koala in the original sonic adventure 1 there simply were no hats oh after all that you want to take the hat off huh well i'm afraid there's only one way it's okay this is mandatory abuse it's for his own good so here's the rub raising a chow takes way way way too [ __ ] long like if you just try to raise a good child by stopping in between levels as you play through the game normally it will take you a very very long time and quite a lot of playthroughs realistically at some point you will end up being forced to grind over and over for animals which is incredibly tedious i really just think they should have balanced it slightly more leniently like i understand the whole point of the child garden was to increase play time and making you replay stages was part of that but raising just one ciao feels like it takes an eternity let alone trying to do multiple at once however by a stroke of luck a glitch was discovered that seems to be an exact solution of this problem the infinite small animal use glitch is probably the single most famous glitch in the entire game usually once you give a chow an animal or drive it will grab it embrace it and then release in a shower of sparkles after which you're no longer able to interact with it and it disappears shortly thereafter however there is a very small area where if you put down the animal right in front of the chow close but not too close the child will absorb the animal and gain the sets but you'll still be able to pick it up and use it again it can be a little tricky to figure out the sweet spot at first but eventually you'll get a feel for it it helps having a few animals near you so you can chain them together to keep the chow from wandering off this works with chaos drives as well however they go flying much further so it's harder to pull off consistently or to get into a good rhythm this glitch spread across the internet chow community like wildfire and honestly it's not even that hard to discover for yourself this is basically the glitch that saved the chow garden i honestly believe there would have been substantially less people who got really into the child garden if it wasn't for this glitch also like i said earlier with this glitch you only need one skeleton dog to remove all the animal parts in a chow which makes that process much less tedious hmm so that's pretty much all the basics covered right am i forgetting anything oh yeah just one of the most fundamental and iconic features of the ciao garden which was introduced in sonic adventure 2 alignment luckily for me alignment is a surprisingly simple feature all things considered basically just a slider that goes from hero to dark when the ciao is still in this child form its appearance isn't just affected by its stat influence it's also affected by its alignment slider if you're kind to a shower as a hero character by pending it feeding it etc you will increase its hero alignment and you can watch the effects of this happen in real time if you just pet the [ __ ] out of one for long enough however if you were to abuse the chow as the hero character the linemen will shift the other way towards dark for dark characters it's the opposite be kind to them to make them dark and abuse them to make them hero but really there's no reason to do it like this it's much slower than just pending them a bunch with the alignment you want and moreover than that it's just cruel if you're one of those psychos out there who's running around bashing your child into rocks and just kicking them and smacking them around and just beating the [ __ ] out of them then shame on you these little blue footballs deserve to be treated with respect you might be wondering how does this work in sonic adventure dx as that game isn't split into hero and dark characters well it actually is possible to change a child's alignment but is an extremely slow and tedious process of feeding them hero fruit or dark fruit this is just one of the many reasons why sonic adventure 2 battle is the preferred game for raising chow when a child shout with a strong hero alignment undergoes its first evolution it will become a hero chow that works the same way for the dark ciao so earlier when i was saying this is a run run chow and this is a fly fly chow that wasn't entirely accurate the full nomenclature here would be a neutral run run chow and a neutral fly fly chow so these are just the standard hero normal normal and dark normal normal chow they're affected by stat influence just the same as a neutral trout so you can have a dark fly power or a hero swim fly etc etc and yes if you were wondering dark run run looks like a little shadow remember the ciao evolution chart i showed earlier well they're actually three times as many types there really are a ton of different ways a chow can look and this is before even putting on animal parts or other cosmetics anyways once the showers reach its adult phase its alignment is essentially locked in the game still technically keeps track of their alignment as adults but it doesn't affect their appearance at all and only has the most minute imaginable behavioral effect if your child has a high enough bond with a character that when it greets you it has a chance to give a bow material aligned or a thumbs up if it's dark aligned i think that's literally the only effect it has in adulthood once you've evolved a hero and dark chow you'll gain access to the hero and dark gardens respectively sonic adventure 1 also has three gardens to choose from one for station square mystic ruins and the egg carrier all gardens across both games can only hold up to eight chow each the hero and dark gardens actually do slowly affect the chow's alignment over time just being in the dark garden for about two hours with no player input is enough to influence a child chow enough to become a dark chow when they evolve as you can see all the gardens underwent some changes between the dreamcast and gamecube versions although some of them only had extremely minor changes the funniest change