It’s difficult to describe how disappointed I am with Road 96 Mile 0. It is uninspired, uninteresting, and constantly pushing dialogue about authoritarianism and misinformation without ever actually saying anything about it. While I enjoyed seeming more of the old characters like Sonya, all the new characters, including the other protagonist Kaito, are badly written and impossible to care about. The musical skateboarding sections are a joke, and some of the most unpleasant and unresponsive controls I’ve felt in years. While both the score and licensed music tracks are phenomenal, it does little to offset the subpar voice acting and wildly inaccurate animations. Road 96 was a masterclass in storytelling, proving that procedurally generated stories can create a personal, compelling narrative for each unique player. All Mile 0 has proved is that lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Full review: https://gameluster.com/review-road-96-mile-0-a-road-with-no-direction/

Ultimately, Meet Your Maker has some great ideas and a great premise that is needlessly over-complicated and hostile to players at nearly every turn. The thing is, I actually had a lot of fun with it when it did work. It was thrilling watching replays of it. Being a free PS Plus game, I heartily encourage you to give Meet Your Maker a try on PlayStation if the idea tickles your fancy. Remember, you will have to both constantly raid and build to play – you can’t just do one or another. There were a lot of times I was really enjoying solving the cobbled-together puzzles other players were creating and seeing what I could manage with the limited toolset. Meet Your Maker is quite fun to play when it’s not actively combating the player. With some truly amazing levels to play and ten times more garbage ones, your mileage certainly will vary.

Full review: https://gameluster.com/review-meet-your-maker-live-cry-repeat/

Some of my favorite games of all time are visual novel hybrids, such as the Somnium Files, Zero Escape, and Danganronpa games. My absolute favorite feature in games is fourth-wall breaking, especially in horror games – when the horror breaks out of the game into real life, that’s when I really start to feel the rush (such as in Pony Island, Inscryption, Until Dawn, Doki Doki Literature Club, and The Stanley Parable). In the first hour of Xseed’s new horror visual novel Paranormasight, I was excited that this might be the game to combine two of my great loves in an interesting new way. Unfortunately, while the story is intriguing and presents some cool timeline hopping that can only exist in a video game, the few amazing moments when it capitalizes on breaking the fourth wall are diluted by unbelievable swaths of repeated and rehashed text.

One other minor annoyance is that this game maxes out at 1080p on PC. My 1440p monitor had to upscale it to match the size, making the picture blurry. While it didn’t really take away from my enjoyment, I’m startled because since I started PC gaming in 2015 this is the very first game I’ve come across that does not have a 1440p resolution setting. It’s a simple thing but it feels oddly lazy when a huge amount of PC gamers are using 2560×1440 resolutions, if not higher. Then again, this is published by Square Enix, and I’ve learned to expect low quality from their PC ports as of late. I also had a bug a few times where the game continued to register the movement of the cursor but wouldn’t let me click on any buttons, but closing and restarting the game fixed that.

I enjoyed a lot of Paranormasight, and I think I’d have a much higher opinion of the game if it didn’t insist on rehashing the same plot to me over and over to pad out the play time. The music is great, the art is nice, and I the script is really well written. With such an interesting premise this could have been a big hit for me, but, alas – it wasn’t meant to be. I do still recommend Paranormasight for any visual novel fans out there, although the execution is going to allay the concerns the wider gaming audience has with the genre.

Abandoned after 2.5 hours.

BAD
- the main character is the biggest asshole on the planet and only gets worse as he goes. He's an asshole to the companion AI 100% of the time even tho the AI is offering actual help, the MC keeps telling it to eat a bag of dicks. He's a misogynistic dude bro to the extreme and i fucking hate him.
- they give you like 4 bullets for your one gun for the first mission and the lowest grunts take 3 headshots to kill so you have to use melee exclusively and it fucking sucks
- there's a lot of sexual assault jokes already, not to mention all of the "satire" in the game is basically just them saying "comrade" over and over while the MC talks about how big his muscles are and how he only plays by his own rules even though he literally is a black ops guy for the russian military
- every fucking room you go in you have to scan 20+ boxes by hovering over them and holding down F and it's miserable in addition to making the game move at a snail's pace between that and stealth sections. This is not a high octane fast paced shooter in any way and it should not have been advertised as such
- i kept dying due to bugs and lost tons of progress because it only saves at checkpoints, and hitboxes are fucked on the enemies
- features the world's worst lockpicking mini game
- the mc literally never shuts up, i want to die, please free me

