Obviously it's the highest selling Mario Kart, hell, the highest selling Mario game at all, so they must've done something right. Totaling a solid 96 tracks and 50 characters, some even crossing over from different games entirely, there should be a little something for anybody and everybody. I dunno know, though, I just can't get into it as much as I feel like I should.

This is a very clean feeling Mario Kart, almost a little too clean. I guess it's the Double Dash fan in me, but Mario Kart 8 has always felt just a little too smooth for my liking, which sounds like it should be a good thing, but I definitely prefer the more chaotic gameplay of Mario Kart. Although, I can give them credit for this, 200cc does do a pretty good job of fulfilling that wish. Custom items as well to an extent, though that's a bit more on the ridiculous side than hectic. Big difference.

I digress, chaotic or not, MK8D still has some beautiful and vibrant tracks. Electrodrome was, and to this day still is, easily in my top 3 tracks out of the entire series. Mt. Wario is another really fun design and concept, which I'm sure has had its praises sung relentlessly by now. Even the retro selection is pretty damn strong, some remarkable glow-ups given to tracks such as GBA Mario Circuit, GBA Ribbon Road, N64 Rainbow Road, though I do understand the grievances to be had on that last one. Outside of the first page of cups, 8 Deluxe also introduced the Booster Course Pass line of DLCs, which, ah...

Sorry, I hate this concept in its entirety. I understand you have your sweet little mobile game and you need to preserve all of its tracks for when that inevitably shuts down, but I really don't think the way to do it was by adding paid DLC to your Deluxe rendition of your 8 year old game. Yes, I see why they did it, I get it, highest selling game on the Switch, it still just feels stupidly counterintuitive. Not to mention how wildly inconsistent the quality can be. For every GBA Boo Lake, there's a 3DS Toad Circuit. For every Yoshi's Story, there's a GBA Sunset Wilds/Sky Garden sorry i'm a super circuit fan and i will NOT sit idly by and let them curse my beloved tracks.

I won't call it bad, it's very clearly not bad. Good, even. I just don't like the feeling it evokes, which is, uh. Not much. Online works surprisingly well, battle mode is easily better than base MK8. Shoutout Reyn and Quent for the fun times and look forward to their reviews as well, assuming they both write one. If not, then at least look forward to Reyn's.

As excited as I was for this game, the opening hours didn't really spark anything in me. The setup is sort of anticlimactic, it presents this open space for you to explore, but moving through that space doesn't feel good and exploration is only really rewarded with small amounts of money. The game starts you off with a purposefully shitty bike, that doesn't go fast or feel particularly good to ride, but then once you get your actual real bike it doesn't end up feeling that much better, I think in part due to the speed and the emptiness of the world.
Then they do the Death Stranding thing where you get to the first big open stretch, and a song with lyrics starts playing while you traverse the space, and my body's natural reaction to this is to get choked up and feel things because it's such a cool way to heighten the emotions while letting you absorb how big this space is. The problem is that this space is little more than just "big." There's not a lot to do but go from point A to B, and when the traversal feels just ok, and the landscape is really just empty space with some rocks here and there, there's not much incentive to continue "just going forward" after you've seen a few different landmarks and satisfied yourself with the sparse rewards therein.
I'm really interested in the story, from what I've heard of it, but I also don't really know if this is a unique enough experience to justify being a Big Old Open World Game, even if it is a short one.

Sonic Lost World is one of the most mixed-up bags I’ve ever seen.

Sonic moves too damn slow, that much is true. His controls can be a bit clunky and the parkour is rarely ever required. The level theming is not just uninspired, but ripped straight from the New Super Mario Bros. games. Grass world, desert world, beach world, ice world, jungle world, sky world, and lava world. Am I playing Sonic or NSMB 2? The level design is so blocky and/or narrow that it can be a pain to try and pick up speed. On top of all that, there are some aggravating gimmick levels, like that one where you have to roll around in a snowball or that particularly infuriating rail-grinding one in the last world.

On the other hand, when the game works, it works well. While the parkour is very underutilized, you can do some legitimately cool stuff with it to skip massive portions of levels. The levels themselves are littered with alternate paths and secrets in typical Sonic fashion. And occasionally, you’ll be running through a level at top speed, plowing through enemies, loading up on rings, and you’ll think “Hell yeah. This is Sonic.”

