YMMV / Knuckles' Chaotix

• Anti-Climax Boss: The World Entrance Level 2 boss. He may be big and intimidating, but he is just way too easy for a final boss—the only danger in this boss is getting smacked during the second phase, which is still not much of a problem, and otherwise he just floats around and launches attacks that are ridiculously easy to dodge, while you pummel him to pieces by either spin attacking him or throwing your buddy at him.
• Awesome Art: The game really took advantage of sprite scaling and 3D effects of the 32X, resulting in a Genesis style Sonic game with substantially souped up art. The special stages and one of the bosses are even done using real-time 3D!
• Awesome Music: It's not exactly a Sonic game, per se, but it delivers on the trend with flying colors.
• Broken Base:
  • The game's art, or more specifically, the color palette. Some believe the game's absolutely gargantuan number of colors are beautiful, while others think it is garish and ugly. The other 32X enhancements, like the better sprite quality and extra animation frames, are much less controversial.
  • The ring-tether mechanic; some people think it's an interesting gimmick while others find it incredibly frustrating.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Metal Sonic Kai's final boss form is probably one of the most famous aspects of the game, to the point that the form, slightly tweaked, made a return appearance in Sonic Mania Plus.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Wechidna" or “Wechnia”, for the Dummied Out character called "*********" by the game, because he appears as a glitched, white Knuckles. Research on the game's prototypes eventually revealed he actually was Tails.
  • "Metal Sonic Kai" or "Mega Metal Sonic" for the game's final boss. The former ended up becoming an Ascended Fan Nickname; "Metal Sonic Kai" was originally the name of the ordinary Metal Sonic in this game according to the Japanese manual, whose body has been reconstructed since his last encounter with Sonic, but the Sonic the Hedgehog Encyclo-speed-ia uses it exclusively to refer to the final boss form.
• Game-Breaker:
  • You can forgo jumping or even rolling into enemies and just run on them while holding your partner as a sort-of human shield. It's kind of a predecessor to boost gameplay, actually.
  • Playing as Charmy turns the game into a complete joke — he can fly anywhere and has no cooldown period for his dash, which makes exploration and rushing through the levels very easy.
• Goddamned Boss: The robotic Robotnik miniboss at Amazing Arena is the only boss in the whole game that requires you to shoot your partner at a target, which here is moving erratically along the top of the screen. How much HP it has depends on the current time of day in the zone and you're rewarded on how quickly you defeat it. Some players have enough trouble fighting this thing that they tend to avoid the paths that lead to it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The reason Mighty was used as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute of Sonic was because Sonic Team didn't want their mascot playing second fiddle to Knuckles. Come 2005, where Sonic would be a secondary character to Breakout Character Shadow the Hedgehog.
  • The Chaotix's next appearance (not counting Espio being playable in Sonic the Fighters) would be Sonic Heroes, a game that also features tubular Special Stages and a monstrous version of Metal Sonic as the final boss.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A big complaint about the game is its lack of any real challenge (bits of Fake Difficulty and Special Stages aside). Dying just sends you back to the level select, because there's no extra lives. And even that's unlikely, since you have a partner that basically acts as a hit point to go along with the ring and shield power-ups, and the level designs are so devoid of enemies and obstacles that you can just breeze through them with reckless abandon. The boss fights, including the final one, are a complete joke, too.
• Nightmare Fuel: The final boss is intimidating, with his blood-red paint job and vicious-looking fangs. Especially in the bad ending, where we get to see him hovering over a burning city.
• Obvious Beta:
  • The game was rushed for release so the 32X could have a Sonic game at launch, and it shows. The teamwork mechanic is wonky and unrefined, with the A.I. being extremely stupid, failing to make jumps and running into enemies constantly. The level design is very repetitive, drawn out and sometimes sparse when it comes to setpieces and enemies. There are also numerous collision bugs that can be unwittingly triggered by the aforementioned team mechanic.
