Enter more characters! After feeling like plot momentum is moving and going in exciting directions, Ian Flynn and company throw more characters into a not-gradual-but-rapidly expanding universe. This time we get time-travelling loner (the friendly kind) Silver the Hedgehog and the shy Wisp-friendly original character Whisper the Wolf.
Silver is a mixed bag of a character, having the honour of being forever linked to the awful 2006 game in which he was introduced. Silver was a powerful Hedgehog who travelled back in time to stop the end of the world. He clashed with Sonic, things happened and then the whole story got erased when time got reset. But the 2006 game is a whole different story, as Silver here isn’t as annoying as he was in that game. He appears in this issue to help Sonic find out what caused a future where no-one is alive.
The interactions with the apparently shy Whisper are quite fun, admittedly. What it does do is help show that Silver is the other side of the kind of loner that Shadow is. He’s a bit immature and naive, and Sonic gets some fun at his expense. The issue also hints of what could potentially be a tragic story to new character Whisper, but we don’t know that much more about her.
As is the repetitive nature of the character introductions, so is the criticism that they’re constantly happening. We’ve not seen Tangle since she was introduced, and whilst we’re starting to flick back to other characters, we’re just not getting enough of them. Considering we’ve now got a good sense of what the actual story of the first arc is going to be, the introductory phase should be over and done with by now.
The series is proving to be great with cliffhangers, however, with the promise of the Floating Islands coming into play again. Only this time Neo Metal Sonic has the Master Emerald with him (a sentence that triggers the older Sonic fanboy within).
Hopefully the “next issue” promise that a big battle is coming will finally start to tie some of the these characters together.