The story and characters are meh. The cutscenes are well-animated, but too fast-paced. The Deadly Six, as a whole, suck. They’re meant to be the Sonic equivalent of the Koopalings, so like the Koopalings, each one has a defining character trait and nothing else to them. However, the reason the Koopalings work is because they’re only ever used in boss battles and appear sparingly, so their lack of personalities doesn’t annoy the player. The Deadly Six, on the other hand, have too much screentime, making it glaringly obvious just how shallow they all are, to the point that they become annoying very quickly. Zavok, at the very least, is decently threatening and taken seriously. Zoe’s excessive nihilism is unironically funny, especially at the end. The rest are just annoying as shit and I couldn’t stand them. Not helping matters is that Zavok is the only one with halfway-decent boss battles, while everyone else is piss-easy, which really diminishes the team as a threat. Like, really? These dumbasses are trying to destroy the world? Whatever you say. Even worse, the game never explains what they are or where they came from, meaning they don’t even have a place in the series’ lore. So yeah, that’s the Deadly Sux. Here’s hoping they never come back.

At the core of the story is the alliance between Sonic, Tails, and Eggman. I’m gonna go against the grain here and say that I actually like Sonic’s arrogant and snarky attitude in this game, as it contributes to an actual character arc for him and gives Roger Craig Smith the opportunity to show off his comedic timing. Tails… not so much. Tails spends much of the game upset towards Sonic for teaming up with Eggman instead of trusting him. The problem is that this game is like the fourth time they’ve teamed up with Eggman, and Tails has never had a problem with it before, so he just comes across as whiny and unreasonable.

Then there’s Eggman, who gets his own paragraph because he’s the best part of the game. The writers, unfortunately, failed to go in-depth with Eggman and his dynamic with Sonic and Tails in the way that Adventure 2 and especially Frontiers did. However, Eggman is still fantastic in this game. He’s treated as a genuine threat and there’s some moral ambiguity to many of his actions throughout the game (him not wanting to destroy the world, saving Tails, and allying with Sonic in the first place), even he’s still clearly a bad guy. We also get to see just how cunning and manipulative he can really be for the first time since the opening of Unleashed, which is a relief since he’d been treated like a complete buffoon for like 5 years by the time this game came out. Mike Pollock, as always, does an excellent job, especially in the scene where Eggman swears to strangle the Deadly Six to death and burn their world to the ground (this game is for kids).

The graphics are surprisingly good. The art style, while simplistic, fits the cartoonish nature of Sonic and friends in a very natural way. The music, of course, slaps my balls; we’re treated to an energetic jazz orchestra that successfully captures the game’s (admittedly uneven) tone perfectly. Gotta love Sonic music.

All in all, Sonic Lost World hits about as often as it misses, and is a disappointment after Colors and Generations. However, when taken on its own merits, it’s a fun time with some missed potential that doesn’t deserve the sheer level of scorn that the Sonic community levels at it, especially considering how awful some of the Blue Blur’s other adventures are. Sonic Lost World is just… fine.

reviewing any piece of art often requires some amount of subjectivity from the writer. our interactions with art are often influenced by our personal experiences in life, and especially in a medium as variable as video games, many people will walk out of a game with something different to say. as an example, someone with an appreciation for deep character studies may find the plot in the last of us to be it's most engaging element, while someone who enjoys stealth games may like the combat more than anything else. i don't believe there's anything inherently wrong with this approach to criticism, it's just how we're wired as human beings. as we consume media we pull from our past experiences and our immediate impressions come naturally. so when a game like journey comes along with such a singular focus, it's no surprise that people feel strongly one way or another when talking about it. as the name suggests, it's more about the journey than the destination. in fact, that's really all there is to it. there's no immediate conflict, there's nothing to move a plot along, and there's barely anything resembling a story. there's subtle bits of world building sprinkled throughout, but nothing to pull you away from your objective. the game has often been heralded as a flawless work of game design mastery, while also frequently being described as boring or just another walking simulator. after hearing the discourse take fold for years, i knew i had to try it out for myself. having finally played it in one straight shot and feeling a wide range of emotions while i played, i can comfortably say i'm at least happy i played it. while it wasn't quite the thought provoking game i led myself to believe, i don't think it necessarily needed to be. the level of comfort i felt on the way to the end trounced any other questionable feelings i may have felt from the offset. i don't believe i have the authoritative right to call journey a perfect video game, but i can say with confidence that it's a game that everyone should play.

