Sonic, as a franchise, has three particulars about it that really stood out to me from back when it started, three core tenants that SEGA have been routinely trying to work out how to translate forward whenever a new game comes out, and despite the initial reactions to Frontiers being a stark separation from what came before, I think it’s interesting to look at what we have in the game and how Sonic Team chose to tackle these challenges in a new way.
1. An adaptation of SEGA’s arcade score-based philosophy brought to a home console experience.
2. A response to the trends of its time period (originally inversely to Mario)
3. A means to harness what was possible with technology to be a showcase for a style of play few others have dared to replicate.
For the first point, although Sonic started as a franchise on home consoles, minus a few arcade games here and there, the first games still had a score to keep track of with ways to balance earning more by the end of levels, limited lives and continues. The highscore stuck around for years, with Sonic Adventure 2 making it a gameplay objective to earn a highscore for the mastery ranks of every level. But it’s been because of this arcade style philosophy that most modern Sonic games end up with short, elaborate zones holding levels designed to be beaten in only a few minutes but designed to be replayed over and over.
Sonic Frontiers answers this by peppering its open zones to have bite-sized challenges at around every corner. There’s very little downtime in Sonic Frontiers, which I think helps keep the pace up. Almost everywhere you look there’s a rail or a spring or a dash panel, with islands 2 and 3 in particular having a lot more height structures and being fairly large in size. Despite pop in, seeing larger, vast structures in the distance does inspire wanting to find out what’s at the top of the challenge, and there’s sometimes a bit of level fun along the way. The game has a lot of quick engagements with several rewards at the end of them, and the open zones being a flow to get from setpiece to setpiece I think is a solid gameplay loop, provided the terrain supported the potential with player expression, but more on that issue later.
Cyberspace is also there as an answer to the high score replayability of past titles, and I think conceptually they’re solid. They’re spread far enough around the world that finding one actually feels like a bit of a surprise, short enough to feel like a quick change of pace and you’ll not need to play many of them just to progress. But, to get the elephant out of the room, the only momentum these have is managing to boost off of the halfpipes and there’s only four themes to go around. It would’ve been SICK to have Eggmanland as a fifth theme, surely, they have Unleashed assets hanging around somewhere to reuse, but alas. The 2D ones I got something out of, mainly due to the bounce to air boost combo giving you some additional height and fixing the insanely speedy acceleration from Forces, but 3D feels very wrong; air control is directionally locked when trying to make platforming which leads to a lot of slippery turning and falling off the sides. I really wish they would’ve kept the Open Zone controls in these; THOSE I think felt pretty comfortable after some tinkering and it’s the main disconnect from what’s otherwise being an incredibly cohesive full experience. This concept is sound, but I hope gets an overhaul for a supposed sequel.
When it comes to being in touch with current trends, it’s far from a secret Sonic’s existence was born of attitudes from the early 90s, but continuing that down the line, Sonic Adventure 1 was constructed as an elaborate tech demo for the Dreamcast complete with an entire campaign to show off its capability for fishing. Sonic Adventure 2, and specifically the creation of Shadow the Hedgehog, feel almost prophetic for what would be viewed as “cool” during the 2000s, the kind of nu-metal emocore cool bouncing off the more spunky ATTITUDE Sonic himself was created under. Sonic 06 was trying to adapt too many things in its rushed development, the increased focus on real time worlds, physics systems, hubs full of NPC sidequests and the grandiose storytelling not overly dissimilar to the Final Fantasy X’s of the world. Since then, we’ve had Sonics focused on dual world gameplay, God of War combat, motion control sword swinging, Mario Galaxy level tubes and custom characters.
