Game Informer has continued with its Sonic Superstars coverage and has revealed a new female character to the franchise whose name is Trip and who joins both Fang the Hunter and Dr. Eggman in antagonising Sonic and co. throughout their new adventure. Trip was a joint design between Sonic Team head, Takashi Iizuka, and Arzest president and Sonic co-creator, Naoto Ohshima. Here’s how Trip came about:
“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.”
“We sent visuals back and forth and had an ongoing dialogue about what the personality should be like,” Ohshima says. “Ideas came up for the character’s actions and themes, like an armored lizard and the ouroboros. I worked on the design while discussing the ideas with Iizuka-san.””When you look at her, obviously she’s covered in armor, and the reason why she’s covered in armor in the game is the base of her character is a sungazer lizard in English,” Iizuka says. “In Japanese, it’s more direct – it’s literally ‘armored lizard’ in Japanese. But the sungazer is that animal that was being referenced for the deign of Trip.”
“The team wanted to show that Trip is not that usual enemy, and we wanted to introduce her in a way that’s not the obvious ‘Oh, I’m super strong’ way,” Iizuka says. “When we presented Trip in the very beginning, I think she even falls on her face in the very first scene that you see her in. The first thing I think people will be thinking is, ‘Who is she, and why is she a super strong enemy? What’s going on?’ We wanted to introduce the character in that way to make it different from how enemies have always been presented in Sonic games.”
“We think as people enjoy watching Trip and watching her go through the story as an enemy, they’ll really appreciate her as one of the enemies.”
The way I see it, Tripp will either become the true final boss or the hidden playable character: there is no in between here