Chaos Emeralds

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The Chaos Emeralds, as depicted in Sonic Advance from a side view.

The Chaos Emeralds (カオス エメラルド, Kaosu Emerarudo^?) are seven fictional gemstones from the Sonic the Hedgehog video games. The Chaos Emeralds have mystical properties and abilities, and the holder of them all can use them for a variety of purposes, including transforming into a powerful "super form". Each emerald is an everlasting source of energy and is capable of floating in the air on its own power. The emeralds are commonly and traditionally collected within a Special Zone. While they were more like "bonus" items in the early games of the series, the Chaos Emeralds became necessary plot devices in Sonic Adventure, and that trend has continued throughout the later 3D games.

Background

According to Sonic Adventure, the ancient saying associated with the Chaos Emeralds and the larger Master Emerald is "The servers are the seven Chaos. Chaos is power. Power is enriched by the heart. The controller is the one that unifies the Chaos."^[1] The meaning of this saying is further clarified in Sonic Adventure 2 by the Master Emerald's power to neutralize the Chaos Emeralds^[2], and in Sonic the Hedgehog where their ability is described as being able to "transform thoughts into power."^[3] Although Sonic Channel reveals that the Emeralds were given the name "Chaos Emeralds" after Tikal sealed Chaos in the Master Emerald^[4], the back story of the Emeralds is shrouded in mystery and wonder, and they are known to have existed for thousands of years. The games and comics have revealed that both the Echidna^[1] civilizations that existed thousands of years prior to the games knew about the Chaos Emeralds, along with the Black Arms^[5], who visited Earth 2,000 years prior to the games. The civilization that created Emerl over 4,000 years prior to the games is also known to have been experimenting with the Chaos Emeralds^[6]. The Chaos Emeralds in themselves are usually used to power machines, for weapons of mass destruction^[7], Chaos powers, and activating Super Transformation^[8]. The energy can also be given from one super form to another character to allow that person to achieve a super form of his own, as seen at the end of Sonic Heroes^[9] and Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)^[3]. And some cutscenes and gameplay times have shown that accessing their powers is possible without being in direct possession of an Emerald, the user is merely required to be close to one or more of them.^[10]. The 7 Emeralds and the Super Sonic transformation were widely viewed as a homage to Dragon Ball Z and the Super Saiyan transformations within. When asked if comments about this were received from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, former Sega executive producer Yuji Naka smiled and said no.^[11]

Role in the games

Throughout most of the early games, Doctor Eggman tries to obtain the Chaos Emeralds in order to fuel his doomsday weapons. The player can choose to collect the Emeralds in their Special Stages in order to unlock a "good ending", a super form, or both. ^[7], and that number has been consistent ever since, with two exceptions. An eighth, golden Emerald can be found in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 by entering a code at the Sound Test and can not be seen normally. Sonic the Fighters features eight Emeralds as part of the story; in order to travel to the Death Egg II, the player must collect all the Chaos Emeralds by defeating the eight characters that hold them. The widely accepted reason for this is because there are eight fighters, and so Sega-AM2 added another Chaos Emerald.

Colors

The Chaos Emeralds as they appeared in Sonic R - yellow, purple, red, grey, cyan, orange, and green.

The colors of the Chaos Emeralds are nowadays red, blue, yellow, green, gray, cyan, and magenta. These are also the seven components of the RGB color model. This has not always been the case. In the original Sonic the Hedgehog, the six Emeralds were blue, yellow, red, green, magenta and gray. A seventh, cyan Emerald then appeared in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. In Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the yellow Emerald was colored orange. The orange Emerald was colored yellow again in Sonic Adventure, and the colors of the Emeralds have remained constant ever since. The grey Emerald sometimes appears white, and Sonic R had both a yellow and an orange Emerald instead of a cyan one (the blue Chaos Emerald on the screen after the race shows it as cyan). Certain games have used their own unique colors for the emeralds - in Sonic Spinball, they are all blue, while in Sonic Battle, they are all green (though Tails mentions the fact they come in several colors). In the Sonic the Hedgehog comic series by Archie Comics, the emeralds were spread across seven locations in the galaxy and there were hundreds of them. Each location had its own unique emerald color, with the total number of colors being seven. A later plot development led to all Emeralds of a certain color being fused together as one, resulting in the seven emeralds of the games. A black emerald served as a prison for Chaos 0 (see Sonic the Hedgehog #80), but it is not specifically stated to be a chaos emerald. In the Sonic the Comic series, the emeralds are blue, yellow, red, green, orange, grey and purple.

