Remember Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood? Maybe you don’t for various reasons, but the DS game was the first ever Sonic the Hedgehog RPG — and the last.
However, in a recent interview with Good Vibes Gaming, Sonic Team boss Takashi Iizuka spoke about his desire to make an RPG starring Sonic, admitting that he has asked himself “Why haven’t we done a Sonic RPG in all this time?”. It seems like Iizuka-san might have forgotten about Sonic Chronicles, but we’ll let him off — it was developed by BioWare, after all.
Iizuka-san told Good Vibes Gaming that he “really like(s) role-playing games. The RPG format is a lot of fun,”. And with the Sonic series being over 30 years old, Iizuka has been wondering why Sega hasn’t “done a Sonic RPG”. He’s hopeful, at least:
“So I’d like to hopefully work on a Sonic RPG at some point before I retire from Sega. But you know, that’s just a dream right now… there are no concrete plans at this point.”
The topic came up as one of Good Vibes Gaming’s subscribers submitted a question about Sega’s talented RPG developers; Atlus, the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona developer is a subsidiary of the company, and RGG Studio — the team behind Like a Dragon (Yakuza) — is another division within Sega.
So it makes total sense. Sega has a pretty good history in the genre, too, with both Phantasy Star and the Shining series being two of its classic franchises, albeit the latter through publishing.
Sonic’s speed might not seem suited to the methodical turn-based combat of a traditional RPG, but we rather liked Sonic Chronicles here at Nintendo Life. That said, the wider critical reception wasn’t exactly glowing, so perhaps with Sega and Sonic Team at the helm, a second shot at a Sonic RPG might be much more well-received.
Last summer, Did You Know Gaming spoke to some of the people who worked on the DS RPG, and uncovered some never-before-seen details on a potential sequel.