Having been disillusioned by Game Freak shipping out Pokemon Scarlet and Violet with both lackluster graphics AND abysmal performance, I became more curious to check out fangames than the next title, beginning with the fangame that seemed so close to the genuine article Nintendo chucked a DMCA its way several years ago: Pokemon Uranium.

I think the existence of fan games, particularly ones on this level of scale, can be fascinating. When created out of love, they can feel like a fan’s attempt to get more of the specific product they really adore, but they also tend to represent what said fans believe the genuine article had been lacking so they can fill what they perceive as a hole the series left in their hearts themselves.

Anyone can write a fanfiction, but creating a full on GAME to contain that writing actually takes another level of skill, and yet another level beyond that to have said game design feel even slightly like an officially released product. There’s been plenty of horrendously misguided fan games over the years (such dreck as Hunt Down the Freeman and Sonic Omens spring to mind) but I think Pokemon Uranium, despite its amateurish execution in places, is an interesting case that shows how far passion can go when trying to fill a void.

It probably further helps that mainline Pokemon, for years, has been a series of very low-tech games holding the kind of longstanding legacy where game mechanic concepts are constantly being changed on a micro level despite the macro concept being a constant. Thus, Pokemon Uranium brings a Generation 4 overworld with Generation 5 battle UI and Generation 6 battle mechanics.

You know you’re getting into a fan game story very fast when just starting the game shows you the heartbreaking story of your character’s mother dying in a power plant explosion and their father, a Pokemon Ranger, became cold and distant from you. After this introduction though, things mellow out and a lot of what you would expect to be in working order falls right into place.

Most of Uranium plays as you would expect from a sprite based Pokemon game. Explore a region, battle trainers along the way by making eye contact, defeat 8 gym leaders to collect badges to challenge the League to become champion, use HMs to gradually explore the world they couldn’t before, basic stuff. But there’s an admirable level of commitment in many spots. The game has a full day/night cycle it tracks with your computer. There’s over 100 original “fakemons” in this, and while it does make the arbitrary amount of true Pokemon stick out like a sore thumb, a fair amount of the designs do veer close to the mix of cutesy charm and anime cool Ken Sugimori has really refined over the years, in particular with Pokemon like the starter trio, the many Bug type variants, Urayne as a box Legendary and especially Nucleon, which fits right in with the other Eeveelutions present. I like that Uranium decides to make Double Battles take occasional prominence after the main series has shunted them out for years; they offer a level of additional planning without the gimmickier styles tested in Generation 5. The Elite Four is structured more like the anime, where it’s arena battles between randomly pooled opponents in a tournament bracket where neither side can heal, and that was a very distinct addition. There’s a Game Corner, you can rematch numerous trainers if they call you, there’s a sidequest where if you complete it, you get free grinding spots which is extremely helpful, one of the towns has a berry trading economy in lieu of a shop which is another standout moment feature that fits, and Legen Town’s aesthetic of feeling like it takes place inside a medieval castle made it a pretty memorable town. There’s a minigame to raise IVs if you’re into that stuff, and as a game it will offer more of a challenge even in a standard run than any of the mainlines. The original music is quite impressive for a fangame. It can be very rocking at times, but it can also be quite cozy in other places, with the use of synthesizers working well to punctuate the game’s original creation in Nuclear Pokemon.

That being said, despite all these nice touches, there are other aspects that feel noticeably undercooked, or straight up unpolished to the level you’d expect if this was an actually released title. Sometimes, it’s an imperceptible feeling, like when it feels as though wild encounters happen just slightly more often than they should, or that moves with status effects activate slightly more often than they should. Other times, it’s the many lines of comically corny dialogue (which I’ll share at the end) or major inconsistencies in its presentation. Screen tearing is a constant, and it can feel like motion blur in a sprite-based game whenever your character is running or biking around the map. Even in Performance Mode I couldn’t find a way to stop it so look out for that or see if you can find a way around it. Battles also, while they try to emulate the style of Generation 5, aren’t quite there. It can feel very inconsistent on whether a Pokemon’s sprite moves when it’s in battle, as some of the sprites move while others are stuck still. Any attempts at backgrounds are shockingly poor; they try harder to be actual backgrounds than Generation 5, but they have the feeling of taking photographs of sprite art and blurring them before placing them on. As if they were halfway committing to something new but also not fully wanting to abandon the more abstract backgrounds from Gen 5.

