Shockingly brilliant and relentlessly at war with itself, you could probably create the perfect Sonic game by taking a list of every design decision Frontiers makes and doing the exact same thing or the exact opposite. It is a game defined by its contradictions. It is a game about going fast; jumping loses all your momentum. It's the first Sonic game whose levels I've enjoyed enough to try optimizing; its challenge times are a joke and it has no way to compare times with others or yourself. It asks you to track a complex web of set pieces through the sky; it has pop-in so bad that most of those set pieces are totally invisible unless you're practically on top of them.

Among a sea of open world games, Sonic Frontiers is one of precious few to deeply innovate on the form. It stridently makes the case that the act of movement through the world can be intrinsic to play rather than a chore to accomplish once and then hide behind fast travel forever after. And once it's given the player just enough time to internalize that lesson, it undercuts itself completely by adding a totally unnecessary fast travel system.

The cyberspace levels (classic self-contained Sonic level design) are layered and engaging—but only if you know how to use the undocumented Magnet Dash technique, wherein you cancel a homing attack into a massive air dash. This trick hits the perfect balance of being doable even by a non-speedrunner like me, totally recontextualizing level designs, and being conditional enough to keep the structure of the level relevant. But while some levels feel like they were designed with it in mind, others will trap you in inaccessible level geometry or totally wreck your camera.

Here's the thing, though: whatever else it may be, Sonic Frontiers is interesting. Some of its choices may be agonizingly conservative or blatantly stupid, true, but many are bold and an impressive number of those end up panning out. It's a AAA game that's messy and outré and occasionally fabulously daring at a time when AAA has come increasingly to mean intense polish and rigid uniformity. That alone is worth celebrating.