GOOD
- it's fucking gorgeous. it is one of the best meetings of high fidelity graphics, amazing performance, next gen lighting, and thoughtful curated art design ever
- robo titties

I am a musician - I’ve spent my whole life playing various instruments, writing and recording songs, performing very occasionally. But like a lot of you, my first real exposure to rhythm games was back in middle school at the height of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I must have poured a hundred hours into Guitar Hero 4, wailing away on the plastic instruments and singing my little heart out into the mic. I remember that time fondly, joking about Through the Fire and Flames with the boys at lunch in 7th grade, having friends over to blast through some Aerosmith or Paramore, and feeling just for a second that I was a rockstar.

Hi Fi Rush takes that second, the one when you nail the end of the solo, and blasts it into a 10 hour masterpiece the likes of which I have never seen before. Tango Gameworks and Bethesda have pulled together everything good about both early 2000's adventure platformers and Saturday morning cartoons with literally none of the baggage attached to the nostalgia.

You’ll take control of Chai, a cocky, young aspiring rockstar with a heart of gold - sorry, heart of iPod. In an experiment gone wrong conducted by suspicious cyberpunk megacorp Vandelay, his heart is replaced with a Tony Stark style contraption - the iPod is always playing music, and the world and his body always move to the beat of that sound. In an appropriately jokey aesthetic of a whimsical far future world, Chai must join forces with the mysterious hacker punk Peppermint, the gentle giant tech genius Macaron, the enthusiastic and comedic droid CNMN [Note: pronounced Cinnamon], and the musical robot cat 808 to stop Vandelay from mind controlling the entire world. Each of these characters experiences an arc, and every one of them resonated strongly with me. It's funny, charming, and distinctly aware it's a video game.

Right away, Hi Fi Rush captures the exact aesthetic it goes for - this game exists as a monument to the shows you remember on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel from the early 2000s. A little bit of Teen Titans here, a little Fairly Oddparents there, a splash of Kim Possible to top it off - you know the vibe. You miss the vibe. You miss the vibe so, so much, and you miss that time of innocence, and no one has managed to recreate that nostalgic ecstasy in your adult life without it feeling forced, or like a cash grab. Until now.

Our underground resistance force sends Chai forward as their weapon - his new robot arm turns a wrench into a guitar by magnetizing the gears around him, perfect for rhythmically landing the beatdown on these robo punks. Hi Fi Rush is a linear action rhythm game, set in a wonderfully realized dystopic future city where robots, mechanical limbs, mechs, and laser guns are all standard issue. Each level is called a track, and each battle within is a chorus while each platforming adventure part between them is a verse. At the end of most tracks you’ll encounter a boss battle, and oh boy, I will get to that.

The tracks perfectly mix together the platforming and combat segments, setting the pace so that one never goes on too long. Recall that the entire world is moving to the beat of the music - that includes platforms, enemies, puzzles, and more. Everything. Chai moves completely to the beat as well, snapping his fingers as you stand idle and keeping his footsteps in rhythm as you move. The platforming segments require precision jumping and timing that uses a full kit of moves.

You can also call your companions in during both platforming and combat sections. Through some future tech nonsense, they can teleport to your location instantly to attack or help with a puzzle segment before going on a short cooldown. However, you can flip between your three companions and summon each one the second the last disappears, if you time it right - that strategy is imperative to win later boss fights. Peppermint comes in for ranged laser pistols that break shields, Macaron slams down to bust open armor, and your third battle companion who I will not name brings wind power that puts out fires and knocks enemies around. Using these abilities to traverse the environments is all well and good, but it’s in battle that it all really shines.

