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.