uuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUGH

This is not really a review, just an opportunity for me to rant - because the gaming industry is currently at an absolute low in some ways and I'm sort of reaching a boiling point about it.

So I love the original Dragon's Dogma. It is, to me, the perfect game that just happens to be woefully imperfect. I love its worldbuilding, I love its gameplay concepts, I love its open world. I love so many things about it, but almost every aspect of it that I enjoy comes with a big ol' asterisk that prevents me from being able to give it the bright shiny gold star that I so desperately want to confer. Unfortunately, it languished in that lukewarm spot between "cult classic" and "abject mediocrity" that had me resigned to the sentiment that it would never get a re-release, let alone a sequel.

Of course, my fears ultimately ended up being unfounded, with the game receiving a fantastic PC port in 2016 and a sequel being officially announced a few years later. Seldom in my life have I ever been so excited for a release, and you'd better believe I was there each time Capcom finally loosed new details on the game. And now it's here!

The prevailing sentiment amongst those who have played Dragon's Dogma II seems to be that it is very much the original experience with some nips and tucks. To some, that might be massively disappointing - but to me, that is an absolute godsend. As far as I was concerned, the OG was a rock-solid concept that simply needed some careful polishing. The idea that Dragon's Dogma II could be loosely described as "Dragon's Dogma but better" is the very definition of a perfect sequel for me. As such, my excitement since its release has absolutely rocketed through the roof... Or that's really what I want to say, but the truth is Capcom's really managed to hurt my feelings this time around.

I'm not as flummoxed by these practices as I think some are because I was there when Capcom was shipping games with characters already on the disc that you had to pay extra to unlock. They were very much trendsetters in the hellscape that is the world of in-game purchases, and as a result their more recent monetization practices seem almost amusingly mild by comparison. In the case of DDII, it seemed to me that at the extra purchasable content was purely to "skip the line" with regards to features that already exist in-game, and thus were simply of the bog-standard "baiting the impatient" flavor. Note that I'm not blaming the "impatient" in this equation - I totally understand how irritating it can be when things such as character modification are arbitrarily gated off, and dangling an opportunity to unlock it at any time in exchange for a few extra bucks is unquestionably a dick move. However, it's not being excised from the base game altogether to be sold to you, so at least in that respect you have the option of ignoring it and simply working your way around it. To me, that's much more benign, even for as lame as it is at the end of the day.

But it IS lame. And so is the $70 price tag, and the shitty PC performance, and Capcom's usual shrugging off of player's complaints, and the fact that I have to reckon with all of these things if I want to play this game that I have eagerly been awaiting for years. I just moved to a new house - a life event that I am very glad for, but also one that is unquestionably a drain on one's finances. I'm really not in a position where I can go tossing every spare cent I have at the next big shiny thing, which already makes my primary hobby a very difficult one to entertain in 2024. However, more and more I'm running into the issue that even if I was the kind of person that could afford to pick up every new release, I don't know that any of these companies actually deserve it. Sony and Microsoft are selling $500 Netflix machines with barely any software to actually justify their existence. Nintendo is out here knocking over emulators and fan projects as if it's ever going to prevent people from pirating their games. Rockstar's assuredly going to ride off of Shark Cards from Grand Theft Auto 6 until I'm in a retirement home, CD Projekt Red is doing their best to pretend like they didn't sell lies to a whole generation of gamers based almost wholly on their Witcher 3 clout, Todd Howard found a way to resell Skyrim another time by dressing it up as a space sim, Konami is proving they will abuse their IPs as many times as it continues to make them money - and yeah, it's still making them all money! People are still buying the games! Day one! Repeatedly! Knowing full damn well it's probably not going to be worth it! And yet, the reason why I'm so miffed about this is because for once I feel like it absolutely would be worth it - because Dragon's Dogma II really does seem like it's the game I've wished for, but does that mean I should be dumping my wallet out for Capcom yet again? I don't know that I should. I know that if I buy the game in its current state, no matter how much I ultimately may enjoy it, it's going to make me feel dirty. And I hate that. I love games and I hate this. It makes me want to tear my hair out.

I can't roast anybody who has purchased the game and is having a good time with it right now. Life's hard enough and damn, if you're having a fun enough time that it makes your 70 bones feel like they were well-spent, who am I to deny you that pleasure? But just once - just once - I wish everybody would be willing to throw their hands up and say "I don't care if this game is the next coming of Digital Jesus, I want you to quit jerking me around". Because I'm tired of getting jerked around. I have massive respect for the people who worked a bajillion hours to make this game match the vision they had in mind for it. I know this isn't their fault. I want to reward them for their hard work by making this game a success, and I know my dumb ass is probably still going to buy the game once I can afford to (and once the game isn't melting people's CPUs). But another year of this and I'm likely to start writing off modern gaming as a whole in favor of diving into the "good old days" - because even if I feel like an old codger for saying it, there was at least a time when I didn't have to feel like a jackass for being excited about my hobby.

