I've come across something on my daily travels through the Sonic Wiki Zone, and thought it was interesting enough to talk about.
There may be (emphasis on "may be"; you'll hear why in a second*) more truth behind universal Sonic than I realised.
Long story short, there's this little known story called "Otherworld Comedy", where various pieces of Sonic Channel artwork portray the cast in rather out-of-character scenarios (Shadow and Infinite being a J-Pop duo, the Avatar being in a high school sweetheart relationship with an Egg Pawn and Silver and Elise being a Soleannan figure skating duo).
As it turns out, there's a plot behind this where, using the power of the Phantom Ruby prototype he created in Sonic Forces, Dr. Eggman creates various alternate realities separate from the main timeline.
This ultimately culminates in a final battle between Super Sonic and Dr. Eggman who, as you can see below, uses the prototype to mimic the power of a Super form.
As Sonic was able to contend with Infinite - who was powered by a prototype of his own - in base form, this has serious ramifications for base cast scaling in the game continuity.
*I think the fact that Sonic had to turn Super in order to challenge Dr. Eggman's own Super form does hurt the "base = universal through Otherworld Comedy" idea quite a bit, but it's certainly something to think about.
