Rebracketing “Death Egg Robot”

Hello! It’s time for me to be normal about Sonic the Hedgehog again. I have been thinking about the Death Egg Robot’s name.

Some background: The final level of Sonic 2 takes place aboard the Death Egg, an Eggman-themed parody of the Death Star. The final boss is a mech modelled after Robotnik himself.

This mech is not named in game but when it was reimagined as the first bossfight of Sonic Generations it was given a not terribly imaginative title: Death Egg Robot.

I don’t like this name and I grew to like it even less as this design got reused in future games and continued to be called “Death Egg Robot” even when it is completely divorced from the context of the Death Egg. It’s the first boss in Green Hill Zone in Sonic Mania and then there are the mass-produced, unmanned, cycloptic Death Egg Robots in Sonic Forces also without any apparent connection to the Death Egg¹.

What got me thinking about this again? The other day I was doing the dishes while listening to a four hour playlist called Epic & Cool Sonic Music Compilation, as is my wont, when the track Battle with Death Queen came on.

The Death Queen is a giant Buzz Bomber, a huge bee robot. The game also features a giant crab robot chase sequence that is identified in the soundtrack as Death Crab.

And it occurred to me: Is the game trying to push “Death” as a general term for a class of giant robots? Is it rebracketing Death Egg Robot as Death Egg Robot?

Perhaps we are meant to take it that, in-universe, it is in fact just the giant, or “Death”, version of an Egg Robo. There area lot of similarities between the two. The spelling is slightly different in English but in Japanese they are both エッグロボ.

The Death Egg Robot debuted one game before the Egg Robos, but we could imagine that perhaps in-universe the Egg Robos were around first, just offscreen somewhere. Maybe Eggman is annoyed that Sonic and Tails associate the Death Egg Robot with the Death Egg at all. That’s just yolk folk etymology!

That said, I don’t know how to fit the final boss of Sonic Forces into this framework, which is inexplicably also called Death Egg Robot despite bearing almost no resemblance to the other Death Egg Robots and also having nothing to do with the Death Egg.

And then the real final boss, a giant robot chestburster that smashes its way out of previous phase of the bossfight is also inexplicably titled Death Egg Robot.

I don’t know how to fit this into any understanding of what Death Egg Robot is meant to mean.