Everything is to the beat. All of your attacks as Chai connect on the beat, regardless of when you hit the button. If you do hit the buttons on time, then your attack power ramps up for each consecutive hit you stay on beat. It’s a genius system, because it means that even if you fall off your cadence you still have the feeling of hitting in time, which makes it easier to get right back into it. 808 acts as a metronome, and you can watch the pulsing light on him for the BPM or if you’re having trouble, open a large metronome at the bottom of the screen. Each strike on an enemy adds a harmonic chord to the song playing, so it feels almost like you’re writing the music yourself.

X is a light attack, Y is a heavy attack. B is to parry, RB is to dodge, LB is to hookshot to an enemy, and RT summons your selected companion. As the rhythm flows through you and the wide variety of robots attack, you’ll have to harness your inner rockstar to execute amazing looking combos and the best feeling melee attacks I can recall in years. Are there any other games where you can surf on a flying guitar and ram through an enemy? No? I thought not.

But upgrades! Of course there are upgrades. Silly. The gears you collect as currency can be traded back at base in between levels for health upgrades, special powers, new combos, new permanent items, and chipsets with incremental upgrades you can level up by using them. Here’s a tip - at HQ, there’s a wall you can check to get gears for in-game achievements that I didn’t find out about til after I beat it. 217,000 gears wasted! Regardless, I was able to make it through alright with what I scrounged up in the levels.

Hi Fi Rush boasts several boss battles that I would call all-timers. I would actually put the Korsica fight in my top 10 of all time. I cannot stress how fun they are. During the Mimosa fight, something odd happened - I was actually so happy, so giddy and excited, that I had to stop playing because I nearly threw up. Every boss fight not only takes what you’ve learned previously and puts it to a grueling but doable test - it also introduces a completely new way to understand and express rhythm. Each is visually stunning, an artistic spectacle, and also a mechanical marvel. The final boss fight was the hardest, and I could feel the deranged look in my eyes as I made my fifth attempt to defeat Kale Vandelay and save the world.


I’ve gone a long time without talking about the music, but hopefully it can speak for itself. It is fantastic, top to bottom. A few talented folks at Tango Gameworks were joined by The Glass Pyramids to create a powerful musical score, each track following a different rock subgenre. The boss fights and high moments are punctuated with excellently utilized licensed music from Nine Inch Nails, The Black Keys, the Prodigy, and more. It’s the exact kind of music I love to chill and vibe to, and if you’re like me you’ll be speechless at how good the soundtrack hits. Different songs let you try out different BPMs as well, so each level inherently feels a little different than the last, on top of the wildly different environments.

Hi Fi Rush’s heartfelt story is full of twists and turns that never try to deceive you, only to delight. Wrapped around the core themes of found family, which you know I’m a sucker for, the culmination of everything at the top of Vandelay tower had such a profound effect on me I actually dropped a few tears. There is a part of many stories which I’ve heard referred to as “the theme restated,” when the protagonist realizes and harnesses the power of the story’s theme in the context of their own character. The moment is powerful in Hi Fi Rush, more than it should be.

You can’t see rhythm. No one can. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Whether you can read music or not, whether you’ve mastered an instrument or can’t manage to play Hot Cross Buns, you are a rock star. You may not know it, you probably don’t believe it. But you’ll tightly navigate those progressions, finesse those pull-offs, and slice through those harmonies until you do believe it. Hi Fi Rush is going to make you believe you are a rockstar.

Isle of Arrows is a near perfect mobile game and the best $6 I've ever spent on the Play store.
- One handed vertical
- No ads, no mtx
- No in game currency or bonuses or powerups
- No daily or weekly check ins
- Campaign with a beginning and end
- Can pick up and play for 1 minute or an hour
- Great art, simple but wildly fun tower defense
- Dozen of permutations to gameplay during the campaign so it never gets repetitive

Do yourself a favor and grab this. Might be my favorite mobile game ever and I wouldn't uninstall it with a gun to my head.

An artist's dream, a bard's song, a manuscript of a forgotten book, a mural of days gone by and days to come. Pentiment does not for a moment feel like a video game, and that is greatly to its benefit. Through the eyes of a melancholic man who has let his life slip away and a curious, ardent young woman who is unsure what she wants from life, hangs a tapestry that winds itself the way you weave it and frays where you err. For all the good and bad that comes with it, the 15 hour walk through 16th century Germany feels as authentic to its the time as walking outside my door feels to the present.

