When I was eight years old back in 2001, my brother and I received a copy of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the GameCube from my dad for Christmas. I wasn’t really familiar with Sonic at the time, being that I was a hardcore Nintendo kid, so I’m not sure what prompted him to get this game for us. Still, intrigued, I remember sitting down with my brother to venture into this strange land that Mario had kept us locked away from in the great console wars of the 90s. I fell in love instantly with the colorful cast of characters, the over-the-top anime madness, the frankly incomprehensible story, and, most importantly, the concept of just going fast. Since then I’ve played nearly every game in this incredibly inconsistent series, including the spin-offs, even during my teen years when I was “too cool” for most video games. Sonic the Hedgehog has been a part of my life for much longer than most anything else, and in a strange way it’s one of the few connective tissues that ties together the person I was as a child, the angsty teen version of me from high school, and the adult me in the present.

As I’m sure you’re aware, since the days of Sonic Adventure 2 the 3D games in the franchise have struggled. Some of them, like Sonic Forces and Sonic Boom, have been offensively bad, and even the best ones like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations were just okay. 21 years later, I find myself, mouth agape, as the credits roll on Sonic Frontiers and I am… ecstatic. The mere sight of Knuckles or Shadow or the Chaos Emeralds always brings me joy, and that’s why we Sonic fans have survived this long. But no. This time, I am ecstatic not because Sonic Frontiers is a masterpiece (because it is very, very much not). I am ecstatic because Sonic has, after two decades, matched the enthusiasm that I bring to the franchise.

Sonic Frontiers is undeniably a mess of ideas. Sure, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I firmly believe is one of the best video games ever created. But there are also moments where I swear I’m playing Nier Automata, Xenoblade Chronicles, Skyrim, Super Mario Odyssey, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy XV, or even Marvel’s Spider-Man. Sometimes all at the same time. So, how do all of these disparate visions for what Sonic Frontiers actually is fit together? Truthfully, a lot of the time, they simply don’t. But in those moments that they do, when it all comes together - those moments outshine the highest points of even the best games I played this year.

The story, written by Ian Flynn of the much beloved IDW comics, brings Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy to the Starfall Islands, tracking down where the Chaos Emeralds have bounced off to this time. Of course Dr. Eggman finds his way there hunting down the same thing, and our old friends stumble onto the remains of the lost civilization of a race called The Ancients. If you’re familiar with Sonic, you’ll likely remember Chaos, the water monster that was the primary antagonist of Sonic Adventure and who has appeared numerous times since then.

In a pretty interesting turn, Sonic Frontiers actually explains the origins of the Chaos Emeralds and Chaos himself as lost artifacts of the Ancients in a pretty organic way. It was a bold move to base the story around lore that we’ve been desperately craving since Sonic Adventure since 1998, but it paid off. While the actual dialogue is pretty mediocre and stilted, Frontiers still clears the incredibly low bar of having the best story in the franchise based on providing this extensive, detailed lore. Taking us to the homeland of a villain from decades ago is just the first piece of the payoff to the longtime fans present in this game.

What is it that makes this game tick? Why are the Sonic fans so excited? It may sound insane to those outside the fandom, but this is the first Sonic game in a long time that is actually built around “going fast.” Sonic games have been riddled with careful, precise platforming for 20 years that runs totally counterintuitive to the whole idea of the Blue Blur, and I personally believe it’s been because they are trying to capture some of what makes Mario so great. Sonic is not Mario and is never going to be Mario, and I think Frontiers is the first time that Sonicteam has openly admitted this in their design strategy.

Sonic Frontiers takes place across 5 contained open world zones, each one themed around a different biome and with different cyberspace levels, enemies, challenges, and lore to unpack. Each of these zones is packed with stuff to do, and yes, I mean packed. Everywhere you look, you’ll see an Unreal Engine default landscape with dozens of springs, wires, balloons, rails, pulleys, rings, platforms and dash panels. You know, stuff that you might see in a Sonic game. Except it’s all just floating there, just pasted over a world created in a completely different art style. And you know what? I don’t care. This game world is so incredibly fun to play in that I just could not care less how hilariously dumb everything looks. Deal with it.

The core of why Sonic fans are clicking with this game is that Sonic has never, ever felt this good to control. You get the sense of speed that comes with combining the two past styles of momentum and boost movement, but you also feel the precise control needed to do the actual platforming. As I said before, precise platforming and going as fast as possible have always been at odds, but there’s a beautiful meeting of the two principles in Sonic Frontiers that I had started to believe was impossible. Utilizing the multitude of rails and springs and such, it’s easy to manipulate the physics of the Hedgehog Engine to get around the open world at lightning fast speeds you feel like the game never intended.

