Stay on target

The upcoming Sonic Forces will let players create their own unique custom characters. This is something that could either be a big boon for the series or a (hilarious) disaster in the making.

Players will be able to select from seven different animal species. These include hedgehogs (naturally), bears, birds, cats, dogs, and wolves. Another neat thing is that your custom character will pop up during Sonic Forces‘ main storyline. It’s not clear how involved they will be, but expect them to at least appear during cutscenes. Each one of these critters has their own set of moves and gadgets. You can see a bit of how customization works in the trailer below.

Sega also released a short gameplay trailer featuring a custom character. Like Sonic Generations, Sonic Forces will have 2D sections. They still contain 3D graphics, but they’re presented from a two-dimensional perspective. You can see some of that action right below.

Custom character options are a big deal these days so having the feature in Sonic Forces should go over well. I can totally see people creating some truly cool or grotesque characters with this tool. Based on the first trailer in this post, it appears that customization options will be limited. This will no doubt help to keep folks from creating anything overtly offensive. This is still a kid’s game after all, and Sega is no doubt trying to keep that sort of stuff to a minimum.

However, the best/worst part about this is Sega seemingly celebrating the… passionate part of the Sonic fan base that deeply enjoys drawing their own awful characters, characters somehow even worse than Big the Cat. This isn’t surprising. The Sonic Twitter feed is all the official proof we need that Sega is aware of the dark meme parts of Sonic Culture. But canonizing what might as well be DeviantArt characters in the next big Sonic game is a new high/low.