Sonic Adventure 2 sounds like it’s going to have one of the darkest stories ever seen in a Sonic game. In an interview with fansite The Floating Island, voice actor and cast director Lani Minella spoke of some of the minor character roles in the upcoming Dreamcast game, and how challenging it was to record the huge script in a five-day period.
Minella, who voiced Rouge the Bat and Omochao among others, revealed some character traits that might help plot out the nature of Sonic Adventure 2’s storyline. “Shadow is a more laid back version of Sonic, Rouge is a sly spy with more than one side,” she said, noting that she couldn’t reveal too much about the game as that’s SEGA’s role.
“There are other characters like the President, Marie, the Secretary, Robotnik’s father and more, which all contribute to the storyline, which was pretty interesting,” Minella added. “The cinematics are good with lots of action and great graphics to add to the intrigue.”
Now this is facinating. A character called ‘Marie’? Could this be tied in to Sonic and Shadow’s rivalry? And the President (we assume of the USA) getting involved makes the whole affair sound rather tense. Most interestingly is the detail about ‘Robotnik’s father’… we wonder how that will tie in?
Pressed further, Minella said “No new major characters [besides Rouge and Shadow], but the role Robotnik’s father plays in the scheme of things is definitely not what you’d suspect. The dying Marie has a significant impact as well.”
So this Marie character is dying now, too? Blimey.
As well as her role in Sonic Adventure 2, Minella also lent her voice talents to – and directed – the first Sonic Adventure game as well as Sonic Shuffle. She recalls her time working on SA2 to be the most tiring. Rather than wrap up vocal recordings in a “long weekend” (a timeframe previously used by Sonic VA Ryan Drummond to illustrate the time it took to work on other Sonic games), Minella said, “Oh, it was a lot longer.
“By the scope of the script, it should have taken about 12 eight-hour days. Because they had people flying in from SF [San Francisco] and Japan at different times, they asked that I get it done in five days. We worked 60 hours in five days and the Sega producers were suffering from exhaustion. I got carpal tunnel out of running the stopwatch so repeatedly for as little as 0.5 second increments, and we did not stop for lunch.”
Minella added that to keep the cast and herself on track, she had to memorise the entire SA2 story script so she could read lines out loud to each actor to help direct them, before recording Rouge last. Talk about dedication!
Source: The Floating Island