Despite being a $70 with paid DLC, none of the collaboration characters in Sonic Racing: Crossworlds will be voiced in the game.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is picking up the slack from Mario Kart World, as Sega is bringing in characters from outside of the Sonic universe into the fold. But while having the likes of Yakuza's Ichiban Kasuga and Persona's Joker are within the same realm of Nintendo adding their own characters to Mario Kart, Sega is going one step further with crossovers every month with characters outside of its wheelhouse like SpongeBob SquarePants, Minecraft Steve, and Hatsune Miku (who is kind of a Sega character, but owned by Crypton Future Media) showing up in game.
However, if you were excited to hear SpongeBob chat with Ichiban Kasuga about the Yakuza life while Hatsune Miku serenades them in the background, you're out of luck. As spotted by TheGamer, Sonic franchise head Takashi Iizuka said in an interview with Famitsu (via Google's machine translation) "There is no dialogue for collaboration characters. Because of the IP, the voice dialogue is limited to the 24 Sonic characters." While I get IP restrictions affecting the likes of SpongeBob, Sega owns Yakuza and Persona, so I'm not sure why that is an issue.
However, it goes one step further, as even the Sonic characters featured as DLC won't have voices. Sega posted a video of the Werehog (which is Sonic's werewolf form from Sonic Unleashed), and in the clip he's completely silent. While the crossovers are bad enough, fans really aren't happy with the lack of a Werehog voice, with one tweet saying "This is just unacceptable for a 70 dollar game."
This is just unacceptable for a 70 dollar game https://t.co/nqb5koeJHTJuly 19, 2025
The Werehog was voiced by Jason Griffith, who also voiced Sonic himself until Roger Craig Smith took over in 2010 with Sonic Colors. But Smith was asked about potentially voicing the character for CrossWorlds, and said "I would love to," but sadly that hasn't come to pass.
