Third time's the charm, gamers. Now that I've properly beaten Sonic Frontiers - if only to justify the disgusting amount of money I paid for this game; I'd forgotten just how much $60 actually is - I think I have some more legitimate grounds to review this game on than a spite-fueled (but justified and honestly based) diatribe / retrospective on over twenty years of on-and-off disappointment at the hands of Sonic Team and their inconsistent little media darling. And guess what? I actually dislike the game even more now that the initial, impulsive surge of anger and disappointment has passed. I didn't just spend $60 on a bad game, I spent $60 on a soulless game masquerading as something soulful. It's so fucking bad, but it's bad in an... interesting and thought-provoking way compared to Sonic Forces' absolute nothingness.

Whereas Forces didn't even bother pretending that it had a heart of any kind, Frontiers actively plays a smoke-and-mirrors game with the player, cleverly waving its' superficially stimulating elements in front of your face like a thick helping of wool right over your eyes. Look! Open world! Ian Flynn! Hype boss battles! A cryptic and mysterious trailer! All of these things, dangled in front of the consumer like jangling, shiny keys, made Frontiers very initially compelling. People were finally interested in a Sonic game for the first time in a long time, and these surface-level elements added just enough intrigue to keep its' oft-battered fanbase hooked. After all, when you're a Sonic fan, you'll take anything other than table scraps if it means you might get a decent experience this time. Something is better than absolutely nothing, right? Even if it winds up being next to nothing?

All these promising, eye-catching elements wound up amounting to absolutely nothing all that special. Like... yeah, sure, there's an open world. An empty, barren, lifeless open world that regrettably - but predictably - prioritizes size & scope over substance. Sure, Ian Flynn's in charge of writing (supposedly), but the shockingly underwhelming and undercooked writing is simply not up to snuff this time around, not even close to the intricate, playful dialogue & characters he gave us in both the Archie & IDW universes. Sure, the boss battles have these screaming edgelord metal tracks in the background led by the Sleeping With Sirens guy of all people (Sonic is still relevant!!!!), but they're also a painfully easy collection of convoluted, on-rails button-mashers at best and a jarring, ill-fitting cluster of quick-time events at worst.

And honestly, for me, all of that intrigue and mystery that was hyped up by the trailers wound up going absolutely nowhere. The Starfall Islands wind up feeling like a less-effective rehash of all the Echinda Lore that Ian Flynn is no doubt very intimately familiar with: a once-powerful tribe that tries to harness the Chaos Emeralds and then get destroyed by a more powerful being... like, shit, stop me if that sounds familiar. (The ancient Kocos even look like Chaos in flashbacks!) Sonic and his friends don't interact with the lore or the world around them in any meaningful way beyond how it only faintly relates to them, in a way that makes them feel kinda selfish.

Amy witnesses this surprisingly tender, nonverbal scene of love between two Ancient Kocos in the middle of a terrible war (one of the only effective scenes in the whole game), and decides that she wants to spread love throughout the world. As if that's... different from what she was basically already doing? Tails decides that he's tired of following in Sonic's silhouette after witnessing a similar situation with an eager, young Koco, as if they didn't already have this exact arc more than twenty years ago in Sonic Adventure 1. The one exception to the rule is Knuckles, who does at least acknowledge that the islanders' situation is remarkably similar to his own people's... before virtually never bringing it up again after that singular scene. So when the lore isn't a vaguely-boring reprise of the Echidna stuff from the games and comics, the plot rapid-fire rushes its paper-thin characters through "character arcs" in scenes where they're like "I want to change in a way that doesn't actually change who I am" or "I've decided to rehash the same arc I literally already went through" and Sonic replies with a steadfast "mmk" each and every time.

The only genuinely intriguing throughline of the entire plot is the 'corruption' thing that happens to Sonic over the course of the game. Initially, I was liking how the story was only quietly addressing what was happening to him, and I thought the buildup to Sonic's full-on corruption was actually pretty great... until it got resolved in a single scene where the power of friendship randomly cures Sonic of the thing that had been ailing him throughout the entire plot. How... convenient.

In a depressing twist of fate, Eggman can't even salvage this plot. You could honestly write Eggman out of the plot entirely; he spends all of his time dicking around in the painfully-underexplored Cyber Space and just looking for a way out instead of doing anything of any merit. I'm honestly not sure why they even bothered, especially given that the one relevant thing about him in the entire story - the relationship between him and Sage - is, once again, pretty undercooked and underdeveloped in the grand scheme of things. Sage herself is... fine, I guess? A for effort. Her character growth is passable, if completely predictable, and the plot pulls a classic "she dies at the end but doesn't actually die" rabbit out of its hat as if that would impress anyone at all.