Sonic Frontiers is a game whose quality scales inversely with how closely it is examined. If you jump into the over world for 15 minutes to run around and collect stuff, maybe play one level without aiming for S ranks, you'll probably have a pretty good time. You'll reflect on how Sonic has finally taken a step forward after years of stagnation, and put your controller down contented with the existence of Frontiers. The experience doesn't fare so well under almost any other amount of pressure.

Over the course of my 24 hour play through in which I completed as much of the game as possible, the cracks in Frontiers's visage were both large and apparent. Almost every system in the game breaks down the longer one plays, and the flaws become impossible to ignore.

I have always been someone who enjoys collecting items in open world games, so it was incredibly disappointing to see that not even this was immune from the wide scale bumbling that plagues Frontiers's mechanics. Initially the various collectibles are presented as both meaningful and plentiful, the best combination. If there is both many items to collect and a good feeling for doing so, the player is incentivized to seek them all out. This extended to all of Frontiers's various tchotchkes and baubles: gears get you into levels, keys get you chaos emeralds, the red and blue stones increase your power and defense respectively, and memory stones get you side story segments. A lot of these items are even marked on your map, further incentivizing players to track them down. It all felt meaningful.

The air was promptly taken from my sails upon discovering how easy it is to circumvent the exploration to get all of these. Literally every single collectible is attainable from the fishing minigame in such a quantity that there is no need to engage with any other part of Sonic Frontiers. One can find the fishing minigame, spend an hour there, go fight the boss of the area they're in, and repeat. The one thing gating this abuse is the currency needed for fishing, which is also known as the currency that more-or-less rains from the heavens every so often in the over world. It is gated in name-only, as the average player is going to accumulate hundreds more of this currency then they'll ever need.

This secondary way of attaining items has two mind-goblin-esque effects on the player: Any effort into exploring and finding items now has the convenience of The Alternative to overcome lest it feel like a chore. There is also the knowledge of the fact that collectibles aren't finite. It's a lot easier to motive oneself to collect 120 stars in Mario 64 than 120 of an infinite amount of stars. The former feels like an accomplishment; the latter feels arbitrary. Having initially started Sonic Frontiers with the goal of finding every collectible presented on the world map before sliding into Big's Fishing Adventure for hours on end, I find it hard to overstate my disappointment.

Said Fishing Adventure is the only part of Frontiers that is a consistently enjoyable experience bereft of frustration. There is one location, one song, a repeating cast of fish, and it's awesome. The gameplay is extremely simple, but the slot-machine-esque feeling of waiting to see what you pull in and how many tokens it brings with it never got old for me. Had it been better designed so as to not trivialize the entire game, I'd say that this is the best fishing has ever been in a game. The depth of other fishing games cannot measure up to the comfiness.

When not exploring or fishing, Sonic is repeatedly subjected to various sections of "speed gameplay", and this is where the game is near-unsalvageable. A thought occurred to me while playing: Sonic games have always encouraged the player to spend as little time actively playing as possible. How many times has a Sonic game been so uncontrollable that the dominant strategy was to maneuver oneself into a place where one didn't need to touch the controller?

"Thank god I'm on a rail for 10 seconds, I won't go flying."

"Whew, a loop, I can relax for bit."

"Lightspeed dash, what a relief."

The controls in Sonic games have always been so bad that they are liable to kill the player if control isn't wrestled from their grasp. "Wrestled" is the wrong word, as it implies a desire to retain that control. No, Sonic games have Stockholm Syndrome'd the player to the point of engaging with an experience they actively seek refuge from while it is ongoing.

Frontiers, of course, is no different. The controls in the speed sections just do not function. What's amazing is that they do not function in consistently different ways; the developer introduces a drifting section for one level solely to remind the player that despite all the time that has passed they still don't have that one down yet. It is very telling that Sonic Team designed these sections to be 90 seconds long, on average. Any longer and S rank runs would have completely fallen apart lest the controls test the player's patience beyond their limits.

These control issues do crop up from time to time while exploring, though not nearly to the same degree. Putting aside the woes of the meaningless collectathon, exploration feels janky. Players are liable to get roped into invisibly marked 2D sections without a way out, or get pushed and pulled by scores of bumpers and boost pads that leave them far off the path they were traveling. How incongruent these items are with the world only adds to the frustration of it all. The lack of apparent intuition in their placement also makes parsing them difficult; it's not uncommon to pan the camera around looking for some improbable link of springs and rails between where you are and where you need to go, especially in later game areas. Finding these paths is too difficult as everything tends to blend together.

