howdy! call me Taffy!

i draw funny animals to pay the bills
and stream video games for fun!

https://twitch.tv/taffywabbit

πŸ‡

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so uhh. Frontiers was... good? mostly? overall? i wanna talk about it somewhere that doesn't have twitter's character limits so let's do this


there were a lot of small things that did bug me throughout the runtime. but when the game was good, it was REALLY good (looking at you, ridiculous anime boss fights), and successfully made me forget about anything else that annoyed me for at least a while.

the writing, especially the banter between characters, was fantastic. this is the most i've cared about or felt like i understood any Sonic characters before, and it makes me really confident that i need to go read the IDW comics if they're anything like this. like... Tails?? or oh my GOD the way they wrote Eggman in this game?? hello?? listening to his memos and hearing him talk in a gentle tone of voice when he was genuinely thinking about stuff/caring about things instead of screaming at Sonic?? fantastic stuff. the overall plot was a bit vague/confusing tho, and i felt like that was only increased by the fact that Sonic himself didn't seem to care all that much about understanding it either. he's kinda like "i don't need to know why, i'm just gonna solve problems and not sweat the details" most of the time and that unfortunately means the player just doesn't GET the details a lot of the time. like it's still good enough to be interesting and compelling, but i still feel like i must've somehow missed something important along the way.

as far as open-world Sonic gameplay goes, it felt a bit... aimless? i enjoyed seeing a distant point and thinking "ok, how do i use all my abilities to get over there? is there a secret path i need to uncover?". but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay was quite repetitive a lot of the time, and the areas were pretty samey and hard to avoid getting lost in. doesn't help that the Sonic staples of grind rails, springs, and floating platforms were just kinda placed all over the world and floating in the air and you never have any idea where they're gonna take you, so it's REALLY hard to keep your focus moving towards a goal without getting detoured and circled back the way you came constantly.

combat was fun most of the time! i definitely think letting sonic beat the shit out of robots with flashy punches/kicks instead of just homing attacks is a fun twist that spices the forumla up a LOT. but also the combo/ability inputs feel pretty imprecise a lot of the time, and you can usually just get the job done just using one or two of them and ignoring the rest. it felt like it mattered a lot more to just upgrade the hell out of your attack power, than to actually improve at dodging and parrying and combo-ing. not a huge complaint, tbh, it's still fun! just something i felt like could have been tuned slightly better.

on the subject of upgrades/skill leveling/progression: the whole system felt very half-baked tbh. there's a very tangible inequality in value between different upgrades, and it felt at odds with the collectibles you turn in as currency to unlock them. like, the stuff that upgrades your attack/defense (very useful) gets handed out like candy, and the skill points used to unlock new combos and abilities are so abundant that they'll end up redundant halfway through the game because you've already unlocked every skill on the tree. meanwhile upgrading your run speed and max ring count both share a currency (and you have to turn them in for upgrades one at a time. it's agonizing) which is fairly rare and also maybe finite?? i'm genuinely not sure?? anyways i couldn't even notice any difference in my speed after leveling it like 30 times. and leveling your ring count is literally just detrimental, because you get an improved boost ability whenever your rings are maxed, meaning "upgrading" your max rings will make it harder to get that boost. you also seem to lose a percentage based on your defense when hit anyways, rather than a fixed number of rings, so yeah. absolutely pointless to upgrade that. very weird how they didn't consider that.

the island boss fights (excluding the last one, which really kinda dropped the ball imo) were insane and i loved them. i need more of whatever the hell those were. god damn. (the smaller mini-boss fights you do in order to get Portal Gears were generally pretty cool too, ranging from "mildly annoying but creative" to "hey this is really neat and also the music bangs" most of the time. absolutely none of them held a candle to the big island boss fights tho)

oh right, and the Cyber Space stages! they're basically just Forces levels i guess, and they sure do feel like it. the controls were weirdly stiff in them, and considering how much i hated any time the game forced me into 2D segments elsewhere, i could really have done without like 40% of these. it kinda felt like the only reason these were even included was because they weren't confident in their main ideas for the game and thought they'd need to appease hardcore fans or something. idk, they're just weird and break up the flow in a way that's appreciated but definitely also flawed. some of them DID have really cool music tho...

but yeah! overall a pretty enjoyable experience, despite its flaws. definitely feels like a step in the right direction compared to something like Forces. i don't think Sonic as a series is completely in the clear just yet, but this at least has me hopeful for things to come. it was one of the most fun Sonic experiences i've had in a while and i definitely think it was at least worth my time.

also, fishing minigame with big the cat. a 15/10 game actually.


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