See, I've been using a lot of magic and illusory terms throughout this review - rabbit in a hat, smoke and mirrors, wool over eyes - because I think that sums up Frontiers perfectly. It pretends to have soul by borrowing elements from the games that people like. A plot and cast remarkably similar to Sonic Adventure 1, complete with a Big the Cat cameo? Check. Poorly-implemented 2D-3D hybrid sections similar to Sonic Generations, the only Boost Formula game that hasn't come under any particular flak? Check. A painful overreliance on Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and Sky Sanctuary, because obviously fans haven't gotten sick of seeing these exact same locales ad infinitum ad nauseum? Check. I even noticed a handful of Cyber Space levels that copied the level composition of Green Forest and Sky Rail from SA2. They went beyond copying the look of those stages and went as far as to just recreate the exact same levels (I believe it was 3-1 and 2-6 respectively). This is the trick the game pulls on the average player. It presents the illusion of depth without the commitment by either borrowing from games that people like (be it popular Sonic games or Breath of the Wild / Nier: Automata) or presenting bold-sounding ideas that would look great in a review blurb. (Open world!!!!!!!!!)

But it's all so... nothing. All of these discrete, separate ingredients half-heartedly combine together to make a frustratingly bland and shallow dish. Everything feels hollow. Combat is a trivial, button-mashing affair that only deserves credit for the fact that it's sliiiightly better than "boost to win". Running feels awful until you level it up to a properly 'fast' amount (having to level up your top speed feels like the punchline to a bad Sonic joke), and even then, there's no sense of momentum or weight to your actions whatsoever. The open world is a cluttered disaster of banal, samey-feeling activities with rails, springs, and random platforms placed so haphazardly and sloppily around the world that it starts feeling like a randomly-generated Forge / Unity map. And the amount of padding Frontiers managed to cram into its runtime is utterly nightmarish. Frontiers is secretly a four-hour game that painfully, laboriously stretches itself out to twelve-fifteen through the tried-and-true Ubisoft method of making you collect shit.

That's right, collect-a-thon fetch quests, everyone's favorite thing about Sonic. Just look at how much people liked the fetch quests in Shadow, or the medals in Unleashed! But Frontiers actually takes it three steps further than its' much-maligned predecessor by asking you to collect an absolutely insane amount of Tokens and artificially withholding the plot from you until you collect these Tokens. There are moments where you deadass cannot progress the story unless you cave in and Collect All The Things, and sometimes your reward for doing so is just a fucking cutscene that basically tells you to keep collecting. At the climax of the game you're expected to collect like over 200 of these fuckers, and lemme tell you, were it not for Big The Cat, I deadass think I would have been driven mad by sheer, unadulterated, tedium-induced boredom. The literal only reason I was able to complete this game in the (painfully long) twelve or so hours I spent playing it was thanks to the fishing minigame you can play with Big, an Animal Crossing-esque button prompt minigame where you can catch fish and then trade in the tokens you get from the fish for Plot Items, including the Tokens you desperately need to continue the story with. This cuts down on the grinding considerably, but it also just feels like a band-aid slapped onto the gaping wound that was the idea to make this game a collect-a-thon in the first place.

The funniest part about that fishing thing I just mentioned? It's unironically the best part of the game, and that's both incredibly sad and incredibly funny. There's something very... Zen about the fishing minigame. You just kick back and relax to easily the best song in the overloaded OST, press a couple buttons, and then smile or chuckle whenever Sonic catches a fish much larger than him or something silly like an alligator or an oversized tire. All of the frustration and tedium just melts away for a few minutes. I was honestly having more fun just relaxing and listening to some chill lo-fi music than I was playing the actual Sonic game I spent $60 for, and funnily enough, that's when it hit me that this game might be a 1 instead of a measly 1.5. I was actively - and repeatedly - playing this minigame in order to avoid having to play more of the janky collection of chores masquerading as a "game" that waited me outside of the peaceful, comforting rivers that Big calmly inhabits. Big makes it incredibly easy to just not engage with the rest of the game, and while I was frankly thankful for that, it also highlights just how trivial everything is. Who cares about exploring or unlocking other parts of the map when you can just put a marker down on the spots where Big is and just run back there whenever you need some Plot Tokens? It actually winds up being faster to do this since the game starts increasing the amount of Tokens you need over time while simultaneously giving you less and less them over time, a bullshit decision that artificially lengthens the game to infinity and dulled me into an upset, uncomfortable stupor.

In conclusion, this is why I'm honestly stunned that some people are so taken with Sonic Frontiers. I'm honestly wondering where all of the heart and soul that people seem to have found in this game actually... is. Frontiers is a boring, dead-eyed trot through an empty, unassuming world that cobbles together a blatantly-stolen BOTW-Genshin Impact aesthetic and a truly garish amount of reused assets/levels/fucking ideas along with capital-M Mandatory fetch quests and the usual game-breaking Sonic jank. When you aren't gormlessly running through a barren and colorless world marred with terrible pop-in and some alarmingly ugly assets just cluttering the skyline, you're making brief treks through old levels you've literally already played before or mindlessly collecting Things to make the artificially broken-up and thoroughly-unassuming Plot actually continue, like feeding coins into a soda machine so it gives you your fucking soda already. It's all so... lifeless, genuinely lacking the same color, zest, and enthusiasm that previous Sonic entries - even the bad ones - had in excess. Soullessness wearing the mask of something soulful. If you're enjoying this, then... good for you? But also, you don't need me or anyone else to hold your hand for you. Sometimes people will hate the shit you like, and sometimes, that's okay, because sometimes that shit is Sonic Frontiers. After five-plus years of waiting, this is what we were given.

So much for redemption.