is they had to lower the water level in the hero garden because in the dreamcast version you could drown tails in it i always thought it was so weird that this version of the mechless tails can even die like you literally never use him in an adventure stage just in the chow garden to me the most baffling change will always be the removal of this cool hill and little hidden cave area in the dark garden i guess they just wanted to keep it flat and straight forward so you wouldn't lose your chow or whatever but it's kind of a bummer if you ever spend a lot of the time in the hero or dark gardens you might notice your chow never seem to use half the garden you can pick them up and put them there but they'll never walk through their own free will this is due to the waypoint structure of the chow's movement ai this entire part of both gardens is simply missing waypoints altogether thankfully you can download a mod to fix this issue on pc what if i told you there was actually a sixth type of ciao you could evolve into there's nowhere in the game that explains how to do this and even online for the longest time people didn't understand the exact mechanics of it there are a number of requirements you need to meet first of all your child needs to have reincarnated at least twice already the second is it needs a happiness value of greater than 80. again this is easy to achieve the third and most important is it needs to have given at least one of every animal in its current life for the longest time people thought you must only give your child exactly one of each animal but that's not the case all that matters is to make sure it evolves into a normal type chow meaning none of its force statin influences are high enough to cause it to evolve into a child of that specific type when you finally complete all of these steps correctly then upon evolving a special music sting will play and your child will evolve into the legendary chaos chow this is a very special kind of chow it cannot receive animal parts like a regular chow and will always maintain a single featureless appearance that does not change regardless of stat influence chaos tower incapable of mating so if you want another chaos chow you need to go through all the steps listed earlier and finally their signature ability is that they're immortal they will never die or reincarnate in addition to your standard chaos chow there's also the hero and dark versions sometimes informally referred to as angel chow and double chow this is essentially considered the pinnacle of ciao evolution but as it is locked into this form and unable to reincarnate its stat grades will never be able to be improved and his final stats at level 99 will be what it's stuck with forever so if you're gonna go through the trouble of raising a chaos chao obviously make sure it's not some e-rank piece of [ __ ] now i'm not 100 sure what the lore implications of this are i mean we already knew chaos was connected to the chow as their guardian or whatever i guess this is implying chaos has evolved from a chow or what in the original japanese release of sonic adventure 1 chaos can be heard making chow sounds when appearing and transforming into calls flashbacks during the last story [Applause] for whatever reason these chow sounds were removed in later versions well according to the official chaos character page on sonic channel he is in fact a mutated ciao after all so let's just leave it at that so what do you do if you want more chow well the main way to get more chao is by breeding them after about three chao years an adult child will naturally enter a mating phase or you can use a heart fruit from the black market in order to cause any adult chow to immediately start its mating season once you have any two chad who are ready to make put them next to each other and they'll rub their little faces together and an egg pops out it's really that simple ciao are not gendered and there's no such thing as ciao incest or well at least there's no negative consequences from it in sonic adventure 1 there are also three hidden ciao eggs you can find in the adventure field a gold one a silver one and a black one then through breeding these rare chow together you can hatch the bronze and onyx chow as well in the dreamcast version of sonic adventure 1 these were the only different color shao you could get besides the default in fact these three eggs were the only eggs you can get in the entire game besides the ones you get from breeding so i think that means if you were to kill the two starting chow from each of the three gardens then find all three eggs in the adventure fields and kill those chow too you'd be permanently stuck without a way to get a new chow right every other version has a black market you can buy new eggs from but not the original sonic adventure one so i think that makes it the only game you can achieve total chow extinction not that i never do such a thing of course but i'm just saying some depraved madman out there or some stupid poor kid who just sucks a raising chat has probably done it sonic adventure 2 for the dreamcast in addition to introducing the hero in dark chow also brought back the black silver and gold chow from the first game however as there were no adventure fields to find the eggs in this is when they had the idea to create the ciao black market however it's quite different in this game compared to the later iterations it was only accessible online via the in-game web browser you see this bulletin board in the pc version it just displays this not so helpful message but in the dreamcast version it offers to launch the website the gamecube version simply referred you to the url this version of the black market didn't charge rings but rather required you to have a certain amount of emblems earned this was verified by uploading your save file to the webpage players were able to download a number of rare jewel chow like the ruby sapphire amethyst and emerald show the final chow available from the site was the incredibly rare