Idk if you saw Whitehead's recent post in Mania's anniversary, he showed how the concept on how the Hard Boiled Heavies would look like as animals. I don't think they'll ever see the light because "Sega hates fun" lol But it'd be interesting seeing classic or modern stories in IDW adapt a thing like this on the future. If I'm not wrong they approved the concepts for the characters you built for the cancelled Shadow comics right? So Sega could or not choose what'd be useful for the lore.
I mean, it's easy to just go "sega hates fun" but it's a matter of whether the concept actually works or not, right?
Whitehead'd talked before about how the idea was the Heavies' personalities were influenced by the animals inside, and the art they've now shown is cute, but at the same time, it raises a lot of questions that I think genuinely make it not work. Least of which is, the point of the games is that the animals being trapped is bad, and you want to destroy the robots and have the animals pop out- but if the Heavies are meant to be memorable fun enemy robots, the chance of them reappearing was always there, and in that case, are the animals just stuck inside?
There's a reason the Mecha Sonics, Metal Sonic, Omega, or Gemerl don't have animals inside; and the E-Series in Adventure does have animals inside, and we're explicitly shown them being extracted. You can't have recurring games underline the idea that "animals being trapped is bad" and then have an entire character set of "animals that are cool because they're trapped". "Rule of Cool" does not actually supersede everything no matter the consequences- you'd have had to write around all this.
(this without even getting into questions of how much personality should the little animals even have- are they just childish cartoon thoughtless animals or not? Are they individuals or not? We start running into "is Yoshi an individual or a species" questions with it)
Could Sega regardless still allow the use of a concept like this? Sure. Just like how the designs of the characters in Chasing Shadows were approved, and so yeah, we hope that in theory if we came up with a different story with these characters Sega'd go "yeah sure". They randomly put Terios as a skin in Shadow Generations, they could've outright made him a character, there's plenty cases of discarded concepts then getting reinvented and reintegrated into things later on (shoutouts to Energer Z as a prototype Mazinger in Shin Mazinger). Maybe a cute classic Sonic story could be kinda worked from this. Mostly I think it's a bit too thorny and existential though, it raises too many questions against the premise of the series itself- similar to how IDW at one point teetered too close to "Eggman robots are all redeemable", which goes against the point of a game series where the main point is destroying Eggman robots.
