Marble Gardens

The Marble Garden Zone is a really beautiful but sad area of the Floating Island--it's all a bunch of huge, elegant, broken ruins all overgrown with grasses, with the wind whistling through them. It's situated on the sides of a bunch of very very steep hillsides in the center of the Island. The reason it is there is that this, in my version AND that of the comic books--was originally the site of the Echidna-people's main metropolis, the "City of the Sun" in my version and "Echidnaopolis" in the comic books (I ask you--which of those names had more work put into it? Ahem.) They were afraid of being invaded (before they made the Island float) so they built their city in the middle of a mountain range to make it more easily defensible. But now, for reasons unknown or simply untold, it is nothing but broken, falling-apart ruins. The last remains of what was once a great civilisation. As with all the other ruins on the Island, it still contains some of their technology, still working, which attests to how advanced they were. (Charmy currently makes this area his home, probably because, even in its decayed and broken state, it's the closest he can get to the courtly surroundings he was raised in.)
Most Sonic gamers tend to dislike this level--they say it's too long, or it's boring, or it's "pointless" (whatever that means. I fail to see how a level can be "pointless"--it's "point" is to move you along further to the end of the game and give you some more adventures to go through along the way, like any OTHER game level, DUH!) but I like it. It's pretty, and sad, and full of secrets and hidden corners. My only beef is with the slow, dull music.
Almost nobody can visit Marble Gardens (the place, not the game level) without simultaneously feeling great awe and great loss. Knuckles can hardly come here anymore because of the sad memories...he remembers the city when it was whole and alive...(in the comic books, it IS "whole and alive" again, but I ain't using that part of the plotline, thank you very much...)



Click HERE to return to the Floating Island Tour Route.

Click HERE to return to the Chaotix Clubhouse.

Click HERE to return to Sandopolis.



curious tourists have come by to tour the sad, broken elegance of Marble Gardens since June 19, 1999. Of course, most of them were killed by falling pillars or pits studded with spikes hidden beneath treacherously weak pieces of hillside, but hey...