I just really hope they select games that have a good story or even better have a great story that and attach it to some IP that has very little storyline. People come for the IP but stay for the story. Unfortunately they’ll probably just pick the game with the largest fan base, attach some well known actors to it and then cram a bunch of nostalgic references into it and call it a day. Especially since the success of sonic means a lot of money will be sunk into it and a lot of suits will try to push dumb shit through.
Seriously though: the dumbest answer that might work is Daytona USA. A live-action anime that’s relentlessly cheerful and energetic. Like the Speed Racer movie, but with less melodrama, less surrealism, and not two hours long. Establish a rivalry with no villains, some stakes low enough that the protagonist might lose, and the sort of heightened realism you get in musicals. If the pit crew do a choreographed spin before changing the tires, you think nothing of it, because it happened in time with the soundtrack.
Genuinely not a bad idea, if you lean into the nearly transhumanist power fantasy of a guy taking on an alien armada with a jetpack and a rifle. It’s an excuse for ridiculous set-pieces where a proper aircraft or vehicle would not work. You can’t sustain that continuously for two whole acts - but fortunately, every time the guy stops, he is just a guy. The difference between standing around talking and zooming away at face-melting speeds is whether he feels like it.
The major downside is that Tony Stark’s already been there.
I was thinking something more like a sci-fi, existential horror film where Harrier is the only force preventing the utter ruination of the universe by an endless horde of Lovecraftian monsters, and his loneliness and indestructibility drives him to extremes, but the Iron Man-esque angle could work, too.
Ooh. So the jetpack-and-rifle angle emerge as he figures out he’s got an Unbreakable situation. Some tinkerer builds increasingly glass-cannon hot-rod fighter jets that are never as maneuverable as he wants. All his miraculous close scrapes in crash landings are really a result of whatever force trapped him in this surreal choke-point holding back the forces of chaos. Once he figures out he’s cursed with immortality, he doesn’t care if his guns leak deadly radiation or glow white-hot, so long as they spray plasma downrange. All of it is just a means to deliver him in-person to whatever elder god is trying to swallow Earth. So he can twist its dicks off.
Which is quite a thing to imagine, from squid-faced-Khorne’s perspective. You’ve found a thriving civilization that’s barely scooting around its solar system. They couldn’t even block your portal on their homeworld. Seems like easy pickings, maybe a few million scorpion-horse-locust minions killed by their measly bullets, then you get centuries of driving people mad and cracking open juicy mineral-rich planets. Your divine adversary blessed one guy. Token resistance. An admission of futility. But… your dudes keep failing. Plenty get past him, but none manage to stop him. You send the big fuckers straight for him, really nip that in the bud, and hours later he’s right back up in another flimsy contraption. They can smack him to the ground and he just runs closer. You are a four-dimensional entity older than this universe. You have despoiled countless galaxies guarded by valiant forces. You were not previously aware that you could sweat.
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