Sonic Boom Team Expresses 'Discomfort' With Character Designs; Team Head Takashi Iizuka Disappointed By The Results
Every Sonic fan around the world seems to want the "Sonic" they know and love back again. Sonic Team just found out the hard way and the team's head, Takashi Iizuka, didn't like it at all.
The developers of Sonic Boom series, Sonic Team Corp. expressed their discomfort regarding the character designs of Sonic and his friends. In an interview with GameSpot, Bob Rafei, head of Big Red Button studios who is responsible for the Sonics redesigned look told GameSpot that.
"Sonic Team and Sega were very open-minded about our approach, and accepting of a lot of things we were doing. Ultimately, because of some of our really wacky ideas, we did find the boundaries of things we could and couldn't do."
"We experimented with different colours and surface features on the characters, such as fur or scales, and quickly Sonic Team came back with their discomfort of that. They were great guardrails for us to understand when we were deviating too far from the character. Without their input, the character would have been a lot more alien and different from what Sonic is known for."
When Takeshi Iizuka went to Los Angeles to see the progress of Sonic Boom. Takeshi felt disappointed at the whole group as Rafei pointed out that he couldn't look directly to the screen because of how horrible the designs were.
"I felt sorry for the guy, sometimes he couldn't actually look at the screen - it was too traumatic seeing all the crazy stuff we wanted to do."
"Over the course of that meeting, when we were coming up with new ideas, we had a very sincere conversation about why a character should or should not wear pants, and that was a very surreal moment in my life and my career, but it helped us understand the rules of clothing in this universe. Any small adjustment went a very long way, so we had to be very careful."
Sonic Boom is a transmedia franchise including 3DS and Wii U games as well as a new cartoon series. It was designed for western audiences and isn't planned for Japanese release. Sonic Team is currently working on a new Sonic game separate from the Sonic Boom franchise.
I hoped that Sonic Team has learned its lesson and must continue on to make progress and avoid another mistake in the future of Sonic Booooooooooooooom.