  • To put this perspective, the earliest known evidence of Chaotix existing in any form is Sonic Crackers (which is barely anything as the "game" is seen as an engine sample used to pitch a game to Sega and nothing more — it is extremely unpolished) and is dated April 1, 1994 (and Crackers is a Sega Genesis ROM, not 32X software, meaning it wasn't even being pitched for the 32X). Chaotix reached its initial retail release in North America (meaning gold mastered, burnt to ROM chips, carts constructed, packed and shipped to stores) in March of 1995. That is less than a year from being a Sonic-themed prototype that barely works to a game that could be bought on store shelves with a completely different set of characters.
• Padding: The game has many levels that rely on Copy-and-Paste Environments that were clearly thrown in to stretch out the game's length to five acts per level (Techno Tower in particular is really bad about this). The level gimmick in Amazing Arena where you have to replay an act all over again if you didn't turn on the lights before reaching the goal is especially egregious.
• Praising Shows You Don't Watch: For a long time, the game enjoyed a degree of popular mystique in the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, owing to its status as a spinoff staring Knuckles, being the introduction to multiple popular characters (and for many years was one of the few game appearances of Ensemble Dark Horse Mighty the Armadillo), its excellent sprite-work, top-notch soundtrack, and the fact that few were able to play it, owing to the 32X's low sales and being notoriously difficult to emulate (so much so that the game has never been re-released in an official capacity). Unfortunately, its reputation took a turn for the worse once technology improved enough for more fans to play it, since it suffered from issues such as the central ring-tether mechanic being gimmicky and frustrating, the labyrinthine level design, and the poor structure and pacing that made the game a slog to play through.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The tether mechanic makes many platforming sections a pain in the balls. Should you land on that ledge and your partner didn't? Too bad, he'll pull you down and you have to try again.
  • The game uses a slingshot mechanic as a substitute for the Spin Dash, which is very underpowered here. You hold the B button to keep your partner in place, run to the opposite side you want to go to stretch the cord, release the Control Pad, and then release B. It is a needlessly complex mechanic to introduce when we've already had a simple Down+Jump boost move for several games, to the point the target audience, children, can have trouble performing the motions.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The game is significantly easier than the previous Genesis Sonic titles for a variety of reasons, such as the relatively straightforward and sparse level design and lack of enemies, the very easy boss fights, the return of the save feature from Sonic 3, the player being able to stack up to three hit points and even get a shot at getting all of their rings back by grabbing only one if they're hit (provided they get the Combi Ring power-up first), the presence of the incredibly broken Charmy Bee as a default playable character, and the fact that dying is merely a short term inconvienience due to the lack of extra lives or game over screen.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus of the game is that, while cosmetically lush and having potential in its array of characters and gimmicks, it is let down by bland level design and clunky physics.
• That One Level:
  • Amazing Arena isn't particularly hard on its own, but it has an irritating gimmick that forces the player to search through the level to turn the lights on — and if you don't activate it, the clear goal will say you didn't complete the level, and you have to play it all over again. There's also a miniboss that can be a pain if you can't accurately throw your partner up at him.
  • The last two Special Stages are very irritating, since they introduce some very sloppy level design and nasty Fake Difficulty (such as introducing a very high ledge in the fifth one that you have to do a perfectly timed jump to cross). And it's very hard to grab all the blue spheres without looping around in them, so if you didn't bring enough rings to extend your time, you're in for a world of pain.
  • The extra Special Stages are a completely different story when it comes to difficulty when compared to the rest of the game and even the previously mentioned Special Stages. Besides also featuring the nasty Fake Difficulty and harsh time limit from the latter Special Stages, the extra ones add some insane Interface Screw, where everything is rendered as wireframes and therefore much harder to navigate and play.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The In-Universe Game Clock does have effects on enemies and the level design, but they're all small, subtle things like doors changing position or some of the bosses moving differently.

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