If it were to be a side-feature of a main Sonic game, like in the Adventure era, it adds plenty of replay-ability, something that some fans have felt has been lacking in Sonic games lately. There’s fan demand, a way to let the Sonic community know they’re listening. There’s definitely ways to go about doing it, it’s just Sonic Team has to, well, do it. There’s even fan support for the Chao Gardens to be its own separate mobile game. It worked for the Sonic Advance games, after all. Better yet, just don’t have them be a Sonic Adventure-exclusive feature. And, well, I suppose you could always go that Sonic Adventure 3 route. So how could they do it? Remaking Sonic Adventure, if this is something Iizuka and Sonic Team really want to do, is one way. And Sonic Team has had a history of considering fan feedback in their games. And that’s not even considering the massive fan demand that has been going on for years. Why? Because “it’s the first time they have been playable since Sonic Adventure 2, and personally I wanted them to show up as playable as well”. And the Chao, according to Iizuka in an interview last year, were his favorite playable character in Team Sonic Racing. Iizuka has expressed interest in remaking Sonic Adventure. Maybe they just don’t want to.īut there is hope. Maybe it’s because they have to dedicate a portion of the developer team to Chao Gardens, as was the case in Sonic Adventure 2, and it would take too much work and resources in this day and age. Maybe they only want them to be a feature in Sonic Adventure games. So yeah, there’s a lot of fan demand for this. And there’s Chao Island, a fan site in the Sonic community dedicated to Chao that has been going for well over a decade, with arguably the most information you will ever find about Chao in one place. Meanwhile, Sonic Adventure 2 modders have been gradually bringing back all of the game’s unused Chao Garden stuff to make Chao World Extended.
CHAO RAISING GAME ONLINE UPDATE
Oh yeah, and did I mention that Sonic fans have wanted the return of Chao Gardens so bad that they did it themselves? Chao Resort Island’s last update released in March of this year. He even got to personally hear fans cheer loudly when Aaron Webber asked them at the 2016 Sonic SXSW panel if they should bring the Chao Gardens back. And Iizuka has been asked about bringing Chao Gardens back. Iizuka had to confirm to IGN at E3 2017 that Sonic Forces specifically wouldn’t have Chao. In 2016, when asked why we don’t see Chao much anymore, he said that “Chao require very clean and pure water in order to survive, so you may not see them in a lot of places”. And when they conducted a Twitter poll in 2018 on favorite features from Sonic games, 61.5% of the 80,500 voters picked the Chao Gardens.Įven Takashi Iizuka gets asked about the Chao often. Aaron Webber, before his promotion, has talked about it on streams in the past. In fact, all it takes for them to hear fans ask for Chao Gardens to return is for the Sonic PR team to make a Chao-related meme. They’re very aware, especially in recent years, that fans want Chao Gardens back. And that growth has only been accelerating as time passed. It took a few years after their re-releases for modders to really dig into them, but since then, their modding communities have only been growing. In 2011, Sonic Adventure DX arrived on Steam, and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle did the same the following year. The first is a growing community of Sonic modders. That fan demand has only gotten louder and more frequent since then, but there are two major differences. Even in 2010, when I got to raise Chao for the first time, I remember seeing fans asking for Sonic Team to bring back the Chao Gardens. My first ever opinion piece for Sonic Stadium is about a topic that has been discussed in the Sonic community for some time. Now, a decade later, I think it’s time that Sonic Team decided to bring that back. It didn’t take long before I discovered that raising these cute, adorable Chao is fun and addictive. I wanted to get all the game’s emblems, only to learn that doing so meant that I had to go raise these little creatures that are called Chao, enter them in races and Karate tournaments, and get some emblems there. It was also the year that I got Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the Gamecube. When I was 18, it was in 2010 and I had yet to become a Sonic news writer.