Smash Bracket’s episode about Sonic vs Fox has just been released and the outcome was truly unexpected for many people. While there are hundreds of questions that people will have about this episode, I’ve attempted to compile the most common ones into this article. Hopefully reading through my answers will give you more insight into the decisions we made for this fight.

Sonic

Why doesn’t Sonic get hyper?

Hyper Sonic is super cool, but there’s two problems that prevent him from being a factor in our research.

Hyper Sonic has a really controversial position in the canon. It was enough for us to question whether he should be included, but ultimately we decided that it didn’t particularly matter. While looking into whether Hyper Sonic is canon and how the transformation worked, we learned that Hyper Sonic is only able to be used by utilizing the Master Emerald. That is pretty commonly talked about. But what is talked about far less is how freaking hard it is to get the Master Emerald to activate this form. Sonic has to sacrifice the chaos emeralds for a while, then perform what amounts to an extended ritual, and only after that is complete is he given access to Hyper Sonic. There’s also a decent argument to be made that this was a one-time transformation that drained the emeralds/master emerald (or just the gear that empowered the emeralds) too much to be used again. But even if it was available in the future, the process to activate it is far too long and complicated for it to be relevant in a fight.

The bigger issue, though, is that there are simply no feats for this form. Hyper Sonic has a cool design, and there are some interpretations that would let you argue for multipliers to Super Sonic’s feats. However, with Smash Bracket’s rules, none of those hold up. Even outside of our ruleset, there isn’t anything but tenuous conjecture for how strong this form is.

Why doesn’t he scale to Solaris or Egg Wizard?

There is a lot to get into about Solaris and the Egg Wizard, but it ultimately boils down to one central point: in Smash Bracket, a character needs to actually display feats for us to count them. Solaris and Egg Wizard are both huge threats to the universe in-lore, but they’ve demonstrated nothing that we can use to back that up, let alone anything that would be directly comparable to Sonic in order for us to scale him to them. I could probably write a few thousand words about other reasons these threats don’t live up to their implied power levels, but none of those interpretations matter without feats to back them up one way or another.

Why can’t you take his speed statements?

The Sonic franchise is full of statements from a whole host of characters about how fast everyone is moving. It’s very consistent about singing the praises of its protagonist. And Sonic himself is quite open about his proficiency for running fast. Unfortunately, what the series lacks is consistency in its claims. It’s not even a matter of games continually saying that Sonic is faster as the timeline progresses: it’s more like every statement of speed is considered interchangeable. It’s like everyone thinks that every statement from “he is pretty fast” to “he is faster than light” are just about equal. Add onto that unreliable narrators (like Sonic himself, who loves to brag and exaggerate) and it’s a huge mess trying to figure out who to trust.

However, there’s clearly enough precedent and intention for Sonic being fast to consider his actual speed feats with some leniency, which is what we’ve done. I also think the numbers that we’ve given for Sonic’s speed are extremely inline with statements from the games and official sources. People are just so used to seeing Sonic’s speed listed in multiples of lightspeed that it’s jarring to see him put any lower than that. But looking across statements from every game, manual, and feats that he’s demonstrated (both in and out of gameplay) it feels clear to us that Sonic was intended to be fast, but still well within the normal bounds of physics.

Why do you hate Sonic

We love Sonic, believe it or not. But Sonic is one of the characters in Smash who gains a bunch of his power from scaling. He definitely needs that scaling in order to reach his highest level of power, and our “see-it-to-believe-it” philosophy hits him hard.

It might be hard to believe, but there were probably a dozen points in the production of this video where I was convinced Sonic had no chance of victory against Fox. Each time, the research team would end up doing another deep dive into Sonic’s games and feats to make sure we weren’t overlooking anything and to dig up new ways that he could win. We have tried very hard to represent Sonic at a level similar to what he’s portrayed in games, but we aren’t trying to sabotage him or anything. For some people, their love of the character makes them attempt to make that character as strong as possible. For us, we try to get the most accurate representation of that character’s directly displayed strength.

Why doesn’t Sonic scale to my fanfiction?

The research team wrote a Sonic fanfiction that negates his scaling to any other fanfiction. Sorry about that.

