Sonic Superstars

Gamernyc78 · 2 Aug 2023

Meet Trip, The First New Sonic Character Created By Naoto Ohshima In Decades
by Brian Shea on Aug 02, 2023 at 01:00 PM

PLATFORM PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
PUBLISHER Sega
DEVELOPER Arzest, Sonic Team
RELEASE 2023
Sonic Superstars takes us back to the 2D era of the franchise, where the gameplay is more straightforward, the story premises are simpler, and the character roster is small. That's certainly the case for the playable roster, featuring just Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy, but it's also true for the villain roster. Sonic Superstars sees the return of Dr. Eggman, as well as Fang the Hunter (previously known as Nack the Weasel and Fang the Sniper) from Sonic Triple Trouble and Sonic the Fighters, but they're not alone. They're joined by Trip, a new character introduced into the Sonic universe through this game.
But with both Dr. Eggman and Fang already set to hassle Sonic and friends, one could argue that duo alone is enough to keep the heroes' hands full. But Sonic Team and Arzest wanted to lay it on even thicker for the Sonic squad. "When we think about the three enemy characters in the game, we have Dr. Eggman, we have Fang, and we have Trip," Sonic Team creative officer Takashi Iizuka says. "Eggman is kind of always there in Sonic games as a villain, and he's always there causing problems. But we really wanted to revive one of the older, more minor characters from the Classic series. That's where the idea to bring Fang back into the picture came up. So we have Eggman, who's always there, then we have Fang, who's back after a long time of being gone, but we also wanted to introduce a new character as well to go with, like, the old and new in addition to the always-there Eggman."

The Creation of Trip

Trip joins the roster of enemies as a joint creation between Iizuka and Arzest president and Sonic co-creator Naoto Ohshima, who oversaw much of Sonic Superstars' development. "When speaking with Ohshima-san about making a new game together, we wanted to have a new story," Iizuka says. "We thought about, well, what story can we have? What characters are going to be there? And how's this all going to play out? As we were talking about that, we really felt we needed a new character for the story – we want to introduce a new character. And we don't just want to have a character with no background with nothing going on that's just going to 'boop' pop up in the world. We really want to show a character with some kind of unique characteristics, some character backgrounds, some storytelling elements that are going to make the character unique and stand out and be a character that people can kind of relate to and empathize with and enjoy as a character in the world, not just because they're there, but because they mean something to the world."