Pentiment is beautifully and deftly crafted by Josh Sawyer (no surprise as he directed the best game of all time) and his team at Obsidian. I feel that it speaks volumes to me in 2023, this story that has happened a thousand times in the past. It's a tad too long, but despite the notable lull in the beginning of the third act it's a story that will resonate with everyone. I recommend to play with a friend so that you may conspire, advise, and meme Saint Goblin the way we did.

Neon White is the most innovative and refreshing action game I have played in years. Fantastic music, sense of speed, and layers on layers of mechanics you feel that you've mastered in seconds, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

I have never been into watching speedrunning, nor have I cared to try it myself, but the compartmentalization of the technique into 15-30 second doses is brilliant. Why did I suddenly care about beating my friends on the leaderboards? It's not something I've ever, EVER cared about before but in Neon White if I saw a friend beat a level a fraction of a second faster than me I'd spend the next ten minutes doing a hundred reruns to beat them.

I will be very open, I think the story is kind of stupid and I did not engage with it after the first hour. The dialogue is badly written and a lot of the VA sounds amateur. This is thankfully not an issue at all, as there's a giant prompt to press the F button to fast forward through every scene, and the game is 100% enjoyable without knowing what's going on. My only other negative is that the game drags for one world before you get the final powerup card.

The final boss of Neon White was so much fun that after a half hour of running it back over and over again, when I finally won, I laughed out loud like a maniac. I can't remember the last boss battle that made me do that, and I'd absolutely list Neon Green as a top 10 final boss of all time. And I got an Ace first try! In addition, the final world is actually the most fun because of a single new mechanic that changes the entire game to make it feel EVEN FASTER. While I wish the story had been any good, it is impossible to deny the sheer brilliance of Neon White. I wish it had gotten more recognition over a certain cat-based indie game, but I'll settle for it residing in the Nirav Hall of Fame.

I reviewed this game with a code provided by the publisher. You can find the full review at https://gameluster.com/pokemon-scarlet-violet-review-glitches-bugs-and-a-whole-lot-of-fun/. The following is a summary:

The frame rate is constantly dropping, the visuals are abysmal, and there is no excuse for the unfinished state of the game. But underneath the hood are the best characters the franchise has ever had, an adventure you can tackle your own way, and the best mainline Pokemon game in decades.

When I was eight years old back in 2001, my brother and I received a copy of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the GameCube from my dad for Christmas. I wasn’t really familiar with Sonic at the time, being that I was a hardcore Nintendo kid, so I’m not sure what prompted him to get this game for us. Still, intrigued, I remember sitting down with my brother to venture into this strange land that Mario had kept us locked away from in the great console wars of the 90s. I fell in love instantly with the colorful cast of characters, the over-the-top anime madness, the frankly incomprehensible story, and, most importantly, the concept of just going fast. Since then I’ve played nearly every game in this incredibly inconsistent series, including the spin-offs, even during my teen years when I was “too cool” for most video games. Sonic the Hedgehog has been a part of my life for much longer than most anything else, and in a strange way it’s one of the few connective tissues that ties together the person I was as a child, the angsty teen version of me from high school, and the adult me in the present.

As I’m sure you’re aware, since the days of Sonic Adventure 2 the 3D games in the franchise have struggled. Some of them, like Sonic Forces and Sonic Boom, have been offensively bad, and even the best ones like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations were just okay. 21 years later, I find myself, mouth agape, as the credits roll on Sonic Frontiers and I am… ecstatic. The mere sight of Knuckles or Shadow or the Chaos Emeralds always brings me joy, and that’s why we Sonic fans have survived this long. But no. This time, I am ecstatic not because Sonic Frontiers is a masterpiece (because it is very, very much not). I am ecstatic because Sonic has, after two decades, matched the enthusiasm that I bring to the franchise.

Sonic Frontiers is undeniably a mess of ideas. Sure, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I firmly believe is one of the best video games ever created. But there are also moments where I swear I’m playing Nier Automata, Xenoblade Chronicles, Skyrim, Super Mario Odyssey, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy XV, or even Marvel’s Spider-Man. Sometimes all at the same time. So, how do all of these disparate visions for what Sonic Frontiers actually is fit together? Truthfully, a lot of the time, they simply don’t. But in those moments that they do, when it all comes together - those moments outshine the highest points of even the best games I played this year.

