Review: "Sonic Frontiers"--Arguably the Best Game in Sonic History
No Sonic game, however hyped and prepared and done by the top peeps in the Sonic Team, is perfect. But Sonic Frontiers came dead close.
This is my review of Frontiers. Before I get into gameplay, I gotta admit, I had super high expectations for Sonic Frontiers. Now, Frontiers isn’t flawless, so some aspects made me go “awww” (with a sad face, not a heart-eyed face). But those aspects are few, far between, and really not so important. The animation is incredible, as is the detail, including for the Starfall Islands—especially during gameplay! Cut scene animation is very similar past Sonic cut scene animations, though they aren’t afraid to show off characters’ powers and more realistic reactions to events, and more emotional scenes are really very gripping. Many scenes are, in fact, movie quality animation. It’s great to have the same voice actors doing everyone’s voices that they’ve been doing for years, and hearing Roger Craig Smith (Sonic) lower his voice to make Sonic sound more mature is an interesting detail, though people used to Sonic’s higher voice may find the change a bit weird and unnatural. I, for one, found it far more appealing than Sonic’s usual higher-pitched voice.
Now onto gameplay (here’s where it really takes off). Frontiers was hyped as “open-zone gameplay,” where Sonic’s well-known philosophy of “I go where I want, when I want, free as the wind” is finally playable in a functional way (not in a glitchy Sonic 06’ hub world way). The gameplay sharpens your mind to better follow clues, maps, compasses, and trails to find where you must go, and unlockable powers make Sonic easier to maneuver and robots fun-er to smash! It’s easy to get lost sometimes, but fortunately you can open the game’s map (if you have much of it unlocked) to find your way back, or you can do like Sonic and keep running! Fortunately, it’s not like getting turned around on rooftops in Sonic ‘06’s hub world, though you can run to parts of the game you’re not supposed to deal with yet (the game signals when you do this with a red swirl that blocks you from going to the restricted area). Fun trick—you can get out of boss fights by simply running away! That’s right, fighting can be optional—of course, bosses don’t want optional fighting and some may follow you until you run far enough away. Winning boss fights will earn you goodies that help progress the game, so running may not always be wise. Even small baddies provide skill pieces, tokens, seeds, and even important keys once beaten. A major Sonic ’06-like aspect is the ability to control the camera angle, which can be handy when looking for the right direction to run, but if you get flung aside during a boss fight, the camera will adjust to what it thinks is the “best angle”—often a strange angle facing the sky and away from the boss, leaving you prone to an unseen attack or even running smack into the enemy! If you learn the camera controls, you can become very good at angling it, but it’s still a bother when it focuses on you and not the enemy or the enemy and not you—or just the sky and nobody at all!
There are plenty of non-boss points where you must be quick on your toes, such as in completing map-revealing challenges or even when a cut scene suddenly switches to a quick, tense in-game battle and then back to a cut scene (yep, that can happen!) Other times, you can take it slow, explore the island (I like to run along the cliffs and snap screenshots of the ocean), and collect the adorable stone-like Koco. These ancient Koco provide insight to many important incidents in cut scenes, and the whole game pays homage to Sonic Adventure in many ways, as well as Unleashed, SA 2, Forces, etc—sadly, no ’06 references).
Speaking of vicious blows, Sonic’s new adversaries—the massive ancient robots called the Titans—are genuinely titanic. The first is a hulking monster; another looks like a flying millipede with four jaws. These, plus other evil robots and scattered bosses called Guardians, are faceless robotic monsters with incredible strength and strange physiology—enough that I was intimidated! While the game’s E10 rating is meant for its (mess-less) fantasy violence, it could encompass the Titans and the Guardians, all of whom are a little frightening for me but possibly more so for younger players (one such Guardian, called Ghost, must be activated by you to fight, but if you do activate it, it begins screaming and rises from its throne to look like a spherical version of a Stranger Things alien. It is very tricky to beat or escape and will absorb rings from you until you run out and die or find somewhere to hide). Gameplay has been criticized by some as “repetitive,” I found the repetitiveness helps memorize tactics and makes beating Titans easier and really quite fun.
As usual, the lore of the Sonic-verse dabbles lightly in spirituality, and the Ancients’ villages have many “spiritual places.” The Koco are said to have once been the Ancients’ lucky charms before they became little living creatures. There is a brief mention of Amy’s fortune cards (a so-called “hobby” of hers I dislike very much and find unnecessary to the series.)
And for fans who get hooked on game soundtracks and must get the newest hit Sonic songs immediately: when it comes to the Frontiers soundtrack, DO IT. If you want "Vandalize" (one of the main songs, performed by One OK Rock), be sure you find the Sonic Frontiers version, aka the clean version. The original version, a song from one of their latest albums, is explicit with several f-words. (This is especially important to note if you've got Sonic-loving kiddos who want the song).
