SEGA has opened Year Two of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds the same way it ran most of Year One - by giving something away. Bayonetta is the first free character of the game's second year, arriving with her own machine, her own emotes and her own audio set, at no cost to anyone who already owns the game. The two paid packs announced alongside her are considerably less restrained: Godzilla and EVANGELION.
The Umbra Witch gets a purpose-built kart
Bayonetta does not arrive as a character model bolted onto an existing vehicle. She comes with the Butterfly Witch, a machine built around her silhouette, plus emotes and voice and sound effects drawn from her own series. That level of bespoke work for a free drop is consistent with how SEGA handled Year One, where twelve characters - Classic Sonic, Axel, Amigo and the rest - all landed on the free side of the line.
It is also a notable piece of housekeeping for SEGA. Bayonetta is a PlatinumGames creation published by SEGA, and she has spent most of the last decade appearing as a guest in other publishers' crossovers more often than in SEGA's own. Putting her in the company's flagship kart racer for free is the kind of move that costs SEGA nothing in licensing and buys a lot of goodwill.
Godzilla and Evangelion are the paid half
The two announced Year Two DLC packs are the Godzilla Pack and the EVANGELION Pack, both shown in gameplay form in the Tokyo Game Show trailer. Six packs are planned for Year Two in total, meaning four remain unannounced.
Those are two of the most recognisable properties in Japanese pop culture, and they are both fundamentally about enormous things moving through cities - which is either a natural fit for a game whose central mechanic is a portal that yanks you into another dimension mid-race, or a scale problem that SEGA has had to solve creatively. The Travel Rings system already sends racers between fifteen CrossWorlds mid-lap; dropping a kaiju or an Eva unit into that structure is a more interesting design brief than another guest driver.
A year in, CrossWorlds is still adding rather than resetting
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds launched on 25 September 2025 across Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC, priced at $69.99. It shipped with 23 playable characters, 24 main tracks and fifteen CrossWorlds reachable through the Travel Rings mechanic, plus a vehicle-customisation layer of more than 70 equippable gadgets.
The split SEGA has held to - characters free, franchise crossovers paid - is the reason the roster has stayed live without fracturing the player base. Free characters mean everyone in a lobby has access to the same drivers regardless of what they have bought. Paid packs stay optional and cosmetic-adjacent rather than gating the racing itself. Kart racers live or die on whether the lobby stays full, and that structure is built to keep it that way.
What is still unannounced
SEGA is holding the rest back for a livestream on 9 October, running as the Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds World Championship Finals and Year Two Showcase. Four unannounced DLC packs, release timing for Bayonetta herself, and whatever else the second year contains are all queued up for that broadcast.
What has been confirmed today is the shape of the deal for anyone still playing: the roster keeps growing for free, and the crossovers keep getting louder.