Gem cut

Through out the game series the Chaos Emeralds have taken different forms. Sonic the Hedgehog showed the Emeralds to be octagon. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 showed the Emeralds to be hexagon, but they were again octagon in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. The Super Emeralds and Master Emerald in the same game appear as brilliant cut, and the Chaos Emeralds have also appeared as such in most games since. In Sonic X's Sonic Adventure adaption, the Chaos Emeralds seen in the ancient Echidna past were point cut until Tikal's father enraged Chaos, and the Emeralds are suddenly shown as brilliant cut.

Power source

As revealed in Sonic Adventure, Chaos Emeralds have both positive energy and negative energy. The negative energy is accessed by negative feelings while the positive energy is harnessed/activated by friendship, as revealed when Tails says, "Negative forces aren't the only way to empower the Chaos Emeralds. Our positive feelings toward each other can make them work!"^[1]. Although the Emeralds are described as having unlimited energy^[1], which is why they are often sought after by other characters, having all seven allows the energy to be tapped into more efficiently. As seen in Sonic Adventure 2, after the ARK's Eclipse Cannon was fired with six emeralds, it was described as taking far too long to charge back up without the seventh^[2].

Guardians

The Chaos Emeralds were originally guarded by Chaos, a mutated chao that protected both the Emerald Shrine and the other Chao that lived there^[4]. Tikal found Chaos and the Chao in her ancient Echidna family. She loved them and cared for them, but her father found out about them and wanted the power of the Emeralds for himself. He attacked the Emerald Shrine and tried to steal the gems, but Chaos absorbed the power of the Emeralds, became Perfect Chaos, and destroyed the majority of the Echidna tribe. Tikal appealed to the Master Emerald to seal Chaos away inside it, sealing her own consciousness in the process. The Chao lived on and bred, however.^[1] This is the point at which the Echidnas took over in protecting the Emeralds. Knuckles is the Echidna that protects them in the time of the current Sonic the Hedgehog timeline, and also the only Echidna left according to the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 manual (in the Sonic Team storyline, other continuities like the American Sonic comics have more echidnas in existence). In the Archie Comics storyline, Knuckles is merely the latest in a long line of Master Emerald protectors, known as the Brotherhood of Guardians.