Why was Super Sonic not put at planet level?

There’s a lot of arguments for why Super Sonic should be at planet level. Dark Gaia, emeralds moving continents, Sonic beating multi-dimensional threats, etc. But once again, it comes down to the fact that Sonic has never displayed any abilities close to this level of power. When you look at actual, measurable feats that Sonic has performed himself, he’s not even close to this. The enemies he’s fought have never displayed anything close to this level of power during their fights, either, so we can’t scale him to them.

But Dark Gaia literally ripped the Earth apart. Shouldn’t he be hitting at least that hard?

There are a lot of problems with this line of reasoning. I’ll do my best to address each of them without getting bogged down in the minutia.

First, while it was Dark Gaia’s awakening that caused the earth to split apart, he wasn’t physically lifting the continents or anything. In fact, we can see him pulling himself up using the continent that had just been lifted. If he was physically strong enough to move the continents, this one would be pulled downward here.

It is still Gaia’s energy and power that is causing this effect, but we’re given no indication that he can channel this level of power into a single attack. Even when he reaches Perfect Dark Gaia and absorbs all that energy into one place, he isn’t destroying nearby continents with his attacks (and he’s got no reason to hold back on environmental destruction, even if he’s fighting Sonic, since his entire purpose is to try and destroy the world). Everything seems to indicate that Dark Gaia can unleash colossal levels of power across a planetary distance, but that he can’t channel all that power into a focused point.

But even if we were generous and assume that Gaia could put all of this energy into his body, moving the continents is still just a lifting strength feat. It’s certainly an impressive one, but there’s still nothing indicating he can do something similar in combat.

If we assume that Gaia can physically exert all of that force himself and put it into his attacks, it comes out to 835.99 teratons of TNT once we account for surface area. That’s a lot, but it’s still only about 29x more than what Fox can output (and Super Sonic has been shown taking damage from far weaker things when he crashed into the boulders in this same fight). Fox would still be able to hurt him through Super Sonic form, even if it would take a few attacks to totally whittle him down.

And if we’re being generous with Sonic and treating Dark Gaia’s attacks at this level, we’d probably be equally generous with Fox. Which would mean giving him this explosion, which was caused by a smart bomb detonating on the surface of the planet Venom. That comes out to 19.77 petatons of TNT total (though Sonic would only be able to receive 13.44 petatons of TNT from it). Even if we only take 10% of this number, that is far above what Sonic could endure.

And finally, even if Fox couldn’t hurt Super Sonic, he’s still so much faster that Super Sonic would never be able to catch him. Fox could just wait out the duration of Super Sonic and then kill base Sonic later.

The Emeralds each moved a continent. Shouldn’t Sonic scale to that?

The emeralds were used to put the continents back in place, but there are several reasons why it doesn’t make sense to scale Sonic to this level. The most important is that he’s never demonstrated any feats with power on this level. Without those feats, we have no reason to assume that he can use this level of power on his own (and yes, that still holds true despite statements that he’s able to use the “true power of the emeralds” and other similar claims). He’s got to back up these statements for us to count them.

But beyond that, it’s not actually clear how much of this feat came from the emeralds themselves. The story is all about using the emeralds to set the world right, but there are still a lot of ways they could be doing this and still not be exhibiting continent-moving power. First, the emeralds aren’t even expending energy to do this. They are completely drained, and putting them in the temple gives them energy. There’s a decent argument that they are absorbing whatever energy is holding the continents up instead of actually doing anything.

Also, the continents aren’t even forced back into place. They are gently lowered into place, and they remain there even after the emeralds are removed at the end of the game. The emeralds clearly aren’t holding them down in opposition of some force trying to keep them levitated. They might have pushed them back initially, but they aren’t maintaining any amount of force. That would still be impressive, of course, but I believe it makes it more likely that they simply removed whatever was keeping the continents in the air, which is less impressive and less quantifiable.

Finally, the game says that this event has happened over and over in the past. During the Time of Awakening, Dark Gaia splits the earth apart to try and destroy it and Light Gaia restores the Earth and seals Dark Gaia away. This cycle has been repeated since the beginning of the Earth. Light Gaia uses the power of the Earth itself to heal these wounds. He probably has used the Emeralds at least occasionally since the temples already existed. But the energy of Earth has been implied to do most of the heavy lifting in the past.

