What is "Dark Chao Adventures?"

Holy shit. I feel.. guys, I feel like writing DCA. I feel like writing DCA again. I feel like, at the very least, finally writing an ending for it. In the meantime, let me make the necessary post describing it.

Dark Chao Adventures

So waaaay back in 2005 (yeah, this was way back), I was a wee ten-year-old. I randomly felt the urge to write! So I found a forum (Chao Civic), found their fanfic section, and started a topic:

Dark Chao Adventures
All I can say is, Episode One: Chao In Space...

I got a reply shortly after. "ooh i cant wait!" shadowhalo, I believe, was the poster's name.

Now, here I will stop to explain what chao are for those not quite "in the know." Back at the turn of the century, Sonic Team released Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast, and later sequel Sonic Adventure 2. Both games got Gamecube ports years later. Both games had these optional little "chao" features which were basically a sort of.. breeding simulator. You could have multiple gardens filled with up to eight chao each, and.. here. Click that for the Wikipedia page; it'll do a better job at describing them than I can.

And see, a Dark chao is basically a chao that you raise with certain characters so it looks evil. But they're really just adorable. And they have their own garden called the "Dark Garden." When I was, like.. seven-ish, I had my own garden full of Darks. But Nathan, my brother, wanted to delete the chao from our memory card to make room for more games. I didn't really care. xD

Cut to May 2005, I'm remembering these chao, and I decide to make a little script in memory of the little dudes. I come up with everything completely on the spot, including the fact that it's a series. I had no idea at all where the fuck I was gonna go with it. So I just improvised!

I came up with, over the course of seven years, eight seasons. The first five seasons had eight episodes each, the sixth had ten, and the seventh had twenty-nine. Yeah. xD The eighth wound up only having one, as that was when I just stopped writing and focused on other things. Like Fearblogs.

So here, we have eighty episodes of a series you guys probably don't know much about. Let me try to give rough synopses.

Season One: Shade and Chao (2005): This stuff is really badly-written. I was ten. Though from the fifth episode onward, I started to realize I could actually come up with original plots, and the quality of the episodes started to improve greatly! This season had a very distinct Spongebob-meets-Invader ZIM really fucking cheesy and childish style to it. I was ten. <_<;;; Each episode had, on average, four "chapters." Each chapter was very short. Some had five. The season finale had eight chapters, I think.

Season Two Beta (2005): I started to get ambitious. Came up with a season-wide story arc involving a cast of antagonists called "the MILKMAN and Friends" and of protagonist Dark trying to get the seven Chaos Emeralds. A few episodes in, Chao Civic shut down and I lost my records of this season (though I was smart enough to save the first one on notepad!).

Season Two: Dark and Mephiles (2006): A year later, I start writing a blog and I remember this thing, so I decide to bring it back. I write a new second season with blackjack and hookers and shit. This was a little better in terms of quality, and I actually wrote some legitimately funny stuff. The three-part season finale involved a trip to the future, and some actually remotely-creepy scenes! My first experimentations with horror!

Season Three: The Beta Avengers (2007): I joined a new forum: CHAO TALK. This would be where I would write for a few years, and this would also be where I met a man that would introduce me to Fentzy and Jane. But that comes much later. For now, I made Season Three. These episodes had me experimenting more, figuring out what I wanted to write, what I enjoyed writing. Highlights included the "Mysterious Stardust" serial (three mystery stories that built up to a return of a foe from the Season Two Beta), the introduction of the Beta Avengers (a recurring group of antagonists that want to make sure the Season Two Beta got.. well, avenged), and the season finale "The Chao World" (my first ever 'feature-length' script, the length of three entire episodes!). By posting on Chao Talk, I also got plenty of fans. :DDDD

Season Four: Purflee and Luis (2007): So "The Chao World" was originally gonna be about.. eight times as long. But I wanted to release the general gist of things now, so I released it as a twelve-chapter finale and simply had the rest of the story be spread out through the next season. In it, the chao are lost on a strange world, in a strange city. Fun fact for you Rapture fans: The city they're stuck in is pretty much the embodiment of the secretcity maps from Sven Co-op, so this is the city that inspired Xanadu. It all concluded with, like.. crossovers with EarthBound and an exciting finale battle with the MILKMAN, head of the Beta Avengers. This season also introduced "third-party/freelance chao," or the chao of my fans'! As a result, this season was the fan-favourite for a while.

Season Five: Echo and Red (2007): The chao had now returned to their gardens after that wild adventure, and now one of the Beta Avengers, a Dark/Fly chao named Echo, was ominously flying over the Hero Garden, waiting for the right time to.. do something. This season was my attempt at writing "old-fashioned" episodes, simple episodic stuff, but I wound up realizing I love writing serial-based stories, so even the most standalone stories were connected by story arcs. I also experimented with playing with my readers' emotions, writing what I considered to be the "saddest episode ever." The season finale was a two-parter taking the story of Portal and expanding it into.. well, I don't know. xD It just expanded upon the ending.

