Sonic Series Extra: Knuckles Chaotix
I was always a huge Sonic fan. One of the earliest videos my parents have of me displays prominently Sonic 2 being played on a Mega Drive in our then living room. I grew up on it, and was excited to play newer games of the franchise, waiting with baited breath to buy a GameCube and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, after not having played new Sonic games for years. It was at that time I started consuming fan-created Sonic content like fangames, and it was at that point I started becoming aware of official Sonic media that I had never heard about. Once I felt I had a good grasp on it all, the existence of a couple of mysterious characters threw me for a loop. Who is Espio the Chameleon? Who is Mighty the Armadillo?
The answer is that they’re from a game called “Knuckles Chaotix”, but the thing that makes it easier on getting to know a game series better, especially on an internet before exhaustive wikis and centralized hubs of information, are the interdependence and connections of characters and worlds across its games. I had never played Sonic CD at that time, but I quickly knew of its existence thanks to how characters like Amy Rose and Metal Sonic prominently exist in many other places, like comics and more popular games like Sonic Adventure. Knuckles Chaotix though, felt vacuum-sealed in comparison. Its characters barely appeared anywhere else, it was like it was completely self-contained. The game had maybe a couple of images online, and nobody talked about it because barely anyone had played it.
My mind at the time was exploding with the desire to fill in these gaps of information, eating up hoaxes of the characters appearing in newer games, playing fan-games featuring them, listening to a MIDI of Evening Star over and over, the mystery making these characters all the more special in my mind. Some time later, maybe a year or two, the ROM surfaced on the places I frequented, and so did a way to play it via emulator. I was going to play a new, hidden, special Sonic game.
But first, a little bit about the system Knuckles Chaotix was released on.
The 32X
The SEGA 32X, or Mega 32X, or Super 32X, depending on your region, was a peripheral made to expand the popular, yet aging Mega Drive’s capabilities to make it feel like a true new 32-bit system, with the added bonus of being retro-compatible with its base console, which enjoyed massive success on most home console markets. This would give players a new system to play new and impressive games on, with the added bonus of the previous base system’s extensive gallery of games.
The 32X extends the Mega Drive’s low capabilities of displaying up to 64 colors on screen to 32,768 colors simultaneously, dwarfing heavily even its graphically-impressive rival, the Super Nintendo, with its 256 simultaneous colors (though 32X games seldom used anywhere near that many colors). It adds a new powerful 32-bit CPU to work in tandem with the Mega Drive’s own, allowing the system to do things like extensive graphic scaling and rotation and polygonal graphics — things that the Super Nintendo proudly had over the base Mega Drive, but with the aid of external chips on the cartridges in many cases, and with heavy slowdown. The 32X, though, can natively display more polygons than the SNES could with the aid of expansion chips, without such harsh performance costs. It has positioned itself, with the popularity and lowering costs of the Mega Drive, to be the ultimate home console for 2D games.
The 32X lasted for less than a year, and released less than 50 games total.
The Mega Drive “enjoyed massive success on most home console markets”, but not “all”. As it turns out, the system was wholly unsuccessful in one region — Japan. SEGA of Japan needed a new product to replace, what they saw as, the failure of the Mega Drive. The 32X couldn’t possibly be it, as it relied on the Mega Drive, very literally, for it to work.
So, due to a strong rivalry between SEGA of America and SEGA of Japan, due to a lack of communication and synergy, due to plain old-fashioned Bad Decisions, SEGA announced and released the 32X only to release a wholly new, more powerful 32-bit system, the SEGA Saturn, months afterwards. Customers felt cheated, confused, and both systems sank down together as commercial failures, though the 32X sank much harder, much faster.
It’s in the middle of all this chaos that Knuckles Chaotix was released, and it’s within that context that it’s no wonder it was so rare and forgotten.
Welcome to the Next Level
At first, Knuckles Chaotix hits you with its unique, explosive sense of aesthetics, that coupled with all the showcasing of the 32X’s new tricks compared to the Mega Drive, make for a strikingly first impression. Colors are exploding out of the screen with intense hue and lighting contrast in their bigger palettes, scaling is seen everywhere. Metal Sonic’s metallic bits are no longer just a couple of shades of gray, as you notice they feature an intense chrome appearance as the character jets into the screen menacingly, like Ridley at the beginning of Super Metroid. The art direction is outstanding, going harder on Sonic’s pop/computer-art aesthetic more than any other game prior or later. Knuckles’ own graphics are unique and odd, featuring a more pastel palette and looser animation. Busting enemies don’t free animals, but dull gray rings that disintegrate into a spray explosion of pixels. The presentation is stunning and contributes to the mysterious uniqueness of the game.
And then the weirdness doesn’t stop when it introduces its gameplay spin: Your character is chained to another one with a magical bungee cord. “Ah, it’s like that Sonic Crackers ROM I played”, I thought, not really aware of the connection between these two games, or how bizarre it is that a leaked beta ROM had less mystery in my mind than this official game. The bungee cord mechanic further frames this game as bizarre, especially since it’s your interface with the game, how you interact with its world, having this gimmick that just completely changes your engagement to all these Sonic elements, like momentum, jumping on platforms and springs, running on slopes. If Sonic already was a pretty different take on a platformer, Knuckles Chaotix sits alone in its own weird unique subgenre.