In the game, though, both Dark Gaia and Light Gaia were weakened due to a premature Awakening. That’s the reason given for why Light Gaia didn’t fix the situation himself right away. However, he still goes traveling with Sonic to each temple and helps in the final battle. He’s still doing his job and fixing the issues caused by Dark Gaia. That makes it extremely likely that some portion of the energy moving the continents back isn’t actually coming from the Emeralds themselves, but rather from the energy of the planet that Light Gaia has used in the past. In my opinion, they seem to act more like a key to trigger this movement than the actual force pushing the continents.

At the very least, shouldn’t Sonic require Planet level AP in order to harm a Planet level being like Dark Gaia?

There’s absolutely no indication that Dark Gaia has durability on par with the power he’s shown splitting apart the world.

Why are you using game mechanics?

Because it’s a video game. We prioritize cutscenes when possible, but gameplay makes up the bulk of video games, so we feel like excluding it would leave us with a worse representation of the character.

When people argue against using gameplay or game mechanics, it’s usually because it would provide some anti-feats to the character. We usually don’t use anti-feats from gameplay, though. Instead, we use it to find new feats or to contextualize abilities that are otherwise ambiguous. For example, Sonic’s speed would be much less impressive if we only used cutscenes. But gameplay gives us a lot of opportunities to find him traveling at higher speeds. Using cutscenes only, Super Sonic would have the emeralds knocked out of him when crashing into obstacles or at least without much effort. But gameplay shows us that he’s actually invulnerable to all but the largest amounts of damage.

There are some things that gameplay introduces that bring a character’s level down, but for the most part it’s extremely helpful to characters.

Another big worry I’ve seen is that using gameplay will give characters a lot of weird outliers for their durability. But we don’t consider a character’s best durability feat to be the threshold that needs to be surpassed in order for them to take damage. When a character has shown variable durability they can be hurt by anything above their minimum durability feat. Their best durability feat then acts as a sort of “health bar” for them. Invincible characters, like Super Sonic, use their max durability as their threshold for damage. We believe this approach allows us to mitigate much of the risk inherent with using game mechanics for feats.

Isn’t everything canon?

Yes, which is why we made a fanfiction story that erases every piece of Sonic media from the timeline except for the ones that we researched. Since our story is canon too, it really simplified things for us.

Didn’t Sonic run fast enough in Secret Rings to cross dimensions?

Here’s what that scene says: “And so, the legendary blue hedgehog, having saved the world of the Arabian Nights, ran endlessly, until he found his way back into his own world. Along the way, he had many adventures… but those are stories… for another time.”

Aside from the atrocious use of punctuation, there are three things that stand out to me in this paragraph. First, it never says or even implies that Sonic literally ran fast enough to leave the dimension. It says that he “found his way back into his own world.” If running was that way back, he wouldn’t need to find it. He would just need to keep at it.

Second, it says that he had many adventures while he was trying to return home. It’s definitely sequel bait that was left unfulfilled, but more importantly, it means that he wasn’t just running the whole time. He was doing other stuff and interacting with other people. This would explain where he could have found another way home and it shows that his travels at least were in places where other people could be found (or, at the very least, events could happen).

Third, it says he ran endlessly. Beyond being immediately contradicted in the next sentence (unless you believe his adventures all happened while he was running at top speed, which I suppose is possible if highly implausible), this is also contradicted by the run having an end at all. He can’t eventually find his way back if he never stopped running in order to find his way back. The obvious answer to this contradiction is “this is obviously just flowery language” which is my point exactly. This passage isn’t meant to be taken literally, and this word proves that point.

Finally, even if I did believe that he was meant to literally be running his way to another dimension, I can’t exactly measure what that means. And not in a “his speed was too fast to measure” kind of way. Just a “that concept doesn’t make sense” kind of way. If it’s meant to mean he got to the edge of the universe and then crossed over, that’s impossible because he’s on a globe. You can’t run off a globe and into space no matter how hard you try. And if you get into space, you can’t run because there’s no ground. If it means that he just ran laps around the planet fast enough that he eventually broke out of the dimension, that’s also not really a thing that could happen. My best guess would be light speed, because breaking that speed does a lot of weird things to reality. But that wouldn’t make a difference in this fight and is far from being conclusive.

