Criminally underrated racer! If you're going in expecting another Mario Kart imitator you will have a bad time, it's totally different mechanically and has its own awesome futuristic style, and even a neat little story and rival characters. These are probably my favorite designs for the Sonic cast. Riders has a very high skill ceiling and is incredibly fast paced once you learn it, the issue is that it doesn't explain how to do anything so a lot of people will be turned away by that and how brutal its AI and tracks seem at first. But man I just adore this game, its vibe is so charming and comforting. The "DX" mod for the GameCube version is actually peak gaming. It's such a shame that Zero Gravity stripped away almost all of the complexity and then the series died shortly after.

What a lot of people either fail to realise or refuse to believe is that the best Sonic games are the flawed ones. The games that try to innovate with bold ideas unbecoming of a Sonic game, or any game. We've had 'perfect' Sonic games before like Sonic Mania or Sonic Generations and those games are great but they can't hold a candle to the way-too-serious tone of Sonic Adventure 2, the quaint but pointless Adventure Fields of Sonic Adventure, the audacity to make half the game a slow beat-em-up in Sonic Unleashed. People love Sonic for its ambition, not its accomplishments. People love games for their imperfections the same way they love people despite their flaws. Sonic Team has, for decades now, dared to do things that are new, bold, and weird. Sonic Frontiers is a continuation of that vision, and to reduce it to petty statements of "open world 🤓 sega hire this man 🤓 serious plot in cartoon rat game 🤓 the controls 🤓 but he's slow" is a pitch-perfect demonstration of how Sonic is doomed to fail. Look at your favourite games and try earnestly telling yourself they're flawless.

Credit to smaench for planting this seed in my brain, actual review when I'm done playing it and can let my thoughts digest rather than spewing unfiltered drivel onto your webzone.