moon chow this chow is completely unique in that is the only ciao available in any of the games which uses a specific texture for its skin and it was only available in the dreamcast version of sonic adventure 2. despite this you only need 30 emblems to be allowed to download it which is a pretty low number all things considered in addition to the black market there was also a section called the chow daycare where you can upload your ciao for other people to download and you could browse other people's chat creations too anyways with the gamecube games they introduced 13 different colored chow wags available from the black market in general as you collect more emblems in the main game the variety of items in the black market increases however you might find that even with all the emblems no matter how many times you check the shop it will never have the specific color egg you want this is because there are three sets of colors each containing three colors blue orange and green yellow pink and purple and finally red brown and sky blue when your chow save game is generated one of these sets is selected to never be sold at the ciao store meaning you will never be able to obtain ciao with these colors on your save this might seem like an odd feature permanently making a few colors unavailable especially on pc where there's no way to get them without hacking but in the gamecube version you could actually trade shout between games using a feature i'll talk about later so the colored ciao eggs you buy from the store can hatch out that are all one solid color these are known as monotone chao and unlike normal ciao change color with their stat influence and evolution these monotone chow will maintain their solid coloration their entire life however this is not the only kind of ciao coloration possible by breeding a monotone chao with a normal chow you're able to create a two-tone ciao these ciao are not a solid flat color and they can display highlights and patterns that come with certain evolutions in addition to color and tone there is another factor that influences a chao's appearance whether it's shiny or not on rare occasions the black market will have a shiny monotone color egg for sale as the name implies that shiny chow will have a brighter sparkling coating all chow can come in either shiny or non-shiny versions however shiny chow is not to be confused with a jewel coat like the gold or silver chad from sonic adventure 1 or the downloadable chat from the dreamcast version of sonic adventure 2. that's actually a separate thing a jewel coat will override the natural tone and coloration of a chow as in technically you have a monotone red chow with a gold jewel coat it would just look identical to a normal chow or any other color chow with a gold coat via breeding it's even possible to obtain a shiny jewel chow however the shiny and jewel traits appear to conflict and depending on the version of the game you're using they can appear completely different on gamecube depending on the color used they can appear transparent or even invisible on the original pc release of sonic adventure dx they just appear as shiny two tones but it's a completely different color than the version you use to breed for some reason for whatever reason on the steam 360 and ps3 versions of the game there's a glitch that causes the shiny jewel chow to appear insanely bright so color tone shininess and jewel code are the four genes that affect a chow's appearance when it comes to breeding their dominant recessive genes for example all color genes are equally dominant except for their normal coloration which is recessive on the other hand jewel coding is a dominant gene with all children of a jewel code parent inheriting it every child will have two alleles stored in each genetic trait chow do in fact have hidden in recessive genes not expressed in their phenotype look i'll spare you the punnett squares but basically child breathing is a pretty simple process although depending on the offspring you're hoping for it might take a few tries so in addition to selling eggs hats and fruits something else you can buy from the black market are seeds in order to plant the seed your chow will need to have won the shovel toy from the crab pool race you can also water the sapling with the watering can toy you win from the stump valley race in order to make it grow faster and live longer most fruits give a small percentage bonus to stamina per bite but some have a special effect for the last bite for example it's the last bite of the heart fruit that makes the chad ready to mate and it's the last bite of the hero and dark fruit that slightly changes their alignment the last bite of the mushroom is what slightly increases your luck chow also have a favorite fruit which it prefers to eat you see sometimes child will behave and eat the whole fruit when you give it to them and sometimes they'll take one bite and then toss it away so you keep having to shove it in their face over and over again so let's say your chad's favorite fruit is a triangle fruit you can get a triangle seed to plant in your garden and start growing them yourself instead of having to buy them individually these planted trees will eventually die though unlike the regular trees each garden has four fixed spots where seeds can be planted apparently in the steam version of sonic adventure 2 battle the trees the ciao plants are broken and will never update from their sapling model resulting in these weird looking buggy monstrosities this is actually really bothering me so i went online and surprisingly there's no quick and easy patch you can download to fix this people had to resort to hex editing the game in order to change the appearance of the sapling to adult trees eventually sonic retro user main memory was nice enough to post a simple text string you can add to the codes list of the sonic adventure 2 mod manager so i did just that and it's still not working huh oh it's because i needed to capitalize the p in patch of course duh