Chaos Emeralds in other media

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Sonic the Comic

In the United Kingdom's Sonic the Comic, the history of the Emeralds is expanded considerably, though some points contradict the storyline of the games. These events were not related chronologically, but this document shall list them as such. The story of the Chaos Emeralds begins in Mobius's distant past, during the war between the Echidna race and the Drakon Empire. Seeking vessels for their unstable, newly developed Chaos Energy, the Drakons raided the Echidnas' sacred emerald mines, and infused seven emeralds with Chaos Energy. The Echidnas were able to steal the seven emeralds back and capture a Drakon prosecutor, but exposure to the emeralds mutated the captive into a monstrous creature known as Chaos. Draining away some of the Emeralds' power, the Echidna elder Pachacamac was able to weaken Chaos, who was defeated and sealed away by the Echidnas. Events which followed remain lost to history - Knuckles, appointed guardian of the so-dubbed "Chaos Emeralds", was apparently sealed into some form of suspended animation for unknown reasons and the Echidna race mysteriously vanished. At an unspecified point, six of the Emeralds were divided into twelve; Drained of the majority of their power, the two sets of emeralds shrunk to the size of a fist and one set, drained even to the point that they had lost their individual colors, came to be scattered across Mobius. The other set remained in a temple on the legendary Floating Island, where Knuckles dwelled in stasis. When the kindly scientist Doctor Ovi Kintobor began his plan to rid Mobius of all negative energy, he sought out a vessel that could contain such power. He located the six Mobian emeralds, which were highly suited to containing such energy, and planned to transfer into them the negative energy he had collected using his Retro-Orbital Chaos Compressor (ROCC), a machine comprised of golden rings. Requiring the legendary Grey Emerald - the "control Emerald" - to stabilize the transfer, Kintobor and his friend, Sonic the Hedgehog, searched for one to no avail. Eventually, Kintobor believed that he had developed a way to transfer the energy without the seventh emerald using the ROCC - but just before he was about to do so, he became distracted by a rotten egg and tripped on a cable, slamming the ROCC's control panel with his egg-laden hand. The resulting explosion bombarded Kintobor and the egg with chaos energy and a large amount of the concentrated negative energy, transforming him into Doctor Ivo Robotnik, this may also be a partial reason for Sonic's dark personality and sense of humor as well as his unstable superform personality Super Sonic, as he was present at the time. Robotnik gathered up the six emeralds, and put them in sub-orbital space warps to keep their power out of Sonic's hands, but Sonic was able to reclaim them (as depicted in the first Sonic the Hedgehog video game). When Sonic brought the six gems to his underground base, however, it transpired that when in close proximity to each other, the Emeralds began to destabilize. The gems began generating and radiating chaos energy as part of a chain reaction that culminated in reality warping around them and shunting them into the other-dimensional Special Zone (as well as re-energizing them enough that they regained their original colours). Sonic was caught in the blast of chaos energy released by this event and was transformed into the berserker Super Sonic for the first time. After reclaiming the Emerald's from the Special Zone, Sonic hid them in the Frozen Zone where the sub-zero temperatures rendered them inactive and prevented the spatial warp. They were briefly stolen by Captain Plunder and his Sky Pirates, but before they could heat up they absorbed the pirates' negative energy and turned them into easily-beaten hippies. In order to keep a closer eye on the gems, Sonic kept them in a refrigerated box at his Emerald Hill Zone headquarters. Robotnik, meanwhile, had encountered the awakened Knuckles and brought the echidna into his service by claiming that Sonic had stolen the emeralds. Allowing himself to be captured by Sonic's Freedom Fighters, Robotnik was able to lead Knuckles straight to their headquarters and steal the Emeralds. Knuckles reintegrated the two sets of six into one, with the help of one of Robotnik's devices that took the place of the Grey Emerald. The device also allowed him to control the Chaos Energy, but Knuckles revealed that he'd secretly had the Grey Emerald all along and he used it to stop Robotnik. The seven Emeralds were returned to the Hidden Palace Zone on the Floating Island, where they steadily regenerated into their original size. The green Emerald was restored to its status as the Master Emerald, which Robotnik then stole to use as the power core for his new Death Egg; Sonic managed to get it back. The emeralds were able to subsequently remain safe on the Floating Island and allowed Knuckles to generate a protective forcefield around it, although they were still the cause of some trouble when Sonic was accidentally exposed to them and transformed into an even more deranged, demonic version of Super Sonic. When the Drakon Empire made contact with Mobius once more, Emperor Ko-Dorr, head of the House of War, secretly entered into a partnership with Robotnik in order to reclaim the Chaos Emeralds and use it to fuel a coup against the other Houses. As part of a double-cross, Robotnik had his assistant, Grimer, apparently defect to the Drakons and inform them of the Emeralds' whereabouts; the Drakon's disabled all of the Floating Island's defenses and defenders, allowing Robotnik (after Grimer had the Drakon's suddenly teleported away) to teleport in and finally seize control of all the power of the Emeralds. At first, the power seemed too much for his body to contain and he was transformed into a crystalline statue, but this soon proved to be merely a chrysalis stage as his form adapted to the energies it now contained. With the power of the reality-warping chaos energy in his control, Robotnik altered history and subjected Sonic to a series of challenges, until the hero baited him into restoring Knuckles to help him. With the echidna's aid, Robotnik was defeated and the chaos energy drained from his body - but it appeared that he could now no longer exist substantially without it, as its removal caused him to shrink into a sub-atomic state. The emeralds were consequently left largely unmolested, aside from a brief abortive attempt by a gang of thieves working with the Doctor Robotnik Appreciation Tribe to steal them; unlike most villains, they knew the Emerald's were too dangerous to mess around with and just wanted to sell them. Robotnik himself, restored to normal, subsequently suffered a string of defeats which plunged him into a suicidal depression. Desperate to break his master out of this dark state, Grimer unleashed the Chaos creature (which had formerly been discovered by Robotnik). Raging out of Grimer's control, Chaos headed for the Floating Island, intended to absorb the Chaos Emeralds into itself, but before it could get further than the blue emerald Knuckles jettisoned the remaining Emeralds to the four corners of Mobius. Without the emeralds' power, the Floating Island crashed to Mobius and sank into the ocean. Doctor Robotnik gathered the emeralds to draw Chaos and the Freedom Fighters to his fortress, that they might all die together along with Mobius; Sonic returned to the present just in time to witness Chaos absorbing the remaining emeralds and becoming the monstrous "Perfect Chaos". Following the creature's defeat, the Emerald's were once again in the Freedom Fighter's hands. The floating island was never rediscovered and several other ideas were left unfinished as the comic itself went into reprints and eventually was canceled. Additionally, at one point, a black emerald was shown to be used by a group of shadow creatures in another dimension as a means of gaining access to Mobius. Its relationship to the Chaos Emeralds, if any, went unexplained.

