Sega and Malaysian airline AirAsia announced a collaboration that will lift the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and Persona 5 Royal up into the sky, literally.
Both the Asian arm of Sega and its subsidiary Atlus took to Facebook to announce the two sides of the collaboration.
Sonic will get the big one, portrayed above, with a livery painted on a widebody long-haul Airbus A330 with tail number 9M-XXU, a relatively new bird that has been in operation for nine years.
Persona 5 Royal will get a smaller Airbus A320, tail number 9M-AFF. This one is an aging member of the 320 family in operation since 2006. Funnily, the design below portrays it with the new sharklets, but the real aircraft actually has the old-school wingtip fences.
While Sonic’s aircraft portrays the whole main cast, Persona 5’s focuses on Joker and Morgana. The choice of game is also interesting, considering that Persona 5 Royal has been around for quite a while. Its original release was in 2016 followed by the relaunch on all platforms in 2022.
Both specially painted aircraft will be operational for passenger service starting in October, so if you fly AirAsia starting next month you might get lucky,.
While liveries inspired by game characters are not new to the skies, we usually see them for the ultra-popular Pokemon franchise, while here we’re looking at something a bit more on the niche san, especially in Persona 5 Royal’s case.
We can only hope that Sega won’t be quite as litigious as Nintendo in demanding their removal when someone inevitably reproduces the liveries for Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’d be really nice if they allowed them to fly in the virtual skies as well as in the real ones.
