sonicmenu | What Can The Sonic Games Actually Do With Team Chaotix
Team Chaotix is the strange middle child of the extended Sonic cast. Not as iconic as Knuckles, Shadow or even Big the Cat, but still beloved, the team of low-income private detectives are sort of stuck in limbo at the minute. Hailing from Knuckles’ Chaotix, a spinoff for a quickly abandoned Mega Drive add-on that nobody bought (the 32X), it’s something of a miracle that they’re still in Sonic games. Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleon and Charmy the Bee persist as cameos for the few people who still care about them. It’s me. I’m the few people. The big question surrounding their continued existence in cameo limbo is: how did we get here?
To make you feel old, the last time this crew was playable in a mainline game was Sonic Heroes, where it’s safe to say they were the least well-liked story to actually play through because it ground the pace to a halt and made you look for flowers. The last time they had literally anything to do with a mainline Sonic story was in Shadow the Hedgehog. They were technically playable in that game but it was only via the janky co-op function that most people don’t even know exists. Regardless, that was still nearly twenty years ago. They only played a minor role, acting as some of the many partner characters Shadow has across the game. However, they did drive the story forward and even had their own little plotline you could follow. However, as the Sonic series was looking to go a bit edgier in the mid-2000s, the reintroduction of the Chaotix Gang didn’t last long. It’s a lot harder to take Shadow the Hedgehog seriously when a giant crocodile with a silly voice and headphones is berating him for mowing down GUN agents with an assault rifle.
Why is that the case? I think the first place to look is Sonic 06’s failure as part of the edgy rebrand, the resulting identity crisis and the writers switching the series style for the following decade. The mainline games stripped their casts back to just Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy for the longest time and even when other characters made an appearance, the Chaotix Crew didn’t make the cut. They didn’t even show up in Sonic Chronicles. You know, the game with slow-paced RPG combat, investigative dialogue trees and a central mystery that could easily incorporate detectives?
When the series started to go lighter with its tone around the early 2010s, they did start to pop back up. However, there hasn’t really been an opportunity for the Chaotix Corps to do anything but stand around unless they’re at the Olympics with Waluigi. Since 2005, they’ve only appeared as cameos in the DS version of Sonic Colours, every version of Sonic Generations and as (big old quotes here) “supporting characters” in Sonic Forces. They are so irrelevant in Forces that I had to look up if Charmy was even in it. Apparently, he was, but I couldn’t tell you what he was doing there. So, where does that leave us now? It’s complicated.
Strangely, since Sonic Mania brought back Ray the Flying Squirrel and former Chaotix member Mighty the Armadillo, things are on the up for the less popular and oft-forgotten characters in the Sonic cast. There’s a lot of name-dropping in Sonic Frontiers that has actively acknowledged practically every game in the main series and even the comics. This change in approach to Adventure-era and even earlier Sonic history has seemingly opened the doors for Sonic games to embrace Sonic’s friends in a more open way than they had in the last decade. It’s started to bleed into other games too; Sonic Superstars brought back Fang as a secondary antagonist and Shadow Generations brought back Omega, Black Doom, Emerl and even the GUN commander makes an appearance in the animated prologue.
The delightful Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog prominently features Team Chaotix (Sans Charmy for real this time) as key suspects. Espio and Vector have a great dynamic as both of them are really into the murder mystery scenario and playing their roles. That classic Chaotix goofiness is back as Espio struggles to make up poems on the spot and Vector gets bored and leaves his post. While it’s refreshing to the two of them acting in character for the first in a long time, does this mean that the Chaotix are coming back in a big way?
No. Unless they show up in a live-action movie or they get a dedicated spin-off. Even then, I’m sure Silver and Blaze are a little higher on fans’ (and let’s face it, the studio’s) priority lists, so it would be at least another five or more years before Team Chaotix could realistically show up. There was a flimsy rumour I struggled to find the actual source for that claimed Paramount had talks about a Chaotix spin-off series à la Knuckles, but I don’t personally believe it was anything to get your hopes up over even if it was real.
But if they did magically come back in a big way, what would that look like? Realistically, I think it’ll be more of the same from their last few appearances but with a little more pizazz. If the Open Zone structure of Frontiers is the way Sonic Team keep the games for the foreseeable future, they could be the inciting incident quest giver characters who find a thing that Sonic has to sort out. They could also work like Big in Frontiers and be a recurring side quest. Still functionally just a cameo, but they’d at least be doing something in character for them to do.
If they were ever playable again in a situation that wasn’t a hypothetical Heroes 2, I forsee Sonic Team cutting out Vector and Charmy and leaving Espio because he’s just got more going on from a fast-paced gameplay perspective. He can use his ninja abilities, throw kunai a little bit like chaos spears in Shadow Generations or even use his tongue like in Sonic the Fighters. Vector and Charmy can still be around, but Espio just has so many options to make him stand out from the other characters that I can’t see the other Chaotix members in a bigger role at the minute.
While that’s where I see them potentially going, where I definitely don’t see them is this: My out-of-this-world, gonzo fever dream idea for a perfect Chaotix comeback would be a Disco Elysium meets Sonic the Hedgehog deductive RPG platformer hybrid spinoff game. I know this site has already done something like this but hear me out here. Vector is now a raging alcoholic and—. No, we’re not doing that, but Sonic’s full of weird, idiosyncratic characters that can all easily have problems that need detectives to solve. This game would have the Chaotix gang go across a number of locations like Sonic Adventure 1 or Unleashed with a big central mystery to solve. However, they’re both overly sentimental and broke. So at each stop, they have to help people and get enough money to continue the main investigation. I see it being split into two halves: an RPG-like exploration segment where you’re talking to people, and other Sonic characters investigating and hanging out with your fellow team members. Then, there’d be more traditional Sonic levels where you go through with one of the three characters, fight robots and get a rank at the end. Across both, you’d get segments that take advantage of all three members’ abilities but generally, the experience would be a bit slower-paced to fit the characters better.
That, in a strange sort of way, brings me back to the point. I think the need for Team Chaotix to be slower-paced to get the most out of their dynamic as characters leads to what I would say is the biggest barrier to their return in a meaningful capacity. The more I think about it, the more I realise that conceptually, they might just not be compatible with the Sonic series’ identity. In games about going fast, making split-second decisions and the sense of freedom that comes from that, having a group of meticulous, if aloof detectives seems to go against everything I’ve just said. You can see that even in Sonic Heroes where their fetch quest-y level design just doesn’t work. There has to be a reason that they’re still around and have somehow managed to persist for 30 years. Despite coming from a total flop, being the least favourite part in their big reboot and not doing a whole lot since then, they’ve never been forgotten. So maybe, just maybe, if we hold out for long enough, someone will actually figure out what to do with them.