Sonic Frontiers’s hat to throw in this ring is player freedom. Past 3D Sonics have often had the issue of containing multiple different gameplay styles or arbitrary conditions players HAD to power through in order to get through to important content across the game. Sonic Unleashed was a particularly egregious example of this with its medal collecting blocking progression and often necessitating backtracking through levels. Frontiers in comparison is refreshingly loose in progressing across the world. Multiple small missions exist in Frontiers to bridge story gaps, but they’re quick and aren’t terribly taxing so players should get back into it fairly fast. That players can use a fishing minigame to help bypass walls of whichever kind of progression they don’t want to deal with the most I find to be pretty funny, when considering how the fishing minigame back in Sonic Adventure is viewed as a primary case of out of place content being outright required to finish the main story of the game. That “repeated content” in an open world game is presented mainly through quick bits of speed and platforming and light map opening puzzles instead of overly elaborate sidequests which I think, again, largely keeps the pace of the game up. Everything you can see (aside from plot progression doors) is something to be toyed with immediately, even if I wish there were more creative ways to finish sequences beyond air boosting to reach character tokens early.
There’s also a skill tree combat system, and it’s a mixed bag. The many moves can look cool and have satisfying sound design but combat itself is very simplistic, to where mini bosses need to have their own gimmick to spice things up. I like MOST of these (the Shark goes on for too long) for giving certain enemy encounters a distinct feel. It’s a combat system that’s very drive-by, in a way not unlike the classics, prioritizing efficiency and style and not effective use of button combos. You see an enemy, do the thing to make them vulnerable, get a thing and then keep running. I still prefer this to locking you in rooms within levels like a lot of the 2000s Sonic’s liked to do, yet it’s hardly deep. But I do appreciate how for the first time ever in a modern Sonic, said combat moveset is actually transferred through during the Super Sonic battles. Those go insanely hard; you have to babysit the camera to keep track of your onscreen position, but they’re the incredibly satisfying and raw energy Sonic’s been losing since the turn to more lighthearted games. The metal music tracks for these are prime workout music in what even without them is Sonic’s most varied soundtrack since 2008.
What surprised me while playing was how this freedom aspect actually ties into the plot of the game, and more specifically, the character of Sage. She’s an AI created by Eggman that routinely attempts to halt Sonic’s progress using the world’s technology, while at the same time questioning what his unfettered morals are to her black and white understanding. This parallels with Sonic’s, and in turn the player’s tenacity to go about the open zones accomplishing objectives, helping your friends recover their memories, and standing up to the giant bosses and mini-bosses. It’s through the player’s sense of progression through the world and Sonic’s interactions with his friends (for the first time in over a decade feeling genuine and not like an excuse for comedy skits) that Sage begins to question her purpose and whether Sonic’s intentions are pure despite also wanting to please her master, his longtime enemy. An actual CHARACTER ARC conveyed through the player’s gameplay in the open worlds, and I find that neat. The rest of the plot was light but pretty pleasant to experience due to Ian Flynn’s character dialogue and….some of the animations. The canned NPC animations are very stilted, but the actual hand animated cutscenes are headed back in a more actioney camera direction with expresses as much as can out of these models, with even some concept art used for flashbacks expanding the lore. The Sonic gameplay Vs Sonic lore video only got more wider after this game.
Beyond the story, there’s also what Frontiers is trying to accomplish on a tech level. As much as blast processing and lock-on technology could be seen as marketing buzzwords today, SEGA adopting them represents trying to push Sonic, and by extension themselves, as being on top of what technology can be. In 2D, the best Sonic level design still had to have branching and a sense of speed blasting through the levels, but it could be said to have been easier to craft it all considering the games were sprite based and only so much needed to be on a screen at once. Going into 3D made it harder to manage creating an innumerable amount of unique assets the player would speed by in seconds, from multiple angles and setpieces, rather than only following the sandbox trend other platformers found more comfortable. There’s few things truly like what a 3D Sonic game is capable of, but it’s a difficult beast to manage and polish.
