During a recent Twitter exchange, Sonic Frontiers' director Morio Kishimoto responded to a fan's inquiry about the release of new games reminiscent of Sonic 4 Episode 1 & 2 (2D platformers released in 2010 by Dimps). He confirmed that there is indeed a 2D side-scrolling Sonic game (or games) in development in addition to the 3D ones, but didn't clarify further.The exchange goes like this: "When I was a kid, I loved playing Sonic 4 Episode 1 and Episode 2. I wonder if we will see games like those again? Maybe through a collaboration with Dimps? Thank you very much! (Sorry for the machine translation...)," the fan inquired, and Kishimoto replied as follows: "Hello. Thank you for translating your question to Japanese. A Dimps-developed Sonic game, you say. Well, In addition to 3D Sonic games, there are also side-scrolling Sonic games on the table, so please look forward to them!"More specifically, the director says that a side-scrolling game – or games as words work as singular and plural in Japanese – "also exists" or "Mo Aru/ã‚‚ã‚ã‚‹ã®", in addition to the 3D games the studio is currently working on. It doesn't clarify if the games are currently in development or still in the planning phase, or if they're even from the same team as Sonic Frontiers. However, since Japanese is rarely translated 1:1 into English and is a bit context heavy, I took the liberty of translating it as "on the table". All in all, this definitely confirms that the Sonic Frontiers sequel is not the only Sonic project currently happening at SEGA.
A month ago, Kishimoto responded to a similar question about the existence of a 2D Sonic game, which he refers to as first and second generation games, as opposed to third-generation games or full 3D games. He stated that although he considers "Sonic Frontier" to be a third-generation Sonic game, not all future Sonic games will follow this classification. He also said that he does not consider the first and second generation games to be inferior to the third generation games. In his opinion, all generations of Sonic games are fantastic.
Sonic Frontier is currently gearing up for its biggest first update, which Kishimoto says will be coming soon. With a packed schedule for the year, it's likely that we won't see any more Sonic games until 2024 or beyond.