I want to preface this review by saying that despite considering myself generally speaking a Sonic fan, this is the first official 3D Sonic game I've played since Heroes. In other words, don't only did I miss out on the jank of 06, the narrative ambition and edginess of Shadow the Hedgehog and the framerate issues of Unleashed, this is also my first "boost-type" Sonic game.

Sonic Frontiers is probably the best written Sonic game I've played. A Sonic fan who actually has played all the games between Heroes and this could tell me it's the best written one of all time so far, and I'd absolutely take their word for it. I loved Sonic Adventure 2's OTT turn-of-the-century action movie plot, but in the same way I love The Rock, Con Air and Face Off - it's balls-to-the-wall ridiculous all the time, and unlike Con Air, it doesn't wink towards the camera and chuckle every so often. Frontiers, on the other hand, has genuine nuance and feels like it was written by someone who is capable of actual character development without hammering the point in to the insane lengths of Shadow The Hedgehog (I have seen the cutscenes for that one, just not played the game). A particular highlight for me was an actually well-written Amy Rose - in Adventure, Amy Rose is written as an airhead who is obsessed with Sonic while Sonic avoids her like a 7 year old boy who just got told girls have cooties. Here, she's intelligent, empathetic and independent - I don't know if this is development that happened in between A2 and now, but it came as a pleasant shock. Another highlight was the relationship between (a very entertainingly written) Eggman and Sage. At this point I also want to praise the efforts of the voice actors, who do an incredible job with their lines (especially Eggman's) despite at times slightly questionable direction.

This brings me neatly onto the sound of the thing. The first thing people will probably point out is the music. I've seen people laugh at how melancholic the open-world island music is, but I think it works really well in context. The cyberspace music is a mix of EDM with a few very choice liquid drum and bass cuts here and there, the guardian boss fights often veer into extremely funny dubstep territory, and then the titan fights, for whatever reason, are extremely angsty rock music. I'm not entirely sure on the exact subgenre of rock, but it's extremely angsty, lets just put it that way. It was fitting in a way, but it did have me wishing for Crush40. Outside of that, the sound effects are all great and show a level of nuance the main soundtrack doesn't, which is nice.

Gameplay. All I can say is that when it works it works - I enjoyed the open world gameplay on 3 of the 5 islands you visit enough to unlock at least 96% of those maps. I enjoyed some of the Guardian fights. I mostly tolerated the cyberspace levels - most were okay but disrupted from the flow of the open world gameplay. The fishing minigame was a far more welcome disruption - a distraction, even, but here's the thing. I really wanted to like this game before I played it. I really wanted to like this game before it even came out, and now having played it, I can't pretend that it doesn't fall apart in some areas, although mileage may very person to person. For example, there was one cyberspace level I thought was complete bullshit that had no business being in a 3D sonic game (the Sky Sanctuary one with the spinning platforms). I actually ended up looking up the solution to that ridiculous puzzle on the first island because I didn't buy a Sonic game to do puzzles that make the later puzzles in The Witness look like fisher price toys for 2 year olds. Similarly, I ended up looking up how to beat that ridiculous second tower on the second last island (worst island in the game by far, thank god it was so short) because the rail grinding in this game actually somehow feels like a massive step back from Adventure 2. That's not even getting into the jank (which I mostly found funny), the pop-ins (which were never a big deal on the Steam Deck for me, somehow), or the occasional massive framerate drops (might be the Steam Deck, but they mostly just happened on that dreadful second-last island) - things that might be dealbreakers for some potential players out there.

What did kind of surprise me however is that sonic fights now! Again I dunno if this has been a thing before now, but I really doubt it. Sonic punches, kicks, throws hadokens and energy balls and slam dunks enemies into the ground. The combat is extremely superficial - especially during the titan fights as super sonic, which are 75-90% button-mashing fests - and that's before you even unlock the autobattle function. Don't confuse this as meaning combat is a walk in the park though, some of the guardian miniboss fights are incredibly frustrating. What is very funny though is how much you can skip by just playing the fishing minigame, which is essentially just a gacha game but instead of having actual gameplay beyond the pools, Big the Cat gives you tokens you can exchange for in game items to overpower your character, unlock portals without even fighting most guardians, or even vault keys to unlock emeralds. During starfall nights the game is quite happy to give you hundreds of purple coins to go fishing with, and with which you can basically skip huge portions of the game if you decide you cannot be assed with them. While I don't hate this mechanic, it feels like SEGA weren't confident enough in their game to make you do everything.

I think Adventure 2 is a better game. It's more fun and is about as polished and as confident in itself as it could be for a Dreamcast game released when it was. If Generations is basically just more of the cyberspace stuff from this game, it doesn't give me a lot of desire to finally start playing that game. This game is flawed as hell, and it certainly isn't for everyone, but.... I still enjoyed it more than I didn't. and on that note, this is a very weak recommendation mostly targeted towards Sonic fans and others who probably have a rough idea of what they're getting into it. If the gameplay segment of this review seems very offputting, avoid this game - you're not gonna have a good time. If you read that part and thought "this fake Sonic fan is weak, I'm obviously going to get more out of it than him" - you probably will enjoy it as much as I did, and you probably will agree with me on the game's flaws, because I was an idiot like you once, before I played the thing.

Oh also this game has mandatory pinball. Also mandatory Ikaruga-lite. I liked those parts by the way. A lot of people didn't, and that's understandable.

// Light 4 Stars, might change to 3.5
Frontier's open world core loop of 'completing challenges > fighting min-bosses > finding memory tokens > regular Sonic Stages' was quite addictive to me, and despite a lot of the challenges not being very interesting, i was still compelled to explore the islands throughly.
The biggest strgenth of it's loop is the feeling that i could be as casual or as serious with the game as i wanted: If i wanted something casual i could just explore the world further Or if im in the mood for more serious challenges i could try to beat all the objectives for the portal stages. This made me spend a lot more time on Sonic Frontiers than i would have if it was more classic 3d sonic.
The combat itself is also quite fun and most of the mini-bosses are fun and occasionally challenging to fighting, and the Titans battles are great visual speculates with great OST that jut bangs. I liked the ambient music in the overworld just as much and i feel like they contrast each other perfectly.

Despite all of the praise, the open world still feel half-baked - The map is filled with things to do, but most of them arent that interesting and the "Challenges" are often-times some of the easiest parts of the game. At first, its still fun to do them even if they arent difficult, but they become more and more repetitive and by the third island it starts to be rather exhausting, and the payoff is just not there after you realize you can just go fishing and max all your stats relatively easily.
The over usage of 2d sections in the third island is also very annoying and the island also being just ugly visually accumulates to it being the perfect representation of all the annoyances in the open-world of the game, just taken to the next level in the third island.
The locations themselves are all visually boring and im not a fan of the art direction as a whole. Admittedly, some enemies are decent enough but i really dont think they clash with the Main cast art-style well and it just looks messy and frankly flat out ugly at times. It really does feel like a bunch of random assets thrown in with a sonic models at times.

But overall, Sonic Frontiers is just mostly good fun and i enjoyed most of my time with it, just dont come expecting it to mind-blowing really - the strength of it to me is the fact that it can be so casual at times yet still feel like you are doing something, theres a lot to like here but the feeling of jankiness never really leaves and by the end it really starts to lose its steam.