This article needs to be edited to conform to a higher standard of article quality.
After the article has been cleaned up, you may remove this message. See How to Edit a Page for help.
Sonic, Tails and Knuckles are walking through Metal City one evening, and Tails detects a Chaos Emerald on his radar. Glass shatters and from Metal City Bank fall Jet the Hawk, Wave the Swallow and Storm the Albatross, who have the Chaos Emerald! Sonic and Knuckles manage to knock Storm off the hover board he was riding, but Wave catches Storm and gives him a lift. Sonic steals the board the clumsy albatross left behind and pursues Jet. However, Jet gives Sonic a taste of his own medicine, and the group, known as Babylon Rogues, escape. Wave slows down a bit, allowing Storm to grab his hover board, then they get away.
The next day, Sonic found that Doctor Eggman had set up a hover board racing tournament, with the prize being the very Chaos Emerald that was stolen, and the top three entries being the thieves! Sonic and his friends promptly pay the entry fee of one Chaos Emerald and take up the challenge. But what was Eggman's true motive, and what of the three thieving birds? Sonic and his friends must face off against the Babylon Rogues to find out.
Gameplay
Sonic Riders is played entirely on either hoverboards or bikes, this tech is called Extreme Gear. Players typically race against seven other competitors on Extreme Gear in one of 14 tracks.
A key component of the game is the air tank, which fuels the Extreme Gear, and is depleted gradually as the race goes on or by performing certain maneuvers. These maneuvers include cornering, which involves using the air as a sideways force against the board, allowing the player to round sharp turns with ease, and building tension before a jump, which involves using the air to propel the player higher off of ramps. When airborne players can perform various tricks, which refill the air gauge according to their rating. Riding off the turbulence another board gives off will also refuel the air gauge. Building the tension before a jump will allow the player to perform more tricks before landing. There are also Air Pits on some courses for refueling the Air Tank.
Throughout the courses, there are many Rings scattered around. Picking them will allow the player to reach higher performance levels. Players start races at Level 1 which can be maxed out to level 3 with 60-100 Rings. Possibly the most costly maneuver in terms of air is boosting, by which a player greatly increases speed for a short duration. If a boost is performed when in close range of an enemy racer, the player will launch an attack against the racer, causing them to lose Rings, and remain stunned for a short duration.
Each racer in the game has one of three beneficial attributes: Speed, Fly, and Power. The Speed attribute allows players to grind along rails. The Fly attribute allows players to go airborne by going through a series of suspended hoops. The Power attribute allows players to knock certain obstacles out of their way. Each of these maneuvers will refill the air gauge partially when used.
Super Sonic has all three attributes thus can't be categorized into a single category. When using Super Sonic he will start off with 30 rings, instead of the usual 50 in other games. Also, when you lose all your rings, Sonic only needs one ring to change back to Super Sonic again. It is possible to ride Blue Star instead of just floating across the track with no board.
Other Characters
These are characters which play a role in the game but are not actually playable.
Omochao: Omochao is the announcer for the races. He has a new voice, along with the rest of the crew.
E-10000Y: A flight robot that appears in Egg Factory, and tries to thaw the ice in Ice Factory.
E-10000P: Purple robots that are in production. The production of the E-10000Ps stops when the factory is frozen.
Several gameplay modes are available. These include races with different level completion objectives and a Shop mode where the player can spend gathered rings.
Story Mode: Players take part in a series of races, one after the other. As the game goes on a story is unveiled via cutscenes. The objective of the mode is to defeat the Babylon Rogues. After the initial story is completed, another story is unlocked, in which players control the Babylon Rogues in a quest to find hidden treasures. The levels in this story are, altered and more difficult. These levels become unlocked after completing this story mode in addition to extra characters. At the end of this alternate story, players battle the only boss in the game. The Heroes Story contains six races; Babylon Garden is the final Heroes story mode stage. Babylon's Story contains 7, but the last race, Babylon Guardian, is played as Sonic.
Mission Mode: Only unlocked after successfully completing the original story. Players must complete various missions in order to unlock secret gears.
Survival Mode: A special mode of gameplay consisting of two separate modes: race and battle. Race mode requires players to grab a Chaos Emerald on the track and pass through five hoops while avoiding opponents whom will try to steal the Emerald. The Emerald is stolen by attacking the player holding it. Battle mode involves launching attacks at the three other racers on the track. Each racer begins with three health points. The racer loses a health point every time they are attacked. The last racer standing wins the match.
Tag Mode:
Shop: Players can purchase new Extreme Gear with the rings collected in previous races.
For a short while the Xbox version of the game was released with a free Sonic X DVD, which contained five episodes from the first and second seasons.
Trivia
Trivia sections are bad Try and incorporate this information into the main article. See the manual of style to find out why.
