When does Sonic CD end?

[P.P.A.]

Something that's been bothering me. Sonic CD's last stage is set in the future (canonically the Good one, as the Bad End causes Little Planet to reappear forcing Sonic to do everything again) and immediately after the boss fight, you flee the planet with Amy and watch it disappear again.
Sonic first encounters Amy in the present (of Palmtree Panic), then she gets kidnapped in Collision Chaos present, is saved in the future of Stardust Speedway and reappears after the final boss where Sonic runs off with her. There isn't any hint that between the last stage and ending they travel backwards in time, so does that mean Sonic CD ends in the future?
If yes, how far into the future? Looking at the changes that some of the rounds have gone through between present and the futures, it might have been be about 20-50 or even 100 years?

[G.Silver]

There's a bigger problem already and that's that the final act of every zone is in the future anyway, and then you end up back in the present (heck, the same for every level). Probably the easiest explanation is that time travel on the Little Planet doesn't effect your chronological position on the main world (so it doesn't matter when it ended), but another way to look at it is that your time travel is temporary and somewhere between each act time simply "catches up." I believe the game manual explains it all away by saying that time "flows strangely" there or some other catch-all to ensure that we don't spend much time thinking about it.

[Crazy Penguin]

The ending is set in the present day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu4JKfGOQyo

At the very beginning you can see the golden Eggman structure from Stardust Speedway in the background. Although this doesn't explain why the Little Planet is metal coated as Sonic and Amy jump down to earth but back to normal again a few seconds later.

[P.P.A.]

The statue was incomplete in the Present however, and only that complete in Bad Future.

Although this doesn't explain why the Little Planet is metal coated as Sonic and Amy jump down to earth but back to normal again a few seconds later.

And in the intro, Little Planet is covered in metal as well but Palmtree Panic and a lot of the other areas are obviously free of it. Argh, so confusing.

[Crazy Penguin]

The statue was incomplete in the Present however, and only that complete in Bad Future.

Eh, there's no major inconsistency. It's a good distance away anyway. We get a better look at it in the Stardust Speedway recap, which oddly enough appears to depict the Sonic vs Metal Sonic race as happening in the Present rather than the Good Future or Bad Future.

And in the intro, Little Planet is covered in metal as well but Palmtree Panic and a lot of the other areas are obviously free of it. Argh, so confusing.

For some reason I assumed that the metal covered Little Planet indicated the Bad Future.

[DackAttac]

Little Planet is obviously a planet with no international date line. As you run further around it, you keep crossing time zones without getting the date reset. This is why Sonic can go back through time simply by running fast. He's doing laps. The actual time you see depends on the angle the light reflects off of the planet, and which layer of the ever-folding möbius strip of a planet is the one you see. And it takes a little while for the effects of the past to become v—

...v—

...Well, this is embarrassing, I've run clean out of bullshit.

[Crazy Penguin]

I really loved the British Sonic the Comic adaptation of Sonic CD at the time, and still look back on it fondly today. I didn't get to actually play the game until several years later and I was very surprised that Sonic could time travel without the aid of a Time Stone. The whole Special Stage/Time Stones system felt more than a little bit off in this game.

[Dasher]

I've got the answer for this thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnqtXOi1iaY

[FlashTHD]

Since this Sonic CD thread is just innocently available, check it out: Sega-16's interview with Spencer Nilsen. Plenty of old Sega CD work stories, but here's the good bit:

Sega-16: The opening and closing movies from Sonic CD, featuring "Sonic Boom," were included in the museum in Sonic Jam for the Sega Saturn, and "Sonic Boom" was most recently revived as a remixed unlockable for Sonic in Super smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii. The song is widely regarded as the character's theme song. Did you ever think it would come to be so much a part of him?

Spencer Nilsen: No, to be honest I didn't even know about these other uses of the song (I'm still waiting for my royalty check! LoL!)