Sonic Frontiers finally takes the step of making sandboxes the core tenant of the game while also retaining the sense of speed. While the first island is fairly small, the second island is incredibly spread in terms of content and all the nooks and crannies within the canyon of the biome while the third island is a vast set of separated landmasses. If there’s one major pro I can give the open zones in Sonic Frontiers, it’s that, with the right capabilities, you really do FEEL fast while exploring in a way that no other open world type game has even tried to accomplish. Using the Drop Dash to slide down the many slopes, power boosting to cross large portions of the map in seconds, and jumping rails at the right angle to hurdle forward through the air like a slingshot.
That being said, there are two issues with this approach. The first is pop-in, which can be incredibly apparent even on the next gen consoles where the game does genuinely have moments of looking quite stunning otherwise, with the day/night cycle. It can be a pretty jarring immersion breaker that makes it harder to gauge where to land on sometimes, even if such is thankfully less apparent during the 2D segments and cyberspace. Seeing it had me wonder if this is more an engine limitation or an actual programming issue?
The second issue is more annoying because of the potential for fun movement in the world: inconsistent reactions to the terrain. Inconsistency is something that could be said to have been associated with Sonic games for years, and as much as Frontiers earnestly tries to have the most fluid 3D Sonic experience out of all of them (never had any bugs while playing aside from briefly flinging off a structure one time) it’s hard to tell, in the game’s current form, what terrain will let Sonic fly through the air and the player subsequently trick their way across platforms, and to what terrain Sonic will cling to and fall like a rock. It can be fun when it happens, but it’s rarely of your intention. I hope this is something they’re better able to delineate in a followup.
I’m glad Sonic Frontiers earnestly looked at these core elements of Sonic to make something I think has done a lot to understand what me and many other Sonic fans personally adore about the brand despite all its ups and downs, but the future continues to be uncertain. I want them to go further, stabilize the control, make terrain more consistently reactive to your movement, have more vibrantly Sonic aesthetic open areas as the new indulgent playgrounds and if Cyberspace is still going to exist have more variety or consistent 3D handling with the worlds. But I also don’t want them to drop the format they’ve created, more serious yet still cheeky tone, Ian Flynn’s understanding of the characters and the more animesque plotting/spectacle.
But this is Sonic Team, or more specifically, SEGA glaring at them near constant. You never know when they’ll live and learn.
(ps. Someone at Sonic Team really liked Ikaruga)
1. An adaptation of SEGA’s arcade score-based philosophy brought to a home console experience.
2. A response to the trends of its time period (originally inversely to Mario)
3. A means to harness what was possible with technology to be a showcase for a style of play few others have dared to replicate.
For the first point, although Sonic started as a franchise on home consoles, minus a few arcade games here and there, the first games still had a score to keep track of with ways to balance earning more by the end of levels, limited lives and continues. The highscore stuck around for years, with Sonic Adventure 2 making it a gameplay objective to earn a highscore for the mastery ranks of every level. But it’s been because of this arcade style philosophy that most modern Sonic games end up with short, elaborate zones holding levels designed to be beaten in only a few minutes but designed to be replayed over and over.
Sonic Frontiers answers this by peppering its open zones to have bite-sized challenges at around every corner. There’s very little downtime in Sonic Frontiers, which I think helps keep the pace up. Almost everywhere you look there’s a rail or a spring or a dash panel, with islands 2 and 3 in particular having a lot more height structures and being fairly large in size. Despite pop in, seeing larger, vast structures in the distance does inspire wanting to find out what’s at the top of the challenge, and there’s sometimes a bit of level fun along the way. The game has a lot of quick engagements with several rewards at the end of them, and the open zones being a flow to get from setpiece to setpiece I think is a solid gameplay loop, provided the terrain supported the potential with player expression, but more on that issue later.