I mentioned before that some of the Fakemon were well-designed for what they were but there’s plenty that doesn’t apply toward. Pajay just looks like budget Ho-Oh. Terlard’s battle sprite when using it just looks like two Charizard heads attached together. And the new evolutions feel jarringly at odds with the original visions. The Uranium developers couldn’t have known this at the time, but when Primeape and Dunsparce got new evolutions in Generation 9, they felt perfectly right with the vision and inspiration of the original designs. Dunseraph in Uranium feels completely disconnected from Dunsparce itself on a pure concept design level, which is something I can’t say for the new evolutions for old mons added in Generation 4.

HM moves were always just situational progression blockers, but Uranium doesn’t do as much as it could to take advantage of them. Strength and Surf work as you’d expect; there’s even a few Strength puzzles near the end of the game to have you think a bit, but Rock Smash loses any sort of relevance very quickly after breaking a progression blocker, Dive is used to pass through a single blocker in the main game and nothing else, while Fly, even beyond how late you get it, can only take you to one side of the region or another. Meaning you’ll either have to Surf a bit of distance to get to the other side or pay a bit of currency every time you want to come over. It feels like a clunky tech oversight, compared to mainline Pokemon organizing the entirety of a single region on one map.

For something with both pros and cons: Nuclear Pokemon! They essentially looked at the Shadow Pokemon from Pokemon XD and decided to turn them from tanks into glass cannons. Every Nuclear attack is super effective on every type except Nuclear and Steel, but they’re also weak to every type. It’s an interesting way of punishing you for using Dual Type mons in your team for more type coverage, as it’s likely a single Nuclear attack would do 4X the amount of damage. It’s interesting, and it does help with the game’s honestly rather questionable level curving in the second half, but it also entirely comes down to a speed advantage. If a Nuclear Pokemon goes first and has a high enough attack, it likely kills, but if it's too weak to one shot for any reason, it’ll likely die in a single turn. On your end, this limits their utility without enough grinding, but the game’s main villain, Apocalypse CURIE, has an entire team of these, and will likely hold major level advantages, and therefore speed, if you don’t extensively grind. Which brings up the story itself.
If there’s one constant among many Pokemon stories, it’s the sense of escalation; often you’re going from catching small rats and racoons to defeating entire organizations of domestic terrorists trying to tame the power of God and anime on their side. But in Pokemon Uranium it sort of feels like the heavier plot is tossed off to the side while you go about the standard Gym badge journey. It’s not like in say, Generation 4, where Team Galactic happened to be occupying buildings within and around the major towns. A lot of the key story moments boat you away from the world to power plant islands, two of which hold dungeons with some atmosphere to them, even as the second one puts you in a suit where you have to slowly walk and repels don’t work to stave away random encounters. Some of the only times the plot takes place within the core world itself involves a two-time subplot involving scheming scientists and Garlikid, a Pokemon that really shouldn’t be. The single corniest thing this game’s story does is in this subplot. They introduce a translator device that lets you hear what Pokemon are saying, since until the ending it mostly comes down to “annihilate, kill, kill, human injustice, why am I trapped in a tiny ball.” It’s not endearingly goofy like some of the NPC dialogue ends up being, it’s just cringe, flat out and reminds me why Game Freak wisely stayed away from having the pets communicate their own abuse.

Disconnection from the world aside though, the Apocalypse CURIE encounters are some of the game’s more memorable moments. The twist regarding them is perhaps the most obvious of all time in the history of anything, but their existence in the story with their 12-year-old edgelord dialogue leads into some climatic battles.

But I should asterisk this as another instance where decisions made regarding said encounters would in absolutely no way fly in an officially released product. The first battle with CURIE is behind a door with a timer where you have to reach them in time, or else. The game does warn you about something big being behind this door, but if you save past the door and your team isn’t prepared, the time limit actively prevents grinding, and your file is screwed. Then there’s another encounter at the very end of the game with a Level 85 Legendary to contend with, 15 levels higher than the Elite Four. Its Nuclear type would make it extra vulnerable if not for its insane level jump compared to what’s likely your party at the time giving it speed priority. Losing this battle gives you a non-standard ending without an instant Pokemon Center warp. Meaning, if you decided to save at any point passed the Elite Four entrance, and it’s impossible to win with your current team and item setup, your file is screwed, FOREVER. It’s possible in one way to do even with a lower-level team (Focus Sash + Thunder Wave= likely win) but still, I have no idea how that got through. If you can make it through, the ending itself is overall a pleasant enough way to close out, accompanied by a strong somber music track.