That's interesting... </jack sparrow>

So he wasn't really aware how much his work on Sonic CD's been used. Then, if Sega's not jerking people around with their "legal issues" excuse for not using the jap soundtrack outside Japan, this rules him out as having anything to do with it. (Excluding any unforseen legal/contractural snafus that've been festering since 1993.) I guess, this leaves Casey Rankin (the songwriter) and/or Keiko Utoku (the lead singer) from the jap vocal tracks as the prime suspects. It all feeds right back to japan, and for legal roadblocks to exist, somebody's gotta be demanding a payout...right? Am I missing anything critical?

* Damnit, Gibbon. First place I knew to check for the names of those two was Sonic CD's Behind the Screens section, where I now find the paragraph mentioning the vocal tracks had been scrubbed.

[Shadow Hog]

Sega-16: The opening and closing movies from Sonic CD, featuring "Sonic Boom," were included in the museum in Sonic Jam for the Sega Saturn

Um. It's clearly "You Can Do Anything" and "Cosmic Eternity". Somebody didn't do the research.

The song is widely regarded as the character's theme song.

Who the hell is this guy, so that I might find him and brutally murder him?

[Ritz]

Personally? I thought Sonic Boom was leagues better than Toot Toot Sonic Warrior. Aside from Tidal Tempest Present, it's virtually the only US track I prefer over the Japanese version.

[Shadow Hog]

It's not that that bothers me, it's the sheer amount of misinformation this guy is spewing within that small clip alone. Who is he to say it's "widely regarded as Sonic's theme song"? Christ, I don't associate ANY song with the character himself (except maybe "It Doesn't Matter", given that this is when all the characters got their own unique songs... something that doesn't happen anymore, for better or worse).

[FlashTHD]

It's not that that bothers me, it's the sheer amount of misinformation this guy is spewing within that small clip alone. Who is he to say it's "widely regarded as Sonic's theme song"? Christ, I don't associate ANY song with the character himself (except maybe "It Doesn't Matter", given that this is when all the characters got their own unique songs... something that doesn't happen anymore, for better or worse).

Chill pills. Down a few. He mixed some finer points up but it didn't seem to affect Nilsen's comments.

[Dr. Watson]

this is when all the characters got their own unique songs... something that doesn't happen anymore

I kinda hope that "My dear friend" from Unleashed is suposed to be purely from Chip's point of view. Atleast that would mean that Sonic doesn't necaseraly consider himself and Chip to be "special" friends.

[Wombatwarlord777]

Shadow Hog wrote...
Christ, I don't associate ANY song with the character himself (except maybe "It Doesn't Matter", given that this is when all the characters got their own unique songs...

I've never really associated any song to be THE Sonic theme either, although whenever I think of Sonic and music, the opening tune from Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 comes to mind. I think it would be really neat if Sonic Team were to make a jazzier and more-upbeat remix of that little song, even if it's only incorporated into some trivial minigame / stage music. But (arguably) even more iconic than that is the Drowning alert music. It's probably the oldest and most-reoccuring tune in the entire series.

I've always wonder what Little Planet and the region of Never Lake look like in relationship to their respective time frames. This is highly speculative, but both appear to be in the present in CD's opening intro (because Eggman had taken over Little Planet in the past, and had appearently heavily terraformed the surface since then, resulting in it's metallic appearence). But as you travel through time on Little Planet, does time progress / revert correspondingly elsewhere? I'm personally more in favor of G. Silver's first theory, that time progresses as normal outside of Little Planet. Most likely, Sonic CD ended in Little Planet's future and Never Lake's present, especially since there's no evidence of erosion or weathering of Never Lake's surroundings in the ending movies.

Man, I think I just thought way too hard about that...

Anyway, since Little Planet could be from an alternative dimension or whatever, it could bring along its own space-time continuum, with more mallability or different rules regarding the flow of time. This theory wouldn't violate the manual's general explanation of the whole scenario.

...I'm still confused. Thank god I never played Sonic '06.