Sonic Team Lead Takashi Iizuka asked a poetic question: “How did we get to the point where we haven’t had an RPG in thirty years?”

Sonic is considered one of SEGA’s core franchises, so the Japanese publisher is doing everything it can to keep the public’s attention. However, the super-fast hedgehog hasn’t made much of an appearance in the RPG genre. There was one RPG, though, and that was Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the Nintendo DS in 2008. But it wasn’t made by Sonic Team, so it wasn’t an in-house development. (But it might come as a big surprise who did: BioWare!)

Good Vibes Gaming interviewed Iizuka, who said the following: “Personally, I like role-playing games. The RPG game format is a lot of fun, and I even thought to myself, ‘you know, we haven’t made a Sonic RPG in 30 years,’ and I asked myself, ‘why haven’t we made a Sonic RPG in all that time? How did we get to 30 years without RPGs? So hopefully, before I retire from Sega, I’d like to work on a Sonic RPG. But, you know, that’s just a dream right now, there are no concrete plans at this point.

It wouldn’t be easy to make something in the genre that would fit Sonic, especially if it wasn’t a handheld-sized project (a Nintendo DS game is nowhere near the size of a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 title). An RPG tends to be slower paced. Sonic is fast. Perhaps if Sonic Team were to think about an action RPG, it could be done without sacrificing the franchise’s speed.

Meanwhile, Sonic Team’s next game is a new version of Sonic Generations, Sonic X Shadow Generations, released in 2011 and due out on October 25 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. Shadow will be a new playable character with his own story mode.

Source: VGC