did i really need to include this information in the video no no i didn't something very strange that you can buy from the black market are menu themes i'm not sure how many people even know this feature exists but if you go to the options menu in sonic adventure 2 you can select a character theme which changes the menu voiceovers to their voice as well as the background of the options menu there's one for each playable character as well as unlockable omochao amy rose and maria themes in the black market they go for ten thousand twenty thousand and thirty thousand rings respectively which makes the maria theme the most expensive item in the game they also have other requirements in order to even appear in the shop in the first place for omocha you need 100 emblems for amy you need two ciao race emblems in all action stage emblems apart from the all-a ranks emblem and finally for maria's theme to appear you not only need all 180 emblems you need to have linked sonic advance 1 and 2 to your save file via the gba link cable so that means it's impossible to get normally on the pc although thankfully being on pc of course it's easy to fix with a mod something even stranger is that there's actually a hidden theme you can unlock go to the menu to select one and then you have to rotate the control stick clockwise for 30 seconds and the theme will appear for the president's secretary you know this one random extremely unimportant character that is an extremely peculiar easter egg okay so after all that what exactly am i supposed to do with my chow i mean what am i supposed to just sit around and look at it well now we can finally play the game i mean sure technically you don't need to know any of that stuff to start racing if you want you can just crack one of your eggs open and head into the waterfall and immediately enter into a race it's just that he's gonna suck the race mechanics differ slightly from sonic adventure 1 to sonic adventure 2. i'll briefly go over the essay 1 system first there are only two sets of races beginner and jewel races and 5 courses pearl amethyst sapphire ruby and emerald once you win the jewel race your chow gets a little race metal it wears on its chest which looks like the corresponding jewel in this version there is no stamina meter for your chow as it wasn't a satin the original sa1 the way boosts work is randomly during the race the camera will shift focus to a different chat when it will start sparkling you can then press a in order to cheer it and give it a short little burst of speed weirdly you can share any chow you want not just your own i'm personally not really a fan of this system i just want to watch my own chat the whole time and the camera is constantly shifting focus because of all this i really do not care for doing the races in sonic adventure 1. a neat feature was the hidden rival chad that can show up once you've completed every race if you have a chat with stats adding up to 6751 or more there's a chance the silver chow can appear who have significantly higher sets than the normal challengers if your chow is at least 1900 in every single stat then the gold chow can appear or even tougher than the silver chow however most interesting is a mysterious black chow named chakron yes in the dreamcast version they could actually display names before races and it shows up as chaklon with an l but it's supposed to be an r you know how japanese people be he has very interesting unique behavior as soon as the race starts he'll immediately lay down and go to sleep allowing your child to gain a huge head start but about halfway through the race he'll wake up and start running revealing he has incredibly high stats even with such a late start he'll often overtake you and win if your stats aren't high enough oh yeah something else interesting in the dreamcast version of sonic adventure 1 is you can actually walk around this room it isn't just a menu screen and you can clearly see these little omocha statues i guess i'm not sure if this technically counts as his first appearance as he's not named and he doesn't speak or anything but i mean that's his character model right there i guess they decided to repurpose it for the next game so in sonic adventure 2 there are actually six categories of races the standard beginner and jewel hero and dark the special challenge races and party race mode which allows you to race your own ciao against each other in the dreamcast games you could have eight of your chow racing simultaneously whereas in the gamecube games up to four chow can race at once one for each controller in the pc versions you're only allowed to erase two of your chow at a time for some reason in both games there's actually only one map which has every single ciao race it's the specific route that changes depending on which race you're doing different routes test different stats for example the aquamarine course is focused on the swim stat with a lengthy water section each category of race not only has different routes but different difficulty levels as well the beginner races have three levels of difficulty per track and once you beat them you get a little medal on your chow and unlock the jewel races these races are much longer and have five difficulty levels per set upon winning the fifth and highest level your chat will receive a medal of the corresponding jewel in addition to swag medals and jewels chow can also win toys from breeding ciao races such as the pogo stick and sonic doll most of these toys are just something the chow will pull out and play with when it has nothing to do however few toys you win are not specific to an individual channel but are instead items that show up in the garden like the ball the radio the jack in the box the rocking horse and the television once you evolve a hero or dark chow you unlock the respective set of races just four each oddly you don't have to be a hero chow to enter the hero race you're just not allowed to be a dark chow and vice versa so you can beat every race in the