With most video games (and Western titles are notorious for this), the default language when you pop the disk in is whatever language your console is set at, and from here, this is the language for the entire game. Many Eastern games, apart from anything Square Enix so much as breathes on, have the ability to change the audio in the options menu, allowing Western fans to listen to the original Japanese audio if they so wish. But otherwise, the only way to change the language is to go back to your console’s language options and change it, which is a pain. And even then, most NTSC-U games don’t contain the programming for more uncommon languages, such as Cantonese, so you’re just out of luck there.
However, Sonic Forces gives lets you change both the audio and text languages from the get-go. In the options menu on the start page, you can easily pick from a long list of both audio and text languages. So, if you want to give yourself a headache like I did, you can pop in your North American copy of Sonic Forces, set the text language to French and set the audio to Japanese. There’s a lot of benefits to this separate audio/text function, more than just giving foreign language learners an excuse to game instead of reading dictionaries. Over 25% of the United States identifies as Hispanic, and though many Hispanics speak English just as well as non-Hispanics, many do not. It isn’t uncommon for Hispanic families to be made up of a mix of English and non-English speakers, and Sonic Forces is a game that appeals to this demographic. A child, who goes to American schools and never learned how to read Spanish because his teachers were too busy being paranoid that his last name would prevent him from learning English, could play the game with his grandfather, who never learned English because he immigrated so late in his life. The game text can be set to English, and the audio can be set to Spanish. Problem solved. And now these two, who likely had little opportunity to bond, now have something fun they can share together. This same scenario works for other immigrant populations too, from Saudi Arabia to China.
Overall, the game was a 3D sonic game, just as enjoyable as Sonic Generations. If you walked into this game expecting something as groundbreaking as Skyrim, then you must be new to the Sonic fandom. Welcome. We have club meetings every Tuesday at 4. Make sure you check out that images tab when you google us. But with Sonic Forces, what makes it so amazing in my book, is that the developers took the initiative to think about other people. The game was fun in a lot of ways, a nice weekend-game to relax and shove some Doritos in your face. It’s not Wolfenstein: The New Order. It’s not Final Fantasy XV. However, it is a game that can be played by thousands more than those games, and at the end of the day, the more people that can play your game, the most money you make, and the more fans you gain.