New frontiers for the Blue Blur! (Sonic Frontiers review, some spoilers ahead)

     Hey guys, let's be real, we all want Sonic to be good, and we were pretty unanimously disappointed by how Sonic Forces turned out. Sonic Mania was a great time, and things looked extremely promising for what looked like a sequel to Sonic Generations, but Sonic Forces just didn't meet those expectations. It has been about 5 years since that game came out, and finally Sonic is back once again with a very different looking (and feeling) game. Not only is this game a completely new formula for Sonic's gameplay, but also the storyline goes is a very new and unexpected direction. Today I'm going to talk about the newest game in the Sonic franchise, and give a thematically fitting quick review on what I think about it. I have to warn you, everything is not exactly as it seems.

The Story this time!

    The game begins with Doctor Eggman trying to take control of an ancient power source before he is attacked by robots and sucked into Cyberspace. We then see Sonic, Tails, and Amy flying in the Tornado to the Starfall islands, which Tails tracked the Chaos Emeralds to. Unfortunately for them, the plane suddenly goes out of control and crashes them through a portal into Cyberspace. Sonic is sent into a level that looks like Green Hill Zone, which he's able to get through really easily and back out into the real world. Sonic is greeted by a mysterious voice in the sky, which tells him that he must be the chosen one since he was fast enough to get out of Cyberspace when no one else had been. He's told to collect keys from these portals which are all over the island, and the keys will unlock the Chaos Emeralds, which Sonic needs to defeat the titan boss of each island. Eggman, while in Cyberspace, is able to create an AI based on the ancient technology of this island and names her Sage, who is given the task of getting Eggman out of his current predicament and also studying what Sonic is up to. Sage is a really important character in this game, in that she not only experiences a lot of character growth in a very short period of time, but she also triggers some nice character development in Eggman as well. Sonic's friends are also trapped in Cyberspace and he has to get them out by collecting different Memory Tokens to unlock new dialogue encounters. There are five islands in the game, though there are only companions in four of them. The first island has Amy's encounters, the second has Knuckles, the third has Tails which you have to collect wrenches for, etc. Among the new characters and information that Sonic and friends get in this game, we have the Kocos, which are similar to the Koroks in design, but actually have a strong bond to the ancient race that once resided on the Starfall Islands. I don't want to give away too much about this game, but the story certainly doesn't matter as much as the changes in gameplay.

    One thing that is really cool about the story this time, however, is that the characters actually have somewhat emotional stakes involved. It's a more serious story, and all of Sonic's friends have actual personalities that make sense based on previous appearances. For much of Amy's time as a character in the series, her only personality trait has been to follow Sonic around and be obsessed with him all the time. The experience of her being trapped in Cyberspace makes her realize that she has a lot of love and talent that she should share with the world, not just devoting it to following Sonic around. Another point of note, Sonic is really nice to her here and says that he'll miss her when she's off helping people, which is definitely something that we would never have seen during the Sonic Adventure era. This game also handles canon in a nice way, much better than Sonic Forces which showed off the bosses from Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, CD, and Lost World at the beginning, then didn't really use them at all for the rest of the game. In this game, characters will reference events from other games such as "I haven't seen something this big since we faced Dark Gaia," which was the main villain from Sonic Unleashed.  There are tons of cool references like this, but my favorite has to come from Knuckles, who realizes the architecture of some of these ruins are similar to the ones on Angel Island. When he realizes this, there's even an image of him laughing at Sonic and Tails from Sonic 3, which is a really awesome touch! I'm really happy that they brought Ian Flynn over from the comics to head the story, because it's something really cool and heartfelt this time around. It should also be stated that you're able to unlock Eggman voice logs from Big's fishing pond (I'll explain later) and he makes several references to things that he said back in Sonic Adventure, such as "Chaos, the god of destruction," or "No way, I can't believe this!" It's so great to see these little voice lines being brought up here, or even when he mentions Maria, a deep lore character tied to Shadow's backstory as his cousin.

Collection is the name of the game!

    For a long time, the folks at Sonic Team discussed Sonic Frontiers as being an "Open Zone" game, not open world. We finally understand what they mean by that, because instead of being one giant open area, there are five different areas that are open world in their layouts. These areas vary between green fields, sandy deserts, and volcano areas with more standard rock. Those are really the only three different settings, because the last two islands are also pretty grassy, like the first one. The game consists of two major points, the open world, and the Cyberspace levels. The open world sections feel really good for the most part, it feels really good to explore the areas with Sonic's speed at your disposal. There are little puzzles scattered around which unlock more parts of the map, which also unlock new shortcuts to get to other areas more easily. The Cyberspace levels are similar in scope to the levels in Sonic Forces, though I think the level designs are much better here than they were in that game, especially since this time around, they aren't the real focus of the game. Some levels feel better than others, of course, but there was definitely something exciting 

     This game is a collectathon at its core, as the whole game is literally all about running around and collecting different things. Sonic has to get different seeds to increase his attack and defense, he has to collect Lost Kocos to increase either his speed or the total number of rings that he can get, maxing out at 999. The rings themselves are collectibles that essentially increase health, of course. He also has to get various character tokens for his friends to be able to interact, with wrenches for Tails, medals for Knuckles, and hearts for Amy. Cyberspace honestly has it's own group of collectibles, with you having to defeat large enemies to collect gears which you need to unlock the Cyberspace levels, and once you're in Cyberspace, you can do four different objectives to unlock keys, with the ability to collect seven once you've completed all four tasks. The keys that you collect allow Sonic to get the Chaos Emeralds, a necessity for Sonic to defeat all of the Titan bosses, since you have to play as Super Sonic. Sonic also has a skill tree in this game which allows him to learn much more powerful moves against the enemies on the different islands. Again, to unlock these skills, he has to obtain blue "Skill Pieces" to buy these skills. Now, it's time to discuss the two major things that break the whole economy of this game wide open.