game with a high level neutral chow if you want the hero races are against dark chow and the aesthetic of the course has been changed to a spooky version to match the tone again the opposite is true for the dark races it's against hero chow in a more angelic looking version of the stage the final challenge in both sets is a one-on-one race against a chaos chow of the opposite alignment winning this race also grants your child a hero or dark themed medal the final and most interesting set of races is the challenge races a set of 12 uniquely themed races against very challenging opponents the first two races are actually called back to sonic adventure 1's ciao races the first is against gold and silver rivals and the second features the return of chakran unfortunately he lacks his trademark sleeping behavior but at least he retains his super high stats the third and fourth races are interesting in the third race you're up against a bunch of omo chows and in the fourth you're up against a bunch of small animals technically these are all just reskinned chow so it's not that different from a gameplay perspective but they are pretty difficult opponents the fifth race is against so-called cockroach chow blackshaw's little antenna the next race is another one with reskinned chow this time against little egg chow next race is against skull chow in the spooky garden followed by a very similar race against pumpkinhead chow this is followed by yet another spooky race but against ghost chow with no legs in the flame balls the tenth race is a rematch against an even stronger chakra and the penultimate challenge race is against a group of colorful duel chow called the chow rangers the final challenge race called here comes the ultimate rival is a one-on-one race against a neutral chaos chat with extremely high stats upon beating this race your child will get the gold medal now there's a number of minutiae i could get into here like the time my child tripped then immediately tripped again or that time it fell into the hole at the end of the race and then it tripped in the hole or that time i was doing the puzzle section and this [ __ ] guy just comes up and skips it like what the hell this little bastard is cheating i have done a shitload of races for this video and this was the only time i ever saw a child thought i'd skip the puzzle section the hell is that about but let's just move on to discuss ciao karate a feature only in sonic adventure 2 battle in this mode 2 ciao fight each other you can either enter in a tournament against 5 progressively stronger computer chow or you can choose to fight any two of your own ciao on the gamecube the inter-league match option allowed to battle ciao from two different memory cards so you could take your memory card to your friend's house and watch your child fight against each other which is pretty cool in this mode you do not directly control the chow rather you merely observe them as they fight at the bottom of the screen you'll see your chavs zeal meter it will gradually decrease over the course of the battle with chunks coming off if your child gets hit or misses an attack once the zeal meter hits zero your chow will sit on its ass and you need to mash that a button like there's no tomorrow to cheer it on and restore as much zeal as fast as you can before your opponent gets a free hit in for whatever reason they decided the cheering noise had to be the most annoying sound in the world there are three ways to win a chow karate match the first is simply attack the opponent until their health bar is depleted of course and the second is by knocking them out of the ring the third is simply to have more health remaining once the 90 second time limit is up it's possible to tie but it's pretty rare you might be wondering how stats work in this mode well in this mode they do different things swim is the defense stat which lowers the damage you take from enemy attacks fly is stealth which increases your evasion making your child more likely to dodge run is speed which increases your chad's attack speed a very useful and important skill it's in this mode that the power stat truly shines it's not terribly useful in races but as you might expect in this mode it directly increases your child's attack power and your attacks do more damage and it sends them flying back further in addition to this as your power stat increases your chow can learn new attacks like the spin kick stamina of course simply affects the size of your chow's health bar as well as reduces the amount of zeal lost when attacked intelligence and luck are both related to zeal decreasing the rate at which it drains at increasing the rate at which you recover it respectively there are four different levels of karate to select once you beat expert mode you unlock the super tournament each is a series of five battles against the computer certain rounds will have alternate opponents you can occasionally face instead the final fight of the super term is against an onyx neutral chaos chow called flash defeat him and your child will achieve the rank of grand master now it's time to discuss what might be the biggest difference between the console versions and the pc versions of the adventure games they completely lack any sort of handheld cross compatibility in each garden there's this machine on dreamcast is to send the show to the vmu while on the gamecube is to transfer them to the gameboy advance the vmu machine has different designs for the hero and dark gardens which is a nice touch whereas there's just one gba machine since there's no tiny chow garden on pc and sonic adventure dx is known as the chow name machine since there's no kindergarten in this game where you name your chow in sonic adventure 2 however it's literally just the chow garbage can getting rid of unwanted ciao is the only remaining feature of this thing so now it has the extremely ominous title of the chow departure machine to get rid of a chai you can chuck it in this thing and select the goodbye option the