Look, the moment-to-moment experience of playing Sonic Frontiers is pretty fucked. You'll be fighting a camera which is designed to inconvenience you and swing around wildly at all times, you'll get locked onto mini obstacle courses when they pop in a meter ahead of you and not being able to return back to moving about the open world until you hop through a bunch of boost rings that shoot you in the opposite direction you want to move, and you'll deal with ever-changing controls as the camera state and context collaborate to make sure whatever you intended to do becomes something else. It's a mess that is pretty much impossible for me to look past.

But I can't really bring myself to dislike it. Despite the fact that it's barely functional and any emotional moment has to be surrounded by smirks and 5 of the weakest quips you've ever heard lest it come off as too sincere, the glitchy somber Digimon-movie aesthetic, tons of Cute Little Guys all over the place, and next-level tunes (outside of the boss fights...) make for something I ultimately still enjoyed a reasonable amount and don't regret giving my time. Frontiers is bold and deeply weird, and I'm always down for that.