I was broken by sonic frontiers. When I finally put the controller down, I didn't feel like I had accomplished anything, but I was relieved. This game made me want to play it. There were some things I did. The experience is inconsistent, slow, and rife with bugs that make you want to throw your controller through the screen.
Sonic, Tails, and Amy are trying to find Chaos Emeralds when they crash land on an island. Sonic needs to find the Chaos Emeralds and fight a bunch of monsters in order to free them.
It takes too long to click the button. I played a demo of the game at the festival. The streamlined experience was perfect for open-world exploration. When I started the game, there wasn't any original brilliance until the last quarter of the first area, which is when most people put the game down.
You are dropped into the open world and told to leave. When you find Amy, you can't talk to her because you need a lot of things to speak to her. The premise of the game is to collect as many token as possible. Sonic wants to talk to his friends who are in a digital world. He needs portal gear to get spires. Classic 3D platforming levels can be opened up by those spires. There is a layer of collecting that you need to do in order to get Sonic keys for Chaos Emeralds.
Did you know that you have all that? Get the Chaos Emeralds by finding portal gears and keys. There is more to come. Sonic is working with a blank map. He has to find a map to find the points of interest. Link visited a number of shrines using the Sheikah Slate in Breath of the Wild. Imagine that as dumb as possible. Can you draw a circle is one of the challenges that can be difficult to solve.
The developers can't make the challenges too complex since Sonic Frontiers' map is so large and contains so many map nodes. Some of the challenges were fun. One type requires you to reach a finish line before a timer runs out. You have to step on lit squares to turn them off. The lion's share of the challenges are so easy that a timer doesn't seem to make a difference. It seemed like there was something in there to keep the running time going.
The act of collecting the map nodes made me smile. I completed four of the game's five islands and one of them is not counted. I enjoyed free running from one map to the next, trying to find the most creative way to get there. Sonic Frontiers understands it here. The world is filled with springs, zip lines, balloons, platforms, and other things that make you and Sonic want to run on me. It's the most fun of the things. It is exploration like a Sonic game has not seen before. When I first started to fall in love with the game, it was because of the 3D platforming that was brought to it.
Combat was one of the reasons. Sonic gets a level-up in his fighting style. Rather than jumping on an enemy's head, he can kick and punch. Don't eat, Mario. The more moves you can pull off, the better. Just about every enemy you face requires a unique strategy, and chaining together the attacks you learn into strings of 100 plus hit combo is very satisfying. You will be forced to weaken their defense with a cyloop attack. The others will surround and sneak attack you, forcing parrying all incoming attacks before beating on the enemies. One of the more enjoyable qualities of enemy and encounter design is that it's enjoyable.
The boss fights are inventive. Sonic engages in these knock-down drag-out fights with giant monsters that have multiple forms and mechanics that bring all your knowledge of Sonic's skills to bear. The boss fights make you feel like you are fighting a giant, and you wail on it while some kick-ass music plays in the background. There are few games that make me feel like I am the main character in the final fight of a shonen animation, and Sonic Frontiers is one of them.
It's time to discuss that bullshit.
Once you defeat the first island's boss, you're thrown to a new location and forced to start all over again, collecting portal gears, keys, and Chaos Emeralds. I had to start from zero because memory token and keys don't carry over. I liked running and ripping through the land. The game stopped being enjoyable once I got to Tail's island.
It is over-the-shoulder, 3D open world platforming on the islands. There are sections in the world where the game removes camera control and hard pivots into 2D side- scrolling. It wasn't always seamless. When I couldn't control my camera anymore, I'd be running and thinking about my business. I didn't mind that platforming was hard but it was few and far between. It ground what was once fun and fancy-free running into a slog through quicksand with 300lb weights on my feet.
Sonic doesn't move very well in the open world or one of the portal stages He will stop even after you push the stick. His speed will go away. Sonic has a boost ability that works like a spin dash, but if you come up on a curved loop, you will just run into the wall instead of carrying you through the loop. The boost is only capable of making you go fast in a straight line, and curves are hard to understand. The island has forced-perspective 2D platforming areas where most of the open world is located.
I would forgive the game if it were the only problem. It wasn't by a longshot. I would have to play one-off mini- games to get to the next section. There was a hacking mini-game that was similar to Nier: Automata. You would have to do silly things like herd Chao or pull weeds in order to survive.
The Koco are at the center of Sonic Frontiers' story, but they don't really add much, and at times, their story gets in the way of the action, slowing it down with egregiously silly side-quests that don't really fit into the main flow of The Koco's presence is explained in the story, but it's not enough to make me care. There is just in the way.
Sonic plays a pinball game in an ancient ruin. Don't ask why; it's plot. I was amused by Sonic Spinball in the way that I was amused by Sonic Mania's nod to Mean Bean Machine. The pinball game took too long. I needed to accumulate 5 million points in order to progress. I don't need to be in a Sonic game. It is difficult to accumulate five million points in three lives. You are on your last life by the time you accumulate a big multipliers. All the multipliers you have earned melt away when you lose your last life.
One of the more upsetting things is that. The things it asks you to do are either so mindless that they can be done in one's sleep or so difficult that it makes you want to destroy your house.
I struggled with that pinball game for more than an hour, cursing the game for locking critical progression behind what should have been an optional side-quest and swearing that if I don't get it in the next try, I'll just quit. On the first try, my husband died before hitting the special button to end the game. I had already been zapped to nothing when we finally got it.
The game kept throwing the un fun sections at me, making me feel frustrated. There is an island where your only goal is to get to the top of the spires. I felt like a Sisyphus when I fell. I transitioned from playing this game for joy to playing it out of spite. It wouldn't defeat me. This was Sonic. Sonic is one of my favorites. I don't know how to call myself a fan if I stop fighting.
I ran into a new monster when I got to the last island. I had the strategy down cold after a few rounds of trial anderror. I didn't lose a ring. I plummeted through the world.
When I hit pause, I was already dispirited from my experience with this game. This clip sums up my experience with Sonic Frontiers. The game snatched it all away when I finally felt something resembling joy. Something beyond my control made it impossible for me to win. I was happy when the credits rolled because they meant I wouldn't have to look at this game again.
I thought I would be able to deliver level-headed, even-keeled criticism when I first started writing this. It will go when Sonic Frontiers works. The combat, exploration, and music breathe life into a franchise that is somewhat lagging behind its competitors in innovation. When it goes wrong, it can bring me to tears and make me angry.
Sonic is one of my favorites. This is too much for me. You want to see Sonic be the best they can be when you love them like I do. Sonic Frontiers is not as good as it could be. There is a lot of great games, but they are buried and obscured by design decisions.
Sonic Frontiers is available on a number of platforms.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
