The executive producer behind the Sega produced April Fools visual novel, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, reveals that Charmy Bee and Cream the Rabbit were planned, but ended up being cut from the murder mystery party. Earlier this month, Sega released a brand-new Sonic the Hedgehog visual novel for April Fools' Day, teasing that the series would be going in a “new direction” after much feedback. It then turns out that the “new direction” was “killing” off the blue blur in a free visual novel.
While announced as a joke, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog was an unexpected hit with fans and critics. Despite the strange premise, the visual novel wasn’t just a one-off prank, but a rather sincere game that put the extended cast at the forefront, offering entertaining dialogue and a well-written and simple murder mystery to solve.. Despite the game boasting an impressive cast of characters, there were two that ended up not being invited to Amy Rose’s birthday party, as revealed by Sonic Social Media manager and executive producer, Katie Chrzanowski.
This was revealed in an interview between Chrzanowski and Kotaku, regarding the development process the social media team went through to make the visual novel. One of the first things that they settled on was the humor and interactions for The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. This includes nailing down roles for characters like Espio, Blaze, and Vector, with Espio being considered to roleplay as a doctor instead of a poet at one point. However, there is one noticeable absence from the Chaotix trio, Charmy Bee, which Chrzanowski cites as him being too young to be participating in a murder mystery game.
The last canonical age that was given for Charmy was him being six years old, as detailed in the manual for Sonic Heroes. The other noticeable absence, Cream the Rabbit, was also cut for the same reason. Blaze and Amy are her best friends, and while she gets mentioned in Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, she's not seen anywhere. According to Chrzanowski, both Cream and Charmy were “too young to dabble in the workings of murder,” though is happy with the cast that the game ended up with and was able to shine a spotlight on each one without dragging the story down.
Aside from these two characters being cut, Chrzanowski described the inspiration for having a completely new player character solve the mystery alongside Tails. There was some discussion about making one of the other characters playable, but realized that the first-person perspective limited their on-screen appearances, citing having the extended Sonic cast’s interactions viewed by a third party would be easier to build. This of course has led to the player character, named Barry according to internal files and the reveal trailer, getting tons of fan art, which the dev team greatly appreciates too.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is available now on PC.
Source: Kotaku