Sonic the Hedgehog (comic series)

In the Sonic the Hedgehog comic series, Chaos Emeralds are much more numerous than they are in other continuities; in reality, there are far more than just seven. They are also connected to the "Power Rings", which are produced by harnessing the energy of the Emeralds. This continuity explains a more scientific origin than a conventional mystical one found in other sonic continuities. It was revealed in a recent storyline that the Emeralds may have been the product of the Xorda (the aliens that transformed Earth into Mobius) gene bombs. Specifically they were formed by the absorption of the Xorda gene bombs' massive energy release into underground beryl deposits. However, this information was revealed by a robot with a heavily corrupted memory, and may not be the truth. In addition, there is the existence of rare 'Super Emeralds'. These are simply Chao that had absorbed much of Perfect Chaos's energy and transfomed into a cystalline state. What's more, there's another level of existence known as "the Chaos Force", which is tied to the Chaos Emeralds and has been tapped into by the "Guardians of the Floating Island", Knuckles' ancestors - one theory is that the Xorda gene bombs allowed the energies of the Chaos Force to spill out into this plane and take the form of Chaos Emeralds or more canonically, the Chaos Force was only recently discovered and its existence made aware to the inhabitants of earth/mobius. There was also a special black emerald that served as the containment vessel for Chaos and Tikal. Mammoth Mogul's own Chaos Emerald was used in a similar manner to temporarily imprison him. While on an alien world, Sonic discovered a batch of red colored Emeralds (officially designated outside of the storyline by the editor as "Chaos Rubies"), which rather than transform him into Super Sonic, created a mad, power-crazed Super Sonic that was independent of Sonic's body (similar to Fleetway's normal Super Sonic). No such explanation has been offered as to the origins of these particular types of Emeralds though the catalyst for their existence can be alluded to a possible previous altercation with the Xorda or perhaps the idea that certain cataclysms of immense energy combined with certain minerals can follow the same suite as Earth/Mobius' Chaos Emeralds. It was revealed by A.D.A.M. that there were many Chaos Emeralds of varying colors scattered across the universe. These include: the Green Emeralds indigenous to Mobius, the Cyan Emeralds of Planet Weeet, the Blue Emeralds from Planet Xorda, the Red Emeralds (responsible for creating evil Super Sonic) from Planet Thoraxia, the Purple Emeralds of Teragosa 6, the Yellow Emeralds that powered the star into which E.V.E. plunged, and the Grey Emeralds of the Bem homeworld of Argentium. In order to gather these gems, A.D.A.M. built a special spire in his city of nanites and captured Shadow and Tails, using their energies to draw the Emeralds to Mobius. While Sonic transforms into Super Sonic as a distraction, Super Shadow and Turbo Tails send all the Chaos Emeralds to the Zone of Silence. There, the Zone's new ruler Feist fused all of them into seven differently colored jewels, similar to the Chaos Emeralds in the games.

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog

The Chaos Emeralds made an appearance in DiC's cartoon series in a four-part story called Quest for The Chaos Emeralds and in the episode Fast and Easy, but they are very different from the game versions. There are only five, and instead of different colors they are all different shapes. They have no guardian, but the Emeralds are hidden in time periods instead of certain places while the one in Fast and Easy was in the form of a ring was stolen by Easy Eddie from Dr. Robotnik. Each Emerald focuses on a different power (Invisibility, Invincibility, Immortality and Power of Life), and collecting all four more or less has the same effect as the game version (transforming into a more powerful form). The Chaos Emerald ring seen in "Fast and Easy", if placed on a altar in the Special Zone, could cause parts of Mobuis to sink into the sea.

Sonic Underground

Another of DiC's Sonic cartoons had Chaos Emeralds in it, but very little is known about them. Like in the games, they are a source of incredible power but the exact number of them in existence in unknown.

Sonic X

In Sonic X, the Chaos Emeralds echoed their role in the games as objects that were sought after by all parties. However, the series also introduced a new concept: Chaos Emeralds reacting to each other. In the anime, whenever Chaos Emeralds were brought together without being given time to adapt to each other's presence, they would release immense quantities of energy. When all seven are present, this results in an automatic gigantic Chaos Control, and the emeralds are scattered.

See also

• Master Emerald
• Super transformation
• Chaos Control
• Special Stage
• Minor power objects in Sonic the Hedgehog

References