We are quickly closing in on 2025' next high-profile arcade racer, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and SEGA keeps adding more and more characters to its rapidly expanding roster. Those loaded up on the game's Season Pass and DLC will see the likes of Steve and Alex from Minecraft, SpongeBob SquarePants and Persona 5's Joker all heading to the track, but none of them will be able to utter a word. It's a strange omission, but Takashi Iizuka has been on hand to explain why all the wider characters are keeping quiet.
In a new interview with Destructoid, the Sonic Team head explained that there's already a lot of interaction between the racers, so asking the wider studios to also add voice lines for each character would have expanded "the scope of the review that we’ll have to ask the external companies," and potentially made things "difficult" in the process.
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On top of that, Iizuka claimed that the development team was keen to focus their attention on the Sonic characters first and foremost, ensuring that the interactions between them were nailed down before worrying about the wider cast. "They really had to focus, put all the effort into Sonic," he explained, "and they had to give up on the non-Sonic characters".
Now sure, we won't be all that torn up about not hearing dialogue from PAC-MAN and a Minecraft Creeper, but don't you think it'll look a little weird to have the likes of Yakuza's Kasuga Ichiban silent for the whole race? We'll just have to wait and see.
SEGA is kicking off a CrossWorlds Open Network Test on Switch later this week (from 29th August - 1st September), and pre-loads are now live. This'll be your last chance to check the game out before it launches on 25th September, with nine courses and seven different CrossWorlds at your pre-release disposal. Let's hope that our screams of excitement are loud enough to drown out the uncanny silence from select racers.