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. 🙂

Wait a minute, you’re not Sonic, this is impossible!

Well that looks like Sonic because those characters above were designed by Naoto Oshima, known as the original character designer of Sonic, Eggman, and others from Sonic 1, all the way to his departure from Sega to form Artoon (and its successor Arzest where he now resides) in 1999 after Sonic Adventure was released.

This is for a game called Terra Battle, which is by Mistwalker for mobile devices, created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy. Arzest even contributed to the game earlier, credited for “Illustration and graphic design for monsters, scenery, etc”. Oshima contributed these guest character designs for a Daily Quest in the game as shown, which will start its rotation next Friday.

What I can’t help but wonder, is why these look so similar to Yuji Uekawa’s artwork, especially in the original Sonic Adventure. What do you folks think about this?