Sonic Fans Really Want SEGA To Bring Back The 'Chao Garden' In 'Sonic Frontiers'

In 1999, SEGA released Sonic Adventure in North America. It was the series’ first foray into 3D platformer gameplay, a change that set the stage for the next 20 years of Sonic games. While 2D entries still popped up here and there, 3D became the hot new way to experience Sonic, spawning games like Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes and the dreaded Sonic ’06.

The franchise’s embracement of 3D platforming has led to a lot of mixed reception from diehard Sonic fans. Some believe the switch to 3D damaged the franchise and comparing review scores for 2D vs. 3D Sonic games somewhat supports this theory.

While the Sonic Adventure games were well-reviewed upon release, even they’ve come under some scrutiny for aging poorly in recent years, with some seeing the love for these games as fueled by nothing more than nostalgia. Whether or not you enjoy the 3D Sonic games, though, there’s one thing the switch to 3D with Sonic Adventure gave us that almost all Sonic fans can agree is incredible — the Chao Garden.

The Chao Garden is a digital pet care sub-game built into Sonic Adventure that lets players hatch and care for little bulbous-headed creatures known as Chaos. The first time you enter one of the game’s Chao gardens (of which there are three) you’re given two Chao eggs. Once you hatch the eggs, you can breed your Chaos to get new, more rare variants, allowing you to fill your garden with rare Chaos over time.

When you’re not busy breeding the best Chaos, you can pet them, feed them and care for them to raise their stats and have them compete in Chao races against other Chaos, which is necessary if you want to collect all the game’s emblems. In the original SEGA Dreamcast release, you could pull out the console’s VMU (a memory card with a screen that allowed for further interaction with the console’s games) and care for your Chaos in the “mini Chao garden, turning your Chaos into a sort of Tamagotchi.

The Dreamcast version also had an online-only black market where you could buy rare Chaos and items for your Chaos using rings collected in the main game mode. This returned in the re-releases of Sonic Adventure but without the online aspects, as was the mini Chao garden in the Gamecube re-release, allowing players to connect their Gameboy Advance’s to play with their Chaos on the go.

Chao gardens are a chill, no-stress distraction from the main Sonic Adventure experience. You can dip in for a few minutes (or hours) at a time to relax in-between the high-speed action of the main game. For many players, however, the Chao garden became the main attraction of the games that included it, especially in Sonic Adventure 2.

SA2 offers what mank think is the ideal Chao garden experience. Beyond the new gardens, the sequel adds new ways to train Chaos, new animals to upgrade your Chaos with and, in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the Gamecube, a karate minigame in addition to the racing minigame, where you pit Chaos against each other in combat.

The Chao garden made its third appearance in Sonic games with 2002’s Sonic Advance on the Gameboy Advance. It appeared again in the sequel, Sonic Advance 2 and the pinball spinoff Sonic Pinball Party in 2003. This time around, it’s known as the “Tiny Chao Garden,” and offers a 2D, overhead version of the sub-game.

It’s almost the same version of the game you get when you connect your GBA with SA2 Battle on the GameCube, letting you hatch eggs, pet and play with your Chao and play a variety of GBA-exclusive minigames to further boost their stats, like the puzzle game “Chao’s CC Shoot” and the Chao Super High-Jump Game. While the mini Chao garden isn’t quite as fleshed out as its 3D counterparts, it was a welcome addition to the GBA titles and still offers that same chill break from the main game.

The Chao garden made a very brief, very stripped-back appearance in the DS’s Sonic RPG game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. This time it's presented as a simple menu. You can level Chaos up using items then equip them to your characters for stat boosts. Calling this a true Chao garden isn’t accurate as it offers none of the things that made the previous iterations of the garden so great. It’s not the type of thing you can spend hours investing your time in. The chill vibes aren't there.