Isn’t the light speed dash slower than Sonic’s top speed, meaning he’s FTL in base?

There are some games where the light speed dash is slower than Sonic’s max running speed. So you could argue that Sonic is faster than light in base. But if you go with this assumption, you also have to assume that every enemy he fights is relativistic. And so is gravity. And also every human he sees in those games, and every animal, and vehicle, and sound, and even light itself would be FTL. It’s just not an assumption that holds up to scrutiny.

And if you assume that all of those things are “game mechanics” or things that the developers couldn’t be reasonably expected to portray accurately, you lose your argument for the light speed dash in the first place. If literally every other element in the game operates at significantly different speeds than what is shown, it wouldn’t make sense for Sonic to be the exception. You could either say the light speed dash isn’t lightspeed or you could say that Sonic’s base speed in relation to the dash only seems fast because of game mechanics. But you can’t say Sonic’s base speed and lightspeed dash speed are both consistent, accurately portrayed, and that nothing else in the series is.

Metal Sonic flew from Little Planet to Earth in a few seconds. This is the same Metal Sonic that Sonic CD beat in a race. Shouldn’t Sonic scale to this speed in base?

You race Metal Sonic, but not in a straight line. Unless it has been shown, it’s unreasonable to assume that someone can maintain their top travel speeds while doing tight maneuvers. Also, Metal Sonic flew through space, where he wouldn’t have air resistance slowing him down. He’s likely not traveling anywhere near his top speed in the race and given how Sonic is topping out at around Mach 3 in this game, it’s likely to assume Metal Sonic was flying around that speed. I don’t have a solid reason for why he would hold back that much in a race, but it’s more consistent with what’s shown throughout this and other games (I am pretty sure that the maneuverability decrease from extremely high speed is enough to account for lower speeds, like it usually is for Sonic).

A more relevant topic of discussion, though, is the distance between Little Planet and Earth. I’ve seen wildly varying speculations about how far away Little Planet is, but they mostly try to use the numbers given on screen here. The problem is that these numbers don’t have any units to them, so making assumptions about what units they are measuring with gives dramatically different results. I plugged in every common unit of measurement and the only one that made any sense was using feet. Everything else either gave values that were too high or too low for the distance between celestial bodies. Using feet gives us a distance slightly further than the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This distance is still fairly impressive, giving us 0.57 C, but Sonic doesn’t scale to it because he never raced Metal Sonic at anywhere near these speeds (and even if he did move this fast, it wouldn’t make a difference in this fight).

The decision to use feet for this measurement doesn’t feel right, though. Kilometers is the most obvious measurement since we’re dealing with huge distances and the game was made by a Japanese company. But there are several reasons why I think this is actually overestimating the distance.

First, the graphic with the numbers doesn’t make any sense as measurements. It highlights seemingly random points and labels them, including drawing circles showing a sphere of influence or something around two of the points. Maybe I’m not smart enough to understand what this is supposed to mean, but to me it just looks like something created to make the trip look intimidating at a glance. Even if they were supposed to mean something, it would make the diameter of Little Planet about equal to the distance between the planets (the actual distance using this method is 10,339.77 km for a speed of mach 2009.67. And that’s if I massively highball the calc by pretending the bigger planet is Earth, which it isn’t). Using the calcs from this thread for the size of Little Planet (I’m pretty sure this is a huge highball, but I’m too lazy to do them myself when the results aren’t going to get higher and these numbers are so low), the distance comes out to 1024.08 km for a speed of mach 199.04. I’m actually pretty sure this is the most accurate measurement we can get.

Also, this is Little Planet that he’s returning from. Last time we saw Little Planet, it was this far away. I don’t think it’s right to say that it is supposed to actually be this close when Metal Sonic flies home, but I do think that it shows that it is usually fairly close to Earth when it has reappeared. The game was unclear whether this took place during the 11 months Little Planet wasn’t near earth or the one month that it reappeared, but I think the second situation is more likely. While we do see Little Planet teleport away at the end of Sonic CD, that was after it had started floating away. It had also been chained down before this to keep it around longer than intended. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that it tends to enter and leave the planet by floating to and from it in space before teleporting. This is mostly a theory, but it’s based on enough solid evidence that I’m comfortable using it to establish a pattern of Little Planet being close to Earth.