    In this game, Sonic has the ability to draw "Cyloops" on the ground, which he does by holding down triangle and running in a circle. Once a Cyloop has been drawn, you receive random amounts of resources. Sometimes, you get Rings, sometimes Memory Tokens, Power or Defense seeds, and you can do that as many times as you want, so it is extremely easy to farm resources that way. There is, however, a different method of farming that may be even easier. I haven't mentioned the Purple Coins yet, but those allow Sonic to enter Big's Cyberspace Portal, which appears once on each island (except the fourth, which doesn't have any portals, but there are two in the final area). Once at Big's pond, Sonic can fish as much as he wants and for each fish he catches, he earns either tokens or Gold Cards, which he can trade for any of the collectibles in the game or Eggman's aforementioned voice logs. This is an extremely broken way to farm for experience, especially considering that you can get 20 Lost Kocos for three tokens, and especially in the last area, you're typically getting something like 26 tokens for a fairly small fish, 8 tokens for the smallest thing that you can catch (such as a Starfish). It does require a lot of Kocos to get the speed and ring level ups, but this cuts down the time needed significantly. It's not like these exploits break the game in any way, but in my opinion, it's nice that you're given so many options for obtaining all of these items that you need! As a side note, it's actually nice to see Big the Cat here, for maybe the first time ever. I despised his campaign in Sonic Adventure DX, and it actually prevented me reaching the true ending of that game for several years, but there's something nice about him being around this time, even if it doesn't make any sense for him to be. The game makes no effort in explaining why he has his own portal, and part of me has to wonder if he is actually here or if it is just a construct of Cyberspace that's been put together from Sonic's memories. Either way, it's a fun little minigame, and one that I really didn't expect to be as enjoyable as it is.

Not a perfect game, but a nice step in the right direction.

    Now, as I've stated before, this is certainly just a first attempt at this style of game for Sonic Team, and as such, there are some glaring issues with it. Honestly the pacing of the game is really fun as a whole, though the gameplay loop is very simple. You're doing basically the same things over and over in this game, and most of those mini puzzles only have a few little variations to them. A few of Tails, Amy, and Knuckles encounters have some other situations involving the Kocos, which I did not like considering they mostly felt like more convoluted escort missions where you could only get hit three times, and there was a bizarre focus on hacking minigames towards the end of the game. I'm fine with some good hacking minigames, and I loved the ones found in Nier: Automata for the most part, which these seem to be loosely based on (meaning that you operate a little ship and have to shoot down different colored balls with lasers of the game color) but it's not until the third island that they bring up anything like that, and for the last bit of the game, those are pretty important. The Titan boss fights are a cool idea in theory, and definitely allow for some really cool "anime boss fight" moments, but in execution, I just had a really hard time understanding how they worked. Super Sonic is really ill-defined in this game, and for the most part, he just has the same moves as Sonic, but he can't be hurt, he just constantly loses rings. There were several times in these boss fights that I legitimately had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I looked it up, and found that the answer was pretty much always just to parry the attacks. That's something that Sonic has really never done before, so I kept forgetting that it was an actual mechanic. Honestly, the whole combat system felt really weird, but I will admit that it works much better than I thought it would. I hope in the next incarnation, they'll put a bit more effort into making the combat seem less like a RNG based affair. I will tell you that there is a secret final boss that is only accessible by playing the game on hard mode (though you can change the difficulty setting at any time), so that's the difficulty that I played on. The game really wasn't very hard, even in hard mode, but I will say that this final boss... was no joke. You know how I said that hacking minigames are focused on a lot in this game? Well, this final boss is one of these sections! For some reason, they thought the final boss of this very unconventional sonic game should be this shoot-em-up section, and honestly I didn't like it at all. It's really the only part of the game that I found truly difficult, but it wasn't really difficult in a good way. I was just relieved to see the credits roll after that, to be honest. Not a great taste to go out on, but I still consider this game a lot of fun, and definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, the boss fights had some pretty incredible songs playing during them!

    I really enjoyed Sonic Frontiers as a whole, and I would definitely recommend it to folks, though I am almost more excited to see what they do next with this formula. It seems like they have something really good here, and I hope they don't just throw it away after this one title. That seems unlikely, of course, considering they just recently announced three new free DLC waves coming in 2023, the last one adding new playable characters, which I'm excited to see what they do with. Sonic fans have a long history of ranking games as either "Good or bad" with very little in the middle, but with that in mind, I would definitely characterize this as one of the good ones, with some of the most interesting story beats and character development since the Sonic Adventure games.

    Thanks so much for reading this review, friends! It ended up being a bit longer than I originally intended, but I got a bit carried away. I thought this game was pretty fun and brought a lot of new energy to the series that I hope they continue capitalizing on as they go down the line. I hope you'll all have a great week and thanks again for reading! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed speedy guy, and I'll talk to you all again soon!