Cyberspace is also there as an answer to the high score replayability of past titles, and I think conceptually they’re solid. They’re spread far enough around the world that finding one actually feels like a bit of a surprise, short enough to feel like a quick change of pace and you’ll not need to play many of them just to progress. But, to get the elephant out of the room, the only momentum these have is managing to boost off of the halfpipes and there’s only four themes to go around. It would’ve been SICK to have Eggmanland as a fifth theme, surely, they have Unleashed assets hanging around somewhere to reuse, but alas. The 2D ones I got something out of, mainly due to the bounce to air boost combo giving you some additional height and fixing the insanely speedy acceleration from Forces, but 3D feels very wrong; air control is directionally locked when trying to make platforming which leads to a lot of slippery turning and falling off the sides. I really wish they would’ve kept the Open Zone controls in these; THOSE I think felt pretty comfortable after some tinkering and it’s the main disconnect from what’s otherwise being an incredibly cohesive full experience. This concept is sound, but I hope gets an overhaul for a supposed sequel.
When it comes to being in touch with current trends, it’s far from a secret Sonic’s existence was born of attitudes from the early 90s, but continuing that down the line, Sonic Adventure 1 was constructed as an elaborate tech demo for the Dreamcast complete with an entire campaign to show off its capability for fishing. Sonic Adventure 2, and specifically the creation of Shadow the Hedgehog, feel almost prophetic for what would be viewed as “cool” during the 2000s, the kind of nu-metal emocore cool bouncing off the more spunky ATTITUDE Sonic himself was created under. Sonic 06 was trying to adapt too many things in its rushed development, the increased focus on real time worlds, physics systems, hubs full of NPC sidequests and the grandiose storytelling not overly dissimilar to the Final Fantasy X’s of the world. Since then, we’ve had Sonics focused on dual world gameplay, God of War combat, motion control sword swinging, Mario Galaxy level tubes and custom characters.
Sonic Frontiers’s hat to throw in this ring is player freedom. Past 3D Sonics have often had the issue of containing multiple different gameplay styles or arbitrary conditions players HAD to power through in order to get through to important content across the game. Sonic Unleashed was a particularly egregious example of this with its medal collecting blocking progression and often necessitating backtracking through levels. Frontiers in comparison is refreshingly loose in progressing across the world. Multiple small missions exist in Frontiers to bridge story gaps, but they’re quick and aren’t terribly taxing so players should get back into it fairly fast. That players can use a fishing minigame to help bypass walls of whichever kind of progression they don’t want to deal with the most I find to be pretty funny, when considering how the fishing minigame back in Sonic Adventure is viewed as a primary case of out of place content being outright required to finish the main story of the game. That “repeated content” in an open world game is presented mainly through quick bits of speed and platforming and light map opening puzzles instead of overly elaborate sidequests which I think, again, largely keeps the pace of the game up. Everything you can see (aside from plot progression doors) is something to be toyed with immediately, even if I wish there were more creative ways to finish sequences beyond air boosting to reach character tokens early.
There’s also a skill tree combat system, and it’s a mixed bag. The many moves can look cool and have satisfying sound design but combat itself is very simplistic, to where mini bosses need to have their own gimmick to spice things up. I like MOST of these (the Shark goes on for too long) for giving certain enemy encounters a distinct feel. It’s a combat system that’s very drive-by, in a way not unlike the classics, prioritizing efficiency and style and not effective use of button combos. You see an enemy, do the thing to make them vulnerable, get a thing and then keep running. I still prefer this to locking you in rooms within levels like a lot of the 2000s Sonic’s liked to do, yet it’s hardly deep. But I do appreciate how for the first time ever in a modern Sonic, said combat moveset is actually transferred through during the Super Sonic battles. Those go insanely hard; you have to babysit the camera to keep track of your onscreen position, but they’re the incredibly satisfying and raw energy Sonic’s been losing since the turn to more lighthearted games. The metal music tracks for these are prime workout music in what even without them is Sonic’s most varied soundtrack since 2008.
