Team Sonic Racing: Overdrive is the most “in character” modern Sonic has been since the opening of Unleashed (where the rest of the game he was a generic anime nice guy).
Look at this cocky asshole. So casually full of himself.
I wish they’d make him expressive like this in the games, INCLUDING body language. Games are an audiovisual medium, you’d think something as big as Sonic would take advantage of that more
Maybe they could have facial features like his mouth and eyes represented by 2d textures like in Smash Bros.
Something like this. It would allow the animators to get super expressive AND would solve the problem of having Sonic’s mouth weirdly on only one side
Like this. Seriously, I understand why this happens, Sonic’s mouth is made part of the model and animation rig so there isn’t so much time spent on animating mouth movements but this just looks stupid. Sonic is a CARTOON character. He was DESIGNED to be extremely expressive. He was MEANT to have his face deform and shift to emote better. Not only does this look super dumb, it’s actively wasting his incredible character design.
Here’s another example of Sonic’s face done well, taken from @BlueParax on twitter.
Just animate mouth movements on a different layer. It’s arguably easier than just rigging a mouth model and trying to keep it in a shot so it doesn’t look stupid.
And as stupid as something like THIS
looks, I can at least forgive it because it seems to be going for that super cartoon-y exaggerated expression
