SEGA needs to bring back the Chao Garden from the Sonic adventure games, and I’m genuinely shocked it hasn’t been done already.
As a Sonic The Hedgehog fan, I’ve played just about every title in the series, not counting some of the compilation titles. It’s this curse of knowledge that makes me excited to rediscover the Sonic world’s history in Sonic X Shadow Generations, releasing later this year.
Take a look at the interview I had with Takeshi Iizuka on Sonic X Shadow Generations below
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With my all-time favourite Sonic game being Sonic Adventure 2 (surprising I’m sure) I was thrilled to see Shadow The Hedgehog star alongside the blue blur once again in a new game. With updated graphics and gameplay for Sonic Generations, and a whole new game added on with Shadow Generations it looks like the upcoming remaster will be a complete success, though it still feels like something is missing.
It’s the Chao Garden. SEGA still hasn’t brought back the Chao Garden and I’m gobsmacked that it hasn’t happened yet.
Introduced in Sonic Adventure and expanded upon in Sonic Adventure 2 the Chao Garden is an adorable mini-game of sorts where you raise and care for the little critters known as Chao. You hatch them from eggs, feed them, name them, take them to school, make them fight like Pokemon and more.
I spent hours on the Chao Garden as a kid, probably more than I did actually playing the game. At one point my memory card corrupted and deleted all my save data so I spent even longer with a new Chao Garden trying to get back what I’d lost.
Even now I still play Sonic Adventure 2 on my Xbox Series X/S and I’m currently trying to get one of every Chao type, including the special Sonic, Shadow and Chaos variants.
With Sonic X Shadow Generations being another celebration of Sonic’s history, now including even more of Shadow’s backstory pre-Sonic Adventure 2, you’d think now would be the best time to reintroduce the mode, but it’s not looking likely.
The Chao ironically are coming back, but will serve as collectables in Sonic Generations. There’ll even be variants like the Hero and Dark chao, in addition to different colours and temperaments. It’s nice to see them back but it feels awfully strange to have them return without a garden to put them in, if the game doesn’t have one already at least as we don’t know everything it has to offer yet.
Honestly if it’s not there at launch I’d kill to have it added in as DLC on a later date, or at least added into whatever game comes after Sonic X Shadow Generations. In fact, I’d go a step further and say I’d happily buy a spin-off game where you exclusively raise chao.
At its core a spin-off game could follow a similar formula to Sonic Adventure 2’s Chao Garden mode. Have a hub world that leads to the various gardens, the shop, a school and a mini-game parlour. You could even throw in some sort of farming mechanic since almost everybody loves a farming sim of some kind. Then add an online mode so you can set up chao playdates with other players as well as play mini-games together, and you could even throw in a trading mechanic.
Then SEGA should create additional forms for chao to evolve into, inspired by both Sonic The Hedgehog characters as well as other beloved SEGA mascots. If you raised your chao in Sonic Adventure 2 to be a neutral flying-type it’d resemble Nights from Nights Into Dreams which I always thought was a nice touch, so it’d be great to see others like AiAi from Super Monkey Ball or even Kiryu from Yakuza.
Those are just a few ideas I can think of, but I’m not a game developer so I’m sure if SEGA put its various heads together it could come up with something much better, and I’d bet my life they’d sell copies of it like hotcakes.
The demand for more Chao Garden content from fans is clear to see, because as soon as chao were confirmed to return in Sonic X Shadow Generations everyone was speculating that the Chao Garden would make a comeback.
If it does return when the game launches in October, happy days, if it doesn’t I’ll continue pleading to SEGA to make it happen, and on that day my life will be theirs.
Topics: Sonic, Sega, Xbox, PlayStation, PC