while Greedy simply stares at it. The ending scene in the international version shows Ristar being reunited with his father once again. Development In the early 1990s, Sega asked its development teams to create a mascot to rival Nintendo's Mario. One proposed character had long rabbit-like ears which could extend and pick up objects, but this was discarded as too complex The team moved on to animals that could roll into a ball, and settled on Sonic the Hedgehog. Some years later, Sega developed another prototype, Feel, with a character that used its arms to pick things up instead of ears, which became Ristar. In a 1994 Electronic Gaming Monthly interview, Sega marketing staff Lisa Best and Terry Tang claimed Ristar was not designed by the same Sonic programming team, although much of the game's staff would later go on to create Nights into Dreams for the Saturn, the next game to be officially credited to Sonic Team. This, along with Ristar's inclusion in a number of Sonic themed compilations and re-releases in subsequent years, would lead game journalists to retroactively label the game as being developed by Sonic Team. Localization A number of small changes were made in localizing the version released for English-speaking countries. The story was altered slightly; in the Japanese version, a star mother, Oruto, summons Ristar's help, where in the international version, Oruto is omitted completely, and Ristar's father, a "legendary hero", is referenced instead. The boss of the ice themed level, Itamor, was changed from a large cat robot to an ice monster type robot. In the game, Ristar must grab hot dishes of food, and throw it in Itamor's mouth. In Japan, it was considered clever to use "hot food" to defeat a cat, due to a Japanese cultural reference regarding a "cat-tongue" not liking hot food. In English-speaking regions, that reference is non-existent, so it was changed to a "cold ice monster" being defeated by being melted by "hot food". The rest of the changes were very minor edits in effort to appeal to western audiences, such as minor graphical changes to make Ristar and other character's faces look more serious, renaming levels to names more descriptive of their looks, and adding a few non-interactive scenes to show more continuity in the game, such as a skiing sequence before the snow themed level, or putting on anti-gravity shoes to explain why Ristar