since the time when sonic first entered the 3D realm, sonic team's primary struggle with designing each game revolves around how to structure each in order to provide a satisfactory amount of content for the player. this was the major motivating design inquiry behind my sonic adventure review that I posted recently -- not required reading to understand the rest of this review but might be handy if you want some context on my interpretation of sonic's primary design philosophy.

in the years since sonic adventure 1 and 2 attempted to pad time with the variety of gameplay styles and reused content, sonic has jumped from concept to concept in such a manner that the franchise's flexibility and wavering identity have become odd staples of the series. some entries pursued hot ideas at the time, such as shadow the hedgehog's ratchet & clank/jak II-inspired shooter mechanics or unleashed's god of war-style action sequences, while others relied strongly on specific unique selling points such as generations' recreations of old levels or forces' character creation function. all of these ultimately exist to add on layers and layers to sonic's "boost gameplay" level design that has been quietly undergirding the series for the past 15 odd years.

in that chronology sonic frontiers is not really out of place. it seizes upon the open world design methodology of its contemporaries in order to bolster its traditional levels. its aesthetic stylings offer another radical change in tone and environment for the franchise, mixing alien architecture and geometric, glitchy robot adversaries with scenic vistas and muted, dour exploration. in many ways, it fits the series' design trajectory perfectly. what makes the game fascinating is how surprisingly well-designed it is without sacrificing or compromising its status as a sonic game. an oddly ambitious title to release when no one was looking, as the previous game in the franchise had launched and flopped right as yakuza/lad was in ascendance in the west, which overtook it as sega's premier gaming franchise (though not quite biggest brand).

sonic frontiers structures its open zones as endless fields of boost level excerpts which often link as intuitive chains. the boost gameplay pattern itself is rather discrete and almost QTE-like in its obstacle structure, with hitting homing attacks at the proper time and performing correct actions such as switching rails or jumping over spikes serving as individual actions performed in between watching sonic roll through loops and zipline around to the next obstacles. in stark contrast with prior games using boost, frontiers chooses to frame the experience of these quick-fire reaction tests in a much more somber fashion. rushing up rails and running up walls center visions of decay with plaintive music behind the preceedings. rain showers occasionally coat sonic's surroundings in a evolving weather system that rotates day and night in a swirl that makes the passage of time feel like a daze. it's an odd juxtaposition of sonic's usual confrontational, energetic get-up borne out through his typical gameplay design against these trappings of loneliness in post-civilization.

surprisingly, this works! the secret behind this is a major shift in how sonic contextualizes these individual gameplay sections scattered throughout the world: absolutely nothing is compulsory. each zone's progression lies in a web of collectables that seem dense at first glance but quickly become second nature. defeating major enemies yields gears that open level portals that grant vault keys via mission completion which unlock emerald vaults, and specific memory items found via "completing" small boost sections strewn across the world open up side character interactions that open up new areas and lead to the final boss of each section. quite a mouthful; combined with the rest of the collectables such as small koko creatures, health and defense pickups, and rings, the design seems to share more in common with donkey kong 64 than breath of the wild.

however, more time spent with the game reveals that obtaining these collectables is not as rigid as it seems at first glance. gears will occasionally drop from random enemies, memory tokens can be found in certain caches hidden around the world, and random breakables with drop any number of other items. in a sense, all the content is optional to some extent. this enhances the forward momentum in an odd way while it makes the pace lackadaisical; simply run into as much new shit as you can until you feel ready to tackle whatever the main quest marker is leading you towards. if you tire of even this, you can choose to fish at one of the spots located in each zone (paid for with yet another currency: purple coins), where no fish can get caught twice and each one showers you with tokens exchangable for virtually any other collectable in the game. compared to its open world ilk, which seek to bury the player in a mound of optional questlines, rigid interactables, and outposts to capture, sonic frontiers eases off and lets the player drive for a while. the content flows so plentifully here that engorging yourself on it all seems grossly decadent. the game even heavily restricts its own fast travel system in an attempt to get the player to just meander. unexpected tact but I fuck with it!

this pacing comes as a cost however, and in this game's case the story takes a notable blow. with sonic breezing through small challenges and exploring semi-aimlessly, each memory-token-brokered cutscene has to take place completely bereft of action given the assumed non-linearity of execution. in each sonic blankly chats with a pal at a standstill remarking on the many off-screen events that occur or working through retreads of each character's "arc" from prior games in a disjointed, abbreviated manner. much of this is peppered with some of the most dreadful MCU-level dreamworks-smirk quips I've ever witnessed in a piece of media. a giant artificial lightning storm arrives at one point after a certain pillar is activated causing tails and sonic to recoil, and sonic without any irony utters "so, that was a thing!". truly a head-spinning display of whedonisms, upstaged only by the late game's unceremonious exposition dumps and heavily-worn "robot learns what human emotion/will/determination" is themes. utterly unsurprising that the lead writer here was plucked from the comic book sphere (archie's old sonic series, obv). this a downside in the absolute sense, but in reality these are not intrusive and the layperson playing this game would certainly not be primarily interested in its story regardless. the actual sonic fans seem to be lapping up the fact the tone is radically opposed to saturday-morning-cartoon vibe of pontac and graff's run on the franchise, so make of that what you will.