Holding down the right trigger turns on your boost, which has a set amount that recharges very quickly, and using this boost along with your homing attacks and developing series of abilities you can work your way through lots of these miniature obstacle courses while making your way from Point A to Point B without interrupting your pace. Filling up your rings to maximum turns on a second boost that lets you move twice as fast, and that’s when you really feel the lightning. Sonic was always meant to be moving faster than even the player can see, and this giant open world is finally the place he can do it while still maintaining a sense of control. These obstacle courses typically yield a memory token, which I’ll get to later. Suffice it to say, this is the most fun I’ve had moving in a game since Spider-Man on the PS4. It’s perfect.

I have seen a few different videos of the PS5 version, which I played as well, having severe pop-in for the floating obstacles and rails. I did experience some pop-in, but it was never close enough to affect me no matter how fast I was going. I have to comment that this game is pretty bug free, although I’ve seen a few videos saying otherwise. All I can say is that my experience featured no major bugs and only a handful of minor ones. It’s one of the more functional launch AAA games I’ve played recently.

While you’re running around you’ll encounter little Koroks, uh, sorry, I mean Cocos, that are just little guys. They’re just little guys! The Cocos are the current inhabitants of the Starfall Islands, and only the Elder Cocos are able to speak to you directly. The others set you up for random minigames that feel so totally out of place they may as well be a different game, even removing abilities seemingly at random to try and make them make any sense. It’s jarring to be blasting through the desert at 200 mph one second and then the next trying to carry a stack of 10 cocos you’re balancing that are vomiting bombs into Knuckles waiting arms. Once these mini games are complete, the participating Cocos inexplicably drop to the floor as their souls feel the sweet release of death while the others celebrate. I still have no explanation for this. Even when the mini games are fun, it’s impossible to not feel like they very much do not belong in Sonic Frontiers.

In addition to the Shrines, you’ll find miniature overworld puzzles very much akin to the ones that net you a Korok seed in Zelda. Completing these unlocks more of the map, so you’ll definitely want to do each one as you come across it. None are particularly hard, and while some are laughably easy, most require a little bit of thought.

Collecting Cocos across the overworld and taking them to the Elder Cocos will earn you extra ring capacity or extra top speed. I opted for speed every time, because heightening your ring capacity actually just makes it harder to reach max boost. The only reason you’d take that upgrade is for the boss fights, which we’ll get to soon. The Coco can also use the attack and defense upgrades you receive from the map puzzles to boost your stats for combat.

Dotted around each of the zones are seven or eight shrines, each of which transports Sonic to a Cyberspace level. Think of it as a miniature dungeon, each one taking anywhere between one and four minutes to complete. I actually grew to love these, and I think there’s exactly the right number of them. The shrines are certainly less plentiful in Sonic Frontiers than in Breath of the Wild, but are also very replayable. Each shrine contains an old school 2D or 3D Sonic level from a previous game reskinned and fitted to work with the art style of the Frontiers cyberspace world. Longtime fans will notice about 30 seconds into a level “Am I in Sky Rail right now?”, which is another sort of subtle way to pat us veterans on the back.

Each Cyberspace level has four missions: complete the stage with any time, complete the stage with S rank time, collect X number of rings, and collect all 5 red star rings. I actually really got into the swing of replaying these until I got all four missions complete, and left only two shrines in the game uncompleted. Going back and trying to beat your time is actually quite fun in these very short levels. You’ll be rewarded with vault keys, which are needed in the overworld on each island to unlock the chaos emeralds. Most of the levels come from Sonic Adventure 2 and Generations, which I remind you are the good ones, so they already feel great to play and are very conducive to this new movement Sonic has in Frontiers that lets you move both faster and with more control than ever before.

I’m sure some of you are thinking right now “is it lazy for Sonicteam to just recycle old stages they know we like instead of making new ones?” For me, I actually see it as more of an homage to the series as a whole and to its longtime fans, and it’s not like they didn’t create a massive totally original gameworld outside of cyberspace anyway. I quite enjoyed the pacing of cyberspace and only found a handful of the levels to not be fun.

One lucky shrine on each island takes you to a parallel world where Big the Cat is inexplicably just fishing. By trading him the fishing tokens you find lying around the overworld, you can borrow his fishing rod and get to work on this quaint minigame. It’s a very simple case of clicking the button at the right time, but I ended up liking it a lot. It’s a little disorienting when Sonic pulls a full sized real Unreal Engine crocodile or squid out of the water and proudly holds it up, but this is when Sonic Frontiers is at its best. When it proudly declares how serious everything is and leaves the audience to revel in that silliness. The fishing minigame also has the huge benefit of allowing you to trade your catches for memory tokens, vault keys, leveling items, rings, cocos and more in case you get stuck.