Pokemon Uranium is a mixed bag, some genuinely thoughtful game design inclusions and a decently amount of creativity hurt by technical inconsistencies and overly strenuous market unfriendly design at points, but it reflects the kind of passion fangame creators provide out of love and appreciation for the accomplishments of a series, even if it can be misguided. I’m curious to check out other full on fangames in the future to see if they’ve better balanced those sensibilities, but for now, I’ll leave off by sharing some of the absolutely incredible dialogue contained within this game:

“Okay, listen: How do you get 50 Pikachu on a bus? You poke’em on! Haha, geddit?”

“Mom just doesn’t understand why I hate sand. It’s coarse, and rough…and it gets everywhere!”
(yes they did just reference a prequel meme)

“I love playing video games. Pokemon’s a really fun one. Wanna play?”

“Hey n00b! Wanna see my 1337 skills? Let’s fight!”

“Lololol im a grrrrl gamer! Y aim a girl and I play video gamezzz! o3o.”

“KILL THE INTRUDER CRUSH DESTROY KILL” (from a Pokemon)

“You may know me as Cameron Caine, engineer, private contractor, and father. However, this is not the truth about who I am. My real name is Cameron Stormbringer.”

Thank Arceus! (used as a sub for Thank God because Pokemon god)

HOLY SHINX! (obvious expletive)

A sign saying “Wow, you found this place, good job.”

“I can’t believe it… you SAVED the day. I knew you could SAVE us. …Why am I shouting SAVE you ask? Well… I just think it’s a good idea to SAVE things!” (helpful but still goofy as heck)

“I’M JUST SO HAPPY TO SEE MY FAMILY AGAIN!! sniffle”

Fans weren’t lying, this really is the best Sonic game we’ve had in years.

If you’re looking for a balanced review of the game, you won’t be finding one here. If you’d like more positive perspectives on the latest Sonic hotness, I’d highly recommend reading Pangburn and MagneticBurn’s written pieces on the game, as well as watching ThorHighHeels and Cybershell’s recent videos on it. This review will not discuss any story spoilers, but will vaguely touch upon the final few bosses.

Initially I had (unfairly) written the game off based on its truly awful press coverage, but it’s not like I had much faith in this franchise’s future anyway after getting a game as vapid as Sonic Forces. Though let it be known that I’m always willing to give something a chance, no matter how little I think I’ll like it. I hadn’t planned on getting to this for a while, but after my brother bought it on Steam out of the same curiosity for the game that I had, I knew I should probably just go ahead and play it. Now that I’m on the other end of the experience I think I’m even more concerned for this franchise's future.

After his last 3D outing this series was bound to take a sharp turn somewhere, but I think this genuinely might be Sonic’s most baffling course correction yet. True to its name, Sonic Frontiers stands as the dividing line between the older boost era of games and whatever empty path the series may decide to take next. This should be cause for celebration as I think everyone was essentially done with standard boost games after Forces, but I’m not convinced this open world zone approach is the right way to go if this series wants to stay on the cutting edge.


Over his career, Sonic has always been nothing if not a trend chaser, and that’s abundantly clear here. Shifting away from a straightforward progression though linear stages, Frontiers dumps you into a huge, empty map and sends you off on your way to do whatever it asks of you, knocking out dozens of menial checkmark tasks on your way to the next Thing. Generally you’ll be bouncing between haphazardly placed waves of enemies, puzzles that feel like they were made by a computer, and traditional boost stages in some of the most shameless methods of content rehashing I’ve seen in a long time. In-between these game-percentage ticks are the vast open fields themselves, letting Sonic stretch his legs a bit and run freely and mindlessly like the little rascal he is. After getting all the chaos emeralds on any given island (a process normally executed by fighting a boss to get a gear, using that gear to open a boost stage, playing the boost stage to collect keys, and using the keys to unlock emeralds), you’ll be thrust into a massive set piece pitting Super Sonic against a massive titan, and after beating the boss you’ll be ejected to the next island where the process begins anew.

It may sound harsh to explain this loop so bluntly and unceremoniously, but it’s not like I’m being totally uncharitable. This is the large bulk of what you’ll be doing during an average playthrough. Even among those who love the game, most would agree that a lot of the content in the open world itself can feel tedious at best or downright poor at worst, and I’d be inclined to agree.

