Sonic Frontiers is a new step forward for Sonic, and a great step in the right direction.
Now obviously they had a bar set low with Sonic Forces the ideal was to make a game at the very least better than that, and I have to say they knocked it out of the park with this opportunity.
The open zones concept is great, giving a more expressive and exploration based world.
The game has 3 unique open zones, with the last 2 just sort of being a retread of the first however each having their own distinct that make them fun to go through.
The levels are comprised of 7 throughout each open Zones featuring worlds of Green Hills, Sky Sanctuary, Chemical Plant, City Escape, though relying way too much on these 4 worlds split across the 7 levels. I will say though, the pace of each world is perfect, the levels are the perfect length to where they have the speed flow great, while having you complete 4 objectives that can be easy to do so, now obviously you could say "shouldn't it be a challenge to complete the levels and get an S Rank" absolutely, however what shouldn't happen is having the levels that are made for speed, become essentially a looking around the world in order to find a red ring.
The missions consist of 4 missions to complete:
COMPLETE THE LEVEL
S RANK
ALL RED RINGS
GET A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF RINGS TO THE END
The game lacks lives as this experience is more so a new experience, so entering levels does not have any punishment in terms of having to start all over. Instead any progress made stacks on top of the time you died on, so if you're planning on getting the S Rank, and you die, you might as well restart the level and try again.
The open zones consist of this same pattern of gameplay, but having the ability to explore these areas is refreshing especially with the background music which can be peaceful to run around in.
Essentially you have to do challenges to open up the map, which later you can see the entire map, as well as portals (levels), locations of chaos emeralds, side stories/interactions with Sonic and his friends, the fishing levels, and Hermit and Grand Kocos.
After completely all the levels, getting all the chaos emeralds, and gaining memory items for you friends and Sage, you get to fight these amazingly Grand Spaken new bosses for a Sonic game.
I love Metal Sonic, he's my favorite Sonic character, only thing is that Sega's over reliance on him was a detriment as they never seemed to be able to make a new enemy that wasn't up to the level of Metal or Chaos.
All that Changes with the Titan bosses, giving you 4 amazing epic boss battles with you controlling Super Sonic and absolutely decimating them with every combat attack you learn.
The boss fights are amazing, as are the mini boss fights within the open zone, as the incentive with defeating said openzone minibosses is they give you items to use either to open portals, open the chaos emeralds containment.
The game has this funny as hell, and easy to master fishing mini game with Big the Cat, who has no clue why he's in the ancients area, but like in Sonic Adventure 2, he's just there in the world.
The fishing minigame is fun and beneficial as it's easy to just cast for fish, and then grab the fish when you press the button at the right time.
You fish via collecting these fishing coins all throughout the world, which as you fish and collect fish of different varieties, give you tokens and sometimes (rarely) golden tickets in order to exchange for things like:
Eggmans Memos (24 in total) - 15🪙
Chaos Key (there's usually a limit but max you need is about 20, but you can get more for some reason lol) - 5 🪙
Portal Keys -5🪙
Memory Piece for (Amy/Knuckles/Tails/Sage) - 5🪙
Defense fruit - 2🪙
Attack fruit - 2🪙
Kocos - 3🪙
In the fishing minigame it varies in terms of what world you're in for the amount of tokens you'll recieve, I suggest spending time in all 4 just to boost Sonics Power, Defense, and speed to help you out. The best fishing spot is on the last island however as if you catch rare fish it gives you about 48 tokens (maximum amount of tokens you can hold from fishing is 999)
Which you can just spam on Big's token shop and get a bunch of attack and defense fruit, or kocos.
The attack and defense fruit go to the Hermit Koco who automatically stacks it onto Sonic's Current attack and defense, and gets applied automatically, so you could go from level 1 to level 64 if you collected alot, though if you did the big fishing mini game and bought a bunch of fruit, you can get to 99.
The Grand Koco asks for you to collect Kocos throughout the open zone as well as the fishing mini game from exchanging tokens, as you collect 10 and give them to the Grand Koco, he allows you to decide whether you want to add it to Sonic's speed or Ring Count. The issue is with this is you have to level it up one at a time and go in a cycle of:
"Increase sonics speed"
Level 1-> Level 2
"Can never be too fast can we? Would you like to increase something else?"
