Tommy Williams
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In Sonic Frontiers, Sonic is charged with rescuing his friends from cyberspace and rescuing Koco. The story isn’t bad, but I feel like it does suffer from the crux of the game: it’s a slow open-world game. I remember when the game was first shown off, many compared it to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It does certainly feel like SEGA took a lot of notes from the hit Zelda game which isn’t inherently bad, but they picked a fair number of elements that make the game feel slow. Sonic is supposed to be fast, but the way the game progresses feels sluggish.
The way that Sonic Frontiers typically plays out is that you go to an area and then have to collect memory tokens that pertain to that area’s designated friend of Sonic’s (i.e., Amy Rose, Knuckles, etc.). You’ll also need to complete portals to earn vault keys and once you have enough vault keys you can get a Chaos Emerald. Once you get enough Chaos Emeralds, you get to fight the boss for the area. Other aspects of the game include obtaining gears to open portals, collecting Koco to increase speed and ring capacity, completing challenges to unlock portions of the map and get items to upgrade your defense and offense abilities, and just running around the islands.
In case you’re keeping track, that’s a lot of collectibles. Technically, you don’t have to collect all of these things in order to progress the story, but you’ll want to engage in at least some of them (really the only optional one in my opinion is the Koco collection). This is all to illustrate that there are so many different things that need attention which means the story really feels like it’s taking a backseat to the collectathon aspect of the game.
Once you unlock a portal, this changes the gameplay quite a bit. You’ll end up in a cyberspace section that will have you playing a level of a more traditional 2D or 3D Sonic game. Honestly, I only have two complaints about portals. First, I hate that you have to use gears to unlock them. Second, some of them are really hard, but I’m also not the best at Sonic games so that may be on me. Portals are the area where Sonic is able to do what he does best: make you feel like you’re going incredibly fast. Outside of my two complaints, the portals are one of my favorite things about Sonic Frontiers.
As I alluded to earlier, there are some stats that can be increased for Sonic. Attack and Defense are self-explanatory and very helpful. Speed appears to only affect your boosted speed and takes a while to be noticeable. Finally, Ring Capacity increases the number of rings you can carry. This last stat is honestly a bit baffling to me. When you max out the number of rings you have, Sonic gets a speed boost which is very nice. Why would you make it harder to get that? I guess it means that you essentially have more health, but I do question the opportunity cost.
Another aspect that I’m not a big fan of is the way that the map works. You have to find points in the world that will either involve a small challenge or you just have to do a Cyloop around them. Once again, this isn’t inherently bad. However, you unlock so little of the map and the area that you unlock seems random. There are times you don’t even uncover the spot where you are standing! I could forgive the former complaint if the latter wasn’t also present. Once again, this feels like a way that the team is trying to slow you down. Want to just rush through a Sonic game? Not on their watch!
One thing I do want to mention is that I feel I would be remiss to mention an unspoken influence. As previously mentioned, many people have compared Sonic Frontiers to Breath of the Wild. However, there’s a lot of influence from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The aesthetic of the game features a lot of ‘broken’ digitized items and artifacts that remind me of some of the art direction from Twilight Princess. Also, using the Cyloop to attack enemies in a circle reminds me a lot of combat as a wolf. I’m just saying. This isn’t a dig at Sonic Frontiers or anything, I just feel like no one talks about this.
Sonic Frontiers looks good and sounds good. It is odd to see Sonic and his friends put into an environment from a different art direction. It works though. The music does a good job of reflecting the world. The main overworld music is epic and empty. There is a juke box feature and you unlock songs for that as you run around the world and gather yet another collectible. However, once you get to a boss fight, you’re in for a real treat. I fought the first boss and the music just got me going. It reminded me a lot of hard rock and metal from the 2000s and I am all about that.