Sonic Frontiers is the third game in the franchise to feature combat, following the woeful execution of the idea in Sonic Boom and Sonic Unleashed years ago. Well, they actually nailed it this time, much to my surprise. Besides the classic homing attack, punches, and kicks, you start with the new cycloop ability. While running, you can hold Y or Triangle to leave a path of light behind you. Connecting the light trail with a loop sends a wind blast inwards, damaging enemies, flipping switches, and producing rings. In addition, holding L1 and R1 together allows Sonic to parry. I like the addition of the parry, which is very necessary to defeat certain enemies, but the parry window is much too wide, lasting up to 5 seconds from when you hit the input. It almost doesn’t feel like you’re even doing it. If this system returns in the future I’d like to see a decreased window to give the player more of a feeling of control.

While spamming your main attack to build up combo points, you’ll use the new abilities you unlock from Sonic’s small skill tree to finish off the fairly wide variety of enemies in the overworld. Most of them require a specific and different technique to overcome as well. There is also a dodge ability, which is quite important when fighting stronger enemies. Speaking of which, dotted around each zone are four to five mini-bosses. Each one holds a gear, which is needed to unlock a shrine. These mini bosses are unique and fun, and all get a splash screen when they first appear to let you know they mean business. All enemies drop skill tokens when killed, which are of course traded in at the skill tree for new attacks. My main read on combat is that it’s not just impressive for a sonic game, it actually feels good in the grand scene of action adventure games. I hope to see Sonicteam build on this system in the next game.

The other main feature of the overworld is the aforementioned memory tokens. Sonic’s friends, as well as the new character Sage, have been trapped in the cyber world and are only able to break through as holograms on each island to speak to sonic. By collecting memory tokens and taking them to a hologram, you’ll basically unlock a cutscene, chaos emerald, or mini boss fight that moves the story along. While I understand the idea here, and I think the pacing works well for what Sonic Frontiers is trying to do, I think it misses a huge part of why people love Sonic.

We LOVE these characters. We do. We want to see them all hang out, interact, and fight together. Separating out the supporting cast into single 1 on 1 interactions with Sonic was a big mistake. We get a single scene at the end where we see Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all together, which is all any of us want. Although this is the first Sonic game written originally in English, the cutscenes are also a bit strange in how spaced out the dialogue lines are , and I wonder if it’s to account for the Japanese dub that had to go over this game later. Regardless, although the performances and delivery are excellent, the dialogue in Frontiers feels stilted because of these gaps in a way that reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts 3.

I have been carefully saving the best part for last - the boss fights. You may have seen videos or gifs of them going around, and it’s because this part of the game nails what the fans want from Sonic more than anything else the franchise has put out. This, this is the vibe. This is what we were waiting for.

[Video]

There are four titans like this you’ll face, each one accompanied by an original metalcore song by Sleeping with Sirens, where you become super sonic and get to unleash the shounen fury that has always been relegated to a final boss fight in the past games. Finally, this is it. I grinned like a big dumb idiot as the music kicked in and I snatched the last chaos emerald off the head of the first boss to take my own final form. These fights are largely spectacle but do ask for a decent amount of precision as well. This first boss fight with Giganto 5 hours in is not only my favorite boss fight of the year; it is the best one in franchise history. This is a hype moment that is going to stick with me forever.

This leads me to the absolute best feature of Sonic Frontiers - the music. This OST is unbelievable. It features excellent music in every genre spanning from soft piano twinkles to hard house to EDM to metalcore to symphonic ballads and of course to the classic Sonic butt rock sound that we legitimately love. Every track is great, and most of them are exceptional. It was composed by Sonic music veteran Tomoya Ohtani, who’s been working on Sonic Soundtracks for decades. On top of his solo compositions, when you hear the result of his work with groups such as Sleeping with Sirens, Dangerkids, To Octavia and One OK Rock to produce something more than the sum of its parts, I hope you’ll recognize He’s one of the most talented composers out there today. Take a listen to the soundtrack. Now!

Sonic Frontiers is a mess of ideas that I’d maybe give an award to for “least directed” game. Most of the time, it’s barely holding itself together as a mass of ideas from other, better games, with Sonic pasted onto it. But when it hits, oh my god it hits. When the music swells and Kellin Quinn is blasting your eardrums with a guttural scream while you plunge a 300 ft sword into a titan the size of a skyscraper, it won’t matter that you’re doing it in the most artistically dissonant game I have ever seen. It won’t matter that there is literally no explanation for the presence of the Sonic items in this world. It won’t matter that you have to rack up 5 million points in a terrible pinball mini game to progress the story for no given reason. The heights of Sonic Frontiers are the highest highs Sonic has ever seen, and while casual players may not enjoy the game as much as longtime fans, I had more fun in this mediocre game than I had in all the many, many better games I played this year. The blue blur is back, and I cannot wait to see where he goes next. One thing’s for sure - always to new horizons.