Sonic Team's Sonic games will be the Japanese branch, inherently.
Polygon said:Veteran Sonic game designer Takashi Iizuka is overseeing the production of Sonic Boom, but main development is entirely in Western hands due to Sega's desire for Sonic to be more appealing to Western audiences.
Speaking with Polygon, Iizuka said the decision to give developer Big Red Button creative control over Sonic Boom and have Sanzaru Games work on the 3DS title was part of Sega's overarching plan to make a completely Westernized branch of the Sonic franchise.
"As part of completely thinking about the West, we wanted to make sure we had Western game developers and make it a part of Western television," Iizuka said. "We wanted to make sure it was developed best for Western audiences primarily; this was very important.
"The whole thing started with the television series," he added. "Our previous series, Sonic X, was made in Japan and influenced by Japanese anime; the main audience it was made for was in Japan, although it came to the West as well. So Sonic Boom is something made specifically for the Western audience. For the TV series to be successful, we pretty much had to make it for that audience, and the games tie into that strategy."
Source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/6/538...-over-to-western-studios-and-gave-him-a-scarfSega of America producer Stephen Frost told Polygon that keeping Sonic Boom in Western studios was important for the projects' "synergy." Frost said Sega picked Big Red Button because its team led by Uncharted and Jak and Daxter veteran Bob Rafei had experience with character-driven adventure games.
"One of the things is, if you think about it at a high level, all the key aspects of this new initiative for Sonic, whether it's the cartoon, the game or the toys, is centered on the Western side, and we wanted to be unified in that," he said. "It's very challenging to create an initiative like this where everything works in a nice synergy if you have a lot of people scattered around the world. Granted, we're doing our [animation] stuff in France, but really, the leads of each group are at Sega of America. And it was really important I think this is where many other initiatives might fail is that we really we see each other every day, we're talking to each other every day, and that was really important.