On the opposite side of difficulty would be the combat, something so easy to trivial that one wonders why the devs bothered.

Two things gate Sonic's ability in combat in Frontiers: Power upgrading items, which as established are plentiful and easy to max out on, and unlockable moves. The latter is worth focusing on. Initially it appears to have depth; there is a skill tree and many options for every encounter. However after only a couple of hours one can unlock the entirety of said skill tree. That is a disappointing experience unto itself, as it's almost always better to use one move, The Most Powerful Move, over and over instead of doing anything else. There is so much effort and focus put onto a system that may as well not exist. Again, it falls apart under the slightest pressure.

Frontiers's use of quick time events in its boss fights deserves to be called out. The bosses, which were already imprecise and confusing affairs of Super Sonic darting all over the screen until getting clipped by an attack, didn't need an extra element of frustration to reset the player's progress towards the end. But Sonic Team thought it impossible to enjoy a "bad ass anime moment" of Super Sonic unless the player was there to hit square with the same rhythm employed for the fishing minigame.

What hurts about all of this is how close Sonic Frontiers is to working. The character writing has never been better. The soundtrack has elements that take steps in new directions while also containing moments that meet the expectations of older fans. The game is different, something that should always be praised from established franchises. It's such a shame that all of its systems are as half-baked as they are.

Despite all of those faults it's not difficult to imagine a few tweaks that would vastly improve Frontiers. Indeed, I can only imagine that mods to the PC version are fixing that as I write, but it would be disingenuous to consider those while writing a review. As released, Sonic Frontiers is a mess. It has the ability to entertain if one really squints their eyes and takes frequent breaks, but it will disappoint anyone looking for meaningful experience.

When playing the Hero Assault mode the only song that would play was the Cantina Band song, no matter the map (played on the Death Star, Mustafar, and a barely loaded in Hoth). When you would die the song would cut off immediately and would restart when you spawned back in. If you died too many times the sound would just completely cut off (a fair punishment that should be implemented in all games). Of all the things that need to be patched in this currently broken collection that I pre-ordered like the stupid man I am (between this and my purchase of the definitive edition of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties I should probably seek out a financial advisor) I deeply hope they keep this one.

1) Buy me
2) Juice me
3) Squeeze me
4) Freeze me
5) Roll me
6) Sell me
7) Pill me
8) YOU PIECE
9) Pay out the believers

(6-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

I met a goat guy 3 times. He had a long beard and I just felt weird.

[Dad's note: She had her tonsils out the same day TotK came out, so she was in a semi-delirious state when she insisted on reviewing the game. I was very impressed that she still managed to get through a couple shrines on her own!]

Ogrepon Ogrepon Ogrepon, the worlds beloved Ogrepon. Put a hat on that thing and watch it go. Drop kick your foes and deliver them unto justice, all with that golden smile.

This dlc is very, very good. Any chance to play more Scarlet is something I would leap at regardless, but I am very glad it seems to be going in a great direction despite my hesitations. I was very worried watching the Directs that The Teal Mask would lose the fantastic character direction that made Scarlet so remarkable, but Im very happy to say I was completely wrong (except you, Briar. What are you wearing.)

I absolutely love the new additions to the cast. Carmine and Kieran are so charismatic and I just could not get enough of their development and interactions. I was particularly impressed with their aim depicting the older sister, younger brother relationship the two have. It was done very, very well in a way that I dont think Ive seen in a video game before. Yet again I found myself taken aback by just how good the character writing was, even though the Pokemon team never have enough time on their hands I was still impressed with the absolute care they put into every little detail depicting their cast and the Pokemon surrounding them. Little things, like Kieran's very accurate nervous swaying and the reactions you would get fighting alongside Carmine all made the world feel so real. There is so much life in the game despite its limitations, especially when it comes to the Pokemon who are endlessly charming and alive. Even for only the first half of the dlc, I was very satisfied just being there.

The Kitakami region, visually, is very pretty to me and looks a bit above the base game. It probably helped that it was smaller, but it does look noticably improved from the looping rock wall textures of Paldea. I had a good time exploring, but I wish it was a bit easier to get around on foot... and I wish there werent so many items everywhere. Why are there so many items everywhere? But, more importantly, I really enjoyed the new outfits and quality of life improvements. The selfie stick is real useful and I love the new customization options that are avaliable to you. I had a good time traversing the world with my Meowscarada and desperately trying to get her to take a look at me for a photo.

All in all i think the next dlc will probably be just as good, if not better, and even if 35 dollars is very very steep I would still recommend it to anyone who really adores SV like I do. It does not disappoint.

This is NOT good-bye, OK? We're definitley gonna see each other again!