The story, written by Ian Flynn of the much beloved IDW comics, brings Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy to the Starfall Islands, tracking down where the Chaos Emeralds have bounced off to this time. Of course Dr. Eggman finds his way there hunting down the same thing, and our old friends stumble onto the remains of the lost civilization of a race called The Ancients. If you’re familiar with Sonic, you’ll likely remember Chaos, the water monster that was the primary antagonist of Sonic Adventure and who has appeared numerous times since then.

In a pretty interesting turn, Sonic Frontiers actually explains the origins of the Chaos Emeralds and Chaos himself as lost artifacts of the Ancients in a pretty organic way. It was a bold move to base the story around lore that we’ve been desperately craving since Sonic Adventure since 1998, but it paid off. While the actual dialogue is pretty mediocre and stilted, Frontiers still clears the incredibly low bar of having the best story in the franchise based on providing this extensive, detailed lore. Taking us to the homeland of a villain from decades ago is just the first piece of the payoff to the longtime fans present in this game.

What is it that makes this game tick? Why are the Sonic fans so excited? It may sound insane to those outside the fandom, but this is the first Sonic game in a long time that is actually built around “going fast.” Sonic games have been riddled with careful, precise platforming for 20 years that runs totally counterintuitive to the whole idea of the Blue Blur, and I personally believe it’s been because they are trying to capture some of what makes Mario so great. Sonic is not Mario and is never going to be Mario, and I think Frontiers is the first time that Sonicteam has openly admitted this in their design strategy.

Sonic Frontiers takes place across 5 contained open world zones, each one themed around a different biome and with different cyberspace levels, enemies, challenges, and lore to unpack. Each of these zones is packed with stuff to do, and yes, I mean packed. Everywhere you look, you’ll see an Unreal Engine default landscape with dozens of springs, wires, balloons, rails, pulleys, rings, platforms and dash panels. You know, stuff that you might see in a Sonic game. Except it’s all just floating there, just pasted over a world created in a completely different art style. And you know what? I don’t care. This game world is so incredibly fun to play in that I just could not care less how hilariously dumb everything looks. Deal with it.

The core of why Sonic fans are clicking with this game is that Sonic has never, ever felt this good to control. You get the sense of speed that comes with combining the two past styles of momentum and boost movement, but you also feel the precise control needed to do the actual platforming. As I said before, precise platforming and going as fast as possible have always been at odds, but there’s a beautiful meeting of the two principles in Sonic Frontiers that I had started to believe was impossible. Utilizing the multitude of rails and springs and such, it’s easy to manipulate the physics of the Hedgehog Engine to get around the open world at lightning fast speeds you feel like the game never intended.

Holding down the right trigger turns on your boost, which has a set amount that recharges very quickly, and using this boost along with your homing attacks and developing series of abilities you can work your way through lots of these miniature obstacle courses while making your way from Point A to Point B without interrupting your pace. Filling up your rings to maximum turns on a second boost that lets you move twice as fast, and that’s when you really feel the lightning. Sonic was always meant to be moving faster than even the player can see, and this giant open world is finally the place he can do it while still maintaining a sense of control. These obstacle courses typically yield a memory token, which I’ll get to later. Suffice it to say, this is the most fun I’ve had moving in a game since Spider-Man on the PS4. It’s perfect.

I have seen a few different videos of the PS5 version, which I played as well, having severe pop-in for the floating obstacles and rails. I did experience some pop-in, but it was never close enough to affect me no matter how fast I was going. I have to comment that this game is pretty bug free, although I’ve seen a few videos saying otherwise. All I can say is that my experience featured no major bugs and only a handful of minor ones. It’s one of the more functional launch AAA games I’ve played recently.

