In a follow-up to the story of Naoto Oshima creating new characters for a Daily Quest in Mistwalker’s Terra Battle for mobile devices, we now have clean high-res grabs of the artwork of the characters, and our not-Sonic the Hedgehog (the quest is called “Hedgehog Hullabaloo”, so I assume he is a Hedgehog himself?) is named Knack. No, not that Knack.
Here are the other three characters:
The Chaos-like character is named Viscount O’eyl (looking behind him, has he been playing Splatoon?), the purple cat is, well, Kat, and finally is the other Sonic-like monkey, known as none other than Wukong, named and designed after Sun Wukong, the main character in the legendary Chinese novel Journey to the West, and what’s EXTRA special, is that said novel was adapted into a very familiar property, you’re probably familiar with this name; Dragon Ball!
So we have Dragon Ball, then comes Sonic who shares a lot of similarities with characters, objects, and certain transformations, NOW we have Oshima himself giving the world his own actual adaptation of the character that was Goku’s main inspiration (notice how Goku has all of his letters in the name Wukong backwards?). Full circle much?
Major thanks to duckroll at NeoGAF for taking all of the screenshots above. 🙂
I have to admit the designs look cool, especially Viscount and Wukong, hope this guy still worked for Sega.
Nope, Oshima has LONG left Sega. He and numerous others left just after Sonic Adventure came out to form Artoon. Eventually Artoon were bought by AQ Interactive and at around 2010 they were absorbed into them. In that same year, all the founders and numerous others left to form Arzest and are still there today.
Artoon made games like Pinobee (their first game), Blinx the Time Sweeper, Blue Dragon, and Yoshi’s Topsy-Turvy and Yoshi’s Island DS with Nintendo. Arzest has worked with Nintendo numerous times, their first work was three mini-games in Wii Play Motion, and their only full original retail game so far has been Yoshi’s New Island on 3DS.
Arzest are credited as working on Terra Battle as “Illustration and graphic design for monsters, scenery, etc.”, this being part of it.
One of the founders of Arzest and Artoon is also Yoji Iishi, who directed and designed the original Flicky arcade game! And the director of Yoshi’s New Island is Masahide Kobayashi, who was one of the directors of Knuckles Chaotix!
Huh, fascinating.
I knew he was no longer at Sega but thanks for the info!
Wow, the circles just keep on coming! XD
Love the splatoon joke XD
Knack? Woah, buddy! You really changed! You’re no longer a sniper weasel! And you’re not purple! And you lost your ha- ohhh, wait. That was NACK.
I like this guy’s design… though if he were to be given an official species, I think he should be a porcupine. Man, I wish he was an actual Sonic character. And because of his origin (Terra Battle), wouldn’t it be badass if he could be one with the earth? Not just digging-wise, like Knuckles, but more so… controlling land.
Wukong looks like Monkey Khan
I was thinking the exact same thing
With a more Sega Sonic design anyway.
This is a very rare example of one of the creators of Sonic making their own fan character!
really? xD knack.. omfg so since they got rid of fangs old name i guess he decided to use it for this character instead.
Hmf….I’ve been wanting a official Monkey character in the sonic cast for awhile now, and it ends up NOT being in a Sonic game, lol.
That big blue guy’s AWESOME! Kinda reminds me of Chaos… 4? The one that had the one big claw arm but otherwise looked like a bigger, buffer Chaos 0…
Also Super Sonic was actually designed by the guy who designed the Dragon Ball characters so no, it’s no coincidence there’s similarities.
Source, plz. I think everybody would know it if Toriyama actually did work on this series.
Unfortunately I can’t remember where I saw it, it might have been Sonic Gems Collection or something similar but a Google search is only bringing up Sonic himself and a crapton of character creator tools and stuff. See for yourself, if you don’t believe me:
Staff Edit: Please don’t post long links.
Everyone wouldn’t necessarily know though, funnily enough, there aren’t that many people who bother to research things like that.
pretty cool! i wanted to know their names! thanks!
now i look closely.. Wukong has pretty similar hands and arms than the werehog..