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?
What is the in-setting explanation for player characters in Sonic games having rings while enemies have health bars...
Jordan Garcia
Carter Rivera
Stop asking stupid shit.
Angel Martinez
autism and deepest lore
Connor Kelly
...
Carter Ross
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
Xavier Martinez
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?
Noah Nelson
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.
Noah Howard
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
Wyatt Campbell
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.
Xavier Ross
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.