DCAHall: Pelottaa Scary Stuff (2007): This was a standalone script serving as DCA's first ever Halloween special. Fans adored it, and I actually wrote some relatively-creepy stuff!

Season Six: The Grey Journey (2008): I had actually been building up this season ever since Season Three. It was gonna be an epic journey, playing on the themes of the Season Two Beta, starring main protagonist Shade as he traveled through several video games in search of seven "chaos drives," all while defeating the four most prominent members of the Beta Avengers. And it was! It was the most epic story I had ever written, but no one was around for it. All my fans left Chao Talk between seasons. ;__; I wound up writing entirely for myself, which gave me ample opportunities to experiment with whatever I wanted. I wrote some of the longest scripts I had ever made, some rather interesting original stories, and some pretty clever situational comedy based on the worlds the video games had established, and I played on as many themes I had established in the earlier seasons. I even had the season finale extend to two more episodes, making this ten-episode season the longest season yet. And its final episode was the exciting Episode Fifty! :D

DCAHall2: Gears n' Roses (2008): Another standalone script, this was the second Halloween special! This was also the single longest script I had ever written, coming in at around 144 kilobytes. Takes a good three-or-four hours to read, I'd say. This script was me taking Gears of War and making it a lot more.. well, scary. And it was legitimately scary at times! But again, people weren't really around to read it.

DCA09: The Secret City (2009): Behold, a script that didn't really belong anywhere! This was my transition from the cheesiness of Seasons One-Six to the epic scale of Season Seven. This was, for all intents and purposes, where I grew the beard. This standalone epic script, coming in at around 237-ish kilobytes, taking a good five hours to read, was about the chao finding themselves back in the city of Season Four. It was an exciting and rather-creepy ontological mystery, and it lends itself to a follow-up, possibly a sequel. Once the chao were done with the secretcity maps, I threw in as much of an original plot as I could come up with, and.. boy, was it good. Again, I don't particularly know anyone who read it. Maybe one person.

Season Seven: The End/The Veteran's Committee (2008-2011): Here it is. After the incredible adventures of the previous stories, the chao were back in their gardens and living normal lives. I wrote a couple episodic-comedy scripts before realizing that nobody was reading this shit, and I loved writing the epic adventures. So I took Season Seven and applied seven pounds of awesome to it. I had, at one point, planned on it having only eight episodes, with the latter half of the season taken up by a DCA rendition of Metal Gear Solid 2. But I quickly realized eight episodes was not enough time to tell the story of this season, so I came up with the plot of a new team of antagonists: The Veteran's Committee, who are out to end the show by any means necessary. I introduced a new main protagonist: Shadow the green Dark chao, who was only a minor character throughout the show so far. I threw him in with my usual main protagonists, making this new story revolve around him. He had to assemble seven chaos drives of his own to stop the show from ending, but little did he know, there were much darker forces at work dwelling beneath the shaded veils of the adventures.

Season Seven grew to last not a set number of episodes, but rather "as long as it takes for Shadow to stop the Veteran's Committee." He ventured through Metal Gear Solid 2; Half-Life 2; an original creepypasta introducing the slender man to the series; a bizarre hodge-podge of Bioshock, all the themes of the earlier seasons, and DCA09; an original feature-length horror story playing on the themes introduced in the earlier creepypasta and introducing many more; popular source mod Nightmare House 2; and an original feature-length adventure taking plots from as much prog as I could squeeze into the story. The season finale, a re-enactment of Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, ended the season with narrator-- myself-- informing Shadow every reason why the show really should end. But I made sure to let him go on one last epic adventure before it all would come to a close.

DCAHall3: Sinister Serials of the Dark (2010): This epic script, standalone as it was, was not quite as standalone as the rest. This had three adventures in it, all adventures taking place in Season Seven. I actually read this entire script aloud in a podcast, and it took six hours. The main attraction was the second story, a five-act tale of the main protagonists exploring one hell of an eldritch location: the forest of Sancheria. This was one of the most consistently-scary stories I have ever written, and it is currently the longest single script in all of DCA. Next to Rapture, this is my favourite story I have ever written.

Season Eight (2011): One single episode was written continuing the adventure. I set up one hell of a story, but I stopped after that. :c


There, that's the rough synopsis of the entire show so far. Dark Chao Adventures has been one of the greatest things in my life. It is such a grand story, and it has offered so much experimentation for my writing. I would not be anywhere near as good a writer as I am if it weren't for DCA. I certainly wouldn't be able to write Rapture at the consistently-good quality it is.

And believe me, that was just the main series. There were quite a few spin-offs, bonus stories within the universe, shorts, even a text-adventure, and even a full twenty-mission RP!

You can read all of this at the official Dark Chao Adventures website. Except for Season Eight, which you can find here. I would love to have new readers. This story was such a huge part of my life. Rapture is its spiritual successor, and I think you'll see that if you read it, especially the later seasons.

And yes. I definitely want to finish this story. EDIT: I did, and here's the summary of the entire plot. And part two of that.