While you’re running around you’ll encounter little Koroks, uh, sorry, I mean Cocos, that are just little guys. They’re just little guys! The Cocos are the current inhabitants of the Starfall Islands, and only the Elder Cocos are able to speak to you directly. The others set you up for random minigames that feel so totally out of place they may as well be a different game, even removing abilities seemingly at random to try and make them make any sense. It’s jarring to be blasting through the desert at 200 mph one second and then the next trying to carry a stack of 10 cocos you’re balancing that are vomiting bombs into Knuckles waiting arms. Once these mini games are complete, the participating Cocos inexplicably drop to the floor as their souls feel the sweet release of death while the others celebrate. I still have no explanation for this. Even when the mini games are fun, it’s impossible to not feel like they very much do not belong in Sonic Frontiers.

In addition to the Shrines, you’ll find miniature overworld puzzles very much akin to the ones that net you a Korok seed in Zelda. Completing these unlocks more of the map, so you’ll definitely want to do each one as you come across it. None are particularly hard, and while some are laughably easy, most require a little bit of thought.

Collecting Cocos across the overworld and taking them to the Elder Cocos will earn you extra ring capacity or extra top speed. I opted for speed every time, because heightening your ring capacity actually just makes it harder to reach max boost. The only reason you’d take that upgrade is for the boss fights, which we’ll get to soon. The Coco can also use the attack and defense upgrades you receive from the map puzzles to boost your stats for combat.

Dotted around each of the zones are seven or eight shrines, each of which transports Sonic to a Cyberspace level. Think of it as a miniature dungeon, each one taking anywhere between one and four minutes to complete. I actually grew to love these, and I think there’s exactly the right number of them. The shrines are certainly less plentiful in Sonic Frontiers than in Breath of the Wild, but are also very replayable. Each shrine contains an old school 2D or 3D Sonic level from a previous game reskinned and fitted to work with the art style of the Frontiers cyberspace world. Longtime fans will notice about 30 seconds into a level “Am I in Sky Rail right now?”, which is another sort of subtle way to pat us veterans on the back.

Each Cyberspace level has four missions: complete the stage with any time, complete the stage with S rank time, collect X number of rings, and collect all 5 red star rings. I actually really got into the swing of replaying these until I got all four missions complete, and left only two shrines in the game uncompleted. Going back and trying to beat your time is actually quite fun in these very short levels. You’ll be rewarded with vault keys, which are needed in the overworld on each island to unlock the chaos emeralds. Most of the levels come from Sonic Adventure 2 and Generations, which I remind you are the good ones, so they already feel great to play and are very conducive to this new movement Sonic has in Frontiers that lets you move both faster and with more control than ever before.

I’m sure some of you are thinking right now “is it lazy for Sonicteam to just recycle old stages they know we like instead of making new ones?” For me, I actually see it as more of an homage to the series as a whole and to its longtime fans, and it’s not like they didn’t create a massive totally original gameworld outside of cyberspace anyway. I quite enjoyed the pacing of cyberspace and only found a handful of the levels to not be fun.

One lucky shrine on each island takes you to a parallel world where Big the Cat is inexplicably just fishing. By trading him the fishing tokens you find lying around the overworld, you can borrow his fishing rod and get to work on this quaint minigame. It’s a very simple case of clicking the button at the right time, but I ended up liking it a lot. It’s a little disorienting when Sonic pulls a full sized real Unreal Engine crocodile or squid out of the water and proudly holds it up, but this is when Sonic Frontiers is at its best. When it proudly declares how serious everything is and leaves the audience to revel in that silliness. The fishing minigame also has the huge benefit of allowing you to trade your catches for memory tokens, vault keys, leveling items, rings, cocos and more in case you get stuck.

Sonic Frontiers is the third game in the franchise to feature combat, following the woeful execution of the idea in Sonic Boom and Sonic Unleashed years ago. Well, they actually nailed it this time, much to my surprise. Besides the classic homing attack, punches, and kicks, you start with the new cycloop ability. While running, you can hold Y or Triangle to leave a path of light behind you. Connecting the light trail with a loop sends a wind blast inwards, damaging enemies, flipping switches, and producing rings. In addition, holding L1 and R1 together allows Sonic to parry. I like the addition of the parry, which is very necessary to defeat certain enemies, but the parry window is much too wide, lasting up to 5 seconds from when you hit the input. It almost doesn’t feel like you’re even doing it. If this system returns in the future I’d like to see a decreased window to give the player more of a feeling of control.