Options:
"No thanks"
"Increase Speed"
"Increase Ring Capacity"
Rinse and repeat until:
1. You've run out of Kocos in order to level up
2. You have an abundance of Kocos to where you're maxed out on Speed and Ring Capacity so you no longer need to speak to the Grand Koco.
The story is amazing as it features a lot of heart warming and friendly moments between Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Sage.
The writer Ian Flynn, who writes for the IDW comics did a fantastic job adding more emotion, lore, and care to the story with the Ancients/Koco (who look like ancestors/similar to Chaos [main villain from Sonic Adventure])
We see a more caring and expressive Robotnik/Eggman with Sage, and we get a lot of amazing call backs to:
Sonic Unleashed
Sonic Riders
Sonic 1, 2, and 3
Sonic Forces
Sonic Unleashed
Sonic Colors and Lost World
Sonic story book duology
Sonic Adventure 1 and 2
Etc.
As well as referencing characters from said games, and even having idw comic characters mentioned.
The issues with game are as follows:
While having an amazing variety of boss fight themes, and the level music being good as well, I wish for a little more variety.
The levels too could've used either more call back stages rather than just:
GREEN HILLS
SKY SANCTUARY
CITY ESCAPE
CHEMICAL PLANT
They could've used levels from Sonic Rush, Colors, The story book game levels, Unleashed worlds, even 06 with crisis city.
Another issue is with the open zone in terms of the pop in, I feel they could've masked the pop in with either making it so the world had a fog to mask the pop in like Silent Hill 2 or could've rendered all objects in so that it didn't look weird.
The controls need a bit more adjustment as they feel abit janky, however Sonic himself is great to control and feels fast to control, that IGN GAMEPLAY reveal shows how bad the people who play games are as they made it seem like the controls didn't work when they work fine, the person who was controlling just sucks ass at video games.
Overall I had a wonderful time with Sonic Frontiers, I hope for the next Sonic game they keep Ian Flynn as the writer and have more characters present, this a great step forward for Sonic, and I can't wait to see whats next! I absolutely recommend this game 😁🙏🏻❤️
Now obviously they had a bar set low with Sonic Forces the ideal was to make a game at the very least better than that, and I have to say they knocked it out of the park with this opportunity.
The open zones concept is great, giving a more expressive and exploration based world.
The game has 3 unique open zones, with the last 2 just sort of being a retread of the first however each having their own distinct that make them fun to go through.
The levels are comprised of 7 throughout each open Zones featuring worlds of Green Hills, Sky Sanctuary, Chemical Plant, City Escape, though relying way too much on these 4 worlds split across the 7 levels. I will say though, the pace of each world is perfect, the levels are the perfect length to where they have the speed flow great, while having you complete 4 objectives that can be easy to do so, now obviously you could say "shouldn't it be a challenge to complete the levels and get an S Rank" absolutely, however what shouldn't happen is having the levels that are made for speed, become essentially a looking around the world in order to find a red ring.
The missions consist of 4 missions to complete:
COMPLETE THE LEVEL
S RANK
ALL RED RINGS
GET A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF RINGS TO THE END
The game lacks lives as this experience is more so a new experience, so entering levels does not have any punishment in terms of having to start all over. Instead any progress made stacks on top of the time you died on, so if you're planning on getting the S Rank, and you die, you might as well restart the level and try again.
The open zones consist of this same pattern of gameplay, but having the ability to explore these areas is refreshing especially with the background music which can be peaceful to run around in.
Essentially you have to do challenges to open up the map, which later you can see the entire map, as well as portals (levels), locations of chaos emeralds, side stories/interactions with Sonic and his friends, the fishing levels, and Hermit and Grand Kocos.
After completely all the levels, getting all the chaos emeralds, and gaining memory items for you friends and Sage, you get to fight these amazingly Grand Spaken new bosses for a Sonic game.
I love Metal Sonic, he's my favorite Sonic character, only thing is that Sega's over reliance on him was a detriment as they never seemed to be able to make a new enemy that wasn't up to the level of Metal or Chaos.
All that Changes with the Titan bosses, giving you 4 amazing epic boss battles with you controlling Super Sonic and absolutely decimating them with every combat attack you learn.