What surprised me while playing was how this freedom aspect actually ties into the plot of the game, and more specifically, the character of Sage. She’s an AI created by Eggman that routinely attempts to halt Sonic’s progress using the world’s technology, while at the same time questioning what his unfettered morals are to her black and white understanding. This parallels with Sonic’s, and in turn the player’s tenacity to go about the open zones accomplishing objectives, helping your friends recover their memories, and standing up to the giant bosses and mini-bosses. It’s through the player’s sense of progression through the world and Sonic’s interactions with his friends (for the first time in over a decade feeling genuine and not like an excuse for comedy skits) that Sage begins to question her purpose and whether Sonic’s intentions are pure despite also wanting to please her master, his longtime enemy. An actual CHARACTER ARC conveyed through the player’s gameplay in the open worlds, and I find that neat. The rest of the plot was light but pretty pleasant to experience due to Ian Flynn’s character dialogue and….some of the animations. The canned NPC animations are very stilted, but the actual hand animated cutscenes are headed back in a more actioney camera direction with expresses as much as can out of these models, with even some concept art used for flashbacks expanding the lore. The Sonic gameplay Vs Sonic lore video only got more wider after this game.
Beyond the story, there’s also what Frontiers is trying to accomplish on a tech level. As much as blast processing and lock-on technology could be seen as marketing buzzwords today, SEGA adopting them represents trying to push Sonic, and by extension themselves, as being on top of what technology can be. In 2D, the best Sonic level design still had to have branching and a sense of speed blasting through the levels, but it could be said to have been easier to craft it all considering the games were sprite based and only so much needed to be on a screen at once. Going into 3D made it harder to manage creating an innumerable amount of unique assets the player would speed by in seconds, from multiple angles and setpieces, rather than only following the sandbox trend other platformers found more comfortable. There’s few things truly like what a 3D Sonic game is capable of, but it’s a difficult beast to manage and polish.
Sonic Frontiers finally takes the step of making sandboxes the core tenant of the game while also retaining the sense of speed. While the first island is fairly small, the second island is incredibly spread in terms of content and all the nooks and crannies within the canyon of the biome while the third island is a vast set of separated landmasses. If there’s one major pro I can give the open zones in Sonic Frontiers, it’s that, with the right capabilities, you really do FEEL fast while exploring in a way that no other open world type game has even tried to accomplish. Using the Drop Dash to slide down the many slopes, power boosting to cross large portions of the map in seconds, and jumping rails at the right angle to hurdle forward through the air like a slingshot.
That being said, there are two issues with this approach. The first is pop-in, which can be incredibly apparent even on the next gen consoles where the game does genuinely have moments of looking quite stunning otherwise, with the day/night cycle. It can be a pretty jarring immersion breaker that makes it harder to gauge where to land on sometimes, even if such is thankfully less apparent during the 2D segments and cyberspace. Seeing it had me wonder if this is more an engine limitation or an actual programming issue?
The second issue is more annoying because of the potential for fun movement in the world: inconsistent reactions to the terrain. Inconsistency is something that could be said to have been associated with Sonic games for years, and as much as Frontiers earnestly tries to have the most fluid 3D Sonic experience out of all of them (never had any bugs while playing aside from briefly flinging off a structure one time) it’s hard to tell, in the game’s current form, what terrain will let Sonic fly through the air and the player subsequently trick their way across platforms, and to what terrain Sonic will cling to and fall like a rock. It can be fun when it happens, but it’s rarely of your intention. I hope this is something they’re better able to delineate in a followup.
I’m glad Sonic Frontiers earnestly looked at these core elements of Sonic to make something I think has done a lot to understand what me and many other Sonic fans personally adore about the brand despite all its ups and downs, but the future continues to be uncertain. I want them to go further, stabilize the control, make terrain more consistently reactive to your movement, have more vibrantly Sonic aesthetic open areas as the new indulgent playgrounds and if Cyberspace is still going to exist have more variety or consistent 3D handling with the worlds. But I also don’t want them to drop the format they’ve created, more serious yet still cheeky tone, Ian Flynn’s understanding of the characters and the more animesque plotting/spectacle.
But this is Sonic Team, or more specifically, SEGA glaring at them near constant. You never know when they’ll live and learn.
(ps. Someone at Sonic Team really liked Ikaruga)