Even its way of stage selection and progression is unlike others. You play a roulette between levels, and that’s what decides what your next stage will be. There are 5 Zones and each has 5 Acts. This means your playthrough can either be a varied look through all these 5 Zones in a random order, but you can also run the chance of just… playing the same Zone 5 times before experiencing any other level. All the levels are weird labyrinths in which your goal is to move upwards more than left-to-right. Again, just every part of the structure of this game is totally different from what most platformers do.
As you stick around with the game and try to puzzle it together, these elements stop feeling like weird unique special quirks and more like nonsensical frustrations. Why is it so hard to use something as simple as a spring? The game barely has any traditional platforming, and when you run across some floating girders in Techno Tower it’s easy to see why: it’s so so hard to even get your characters to do the most basic jumping on platforms. If the game had any death pits and wasn’t scarce with hazards (spikes don’t even exist in this game), it’d be impossible to play. How laborious it is to get your characters to do anything remotely precise means that the levels can barely do anything interesting, and so, all of them basically feel the same, their gimmicks just being slightly different structures and slightly different excuses to transport you from one closed off area of the level to the next. With Marina Madness, it’s flying cruise ships. With Amazing Arena, it’s floating UFOs and tubes. With Botanic Base, it’s doors and elevators. With Techno Tower, it’s elevators. With Speed Slider, it’s, can you guess what? Elevators. GOD, I love elevators, especially slow ones. Nothing beats not playing the video game I’m supposed to be playing.
Playing the levels after a while start feeling more like nuisances so you can get to the Special Stages, which are fun. It’s not the best Special Stage we’ve seen in the series, mind you, but it’s still above most of them, and there isn’t another one like it. It also runs really smoothly considering how other games of that era struggled with polygons. The Special Stages being surprisingly kinda fun makes it all the more frustrating when you end up finishing a level without enough rings to access them because you got flung into a spiked enemy near the end.
I still enjoyed the game when I played it back then, but mostly for aesthetic and superficial reasons. I ignored the issues and frustrations of playing it and appreciated having control of these weird fun characters I had never played as before. I appreciated the striking aesthetics, the amazing groovy music (seriously, you wanna click this link), the Special Stages, how cool Metal Sonic was. But nowadays, with my critical sense consolidated, it’s easy to dismiss it as just this weird failed experiment on a failed system, and appreciate the elements I most like from it — its graphics and music, divorced from the game itself.
And yet, the mysterious allure of the game didn’t quite fade away completely. But now, instead of being pulled in because of a desire to fill information about these characters and about the game’s place in the Sonic series, it was because I wanted to make sense of its odd mechanics.
When you don’t understand the intent of the mechanics behind a game, the game can feel confusing and chaotic, like things happen just because they do, for no rhyme or reason, because there wasn’t thought or intent behind these decisions. Sometimes, there really wasn’t, and I feel that’s what most defines a lot of interesting kusoge. But, during a recent playthrough with Knuckles Chaotix, it clicked with me, what the game was aiming for. It was right in front of me the whole time, it was right on the title of the game itself.
Unlike the ways that kusoge can feel chaotic, Knuckles Chaotix, more than just its name, feels like there was real intent and design behind that feeling the game gives you. Under that lens, all of the game’s decisions started making sense to me.
You pick your stage from a random roulette. You pick your partner character from a claw prize machine with difficult timing (and with two dud characters mixed in there!). The mechanics of the game lend themselves to unpredictable outcomes where you can shoot yourself into a hazard, or skip a decent amount of the level, almost entirely by chance. It gives new meaning to the Sonic tradition of having little hidden rooms behind walls with items that way, as you can accidentally shoot yourself into them and grab unknown items. The new items of increasing or decreasing your or your own partner’s size aren’t just a showcase of the 32X’s scaling capabilities, but they can either make your life easier or harder depending on the item and whether it’s you or your partner who grabs it. In two-player mode, all of this chaoticness and more intense cooperation makes for a near party game experience. The designers of the game correctly assessed that the heart of the bungee cord mechanic is its unpredictableness and difficult cooperation, and then designed the game completely around those themes. Even if I still don’t think Knuckles Chaotix is a great game, I can appreciate the thought put into it a lot more.
It’s clear, especially when playing Sonic Crackers, that the team wanted to try to make a Sonic game that was truly for two players, and not just a game that the second player barely gets to play because the first player is zipping too fast. I can’t say that the experiment made a great game, or that we’re all better off for Knuckles Chaotix being this way. The game might’ve been better, and better remembered, if it was a regular old Sonic game with some 32X pizzazz. Knuckles Chaotix has basically no footprint in the history of gaming, so I can’t even say that its bungee cord gameplay led to anything. But, between a mediocre, forgotten platformer that doesn’t do anything unique, and one that tried to, it’s a lot easier and pleasant to appreciate the latter, isn’t it?
But I don’t even know if Knuckles Chaotix holds the same appeal nowadays, in an internet that’s easy to google these characters and there’ll be 10 wikis to tell you in extensive detail every one of their appearances, where there’s easy to find longplays of almost every console game out there. Like obviously, we’re always finding about new betas, new games we didn’t know existed, but those discoveries are instantly broadcast and not of interest to anyone but the hardcore. I wonder if internet kids nowadays experience the kind of wonder that I felt, of piecing by themselves the stuff they’re interested about by little pieces and breadcrumbs, instead of getting that knowledge instantly, or whether these things have shifted so hard to the most niche, to the most obscure. I guess is what I’m trying to say is that I really enjoyed that experience, and those feelings are what comes to my mind when I think about this game.
