Trivia / Sonic Forces

• Ascended Fanon: The Custom Hero feature lets you create an original character to play as, making it possible for virtually every Sonic fan character ever created, including Sonic.exe, Coldsteel, Nazo, Ashura, etc to appear in an official Sonic game if you so choose. Then they went and added in a t-shirt bearing Sanic.
• Colbert Bump:
  • People have looked up Mongolian Throat Singing videos after Sonic said it's his favorite music type in the Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter Takeover.
  • The game itself received one when it was Rereleased for Free on the PlayStation 4 via PS Plus in March 2020, which eventually led to it being the second-highest downloaded game on the service of all-time.
• Content Leak: Some retailers released the game early in late October 2017, leading to a few lucky players revealing important plot points to The Internet, such as why Shadow the Hedgehog is evil.
• Dueling Games: With Super Mario Odyssey, fittingly enough. Both were set to be released in the holiday season of 2017 (within a week of each other even: Mario - October 27th and Sonic: November 7th in North America and 9th overseas), and both aimed to take their respective series in a bold new direction. Odyssey ended up being much-better received than Forces in the long run.
• Dummied Out: There is an unused piece of dialogue in Null Space that is inaccessible by normal means^note The dialogue trigger is still in the stage, but since your starting position is beyond the trigger, it doesn't play. There is also an unused special Boost animation for Shadow that looks a lot like Chaos Control.
• Milestone Celebration: Alongside Sonic Mania, this game serves as the celebration of the franchise's 25th anniversary.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Kotaro Nakamura succeeds the late Chikao Ōtsuka as the voice of Eggman.
  • This is the first mainline game to feature Colleen O'Shaughnessey as Tails, having assumed the role from Kate Higgins for Sonic Boom and all later releases back in 2014. The same is true of Matthew Mercer as Espio, who replaced Troy Baker beginning with Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
• Pre-Order Bonus: Pre-ordering the game physically nets you a Bonus Edition that comes packaged with a controller skin for the console that you pre-ordered on, as well as a pack of outfits and accessories for the Custom Character based on Beat, Amitie, AiAi, Joker, NiGHTS, and Shadow the Hedgehog.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Tyler Smyth of Dangerkids, who wrote and performed Infinite's theme song, is a life-long fan of the blue blur.
  • Aoi Yūki, the voice actor of the female Avatar is also a life-long fan of the series. She previously voiced Sticks the Badger in the Japanese dub of Sonic Boom.
• Trolling Creator:
  • Shortly after the first trailer was revealed, Ian Flynn, writer of the Archie Sonic comic book, vaguely teased on Twitter that he might be writing the game. However, it would later be revealed that Sonic Forces Producer Shun Nakamura, who previously wrote the infamous Sonic 06, also revealed had returned to write Forces, with Eitaro Toyoda and Makoto Goya on script duty and Ken Pontac and Warren Graff, writers of the previous three Sonic games, handling localization. However, Ian Flynn did end up writing the prologue comics.
  • When asked what Infinite's species is, the official Sonic The Hedgehog account said, "Bad Guy".
• Troubled Production:
  • While nowhere near as bad as Sonic 06 or Sonic Boom's productions, Takashi Iizuka has admitted in notes within the insert of the game’s soundtrack CD release that the development of Forces wasn’t exactly smooth, stating that there were major changes made to the game during development and that there were even times when the project’s future was called into question.
  • According to this CGWorld article, the game and the engine were in development at the same time, resulting in a lot of trial and error.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Ian Flynn didn't receive any note on how Infinite's sword was supposed to look like when he received the script for Rise of Infinite. He was going to give the villain a Black Sword, an object from Shadow the Hedgehog as an Easter Egg, but he then received the proper notes (BumbleKast Q&A for May 31st, 2021).
  • Null Space was potentially going to be longer than in the final game, with the stage having a handful of unused Sonic dialogue and concept art of Infinite manifesting inside it.
  • The Episode Shadow DLC has leftovers implying a larger scale too. There is unused dialogue ripped directly from the Looming Shadow comic, and of Shadow addressing a "whole horde of chumps" and being surprised when they put up a fight (possibly the Jackal Squad). There's also evidence that Shadow would have Chaos Control as a special move, as there's an unused animation and hacking the game to increase Shadow's boost causes an unused sound effect to play.
  • Lines from an early script of the game indicate Mephiles the Dark was originally going to appear alongside Shadow, Chaos, Zavok, and Metal Sonic, at least during the penultimate stage.
• Word of Saint Paul:
  • Nibroc-Rock, a 3D artist who did character renders with artist Adam Bryce Thomas for the Sonic Forces tie-in comics, tweeted that the names Uno, Deux, Trois, Quatre, Cinq, and Sei were approved for the six members of Infinite's former Jackal Squad. However, they hardly have any screentime in their comic (the last two are only silhouettes) and don't even appear in the game proper outside a brief mention.
  • Shiro Maekawa, who wrote the scenario for Shadow and Silver's stories in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) but is no longer associated with Sega, believes that Blaze's absence in this story has to do with the ending of '06. He has yet to elaborate.
• Working Title: According to an early script released a year before the game came out the game was titled "Sonic Wars" but was changed to appeal to a younger audience seeing how some countries would most likely ban the game just for that title alone.

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