Sonic Head Talks of Making Sonic RPG Before Retiring From Sega

The head of Sonic Team studio, Takashi Iizuka, talked about how he wants to make a Sonic the Hedgehog role-playing game at some point in the future before he retires from Sega.

The comments were made during an interview with Good Vibes Gaming and Iizuka was asked if he would work on a Sonic RPG in the future. He said that he was interested in such a project and expressed his surprise that Sonic Team has not yet done anything similar in the past.

A Sonic RPG

Sonic Head Talks of Making Sonic RPG Before Retiring From Sega — Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka talked about how he wants the studio to work on a role-playing game for the franchise before he retires from Sega.
(Photo : Sonic Team / Screenshot taken from official website)

Iizuka said, "Personally, I really like role-playing games," adding that the RPG game format is a lot of fun. He added that he thought to himself that for the past three decades, they have not yet done a Sonic RPG.

The Sonic Team boss also said that they would "hopefully" start working on a Sonic RPG in the near future. However, he added that there is nothing "concrete" right now regarding that particular endeavor, according to IGN.

So far, the only Sonic RPG that has been released was Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, which was a game released for the Nintendo DS in 2008. But it was not Sonic Team that worked on that project, rather it was Mass Effect and Dragon Age developer BioWare.

For an RPG, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was fun in the beginning but failed to maintain its appeal to players after the first few hours. This was because there were a lot of other superior role-playing games on the platform available at the time.

The closest that the Sonic Team has gone to incorporating RPG-esque elements to a game that it developed was in the franchise's first 3D game, Sonic Adventure. Iizuka also explained that after work on NiGHTs into Dreams, he approached Naka and proposed that Sonic Adventure be an RPG-style game.

While the Sonic Team has not made an RPG game from the blue hedgehog's franchise, it has worked on other RPG titles such as the aforementioned Nights into Dreams and the Phantasy Star Online series.

Issues With the Endeavor

Throughout the years, the release of Sonic games has been either a hit or a miss and can either be great or awful. This is particularly true for the titles that were released after 2001 but they can still be good news for fans of the series, said Rock Paper Shotgun.

Another issue that popped up with Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is that it resulted in a lawsuit by former Archie Comics scribe Ken Penders. He accused the game of outright copyright infringement.

While that particular case was dismissed, it did lead to Penders suing over the rights to his work on the Sonic comics, which he ended up winning. This means that the vast majority of original characters who were created in the early comics are now owned by him.

But since it has been more than a decade since the last RPG game in the Sonic franchise, fans are arguing that it was time to have another go at it. The series itself has a bit of lore that can be used for an extensive story campaign, according to ComicBook.