music changes to this incredibly melodramatic sad song and it reads chow will have a happy life in a far away forest you will never see your chow again oh my god that's that's so sad that's the saddest thing i've ever seen psych just kidding i don't give a [ __ ] get the [ __ ] out of here you little [Music] [ __ ] nah i'm just kidding i won't really get rid of you yet originally in the dreamcast games an integral part of the chat raising experience was putting it in the vmu to interact with it in addition to just phrasing your little child while playing the main game you could even take it around with you in fact quite a lot of important functionality was locked behind this feature such as the ability to see their sats and mood and it was crucial for raising your child's stats quickly there were also unique items you could obtain which had special effects when taken back to the main garden sonic adventure 2 had its own version ciao adventure 2 which was a little different but the same basic idea in the dreamcast version of sonic adventure 2 the only way to raise luck and intelligence was with the vmu minigame something interesting is that you can actually connect vmws together and have the chow interact there was a little fighting mode where you could make the 2 chow fight and there was even a breeding option where you could link xiao together giving you both an egg the vmu breeding is actually superior to regular garden breathing giving a child that starts with 10 of the stats of its parents average together for the gamecube games this feature was completely revamped and overhauled as obviously it would be very difficult to play ciao adventure on a gamecube memory card instead they introduced the tiny chow garden a feature that was designed to take advantage of the gba link cable the tiny child garden is a simple 2d ciao garden that was included in sonic advance 1 and 2 as well as sonic pinball party if you didn't own any of these games they actually gave you the option to download a temporary copy of tiny chow garden to your gba which you can use until you turn the system off either just to mess around with it or in order to transfer chow between games the tiny child garden essentially works like a simplified version of the main child garden unlike ciao adventure 1 and 2 or essentially just little mini games time does not pass in this garden so your child won't grow old or die you can hold one chow and one egg at a time a chow's appearance in the tiny chow garden doesn't necessarily reflect their actual coloration or evolution from the main game but other than that it pretty much works how you'd expect you can pet them you can feed them fruit give them toys to play with etc however there's one critical feature missing from the chinese chow garden there's simply no way to abuse the ciao however if you completely neglect them for long enough they can actually run away it even has its own shop which happens to be the only way you can acquire jewel chow in sonic adventure 2 battle the currency used in this shop is the rings from the advanced games or pinball party however you can also earn race from one of the two included mini games the first game which is in every version is ciao memory a simple matching game however the second mini game depends on the version you're playing in advance 1 in the downloadable garden from sonic adventure 2 battle the game will be rock paper scissors and in sonic advance 2 it's ciao bounce and in sonic pinball party is chao ball only in the temporary downloadable garden from sonic adventure dx can you play ciao search this game even has official sprite work of takal something else you might notice is that what the what the [ __ ] so apparently ciao can talk i mean i guess i already knew chow could talk like the chow doctor and principal but i didn't think my child could talk in the main garden they just make baby noises but transfer them in here and they just start chatting away it's not just that it's not just that they talk but they say the weirdest things i mean some of the things they say are pretty normal like i'm hungry or how was your day or just like gameplay tips or whatever but some of these are just bizarre ciao i love screaming ciao when i see nuts i go nuts i can't breathe underwater i tried my young carefree days are gone dude you're like 15 minutes old chill out sometimes i wonder if my career is going anywhere i want to be 30 000 meters tall get a new battery or i'm a goner well that's a little morbid oh no split ends my poor hair but but you're bald if i had shorter legs i could be a model what the hell are you talking about how can your legs literally get any shorter your feet are practically connected to your torso what is politics should i care what is political reform is it tasty what maybe i should conquer the world okay that's uh that's enough on the tiny chow garden what if i told you there was one final special type of ciao known as character chow unlike the sonic shadow and nice chow which are natural stat based evolutions these are three completely unique chow specially edited to look like one of three characters tails knuckles and amy but there is no way to unlock these ciao on your own through the natural course of playing the game you see these shower actually distributed at special events in japan like the 2001 world hobby fair there aren't a whole lot of pictures of these events unfortunately and for a long time this was thought to be the only way they were officially distributed however users of the chao island forum specifically purr and eventually discovered there was another way japanese players could obtain them this is the nintendo gamecube 2003 e-soft catalog as the title implies it's an electronic software catalog and has 116 titles listed it also contained a few demos one of which was sonic adventure dx on the demo menu one of the options has a little chow icon the text translates to joy carry which was a term used for downloading mini games to the gba from the gamecube selecting the