Didn’t Sonic fly to the Nonaggression zone in seconds, which would require at least flying to another galaxy?

The idea that Sonic flying to the nonaggression zone would require insane speeds is based on the idea that he’s actually flying to a nebula in a few seconds. While the background does look like a nebula, I’m far more inclined to treat this like an incorrect background detail than any kind of meaningful statement about the location being traveled to. It looks like an artist thought “I’m going to make space look SO cool” and didn’t think of the implications of what that would mean. There are enough problems with this feat that I’m inclined to throw it out anyway though. The screen cuts to black and you don’t see any implication of how long the travel took or how far they flew (other than the background). We could assume it took as much time as it did in game, but that’s likely to be incorrect given how fast Super Sonic normally travels. Eggman also had no problem keeping up with Sonic, which is basically impossible for a normal dude in a machine at those speeds. And Sonic isn’t helping him maintain those speeds because he passes out after the fight. He either fell back to Earth or (more likely and also implied by the game) Eggman brought him back. Also, G-Merl definitely fell back to earth (you can see him washing up on shore and he falls when you beat him). You can’t fall to earth from lightyears away.

However, even if we were to be lenient with Sonic and assume he made the 700 light-year trip in 12 seconds as shown (putting him at 12 billion C) we would have to be equally lenient with fox. His solar system has at least 6 nebulae in it that seem to resemble H II Regions. These nebulae are the only type that can take any shape and they are formed by methods that wouldn’t require this solar system to have other stars inside of it. They range from one to hundreds of lightyears across. Even fairly conservative numbers will surpass Sonic’s speeds, and Fox is regularly shown to fly and battle through them. While it’s obviously absurd to think of a Solar System lightyears across, Star Fox has definitely demonstrated weirder things. And it honestly has more going for it than the nonaggression zone being an actual nebula that Sonic has traveled to.

While accepting both these claims would make the fighters much more equal to each other in terms of overall speed, only Fox has demonstrated his ability to fight at these top speeds. He would still outclass Sonic in a fight by an extremely considerable margin.

Why isn’t Sonic FTL for dodging laser wisps in the DS Nega Wisp Armor fight?

Every iteration of the laser wisp explicitly moves at light speed. It stops time, even in the background, bounces off obstacles, and even dims the light because Sonic is moving at the same speed as it. Every iteration except in Sonic Colors DS, which is where this feat comes from. The DS version doesn’t make any effort to slow down anything, so it’s got no support at all for being light speed. In the Nega Wisp Armor fight, you can even see rubble falling in the background while the attack happens. In the console version, where it does appear to be light speed, the attack looks completely different and there’s no tandem movement at all. The mechanics of this wisp shouldn’t logically change between games, but they obviously and intentionally do.

Why doesn’t he scale to the Final Egg Blaster or Emerl?

The Final Egg Blaster didn’t even have any emeralds in it, so there’s no reason at all that Sonic should scale to it. I’ve seen people argue that since Eggman still wanted the emeralds, they must be more powerful than the egg blaster, but they perform such different functions I think it makes sense for Eggman to want them even if he had a more powerful weapon already. Emerl also wasn’t involved in the firing of the weapon at all: Eggman just waited for him to show up in order to impress Emerl and overwrite who he considered his owner.

As for Emerl, while beating him is undoubtedly a feat of skill, it is far from being a meaningful feat of power. Emerl has never displayed either power or durability on a planetary scale. He’s said to have this power in the story, but it’s never backed up. Notably, once he went crazy he didn’t use his own power to try and destroy Earth, he used the Final Egg Blaster. There’s no reason for him to do this if he had comparable power.

Finally, while Sonic did win 10 rounds against Emerl in 30 seconds, those rounds obviously aren’t representative of what a round would be in something like boxing. They’re pretty abstract and there’s no way to measure how long a round would take. You have people getting “knocked out” 10 times in a match only to immediately go another 10 rounds as a rematch. In any case, while this is probably still pretty fast, it’s not going to be anything super crazy.

