What is the in-setting explanation for player characters in Sonic games having rings while enemies have health bars...

What is the in-setting explanation for player characters in Sonic games having rings while enemies have health bars, even when those enemies are playable in other parts of the game, even when it's the exact same fight from different points of view like the Sonic/Shadow/Silver boss fights in 06?

Stop asking stupid shit.

autism and deepest lore

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It would be really fucking annoying to be fighting a guy but not be able to kill him because he keeps getting his health back. Next time you fight Knuckles in S3&K just imagine you're knocking rings out of him you can't see, because in Sonic the Fighters the characters have health bars but lose rings when attacked

I asked for the IN-SETTING explanation. I understand why the game was designed that way for the benefit of the player.
What do the characters within the setting think is happening, when in some fights they can take hit after hit after hit without any rings, and in other fights they can't?
Why doesn't Eggman build robots with some kind of ring magnet so they automatically catch the same ring every time they're hit?
Are the characters aware that sometimes a player takes control of them and that changes the physical properties of their bodies?

Gameplay/story segregation. For the most part, Rings are just the chosen manner of "health" for the player, taking the idea of Coins from mario, but making them worth more than a 1up upon collecting 100. When facing a boss or foe, it's easier to list them with HP.

In SA1 and 2, with Gamma and the mechs, they made the Rings a health object but not a be-all for HP as the mechs had health bars when playing as them.

Eggman's machines don't have the same kind of ring health system as the non-robot characters. This can also be seen in Sonic the Fighters, where Metal Sonic and Eggman's mech do not drop rings when hit.
Since Sonic the Fighters shows this ring and health bar combination for both CPU and player characters I imagine the other rival fights in the Sonic series are like that but the rings just aren't shown

Its allegoric for Nazi gold.
Sonic is the ultimate lifeforms who gets blond hair when he gets the chaos emeralds or the master (race) emerald. Additionally the master emerald is guarded by a South American, South America being the place that many Nazi's fled to.

If I recall correctly, in the comics and anime, rings are treated as minor artifacts which grant power, similar to but much weaker than that of the Chaos Emeralds. In the (non-canon) Archie comics, they're a natural byproduct of the emeralds, and could also be created artificially. In theory, the emeralds amplify the power of the rings, hence the much improved durability when going super. A health gauge would be the simplest way to display the durability of robots, and it makes sense that a furry being hit by a robot is nearly guaranteed death, so it also makes sense that it only matters whether or not the furry has rings at all, not how many he has.

There doesn't seem to be an explanation for why there are still health bars for other characters you can play as. It just seems to be an abstraction of how many hits it took for them to go down. The obvious technical answer is that it's just a gameplay mechanic. None of the games prior to SA had health bars because they didn't need them, and it was just understood that some things were tougher than others. I don't like that Sonic is moving more and more to the Mario style "do a thing 3 times" model of bosses.

What about the Adventure series? Gamma and Eggman's mech in SA2 take rings.

There is none. Its just game mechanics. Calm your tism.

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Now I wanna play a spinoff where you play as Metal Sonic and you have a health bar that you can restore with rings as opposed to rings being glorified invincibility.

Eggman's and Tails' mechs in SA2 use collected rings to repair themselves after taking damage which isn't the same kind of system.
I'm unsure about Gamma or Omega. I could make some theory about how Gamma and Omega were made to use ring protection and Eggman never did it again because Gamma and Omega both betrayed him, but we all know it's just a gameplay thing so whatever

Shadow the hedgehog had a similar mechanic, but I agree ,Metal Sonic needs a game where he mainlines as a playable properly.

Not sure if Tricks (generations) or anything would contribute to the cooldown, I just know that hitting foes and collecting rings should be either a null or minimal contribution to keeping the meter down.

What the fuck am I watching?

it's a jap game

I think they are actually magic rings. So magic, magic is the answer.

a weird show called Onegai, My Melody. Basically, people make wishes, but they go wrong ("I wanna be the fasted trackrunner", but then he can't stop running), and then the good guys use a sticker to possess a random object to "fight" the person's bad wish

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I was going to make a new thread for this, but there's already a sonic thread, and sonic is never good.

when did this become a thing???

Last year sometime 2 years ago maybe?

August 10, 2015 according to jewgle

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I also watch matthewmatosis

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Nothing wrong with being autistic, being a sonic fan on the other hand…

Wew what’s with the cuckchan like thread?

The infinite runner for mobiles would actually really fit this concept. Just think if it had unique levels where cool shit would happen. Then that blasted hedgehog whoops your ass

Pick some, or all of the above

wtf, why would they do that?

Anything else besides what (((we))) know?

Because all good things come to an (((end))) eventually, dubsman.
I think 8ch is listed on google again too

! !?
!? ! _
Guess the end times was sooner than I thought. Exodus when.

Rings are portals to the Chaos Emeralds, thus why they let you warp to one in the Special Stage (assuming there are any in the Special Stage at the time). Some rings have more portal energy or whatever than others. Giant Rings in Sonic 3 & Knuckles have enough energy to warp you directly to the Special Stage, while the Giant Rings in Sonic 1 require the additional energy of at least 50 regular rings to be able to do it (note that the power of the Chaos Emeralds themselves was weaker in Sonic 1 due to there being only six of them on the island. The Master Emerald may also have been augmenting things in 3&K). Signposts from Sonic 2, 3, and K, seemingly created by Robotnik, seem to try to replicate this power, with varying degrees of success. Note that the rings' direct connection to the emeralds is made rather explicit in games such as Knuckles Chaotix and Sonic 3D Blast.

So in short, by collecting rings, even regular ones, Sonic and his friends are tapping into the power of the Chaos Emeralds, albeit only a tiny fraction. Thus they can take on a tiny bit of the invulnerability of Super Sonic, but only enough for one hit.

Health bars are evidently because Shadow or whoever you're fighting just doesn't happen to have any rings at the time. Many times in these boss fights they also use attacks that use up Chaos Energy and thus ring power. Attacks that you can't use in single player. So even if they collect rings, they're using that power up in their attacks rather than their defense.

The issue then becomes why you don't have an additional health bar if you get hit without rings. Well that's just because it's a fucking video game.


If rings are conduits of Chaos, it's a neat idea that they can cause Eggman's robots to break free of their programming, or rather, allow the animals inside of the robots to override the programming. The idea that Eggman represents Order and the good guys, particularly the amoral speed freak Sonic, represent Chaos, seems quite obvious, even if the games never got very explicit with it. People always saw it as nature vs machinery, but I think it's more that nature represents Chaos and machinery represents Order. Life, uh, finds a way. When Eggman introduces rings, with Chaos energy, to his robots which are actually means to control animals, that introduces enough chaos to defeat his Order.