 This video is sponsored by Squarespace, helping you to make pretty websites fast. Sonic Frontiers certainly looks familiar. A first proper look at the new game, shown off at the Game Awards, bears a striking resemblance to the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Sonic stands on a cliff edge overlooking a lush open world. He's pursued by a big, glowy robot. He takes a trip through some ancient ruins. None of these elements are distinctly unsonic, but the presentation does feel very familiar to Zelda fans. So why is Sonic Team leaning in this direction? Besides, of course, the fact that every game studio wants to make the next Breath of the Wild right now. Looking at the past few decades of Sonic titles, it's clear that the developers at Sonic Team have a special love for Zelda. Whether he's turning into a werewolf, swinging a magic sword, or literally dressing up in Link cosplay and collecting rupees, Sonic always seems keen to emulate the hero of Hyrule. Part of this is due to Sega's philosophy with Sonic, beat Nintendo. Catch up to what they're doing, do it better, win the console war. At least, that was the old strategy. In 2001, Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka was candid in an interview when he said, Since the beginning, Sega has been saying, We need to beat Nintendo. But my intention wasn't really to beat Nintendo, but to make games that could stand shoulder to shoulder with theirs. If you try to make the exact same thing, you'll never win. You've got to pursue a different path. That was our thinking when we made Sonic. But of course, when Miyamoto showed me new games like Mario 64, I realised we were lagging behind again. Just when I thought we were on par, he goes and puts out an amazing game like that. So when approaching Sonic games with a beat Nintendo mindset, Sega has often been on the back foot, responding to what new innovations Nintendo introduces and, ironically, for Sonic. Always being a bit too slow. In fact, the fallout from Super Mario 64 is an excellent example of Sega choosing to follow Nintendo's lead rather than try their own thing. Here, we can see definitively how Sega would rather copy Nintendo than embrace their own original ideas and how the entire modern Sonic era has been shaped by a desire to keep pace with Mario and Zelda in particular. Before we get into that, though, let's talk about Squarespace. With Squarespace, you can create websites for any purpose using a variety of sleek and stylish templates. With a few simple clicks, you can start putting together something that matches your unique vision no matter what you have in mind. We messed around with it for a while and were quickly able to make a site showing off some of our videos. The result looks very cool. Squarespace is offering 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. All you have to do is head over to squarespace.com forward slash video game story time or use the offer code video game story time at the point of purchase. Now, let's talk about how copying Nintendo has shaped the entire modern Sonic era. Prior to the game's release, Sega Technical Institute had been working on a brand new 3D game called Sonic Xtreme, which involved Sonic exploring floating shapes with shifting gravity. Sonic Xtreme was cancelled for various reasons which we won't go into here, and the next main series Sonic game, Sonic Adventure, instead borrows from Mario 64's approach to 3D platforming, albeit with a far greater focus on cinematic storytelling. Years later, Nintendo released Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, in which Mario explores a variety of spherical planets floating in space. A few years later, Sega released Sonic Lost World, a game about exploring cylinders floating in space. When asked about the similarities between these two titles, Sonic Lost World brand manager Derek Peel said, There is a lot of visual similarities, but I think what's different, what sets Sonic Lost World apart from Mario Galaxy, is that Sonic has his super-fast speed, and actually, if you go back to 1995, there was a game that didn't come out, but that had similar ties to the Mario type of exploration, and it's called Sonic Xtreme. So if you look further back, actually, Sonic had that same idea way back when. It's a great gameplay experience, and I think it's great that both Mario and Sonic are experiencing the same thing. While we are massively over-simplifying things here, it is interesting to note that Sega didn't consider the core concept within Sonic Xtreme as viable until Nintendo proved that it was possible to make it work. As if this wasn't enough, Lost World also features DLC in which Sonic literally runs through a pair of Nintendo games, Yoshi's Woolly World, and the Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword. Speaking of the decision to throw Sonic into Zelda and Yoshi games, longtime series producer Takashi Izuka said, The idea was there around half a year before the original game was completed. As Lost World was releasing on a Nintendo console, we wondered if we could collaborate on something together. Originally, we thought of putting the levels in the main game, but there wasn't time in the schedule they had to be distributed as additional DLC after the game's release. According to Izuka, the decision to merge Sonic and Zelda came specifically because these two franchises felt so incongruous. The game characteristics of The Legend of Zelda and Sonic are completely different, and I think it's a surprising collaboration in terms of different combinations. Plus, he says, he wanted to be able to use that iconic Zelda puzzle jingle. You know the one I mean. So the Sonic developers are clearly fans of Nintendo, and Sega is clearly watching Nintendo carefully to create a blueprint for the Sonic brand. Alas, though, in trying to keep up with Nintendo, there's one thing that Sonic Team can't emulate, Nintendo's quality control. When speaking with Shigeru Miyamoto all the way back in 2001, Yujinaka said, At Sega, as soon as we finished a game, it was kind of like, Alright, we're done, now let's release it. We would only spend a scant few weeks on balancing and fine-tuning. Later, I looked back on it and really wished we had spent more time on that. Had we been more careful and thoughtful there, we might have made better games, I think. I get the feeling your approach to that, Miyamoto, was different. Certainly the prospect of making a Breath of the Wild-inspired open-world Sonic game is daunting. Studios such as Game Freak have proven that if you aim for Breath of the Wild in terms of scope, but don't give the game more than a single year's development time, the result may not meet fan expectations. Indeed, even as recently as this year, Sega was accused of rushing out an unfinished game. In this case, a port of Sonic Colours. Although, for what it's worth, we were provided with a review copy of the Switch game by Sega, and it ran perfectly well for us a few months after launch. The good news is that Sega seems to be saying all the right things with Sonic Frontiers. In 2019, Aaron Weber said, Back in the day, it used to be, every year was a new Sonic game. And as a result of that, there were a number of times that because of that rushed production schedule, the quality of the games wasn't where it needed to be. So a couple of years ago, we said that's actually going to change going forward. We're going to put more time into things. That's going to mean that you need to wait longer between trailers and announcements and stuff like that. At around the same time, Takashi Yuzuka said that 2021 would be a big year for Sonic, hinting that the then-unannounced Sonic Frontiers would release to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega appears to have wisely chosen to delay the game further. Of course, Sonic Forces also had a relatively lengthy development cycle, but due to a number of factors, this extra time didn't necessarily lead to a well-received game. It seems that Sonic Team is hoping to learn from this experience. Said Yuzuka, Ever since the release of Sonic Forces, Sonic Team in Japan was trying many different approaches to deliver a next-gen Sonic experience. Celebrating 30 years of Sonic titles and thinking about what the modern gameplay experience should be for a Sonic title, we also needed to think about what path forward we should plan to take for the next decade. He is hoping then that with the extra time to work on this new game, Sonic Frontiers will live up to expectations. Even if it ends up being very derivative of Breath of the Wild, so long as it's actually good, that's no bad thing. As for the moral of the story, well, it would be nice if, instead of chasing whatever Nintendo is currently doing, Sega could instead embrace what makes Sonic unique. But maybe that's just wishful thinking from some of us who really only actually want Sonic Mania 2. Thanks for watching.