Look, the moment-to-moment experience of playing Sonic Frontiers is pretty fucked. You'll be fighting a camera which is designed to inconvenience you and swing around wildly at all times, you'll get locked onto mini obstacle courses when they pop in a meter ahead of you and not being able to return back to moving about the open world until you hop through a bunch of boost rings that shoot you in the opposite direction you want to move, and you'll deal with ever-changing controls as the camera state and context collaborate to make sure whatever you intended to do becomes something else. It's a mess that is pretty much impossible for me to look past.

But I can't really bring myself to dislike it. Despite the fact that it's barely functional and any emotional moment has to be surrounded by smirks and 5 of the weakest quips you've ever heard lest it come off as too sincere, the glitchy somber Digimon-movie aesthetic, tons of Cute Little Guys all over the place, and next-level tunes (outside of the boss fights...) make for something I ultimately still enjoyed a reasonable amount and don't regret giving my time. Frontiers is bold and deeply weird, and I'm always down for that.

I had nice 45 minutes or so on this spent remembering good times playing the original, but I think the absurdity of that worked better in a time when there was still novelty to seeing "random" humor in a game...not to mention when I was much younger. Still good for a chuckle or two but the past decade of indie games created to be as ridiculous as possible to catch the attention of YouTubers and streamers have really desensitized me to this kind of thing.

I've no problem with this, really, but I also doubt I'll go through it all.

I picked this up as I had the urge for Battlefront and didn't want to burn myself out on the Pandemic ones in the leadup to the Classic Collection. I avoided the DICE Battlefronts since I always heard about their awful monetization, but strangely enough abandoning this game seemed to be the best thing EA ever did. You get just about everything the game has to offer in an edition that regularly sells for about nothing. If there's anything that doesn't come from regular reasonably spaced unlocks or the Celebration Edition, I haven't been able to find it.

While I still hang onto the 2005 game being superior overall, this functions as much less of a clusterfuck when it comes to the pure multiplayer experience. There's a clear flow to games that mostly falls apart in favor of wrist rocket madness in 2005, the gunplay is far more satisfying, and there's a much-needed sense of progression in weapon and modifier unlocks. Supremacy (what I usually play, aka the mode that plays like Battlefield) has the wonderful push and pull you always want from these games, plus it includes the brilliant addition of the winner automatically boarding the enemy team's ship and needing to push through and blow that up within a time limit to close out the game. If they can't, it returns to the standard Battlefield mode again. This can lead to monstrously long matches where each team wins and boards multiple times only to be pushed back, providing a natural drama to matches as well as compelling stakes.

I played this on PS5 backwards compat first and had to move to PC partially because I am ass at shooters with a controller and partially because the maps were so gorgeous I needed to see them maxed out. Look past the barely functional AA and messy reflections and you'll see the most lovingly recreated Star Wars locations you'll get in a video game. The sheer sense of scale and war-torn tragedy on a map like Geonosis is astonishing. Serious props to the artists, I've been pretty jaded when it comes to Star Wars after Episode 9 and the flood of TV shows and this still manages to make me feel like a little kid immersed in this world again.

I have no doubt this was once a terrible game, but if you haven't tried it in years and care about Star Wars and/or Battlefield-like games, you owe it to yourself to give this a shot. I'll do a separate review for the campaign when I get to that.

"Beneath a patch of grass, her
Bones the old Dutch master hid
While elsewhere Tobias
And the angel disguise
What the scholars surmise was a mother and kid

Interred with other daughters
In dirt in other potter's fields
Above them, parades
Mark the passing of days
Through parks where pale colonnades arch in marble and steel
Where all of the twenty-thousand attending your footfall
And the cause that they died for are lost in the idling bird calls
And the records they left are cryptic at best
Lost in obsolescence
The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal
With any fluorescence
Where the hand of the master begins and ends"