Sonic Frontiers is the collective effort of all of Sonic Team to make the game that they, individually, think is the coolest game ever. the resulting product is a lovable bootleg flea-market 51-in-1 game cart that aggressively defies any sort of coherence and left me saying "you can't be serious" in as many different ways as possible for 20 hours.
in this story, eggman is tsundere
"serious open world Sonic" was from day 1 a sort of wild concept, and every bit of this game feels exactly as unreal as that phrase. the way you clash against monstrous titans as Super Sonic by hour 2 of gameplay, throwing afterimage clone punch barrages and getting knocked into mountains as djent metal blares. the way you dash through a lush meadow and bounce through a setpiece of springs and rails, only to reach a dead end and to be told you have to Collect harder. the way the gravitas-filled cutscenes finally let you into the volcano you've been excited to enter for hours, only to find out with no fanfare that it's a dry salad of a pinball game with no story dressing. the way the Japanese script diverges completely from the sharp and superhero-like English script.
that is to say, despite my fears that it would be AAA and soulless, Frontiers is, without a doubt, a Sonic game, in every sense of the word, and I'm finally at the point in my life where I can weaponize the phrase "for a Sonic game". it's a convoluted, grindy, and often dumb game, throwing you between moods and soundtracks with no warning or explanation in almost a 2000s way, but it's OUR dumb game, our fever dreams when we were 10 imagining Sonic just going whoosh and kapow and also playing Ikaruga for some reason.
fishing as accessibility
not only is this a game that speaks to the 10 year old inside our 30 year old selves, it's a game that wants both the skill-challenged child and time-busy adult to finish it, and I think a surprising amount of polish went into this under the surface of The Sonic Jank.
Frontiers eschews careful game balance and making sure that the player experiences everything in favor of "just go out there and do some stuff": though each collectible is associated with a core gameplay concept (playing old Sonic levels reskinned as Green Hill, fighting bosses, and doing cool flips), all collectibles are renewable through a bizarre Slot Machine Blood Moon mechanic, grindable by playing Tug of War from Mario Party, and also collectible by fishing, effectively letting you bypass game mechanics however you like if you're just sick of them.
I saw criticism of the lengthy grind loop and the OP fishing loot in reviews, and this instantly told me: "if you get tired of the game, go fishing". mood! (the fishing game is also very pretty and extremely rigged in your favor.)
it simply feels good to run
there's lots of times where Frontiers is a frustrating game, and for that reason sometimes I feel "it succeeds despite itself" - when the physics are just a bit too weighty when throwing a punch, when a mandatory minigame is tuned just a little too difficult, when the next waypoint is just a bit too far away. but it's also a game that left me constantly curious about what it was going to do next, and I think that's what's really worth it for me .
there's lots of points I'm skipping over for this review that I'll probably come across in the future, but I'll leave you with a non-exhaustive list of games on this flea market game cart:
- breath of the wild
- something by platinum games, I think
- a bunch of sonic ROMs
- fishing
- slot machines
- watching a giant robot show when you're 10 years old
- jump rope
- radiant silvergun
- graph traversal problems
- laser-reflecting mirrors
- ikaruga
- a crane game
- sheep herding
- pinball but it's really clunky and you need to rack an exponentially increasing multiplier up to 256x in order to have a shot
final score: like a million octaves dropped in the english voice acting and now I want to play metal gear rising revengeance completely blind