The last 20 years have seen more and more video games making their way to movie and television screens, with studios trying to translate aspects of games likeHalo,Mortal Kombat, andUnchartedwith varying success. It’s rare, though, for the inspiration to go the other way and see development teams attempt to bring aspects of said adaptation into new games in notable ways. However, that seems to be exactly what theSonic Frontiersteam is doing with the titular hedgehog’s new game as its director says the team is pulling from Sonic’s recent films for the game’s combat system.
Sonic Frontiersis the latest game starring Sega’s iconic hedgehog and will mark his official debut on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game will see Sonic, along with his friends Tails and Amy, pulled into a wormhole that dumps them on the lush and mysterious Starfall Islands. The heroes will need to journey across the islands to find the Chaos Emeralds to get back home while also contending with the hostile robots patrolling Starfall Islands.
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The last month has seenSonic Teamroll out the first, in-depth look at the nextSonicgame, giving players a proper look at Starfall Islands and the team talking about some of their influences in development. As mentioned above, one of those influences has been Sonic’s recent leap to movie screens and how his portrayal there has been used to craft the game’s combat.Sonic Frontiersdirector Morio Kishimoto confirmed this in a recent interview with IGN, saying the films, especially the first one, have made the team change their approach to Sonic’s combat and traversal.
“The first [Sonic the Hedgehog] movie really caught me by surprise,” Kishimoto told IGN. “We have been focusing on how Sonic is supposed to run, jump and fight within our games, but the movie showed us an entirely new approach. They came up with a great interpretation of Sonic, which became a huge inspiration forSonic Frontiers’ development.”
While this may be surprising for some players to hear, this is likely to become more common as film studios continue looking for video games they feel are worth bringing to the big screen. The first six months of 2022 have already seenSonic the Hedgehog 2,Uncharted,The Cuphead Show, and theHaloTV series release, with some more well-received than others. There’s plenty more coming, too, with adaptations of games likeBorderlandsandThe Last of Usdue out in the near future.
Sonic’s films, in particular, have proven to be a hit on the big screen, withSonic the Hedgehog 2being more well-received by critics and audiences than the first film. Keeping this in mind, it makes sense for Sonic Team to take a look at the films to see what parts of Paramount Picture’s iteration of the hedgehog worked and if anything from the films could translate to the games. The statements made by Kishimoto seem to indicate that some elements from the films are working well inSonic Frontiers, though players will have to wait to see for themselves.
Sonic Frontiersis scheduled to release in late 2022 on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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