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.
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.