Instead, the game's Chao garden works as just another way to enhance your main game characters rather than offering a unique experience, unlike Adventures where the opposite is true and the main game allows you to enhance the Chaos. Sonic Chronicles came out in 2009 and since then, the Chao garden has been absent from the Sonic franchise. It’s mentioned in passing in other Sonic titles, often through in-game billboards as if teasing the player directly, but no Sonic title has let players travel to the garden since Sonic Pinball Party. Nearly 20 years later, players still haven’t gotten over it.

The recent release of the gameplay teaser for Sonic Frontiers, the newest 3D entry in the franchise and the first-ever open-world Sonic game, has fans across the Sonic fandom talking about Chao gardens again, particularly about the seeming lack of a Chao garden in the upcoming title.

The users over at /r/SonicTheHedgehog have been vocal about this, posting memes stressing out that there’s no sign of a Chao garden in Frontiers. In fairness, it’s a little too early to say whether or not there will be a Chao garden in Frontiers considering there’s only one short gameplay clip out so far, but considering how there hasn’t been a real Chao garden implementation in the series since 2003, most users find it safe to assume that they won’t get a new opportunity to raise Chaos in the upcoming game.

Players have been requesting Sonic Team to bring back the Chao garden for years now, often through posts and memes on their fandom sites, Twitter and YouTube, where there are several videos with tens and hundreds of thousands of views wondering why the Chaos got axed.

Sonic Team has never given an answer on why they dropped the Chao garden from the franchise, leaving fans to speculate on the matter. The lack of an official, modern-day Chao garden has also inspired some fans to take matters into their own hands.

In 2021, BillehBawb released the unofficial Android game Pocket Chao Garden. It's a reimagining of the Chao garden somewhat akin to the mini Chao garden from the Advance games. At the time of writing, it’s been downloaded over 10,000 times from the Google Play store.

More notably is Chao World Extended, a mod for Sonic Adventure 2 first created in 2014 that adds onto the Chao garden experience with tons of new chao colors and features, giving players even more reasons to keep on coming back to the garden. Chao Garden Extended is still updated today and has a dedicated following of players who want nothing more than to chill with their Chaos in the polygonal wonderland that is the Chao garden.

While the Chao garden was always meant as a side attraction to the Sonic games it appears in, it adds a lot of replay value to those games, giving players a reason to keep on booting up the game long after the main quest is complete. The way the Chao garden plays off of the main game, such as by allowing players to bring animals they rescue from the game’s defeated robots into the garden to change their Chaos’ appearances and stats, give players a reason to not only return to the garden time after time but to the game’s levels as well. Each chao has a unique animation linked to the animal you give them, adding another layer of replayability if you want to see them all.

The infinite nature of the garden, with very little in the way of timed goals, gives players all the incentive they need to fall into the game’s relaxing feedback loop, similar to what farming games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon offer. It’s not fast, it’s not hectic and it’s not action-packed, giving players the opposite of a Sonic game within a Sonic game.

These two contrasting gameplay styles work together in an unexpectedly successful way, making the Chao garden more than just nostalgia bait. If anything, the Chao garden has aged better than the main Sonic Adventure experience because of all this, still offering players a unique experience all these years later that hasn’t been replicated in a game inside or outside of the franchise since. Some players have even suggested replacing the Chao garden with a Wisp garden, wisps being another creature introduced to the franchise in with Sonic Colors.

Regardless of how they do it, the memes tell us that Sonic players only want one thing, and it’s the Chao garden. There’s a lot of pressure on the Sonic Team to bring back the Chao garden from some of the most dedicated Sonic fans online, who won’t rest until they see a new official iteration. With modern technologies like smartphones and the portability of the Nintendo Switch, the possibilities for a modern, upgraded, first-party rendition of the Chao garden are immeasurable.

Imagine a Chao garden that’s constantly updated with new chaos, events and cosmetic items. Sure, they’d probably come in the form of micro-transactions, but based on the outpouring of support for a new garden there would likely be more than a few fans willing to sink their money into a Chao garden app. We won't know if Sonic Frontiers will give players the return to the Chao garden that they desire until later this year, but until fnas know for sure, the memes of protest and nostalgic want will continue to pour in on sites like /r/SonicTheHedgehog.