The boss fights are amazing, as are the mini boss fights within the open zone, as the incentive with defeating said openzone minibosses is they give you items to use either to open portals, open the chaos emeralds containment.
The game has this funny as hell, and easy to master fishing mini game with Big the Cat, who has no clue why he's in the ancients area, but like in Sonic Adventure 2, he's just there in the world.
The fishing minigame is fun and beneficial as it's easy to just cast for fish, and then grab the fish when you press the button at the right time.
You fish via collecting these fishing coins all throughout the world, which as you fish and collect fish of different varieties, give you tokens and sometimes (rarely) golden tickets in order to exchange for things like:
Eggmans Memos (24 in total) - 15🪙
Chaos Key (there's usually a limit but max you need is about 20, but you can get more for some reason lol) - 5 🪙
Portal Keys -5🪙
Memory Piece for (Amy/Knuckles/Tails/Sage) - 5🪙
Defense fruit - 2🪙
Attack fruit - 2🪙
Kocos - 3🪙
In the fishing minigame it varies in terms of what world you're in for the amount of tokens you'll recieve, I suggest spending time in all 4 just to boost Sonics Power, Defense, and speed to help you out. The best fishing spot is on the last island however as if you catch rare fish it gives you about 48 tokens (maximum amount of tokens you can hold from fishing is 999)
Which you can just spam on Big's token shop and get a bunch of attack and defense fruit, or kocos.
The attack and defense fruit go to the Hermit Koco who automatically stacks it onto Sonic's Current attack and defense, and gets applied automatically, so you could go from level 1 to level 64 if you collected alot, though if you did the big fishing mini game and bought a bunch of fruit, you can get to 99.
The Grand Koco asks for you to collect Kocos throughout the open zone as well as the fishing mini game from exchanging tokens, as you collect 10 and give them to the Grand Koco, he allows you to decide whether you want to add it to Sonic's speed or Ring Count. The issue is with this is you have to level it up one at a time and go in a cycle of:
"Increase sonics speed"
Level 1-> Level 2
"Can never be too fast can we? Would you like to increase something else?"
Options:
"No thanks"
"Increase Speed"
"Increase Ring Capacity"
Rinse and repeat until:
1. You've run out of Kocos in order to level up
2. You have an abundance of Kocos to where you're maxed out on Speed and Ring Capacity so you no longer need to speak to the Grand Koco.
The story is amazing as it features a lot of heart warming and friendly moments between Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Sage.
The writer Ian Flynn, who writes for the IDW comics did a fantastic job adding more emotion, lore, and care to the story with the Ancients/Koco (who look like ancestors/similar to Chaos [main villain from Sonic Adventure])
We see a more caring and expressive Robotnik/Eggman with Sage, and we get a lot of amazing call backs to:
Sonic Unleashed
Sonic Riders
Sonic 1, 2, and 3
Sonic Forces
Sonic Unleashed
Sonic Colors and Lost World
Sonic story book duology
Sonic Adventure 1 and 2
Etc.
As well as referencing characters from said games, and even having idw comic characters mentioned.
The issues with game are as follows:
While having an amazing variety of boss fight themes, and the level music being good as well, I wish for a little more variety.
The levels too could've used either more call back stages rather than just:
GREEN HILLS
SKY SANCTUARY
CITY ESCAPE
CHEMICAL PLANT
They could've used levels from Sonic Rush, Colors, The story book game levels, Unleashed worlds, even 06 with crisis city.
Another issue is with the open zone in terms of the pop in, I feel they could've masked the pop in with either making it so the world had a fog to mask the pop in like Silent Hill 2 or could've rendered all objects in so that it didn't look weird.
The controls need a bit more adjustment as they feel abit janky, however Sonic himself is great to control and feels fast to control, that IGN GAMEPLAY reveal shows how bad the people who play games are as they made it seem like the controls didn't work when they work fine, the person who was controlling just sucks ass at video games.
Overall I had a wonderful time with Sonic Frontiers, I hope for the next Sonic game they keep Ian Flynn as the writer and have more characters present, this a great step forward for Sonic, and I can't wait to see whats next! I absolutely recommend this game 😁🙏🏻❤️