Game Ramblings #166 – Sonic Frontiers

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Steam

This is such a strange game. It’s undeniably Sonic, but at the same time it’s not. It’s got little pieces of things like Sonic Adventure or Generations, but those are just hints. They trigger a bit of nostalgia but don’t lean into it. It’s got the speed of the series, but uses it in new ways. It’s still maybe not the best example of a 3D platformer, but it does a lot interesting, and importantly it stays fun.

A lot of the early discourse I saw on this one was that it was a Sonic game through the lens of Breath of the Wild. I don’t necessarily think that’s true. Ya it’s open world, and ya it has the overworld red moon reset mechanic, but I don’t really get the Breath vibe from it. What I do get is entirely Mario Odyssey. It has the same feeling that there’s something to do around every corner, and you’ll always be rewarded. It also has the same pace. Where Breath tolled out rewards infrequently through the shrines, Odyssey set moons down everywhere, to the point where you were getting moons sometimes at the pace of a few per minute. That is the feeling that I hit here.

The individual little actions are never that complex. It’s always some jump pad that gets you onto a rail, but they’re always fun. It’s almost always some little 15 second quick hit platforming segment, but it hits the manic Sonic pace and ends with some reward. Usually it’s something to collect to eventually push the story forward, but you end up hitting so many of these little things that you’re hardly ever prevented from moving the story forward if you want to. What generally ends up happening instead is that you start going towards the next story beat, find about 40 things to accidentally do along the way, forget where you were trying to go, and end up completely in the wrong direction while having fun the entire time. That’s the Odyssey feel to me, and it’s what made both games work so well for me.

How it all ends up tied together also works inexplicably well. The overworld has a bunch of little combat segments against minibosses that end up working well to show some combat variety. Some of them end up being dash target-focused, and feel more like traditional action bosses fights. Some of them are more focused on taking advantage of the more typical fixed Sonic camera and feel like more traditional gameplay for the series. There’s also a whole bunch of Generations-style Sonic levels that offer more of what the series was used to offer. I suppose in hindsight, these are a pretty good analogue for the Breath shrines, but they serve a different purpose. Rather than being puzzle segments, these feel like pace breakers. The rest of the game is short segments of fairly specific platforming elements. These end up being longer sections that are typically speed and spectacle with a reward at the end, allowing the player to have a high excitement break in the middle of smaller actions.

All of this is bookended by some extreme boss fights. These are all spectacle and basically involve you turning into a super saiyan and beating the hell out of a kaiju. Does it make sense? No. Is it challenging? No. Is it hilariously fun? Absolutely. There is nothing to these fights that actually ends up expanding the mechanics of the game. You’ve got a bunch of auto targeted weakpoints to hit while you have effectively close to infinite health, so long as you beat a soft timer in place. It’s all button spam and visual chaos and it’s incredible.

That said, the entire game is of a B-movie jank level that makes it simultaneously hilarious. The pinball minigame? Absolutely unplayable. The physics in less restricted movement sections? Shooting off in the wrong direction on a jump is not unusual. The story and voice acting and overall presentation? It’s there, but only to serve some minimum needed for the game to ship. Targeting reliability during large combat segments? As reliable as my internet was when I still used Comcast. The game often succeeds despite itself, which is something pretty normal for the series over the past couple of decades.

It’s frustrating that they continue to be unable to tie together a full package, but when the game ends up being so fun anyway I guess I’m not really too annoyed to care. The Sonic series has had so many ups and downs that when I get an entry that ends up being fun, I just roll with it. This is up there with Mania or Generations for me as games that prove the series still has some life in it. I also fully expect that for the next entry everything learned here will be thrown out and ignored, but I sure hope I’m wrong and we see more iteration on this idea. It’s got a lot of potential that has only started to show.