Stopping dead in your tracks while zooming from place to place to complete another copy and pasted “puzzle” to fill out a map you’ve already explored is a recipe for disaster in any Sonic game as far as I’m concerned, and that's before you even consider the quality of the puzzles themselves. I think I’d be more charitable towards these if they were taxing in any way whatsoever, but they genuinely amount to turning your brain off for a variable period of time and getting rewarded with the mild satisfaction that you’re working towards a greater task in some small way. Sometimes you’re holding a button down for 30 seconds, sometimes you’re following a path around an obstacle course, sometimes you’re drawing a circle on the ground, sometimes it may even give you a slightly more valuable trinket as a reward for your hard work, but none of it will meaningfully latch onto you regardless. The game may as well just give you the stat boost / item for finding them (see also: looking at the marker on your map and running from one side of the map to the other to get to it) because the puzzles ultimately add nothing to the experience but provide a shallow time waster between story moments.


Let me slow down for a second, I know that these puzzles aren’t the primary draw of the game and it’d be foolish of me to pretend they are. This is a Sonic game after all, it’s always been more about the journey than the destination. Even the best 3D Sonic games are usually pretty fun to move around in regardless of any extraneous elements that may bog it down, so how is the movement in Frontiers? Well…

I’ll be upfront and admit that boost Sonic has never exactly been my thing, but there was a real opportunity here to transform this style of control into something that not only felt fresh, but managed to hold up the rest of the experience on its shoulders, flawed as the surrounding game may be. Against all odds, the system presented here managed to be possibly the most underwhelming iteration on this formula yet, but it’s not entirely the fault of the physics engine.

There was clearly an effort made here to give Sonic more tools to work with and add extraneous world elements to make field traversal flashier. but ultimately most of your experience will just be spent boosting everywhere if you’d like to get to your destination with any semblace of expediency or natural flow. It feels like most movement options (barring a few niche maneuvers like boost jumping off of a rail or other admittedly interesting speedrunning tricks for the Cyberspace stages) just punish you for trying anything other than the prescribed fun it wants to give you. Gone are the days of empty homing attacking to convert air acceleration into ground speed or spin dash jumping off a slope and shooting into the stratosphere, and in their place lie disconnected setpieces of rails and platforming challenges to stumble into and sit back in awe of. Admittedly, it can be rewarding in its own way to string these setpieces together in a way that can very occasionally bring me back to the beautiful labyrinthian nightmares of Sonic CD, but this type of traversal just is not my thing at all - boosting off a bump in the ground and entering a stiff arc in the air will never scratch the same itch to me as some of the crazy shit you can do in Sonic Adventure.

The elephant in the room regarding the openworld design is Breath of the Wild, a game that not only breathed new life into its own series back in 2017, but inadvertently spawned a wave of imitators that wouldn't pop up for at least a few years after the fact (you can’t make a game like Elden Ring in just a weekend). Sonic Frontiers is clearly drawing inspiration from this title, and while this isn’t a terrible thing on the face of it, I’m intensely bothered by the approach taken by Sonic Team. On the surface, both games are strikingly similar: A desolate, wide open map to explore, exceedingly simple puzzles sprinkled across the land, an emphasis on player growth in its collectables, and short cutscenes that add almost nothing but small moments of character growth to bolster the main plot. A common critique I’ve seen levied at Breath of the Wild over the years is that the land of Hyrule is boring to traverse, that nothing you do ever feels significant and that there’s nothing truly special to be discovered. I obviously resent this notion, but the reason why its crept back up in my mind is how Sonic Frontiers just feels like that imaginary game people have occasionally punched down on for 5 years. While many will bring up these two games in the same conversation primarily as a point of praise for Sonic, I feel like the core of each game couldn’t be any different.

Sure, it may be true that not every single task you perform is Breath of the Wild is exemplary, the secret to their success is one word: freedom. The freedom to go anywhere, do anything, see new sights, play at your own pace, and tie it in a nice bow at the end of it all. There are more granular elements to the game I adore, like how truly alive the world actually feels, but the thing that stands out the most to me in this concoction of fun is how decision making affects the game on such a massive scale. It’s not just that the game gives you a stat boosting item for a large portion of puzzles, it’s that you have to make the choice between boosting health or stamina. The world can be vicious early on with enemy camps dangling good early-game rewards on a string just in your grasp, so upgrading health might be desirable. At the same time, having a higher stamina bar is all but essential to make some of the more treacherous climbs in the game, and may also inadvertently make some combat encounters easier on the defensive if you need a hasty escape plan. While both of these can be mitigated somewhat through clever uses of the cooking system, it’s this consideration for player choice and their long term consequences that really make Breath of the Wild special to me, and go some way towards recapturing what made the original The Legend of Zelda feel like such a magical bolt of lighting on the industry.