tab shows off a number of mini games including puyo puyo chuchu rocket and tiny chow garden picking this option allows you to choose one of three character chow to put in the game here we can see the screen showing a lot of the live event photos when you transfer the ciao over to sonic adventure 2 battle it also gives you a thousand rings for whatever reason a forum user named air conditioner managed to track down one of these disks and even made an iso image of it and put it online so you can try it yourself if you want you know if you really want an unofficial official character chow anyways these chow were immortal and cannot breed like the chaos chow and nothing can change their appearance like animal parts they start with 250 in all stats at level 1 all a ranks and maximum intelligence and luck for whatever bizarre reason the knuckles chow is unable to participate in the dark races and the amy chow is unable to participate in the light races amy secretly a dark character confirmed or and this is pure speculation on my part like i implied earlier they're probably just copied and pasted from the chaos chat when they just changed some values around because otherwise they're nearly identical on a gameplay level but alas this was all japanese only unfortunately there was no way to obtain any of these character child north america well actually there is a legitimate way to unlock the tails chow but the method is unbelievably esoteric step 1 turn off the game step 2 pop in your copy of fantasy star online episode 1 and 2. once you've completed the first three quests you'll unlock an offline mode only quest called the fake and yellow if you've already completed this quest you'll need to either finish every single quest to be able to replay it again or try again on another difficulty setting the quest objective is to find doctor gulls it's a fairly straightforward mission just complete the level and talk to the friendly rag rappy and will agree to return home a telepipe to pioneer 2 will appear take it back but do not finish the mission instead immediately return through the telepipe once you're back you have to find a specific area and face it eventually a chow will appear and talk to you and give you a key item it even plays a little song from samba de amigo there will now be a game boy advance machine sitting outside of the hunter's guild activate it and connect your gba to download the tiny chow garden this version of the garden comes with the tails chow now turn off fantasy star online and put in sonic adventure 2 battle again and transfer him over and that is the only official way to get a tails chow in this region i should mention this was far from the only crossover they had with sonic so it's not like this was totally out of the blue or anything but it's still a pretty obscure method with the way stats affect the chow's appearance sometimes i wonder what it would be like if you could maximize run and power or swim and fly but as stated this is fundamentally impossible on a genetic level for chow however interestingly enough in the 3d ciao viewer it gives you that option again this is just for funsies none of this is actually possible in game without the use of hacks and obviously you're never supposed to see ciao like this these are forbidden chow like let's take a look at a neutral run run chow let's see what he'd look like with full power influence on top of this oh yeah that looks powerful now let's crank up the fly stat oh yeah looking good let's go ahead and max out all the stats damn he looks straight up majestic look at this absolute unit or here why don't we make the ultimate swimmy boy and now let's give him the ability to fly and now let's make him fast and finally we make him strong oh yeah i would not want to [ __ ] with this guy it almost looks like he's got another little face on his forehead little [ __ ] bizarro sephiroth dude and i have absolutely no idea what the [ __ ] is going on with the child child this is beyond my mortal comprehension okay i just thought probably literally doing this all day something really caught my eye when i was using fusion's chow editor a warning setting your chow's stat values too high can make them unable to complete races stats too high to finish a race how does that work well i decided to do some experimentation to figure it out first for reference i hacked this little guy named elvis to have the maximum stats possible you can normally obtain normally in quotes because it would take dozens and dozens of hours to breed and reincarnate and love love this chow with the animal glitch and actually it would be a million times worse than that because you have to be resetting every single time you leveled up without getting the optimum stat boost and you have to be doing that for multiple reincarnations basically it's theoretically possible but it would take ages and uh as you can see it's fast very very fast fast enough to handily win any race in the game but what if we went even faster by cranking the stats up to the absolute max i made this little freaking nature sure spike sounds like a good name oh my god look at him running around the garden just grabbing him as an actual challenge now 65 may be the highest value you can enter but the actual real highest value is 21 845. once you go even one point higher than that your stats effectively reset back to zero so ciao with stats of 21 845 43 690 or 65 535 will be functionally identical so why don't we put him in a few races and see what happens right off the bat i'm already seeing what that warning meant apparently for whatever reason if your child's intelligence status too high it will simply sit here in front of the jack in the box forever never opening it i guess it's infinite wisdom and is determined the only winning move is to not play the game so let's tweak his intelligence down a bit to fix that all right let's try this again it looks like he got spooked even with a maxed out luck stat there's always a chance elvis has a chance to get a little