Sonic Team studio head Takashi Iizuka wants to make a Sonic the Hedgehog role-playing game “at some point” before he retires from Sega.
In an interview for Good vibes in gamesIizuka was asked if he would like to work on a Sonic RPG in the future. Iizuka replied that he was interested and was shocked that Sonic Team hadn’t already done so.
“I personally really like RPGs,” Iizuka said. “The RPG format is a lot of fun, and I even thought to myself, ‘You know, we haven’t made an RPG about Sonic in 30 years.’ And I ask myself, ‘Why haven’t we made an RPG about Sonic in all this time? How come we’ve gone 30 years without an RPG?’”
Iizuka said he would “hopefully” start working on a Sonic RPG before he retires from Sega, but made it clear that there is nothing “concrete” at the moment. “So I would like to, hopefully, work on a Sonic RPG at some point before I retire from Sega,” he said. “But you know, right now it’s just a dream. There are no concrete plans at the moment.”
The only Sonic RPG released to date was Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, a 2008 Nintendo DS game. However, the project was developed by Bioware, creators of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, not Sonic Team.
In our review of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, IGN wrote, “It’s fun, and the game picks up pace after the first few hours, but we’d be surprised if many DS players would embrace Dark Brotherhood when there are so many better RPGs on the platform. There’s good design in here somewhere; it just gets lost in all of it.”
The closest Sonic Team has come to incorporating RPG elements into a Sonic game was the blue hedgehog’s first 3D game, Sonic Adventure, which introduced some RPG elements. In cut commentary for Sonic Adventure DXIizuka explained that after completing work on NiGHTs into Dreams, he approached Naka with the proposal that Sonic Adventure be an RPG-style game.
While Sonic Team is not making an RPG about Sonic’s adventures, the development studio has worked on RPG games, including the previously mentioned Nights into Dreams and the Phantasy Star Online series.
Taylor is a reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