While spamming your main attack to build up combo points, you’ll use the new abilities you unlock from Sonic’s small skill tree to finish off the fairly wide variety of enemies in the overworld. Most of them require a specific and different technique to overcome as well. There is also a dodge ability, which is quite important when fighting stronger enemies. Speaking of which, dotted around each zone are four to five mini-bosses. Each one holds a gear, which is needed to unlock a shrine. These mini bosses are unique and fun, and all get a splash screen when they first appear to let you know they mean business. All enemies drop skill tokens when killed, which are of course traded in at the skill tree for new attacks. My main read on combat is that it’s not just impressive for a sonic game, it actually feels good in the grand scene of action adventure games. I hope to see Sonicteam build on this system in the next game.

The other main feature of the overworld is the aforementioned memory tokens. Sonic’s friends, as well as the new character Sage, have been trapped in the cyber world and are only able to break through as holograms on each island to speak to sonic. By collecting memory tokens and taking them to a hologram, you’ll basically unlock a cutscene, chaos emerald, or mini boss fight that moves the story along. While I understand the idea here, and I think the pacing works well for what Sonic Frontiers is trying to do, I think it misses a huge part of why people love Sonic.

We LOVE these characters. We do. We want to see them all hang out, interact, and fight together. Separating out the supporting cast into single 1 on 1 interactions with Sonic was a big mistake. We get a single scene at the end where we see Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all together, which is all any of us want. Although this is the first Sonic game written originally in English, the cutscenes are also a bit strange in how spaced out the dialogue lines are , and I wonder if it’s to account for the Japanese dub that had to go over this game later. Regardless, although the performances and delivery are excellent, the dialogue in Frontiers feels stilted because of these gaps in a way that reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts 3.

I have been carefully saving the best part for last - the boss fights. You may have seen videos or gifs of them going around, and it’s because this part of the game nails what the fans want from Sonic more than anything else the franchise has put out. This, this is the vibe. This is what we were waiting for.

[Video]

There are four titans like this you’ll face, each one accompanied by an original metalcore song by Sleeping with Sirens, where you become super sonic and get to unleash the shounen fury that has always been relegated to a final boss fight in the past games. Finally, this is it. I grinned like a big dumb idiot as the music kicked in and I snatched the last chaos emerald off the head of the first boss to take my own final form. These fights are largely spectacle but do ask for a decent amount of precision as well. This first boss fight with Giganto 5 hours in is not only my favorite boss fight of the year; it is the best one in franchise history. This is a hype moment that is going to stick with me forever.

This leads me to the absolute best feature of Sonic Frontiers - the music. This OST is unbelievable. It features excellent music in every genre spanning from soft piano twinkles to hard house to EDM to metalcore to symphonic ballads and of course to the classic Sonic butt rock sound that we legitimately love. Every track is great, and most of them are exceptional. It was composed by Sonic music veteran Tomoya Ohtani, who’s been working on Sonic Soundtracks for decades. On top of his solo compositions, when you hear the result of his work with groups such as Sleeping with Sirens, Dangerkids, To Octavia and One OK Rock to produce something more than the sum of its parts, I hope you’ll recognize He’s one of the most talented composers out there today. Take a listen to the soundtrack. Now!

Sonic Frontiers is a mess of ideas that I’d maybe give an award to for “least directed” game. Most of the time, it’s barely holding itself together as a mass of ideas from other, better games, with Sonic pasted onto it. But when it hits, oh my god it hits. When the music swells and Kellin Quinn is blasting your eardrums with a guttural scream while you plunge a 300 ft sword into a titan the size of a skyscraper, it won’t matter that you’re doing it in the most artistically dissonant game I have ever seen. It won’t matter that there is literally no explanation for the presence of the Sonic items in this world. It won’t matter that you have to rack up 5 million points in a terrible pinball mini game to progress the story for no given reason. The heights of Sonic Frontiers are the highest highs Sonic has ever seen, and while casual players may not enjoy the game as much as longtime fans, I had more fun in this mediocre game than I had in all the many, many better games I played this year. The blue blur is back, and I cannot wait to see where he goes next. One thing’s for sure - always to new horizons.