No such consideration exists in Sonic Frontiers. Every task feels like it's being done for the sake of itself, rather than acting as a vehicle for interesting engagements with the world. Stat boosting has no bearing on how you play the game and does nothing but make combat slightly less tedious, so those rewards you get for completing puzzles may as well not exist. Enemy encounters similarly feel slapdash, there was not a single fight in my 15 hours of playtime that instilled any excitement in me whatsoever and I was tired of fighting the same mobs and minibosses by the time I saw them more than once. I guess it must appeal to someone that there are hundreds of little things on the map that go in one ear and out the other, but it certainly doesn’t to me. Frankly I don’t feel like this new approach fits the playground philosophy of Sonic in the slightest, and unless they come into the next game with a fresh mind on how puzzles and combat are designed, I think this approach should just be scrapped altogether. If Breath of the Wild was Zelda’s come to Jesus moment, Frontiers is Sonic’s JESUS IS KING moment.

As I’ve tried to lay out so far, I have massive fundamental problems with this game, but what truly breaks my heart is every small crevice of the game that just blows its potential for no good reason. It feels like with every nearly decent idea Sonic Frontiers has, it somehow undermines it and makes you realize the whole thing was built on an extraordinary shaky foundation to begin with. Why go to the effort of divorcing the homing attack from the double jump, only to layer it over another opposing action anyway with the combo button? Why even force a stamina bar on you when it takes two seconds to enable infinite stamina? Why offer me the choice of pumping my stats into ring capacity when you simultaneously benefit massively if you can reach the maximum rings, making an increase in rings tantamount to wasting my time long term? Why dangle a defense stat in my face when I can spawn infinite rings at any point negating every single challenge in the game? Why would you design these massive bosses in a game with combat at the forefront only for me to fight every single one in exactly the same way. Why would you add a mediocre fishing minigame to your laundry list of side activities and skip out on the presentation side of it (the only good reason to have a fishing minigame), completely? Why include Big the Cat in your roster of side characters if Jon St. Jon’s goofy ass voice isn’t the one backing him up? Why include a parry if you can just hold it down indefinitely, defeating the entire point of adding a parry to your game? What’s the point of living if we are all just going to die?

Even beyond the gameplay itself, I never found the actual primary tasks you’re bouncing between to be very satisfying either. Between chaos emerald runs, you’ll be collecting island specific collectables to satisfy the needs of a few of Sonic’s friends, and will be treated to short cutscenes of banter between Sonic and the character in question. Occasionally these conversations will directly tie into or work to resolve the current events unfolding in the game, but oftentimes are just quick conversations about old adventures or ad libs about the current psyche of the characters. The writing of these scenes (and by extension the story as a whole) have honestly eclipsed all other discussion surrounding this game, and part of me understands why. It's clear Ian Flynn cares for these characters and wanted to push this series forward in a big way, nearly every scene feels far more grounded than what you’d find in an older game with even this same cast, and with every character interaction you can practically feel the love flowing from the heart of Flynn as he tries to humanize everyone to the best of his ability. I see why people are into his approach of character writing, but man it’s just really not my thing.

To me, the highest highs of this series were always founded on sincerity through the shmaltz and camp. It's not that you had to take it seriously, it's that it was all coming from a genuine place of earnesty to make something fun first, and to write a compelling character drama second. Even when Sonic is absolutely fumbling over himself trying to weave together an interconnected mess of a story, he still somehow manages to bring it all home with an absolutely legendary finale. I’ll admit that much of this may be down to personal taste, but none of the melodrama here in Frontiers really managed to resonate with me, and I think part of that may be due to the presentation and escalation of scale here.