Character Trivia
This game, while technically developed by "Sonic Team" actually comes from the part of Sonic Team that used to be United Game Artists, who developed Space Channel 5 (the game Ulala comes from), and Rez along with Feel the Magic: XY/XX, and The Rub Rabbits!. United Game Artists eventually merged with Sonic Team.
The inclusion of NiGHTS, Ulala and AiAi was confirmed very early on at The GHZ, although some denied the reliability of the info.
The appearance of AiAi was officially confirmed by Nintendo Power magazine, however, many were in such disbelief, that they believed the report to be a mistake, and wanted to hear it from Sega and/or Sonic Team first. Nintendo Power also started a false rumor that Mario would appear as a racer on the GameCube version.
The Babylon symbol is a "magic lamp" with wind markings around it as a reference to being descendants of "real genies".
When watching the story cutscene before the Babylon Guardian race, Amy Rose is wearing her normal red dress, but when the race starts, she is wearing her pink racing clothes.
E-10000R is said to be made using the engine parts of Metal Sonic according to the Japanese Sonic Riders website.
In Rouge's official art her eyelids are blue, but in races, on the tailing map at the bottom of the screen Rouge's icon has pink eyelids, this could be because these images are just snapshots from other 3D sonic games, and Rouges image was ripped from Sonic Heroes.
Track Trivia
When starting a race in Metal City and an overview of the track is shown, during the second shot, a billboard is visible in the top right showing a picture of Sonic running from a whale in Sonic Adventure, next to that is a picture of Sonic's artwork from Sonic Heroes.
In the Sega Carnival, when entering Crazy Taxi's city a big sign can be seen indicating a right turn, but if you go in the small space (on the left) your character can get a free ride in a taxi with a man named Axel. He stops near the finish line and lets the character out, and during replays Axel can be seen pushing a button on the Taxi, then fling away... literally.
Story Mode Trivia
During the cutscene at the beginning of the Hero story, but before the Babylon Rogues interrupt, the Future City theme can be heard faintly. This is actually the basis for the music of the SEGA Carnival track.
In the Heroes Story opening scene, during Eggman's announcement, a city that appears to be "Central City" can be seen in some monitors behind him. Either that is the case or the monitors are actually windows.
In the CG introduction to the Heroes Story, the exhaust coming from the Type-S is green, as though Storm is at Level 1. After Sonic steals the board, the exhaust coming from the back is blue. Also, when Wave is using the Type-W, the exhaust is green, which changes to blue immediately when Storm grabs on.
Music Trivia
"High Flying Groove" is Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles' first instrumental theme song.
Miscellaneous Trivia
Speed, located in the bottom right corner, cannot actually refer to mph, otherwise this would mean that Eggman can run backward at 20 mph and forward at 150 mph (although he does run as quickly as Sonic in Sonic Adventure 2's Chao World minigame). The actual measure may possibly be meters per hour.
The Archie Sonic Comic issues #163 and #164 include an adaptation of Sonic Riders, even using the same art style that is used in the game's title sequence. Two characters are also seen riding Extreme Gear in issue #173. Bark the Polar Bear and Bean the Dynamite also use Extreme Gear in the Archie Comics.
Dr. Eggman is both voiced by Deem Bristow and Mike Pollock. However, most of his gameplay dialogue are actually voice clips that were recycled from Sonic Adventure 2. Deem Bristow died before the release of Sonic Riders. Wave uses some of Blaze the Cat's voice clips from Sonic Rush; they both are voiced by the same person.
The PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC versions have both voice language tracks included in the game disc. The PlayStation 2 version, together with a multi-lingual text language option, features an additional option to switch between both English and Japanese voice language, though this is only present in the Japanese and North American versions. The EU/PAL PlayStation 2 version remove this feature and only has the text language option present, defaulting the voices automatically to the system language. The PC version has both a text and a voice language option which are present in all its regional variations, but these can only be found in the external game settings instead of the proper options menu of the game like in the JP and US PlayStation 2 versions. Since the Xbox version doesn't feature any language option at all, neither of text nor of voice, the only way to have the Japanese voices in this version is changing the console language to Japanese in order to set the game entirely in Japanese.
The GameCube version features only one voice track in the disc and according to the regional version, due to size constraints. The Western versions have the English voice language whereas the Japanese version has the Japanese one, while the text language is entirely multi-lingual and manually selectionable in all regional versions.
The FY 2006 Full Year Results, which describe the individual amount of units the game sold in the United States and Europe, erroneously describe the game's platform for the Nintendo DS. The FY 2006 Full Year Appendix and Annual Report however do describe the game with the proper release platforms, and the amount of total sold units matching those in the Full Year Results.