"Sonic Blitz" softlaunched on mobile devices, digital collectible card game by Rovio

Good folks at Sonic Stadium uploaded about 20 minutes of gameplay featuring the tutorial.

It looks...perfectly passable. Nothing special but a decent time waster.

 

Oh God. I just realized something. I'm still pretty sure most of this stuff isn't gonna be approved by SEGA. This isn't a "oh yay we're finally getting the characters back" moment, this is a "someone at Rovio fucked up BIG time" moment. They're gonna step in and make Rovio remove all this, without a single word for the public. The backlash is gonna be insufferable. It's not gonna be Rally 4 Sally, it's gonna be Armed Revolt 4 Sally

 

Looks pretty neat honestly but let's be real - it's a Sonic mobile game. It's going to be extremely predatory in its monetisation and ultimately very unfun for F2Ps once the honeymoon period is over. I'll give it a download when it launches globally (*side-eyeing Sonic Rumble* if it ever launches globally), but I won't spend in a penny on this unless I feel like I want to rather than that I'm being pressured to.

As far as the non-canon stuff goes, I could see that being the case, but I think anyone with a model and/or render may be safe (modern Mighty and Fang would be craaaaazy though).

 

I just wanna see what happens, regardless of WHAT happens.

 

I'm speaking mostly about the text strings characters here, yeah. Also, I don't know why we're calling that Fang model "modern Fang"? He looks identical to regular fang, just with an eye color.

 

You're right about the design being all wrong, but Ian Flynn didn't draw it.

 

They were being facetious to follow up an earlier joke, don't worry.

 

Isn't this just the plot of SatAM?

 

I don't remember them being armed in most episodes.

 

Do water balloon catapults count?

 

No.

 

waiting for the people who are good at snap to tell me if the game play is good or not.

 

I would never ever, spend a single cent on what is basically a gacha game for Sonic characters, but I would not be surprised if this is what brings back an insane amount of lore and redesigns, even if none of it is "canon" to the main titles.

This is also the most likely form any of these characters are going to ever return in, precisely because it has practically 0 impact on the lore or mainline titles. If anything, this is a solid testing ground for social media's demands and reactions to certain characters.

Mighty was pretty much extinct from the franchise... until he wasn't. Now I see toys of him on the shelf as if he's somehow merchandisable despite 20+ years of neglect. I've long since learned not to assume anything is impossible so long as there aren't any signifigant legal/licensing barriers (Re: Sonic 3's original OST), and that's likely only a major problem for Penders era characters. Sonic Team is unlikely to veto other characters for some silly monetized gacha game, as the genre is designed to exploit, even test the waters, for this kind of nostalgia.

Typically, they just want the right to veto elements that go against their vision on any one given project, and those visions will change from one game to another.

 

I agree, this feels like a natural reaction to fans getting upset over the Freedom Fighters not being in IDW, or any new game lacking characters showing up in the story. Sega can now gauge interest in characters based on how popular certain cards are (collectors vs their actual usefulness in-game).

This isn't really the same thing as a gacha game, though. Or at least it won't be if they allow you to purchase singles.

 

At least back when I was playing it in 2020ish, Forces/Speed Battle/Whatever that predatory piece of slop is now called worked on a card system to upgrade characters. If this lets you buy singles, it'll be at absolutely extortionate prices, I bet. The option will be to either shell out big bucks to be guaranteed the cards you want, or shell out even bigger bucks over time and without noticing for a chance at it.

 

I remember Rovio being known for having really exploitative monetization.

 

Angry Birds fan here!

This is true and it will be present here too. Welcome to the world of Rovio...

 

If I'm honest, I think fanservice is all that most of the people asking for obscure other-continuity characters actually want. I've seen Sally, Bunnie, Antoine and Nicole's character arcs, and while I'd love remakes that make them, y'know, actually good, I'd feel satiated with just a token acknowledgement that they exist every once in a while.

Like, okay, you can't do the Drakon or Iron Dominion without some major plot shit going down, but people are almost always asking for the friends. The conversation about implementing Sally or Tekno or whomever always seems to jump right to revolving around them being permanent active additions to the cast taking a role in the main plot of major games or something, when simply using them to populate the world serves a function of its own. A character profile, a few pieces of Sonic Channel art, skins for mobile and racing games, maybe even a plushie or two, and you're all good! Maybe if Toyoda wants to write a cover story with them he can, maybe they can be in another visual novel, whatever.

And none of this strictly needs to be "canon", does it? You don't even need to specify, as long as you keep it domestic and don't do bombastic alien invasion stories and the like. Cosmo is honestly the most locked-down of these due to her innate tragedy and ties to a grand space opera, but it sounds like there are issues within SoJ that make most of Sonic X even less possible than Archie to begin with.

Frankly, while I understand the need to establish a canon at all, it utterly baffles me that they went and said Murder of Sonic wasn't canon, because in both that game's case and the thing I'm proposing, saying nothing at all and not caring whether fans think they're canon or not would only improve things, even if you never do anything with them. Because Murder of Sonic was a bottle plot! They were never gonna see any of those guys again, and yet for some reason that non-canon side game has gotten plenty of representation and fanservice for its characters in the years since. I don't see what's so hard about Sally, Antoine and their wives occupying the same territory.

It reminds me a lot of their approach to other playable characters. People weren't clamoring for radically-different gameplay styles (necessarily), they just wanted to be in-control of someone other than Sonic, and for that character to matter. The "we have to figure out Sonic's gameplay before letting anyone else take the reigns" excuse really falls apart if you consider they coulda just made them play identical to Sonic if it were that big a deal. People would have complained way less if that were the case, even if it isn't the ideal.

 

My liiiittle Tzaarath, my little tzaarath, aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh.........

 

I doubt that SEGA didn't know about the DiC characters being added in. I'm not an expert on game development, but there must have been some mention of them in the design doc that Rovio showed to SEGA prior to this game being greenlit, right?