Sonic Superstars Only Has Seven Powers, And It's The Chaos Emeralds' Fault

thegamer.com:

Sonic Superstars is giving us classic 2D platforming with a twist, in the form of the new Chaos Emerald abilities. Whether it's slowing down time or sending a bunch of duplicates to go and take some hits for you, there are now a bunch of new ways to approach stages and boss battles. Well, there are exactly seven ways to mix things up, because there's one for each Chaos Emerald - something that created a problem during development.

Turns out, there were more ideas for abilities than there were emeralds to assign them to. In an interview going over these new powers, Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka explains that they had loads of "interesting ideas" for other abilities, but had to "whittle them down" to just seven because there weren't any more Chaos Emeralds to go around.

Related: Sonic Prime Just Gave Us Our Best Interpretation Of Sonic And Shadow Ever

"Simply recreating gameplay isn't enough to excite new players. And that's why we designed the emerald powers, to make new interesting action in Sonic," says Iizuka, hyping up the emerald abilities that players can activate mid-game.

"We had multiple ideas about abilities we could put in the game. But there are only seven emerald powers and we need each to be associated with an emerald," says Iizuka. "Unfortunately, we had to whittle down all the ideas to only seven. We did have some interesting additional ideas, but we couldn't implement them because they would have gone over that threshold."

This raises some questions, to be sure. The emerald powers are a completely new concept, so they didn't have to be associated with the seven Chaos Emeralds at all. They could have been attached to a new magical object that our heroes collect in the main story.

But in any case, we now