Sonic Superstars is changing up the Chaos Emeralds a bit, as now each individual emerald will have a unique power-up.
In the original Sonic the Hedgehog games, a single Chaos Emerald was mostly useless, as you’d need all seven of them to turn Sonic into Super Sonic. The Super form is back with Sonic Superstars, but in a recent interview with Game Informer, Sonic Team creative officer Takashi Iizuka spoke of the new powers that come with each of the Chaos Emeralds. Speaking of how you’d only get something from the Chaos Emeralds through collecting all of them, Iizuka said, “We wanted to say, ‘How can we reward someone for getting just one?’ And if we reward someone for getting just one, that will motivate people to get each individual one and see what they are.”
According to Iizuka, the idea for Emerald Powers took some inspiration from the Wisp mechanic introduced with Sonic Colors. The big difference between Wisps and Chaos Emeralds is that you’d need to use the Wisps to beat the game. “But we didn’t want that to be a part of the Superstars game,” Iizuka said. “We wanted the Classic Sonic gameplay to still remain true, so when we were looking at the Emerald Powers and the Wisps, we wanted to make sure you could still beat Superstars without having to use any of the powers, which is what we needed to balance during game design.”