Why didn’t you mention Sonic outrunning/surviving a black hole?

Because he didn’t do this. The “black hole” at the end of Sonic Colors doesn’t demonstrate any of the properties of a black hole except for sucking things up. Sonic also didn’t outrun it, he was caught by it. When Sonic eventually left the black hole, it wasn’t even by his own speed, he was just carried out by wisps. Finally, while we could say this requires light speed to escape the pull of gravity, there’s not actually a set speed that black holes “expand,” which is the part that most people seem to talk about.

Fox, on the other hand, has basically an entire comic about going through a black hole, how he endured it, and escaped on his own power. This one also doesn’t hold up to our scrutiny of black holes, but it’s much more explicitly intended to be a black hole, at least, and he didn’t require outside help to perform this (well, he required his Arwing, but that’s just part of his equipment).

Fox

Aren’t the comics non-canon?

Canon for Star Fox is pretty unclear. We’re using it primarily to back up other feats that have happened in the games or as a secondary source to illuminate unclear situations, but we’re not pulling any of Fox’s best feats from it. That said, it is usually widely regarded as canon.

Isn’t Star Fox 2 non-canon?

Once again, canon is weird. Star Fox 2 especially since it was unreleased until 2017. There’s two general approaches to the canon that seem to make sense. The first is to treat Star Fox as having three separate canons. One for the SNES games, one for Zero (and maybe guard but no one remembers that game exists) and one for the rest of the games. The other interpretation is to say that all of the games are canon, since they all have a place in the timeline if you ignore a few minor inconsistencies. We’ve chosen to go with that second interpretation in order to get a more clear representation of the cast.

Why are you taking Fox’s speed from a level select screen?

It’s not actually a level select screen. Or at least, not just that. It’s more like an overworld, but it moves in semi-real time (it waits for you to input an action, but it’s real time otherwise). More importantly, we’re actually getting the speed from the battles where you destroy the interplanetary missiles. They wouldn’t slow down because Fox is attacking them and being able to intercept them at any point in the map means they aren’t warping. That means that, if nothing else, Fox is able to maintain his top speeds in combat, which is what we’re concerned about anyway.

Why are so many of Fox’s feats from gameplay?

Many people feel like gameplay is unreliable when collecting feats. While sometimes it can misrepresent a character’s strength, it is usually the best source of feats for characters. Especially in a franchise like Star Fox that is almost 100% gameplay, there’s not much of a choice. We are very wary of using antifeats from gameplay though and are more concerned than usual about outliers.

Isn’t it an outlier when the smart bomb destroyed that pillar from so far away?

Yeah, it arguably is. But Fox didn’t need that feat to win, so it didn’t matter too much. And more importantly, that level of power has been consistently backed up through other games and media. We see the Arwing survive a planet-sized explosion in Assault and in the comics a smart bomb did this. There’s also a ton of insistence that the Arwing can survive black holes in the older games and comics. It’s also consistent with the intended power of the Star Fox team. These guys are literally the answer, on their own, to every threat to the entire solar system. The government considers it a better idea to send this one team to deal with every problem in the solar system than to do anything else. They’re supposed to be crazy.

Why is Fox’s dad a whale

That’s obviously because whales are how higher-dimensional space ships manifest in our dimension. He got sucked into a black hole that shot him into a higher dimension where he gained trust by teaching the people about our dimension. He came back to visit Fox when Fox drove through the black hole. It’s pretty simple stuff, really.

Why does Fox get multiplayer feats and weapons when Sonic doesn’t?

The Star Fox team is really hurting for feats of them outside their ships, so this is basically a must for accurately representing them. There’s also the fact that Assault’s multiplayer seems to maybe be canon, and the fact that the Demon Sniper (the weapon that matters the most) is unlocked in the story mode, giving it some implication of being canon. The weapons are also all things manufactured by existing companies and wouldn’t require any additional ability or training to use. Sonic has some multiplayer-only feats, but he’s got a ton of other canon sources confirming that he can’t do that stuff ever again.