head start and there he is it's here where i've identified the second issue with having stats too high again for whatever reason having your strength stat bait too high actually leaves you unable to shake a fruit down from the tree so he's gonna be sitting here shaking this tree forever you can fix this just by setting your strength down to a less extreme value but for now let's try a different race that doesn't have the tree part yep that's my boy that is as fast as a chow theoretically conceivably can move although amusingly he still walks at a normal pace when he's solving the puzzle part but the moment he's done he just blasts off again he's so fast he keeps smashing his face in the walls and [ __ ] he's so fast he can trigger the pitfall but have cleared the hole before he can even fall in it although it still caused him to trip god damn he's fast he can clear the crap pool in about three seconds let's see how he does in a karate match yep that seems about right it turns out there's actually another set that can be too high to complete a race if his flying stat is too high he can just fly straight over the goal and end up flying circles around it indefinitely depending on which track you're on if there's a cliff anywhere near the end you may be unable to complete sometimes if the flying stat isn't cranked to the absolute maximum he'll land after circling enough times seriously though look at this little dude he takes off into the goddamn stratosphere if you're wondering why spike is green now it's because he crashed my damn game so i had to make him again so i guess this is spike two also depending on the race there are some areas in which she can be going so fast he'll just find a little break in the geometry and fall through the map and then be unable to complete the race these can usually be avoided by not mashing the boost the entire time if you do just mash boost non-stop you'll actually get stuck running circles around the fruit you shake down from the tree so you need to ease up a little bit so he can actually touch it anyways that's enough messing around to the races another thing that caught my eye in the chow editor was this option unlock limits allow extreme values i wonder what this does hmm well it doesn't really seem to be doing anything let me just oh my god his head turned into a gigantic ghost fish there there good boy good thing look at him go hey little dude are you feeling okay jesus christ look at that thing that is truly a lovecraftian abomination oh god look at the way it jiggles that is weirdly disturbing you got your wish little dude but at what cost be gone demon interestingly normal colored chow will start to become transparent as you go beyond the game's limits god they're so weird i think i'll just let them have this garden he thinks they're so big they're covering up information on the menu screens okay i i think i officially spent too much time in the chow garden time to wrap this video up so will the chow garden return in the future maybe i don't know it's clear they haven't forgotten about ciao there was a period of time you didn't see them too often but they've been getting a bit more attention lately of the two people credited on working on the ciao garden in both games the lead programmer yoshihisa hashimoto no longer works for sega his last job with the company was as the director and lead game designer of sonic unleashed in 2008. he left sega and sonic team in 2009 to work for square enix where he became the technical director of luminous studio the engine later used in games like final fantasy xv in 2014 he left square enix to form libsent innovations a japanese company that does something anyways the other person credited in both games is sachiko kawamura an artist for sonic team credited with creating the show and designing the ciao garden gameplay with hashimoto as far as i can tell she still works to say again she still works as an art director in modern sonic games i guess sega could also just bring back the chow garden feature without consulting any of the people originally came up with it it probably wouldn't be as good but it's a possibility there seems to be a lot of fan demand for the chao gardens return whether or not sega will listen remains to be seen so as i hope i've demonstrated in this short little video there's a lot going on in this completely optional facet of the game it was definitely more complex than i originally anticipated i thought i could just [ __ ] out a quick 20 minute video on ciao but every time i brought up one thing led me talking about another and another at the end of the day it's still not really my cup of tea exactly but i can definitely understand the value and the appeal of this part of the game better i totally get why there's still an active and dedicated ciao community to this very day and if everything in this video i've discussed so far wasn't complex enough for you you can always resort to using mods to spice things up even more you should check out ciao world extended a collection of mods which introduce a number of changes you can read about new fruit items colors etc it's pretty neat even without mods the pc version's mod loader has an extremely useful cheat built in called the chow stat multiplier that actually makes raising chow somewhat tolerable without using the small animal glitch once again i'd like to give a super special thanks to chao island moon cow fusion justin 11 3d and sapphire chow if you have any questions about ciao whatsoever please feel free to ask someone else because i am very tired of talking about them and saying the word ciao

Channel: Cybershell

Views: 697,206

Rating: 4.9416428 out of 5

Keywords: Cybershell, Cybershell13, Sonic, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, Chao, Chao Island, Chao Garden, Chao Raising, Chao Racing, Chao Karate, What are Chao?

Id: nuGA2taKfmA

Length: 74min 39sec (4479 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Axtwyt]

I don’t even care about Chao, why did I watch an hour of this?