the other elements of the game that feel undercooked or particularly uneven feel mostly like results of sonic team's hit-or-miss variety of ideas and poor execution. the combat may be the most egregious of these: much like the open world, it initially seems like the team struck gold simply by throwing the prior boost gameplay elements into these fights. simply serve up these fundamentals with about fifteen different taped-on moves (that each "extend combos" ie play pace-breaking animations while having identical end results) and the system should be fine, right? other than the laughable "variety" of moves, with virtually all enemies being utterly decimated by one of sonic's two projectile moves rendering the rest pointless, each enemy has a heavily telegraphed counterstrategy that makes repeat fights undesirable. these tend to make each fight shockingly quick in the most free cases or unreasonably tedious when the fight requires sitting through repeated platforming challenges. specific ones like squid and caterpillar truly strain the pace with their overly long traversal phases required to simply access the privilege to fight them; caterpillar makes this even worse with laser beams that have a buggy habit of meaty-ing the player upon get-up and effectively OHKOing them. this didn't have to be the case; fortress has its own rail-grinding section and yet conjures the thrill dogfighting with its fast pace and multiple unique quick rail-switches required to approach its head. most regular fights (and some other major fights like certain towers) becomes slogs of repeatedly "cyloop"-ing each enemy's shield and then peppering them with projectiles. of special note in this section is the parry, which merely has to be held to successfully dispel the attack without any timing component. this appears like some last-minute mechanical change to be honest (there's a series of escalating challenges that feature parrying faster and faster projectiles... which makes no sense without the timing component), and by proxy this trivializes every ninja-type encounter. too many instances of these combat mechanics seeming cobbled together in a way that begs the question of why they were included at all.

combat is likely the worst of frontiers' sins when you break it down (I'm saying this to make myself feel better about that prior monster paragraph), with the other point of contention being the boost stages proper. these draw from generations' asset pool and feel somewhat awkward on first pass thanks to the general handling evidently being tuned for free-roam gameplay. however, these grew on me quickly. the vast majority of these particular boost stages rank among sonic's best, with a much better emphasis on verticality, alternate paths, and interesting structures and obstacles compared to sonic's other similar games that I've experienced. certain stages recreate famous SA2 adventure stages such as city escape and metal harbor, and playing these back to back with the others showcases just how bare the boost gameplay skeleton is. SA-era sonic was much richer in terms of its environmental variety in exchange for consistency in terms of mechanics, whereas boost reuses the same toolkit frequently with the reassurance that the mechanics will be predictable. the combination of these here as well as the surprising amount of juice squeezed from the now-old boost fruit make this feel rather robust in terms of its levels. it helps that each one is only about a minute and a half to three minutes -- the ideal sonic level length.

thankfully you can modulate how much you want to experience any of these facets with the fishing minigame, and with that sonic frontiers reorients the focus back to simply experiencing the vastness of each zone and the intermingling of rails, spring pads, and boost pads in each. a particularly neat trick it pulls in this regard occurs in the second island, where an initally large desert plateau gives way to a much larger web of tunnels and valleys once one climbs to the ridge cutting them off from the rest of the island. unfortunately the third island focuses too heavily on island-hopping that requires knowing specific entrances and exits; this is annoyingly infeasible without memorization thanks to the game's poor draw distance. it is also during this section that the amount of 2D boost sections in the overworld increases, which have the unfortunate effect of both struggling to work if their camera trigger is not activated as well as locking the player in to surmounting the obstacles once triggered even if the reward had already been received. the final major area (not as big as any of the others but still plenty large) splits the difference, with the most annoying enemies in the game and more forced 2D but a nice big contiguous hunk of land to traverse. at the very least each island has some dazzling structure that can be triumphantly scaled from multiple directions. this never ceased to excite me even when other environmental elements blended together in my brain.

in some ways, the lack of compulsory objectives in sonic frontiers (outside of completing each area-end boss; these use the same combat mechanics as the other sections but you get to play as super sonic so they're passable) makes it feel the perfection of sonic as the lightning-fast 3D playground series. by padding out the game with the boost sections themselves, sonic team has managed to make a seamless entry that still packs a significant amount of content; I ran a little over 20 hours without doing a decent amount of levels or uncovering each part of the map. in that way it seems like less of an "open world" game and more like an askew modern take on the collectathon. much like how sonic's older games featured multiple different level routes to cater to each player's needs, so too does frontiers allow a wide array of different experiences, event orders, and paths through its boundless exploration. I'm equally curious to see if sonic team attempts to expand on these particular ideas and aghast at the idea of them doing the same thing twice. I think there's enough here to overhaul or improve that proves this particular field is still very fertile.

even beyond what I've discussed there's more little goodies and surprises to find (pinball: meh, shmup sections: honestly pretty tight??). true final boss also definitely delivered on the crazy overwrought schmaltz and surprising mechanics. definitely worth playing through the game on hard just for that even though it made the combat 2% more tedious and isn't even necessary since you can switch it in the menu. platinum looks pretty doable too... I still have trophy hunter brainrot even though I've barely tried for completion shit since I started using this site. but maybe someday...