One of my favorite elements to the older Sonic games, (and you’ll have to bear with me here) was the buildup and anticipation to Super Sonic. This was less the case in the 2D games as it served more as a completion reward more than anything, but with the transition to 3D came a far grander scope, and an attempt at narrative pacing. The key word there is attempt - I think most would admit the writing in Sonic games has never been Shakespearean - but the effort was certainly appreciated, and likely played a large part in how these games were remembered over time. Even the blindest of Sonic haters would have to admit that he rarely disappoints for the finale, and this shift where Super Sonic went from a cute in-game bonus to a crazy big payoff right before the curtain call was a brilliant move on SEGA’s part. I tend to be one who prefers intrinsic gameplay benefits over extrinsic ones, but the buildup to the inevitable Super Sonic encounter in every subsequent 3D Sonic game has excited me ever since I first finished Sonic Unleashed back in 2008. Not only was it a smart move to ensure players couldn’t steamroll the challenge of the game (assuming they didn’t also intensify the requirements to unlock Super Sonic), but also to make the game’s final moments land way harder than they could have if say, you had repeated access to Super Sonic at multiple points throughout the game up until that point.

This is why the approach found in Sonic Frontiers feels extremely flaccid to me. It's hard to get excited over an encounter that may have been the equivalent to smashing my childhood toys together had it happened in an older Sonic game, but when it gets repeated 5 times without any build up or escalation on subsequent encounters, it quickly loses its luster. At first I thought this may have been done to amplify the impending finale where we’d really do some mad shit with Super Sonic, but that's not the case. Instead you have two choices based on the difficulty you’ve selected: on Normal you can have a final boss that plays just like the final encounters on the previous 4 islands followed by a Super Sonic cutscene, or on Hard you can have that followed by an… Ikaruga inspired final boss? I know I’m normally the biggest blind defender of shoving shmup sections in games where they admittedly rarely belong, but there was such a missed opportunity here to blow the roof off the finale of the game and at least end with a bang, but I suppose that would require some amount of buildup to be paid off by a hypothetical section like this.

I don’t wanna rip this game away from anyone who’s having a good time with it, after suffering for years with no reinvention I can totally buy that this game would be the one that ties everyone together and brings back a feeling of hope for this series that hasn’t been felt on this scale since Sonic Generations. That said, I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed this on any level. This genuinely might just be a case of me growing up and this type of thing not really being for me anymore, which would be a genuine shame if that's the case. This series that once felt like a cause for joy and celebration in my life now feels trite to me, like the ship is finally sinking and the Captain is trying everything in their power to keep the cruise afloat. I’m sure they’ll still find some way to wrangle me back in to see how the blue bastard is doing in the future, but there’s no doubt that the spark is starting to fade for me.

i'm generally not someone to go out of my way to play remasters or fan-adjusted versions of older games. most of the time, i'm more interested in getting as authentic an experience as i can out of these titles - to assess the work as its own standalone piece with the historical context behind it, splinters and all. that said, sonic 3 a.i.r. is a rare exception. for a game i have this much history with, being that i grew up with sonic 3 & knuckles, i'm happy to say that not only did this remaster completely make me understand WHY this is the best sonic game (even surpassing my beloved sonic 2 and the fantastic modern revival, sonic mania) but after revisiting this version for the FOURTH time this year and 100% completing it, achievements and all... this is my favorite 2d platformer of all time, now. one of my favorite games, period.

EVERYTHING about sonic 3 a.i.r. screams 'definitive'. the amount of customization options available to the player here, from level layouts to movesets, from item arsenals to soundtrack swaps, is on the cusp of fucking absurd. and as someone who yearns for the days of game-changing unlockables and cleverly tucked away easter eggs, sonic 3 a.i.r. had me covered in spades. the new mania-esque animations and updated 3d renders keep 3 a.i.r. feeling fresh and relevant while maintaining complete faithfulness to the original. the soundtrack remaster sounds crisp, full and lively - being a musician myself, i found the mixes here to be stellar and truly accurate to the intent of that near-perfect original score. time attack fans - i myself slowly find myself becoming one thanks to this game - are even eating good here, with a really intuitive and well designed mode to help you optimize time between runs. hell, i'm not even an achievement hunter but i sought out 100% completion with these fan-added trophies for the FUN of it. that's the sign that i've really, truly enjoyed your game.

there are still some fundamental issues that may boil up from the original sonic 3 here - i still think sandopolis and marble garden are a little patchy in comparison to the perfect streak of levels the rest of the game offers, but what's here is so good, and the feeling of just... experiencing a masterpiece fully realized to an ultimate apex of potential, that those qualms are frankly negligible. much as mario 64 remains my all-time platforming king, the 2d throne finally belongs to the blue blur. believe the hype - this one is the real deal, and a.i.r. has set that firmly in stone.

also - this got to be my 10 year old brother's first sonic game. he demanded i play sonic and he be tails. god damn it was so sweet. :)