I enjoyed this quite more than I expected I would as someone who hasn't played a single Sonic game in probably a decade. While there are a number of often baffling design choices in Sonic Frontiers, the exploration/
cyberspace gameplay is great, and the Sonic formula translates surprisingly well to an open world-ish format. Zooming from encounter to encounter in each island feels great and kept me relatively engaged for hours at a time without much falter.

While I haven't personally played any recent Sonic games, I can still tell how much the writing is improved in Frontiers, and the soundtrack is fantastic. As the director of the game said, there is plenty of room for improvement, but I commend them for really taking a risk with this game.

I also agree with what the director said of the game being a sort of "global playtest" for the franchise's future. This year saw a number of franchises take on some significant formula changes after remaining stagnant for quite awhile. Pokemon Legends Arceus looked to change the mainline Pokemon formula for the first time ever and Kirby finally transitioned to 3D, as examples. I would say that those games, along with Frontiers, are successes at the absolute least to the extent of paving a promising future for their respective franchises. None of these games are perfect, and with massive formula changes will inevitably come some borderline broken mechanics or technical tradeoffs, but I can generally excuse these in the name of progress and innovation. Sonic Frontiers' core gameplay loop is quite engaging throughout, and is a promising building block for the future of the franchise.

To end this off, I wanted some of questionable design choices that I made note of throughout my play through, as a sort of documentation of what to maybe improve on in an evolution of the Frontiers format. I don't mean these at all to be just shitting on the game, more of just specifics that I wanted to mention that I think need to be considered and if improved on could turn a future entry from good to great or more.

- Combat skills don't really matter. While a lot of the new fancy moves Sonic has look cool and are fun to use, ultimately there wasn't much of a reason to use one over the other, as they all fulfill pretty much the same role of 'doing damage' and nothing more. The combat of this game was extremely basic, and if these skills were more diverse in their applications, a la how each weapon in a game like Doom Eternal is used in different situations, it would be much more deep and engaging.

- The game was way too easy to the point of arguably disrespecting the player's intelligence. Most of the puzzles came down to "fit square block into square hole," and while I wouldn't want every single challenge to be a pain in the ass, calling most of them a "challenge" is a ridiculous overstatement. I would chock some of this up to the developers playing it safe with this new formula, but the challenges could definitely require a little more brain power and just improvement in general. One of the challenges is literally just to run in place.

- Skill points become completely useless after unlocking all the skills, despite you still earning them. This was easily one of the most baffling parts of this game. About halfway through the second island I had unlocked every single skill, and with over half the game to go, I ended with like over 150 skill points to spare with nothing to use them on. It almost feels like they forgot about this completely, or just didn't have time to find a use for them, but yeah. If anything, they could have spread out the skill point requirement more for skills as to not unlock everything so early on.

- Parry not needing to be timed. Lots of people have mentioned this but I would like to as well. This whole mechanic goes right along with the 'game too easy' thing and made a lot of awesome moments in the combat so much less impactful because there was just 0 risk/reward in holding the counter button until you were attacked. I can't say I've ever seen something like this in a game before for a reason, lol.

- Very strange narrative/progressional pacing. I feel like there was something missing to hold the narrative of this game together. I'm glad that you were not interrupted every 5 minutes by some story event, but I also felt like the narrative was so disconnected from everything else that there was hardly much of a story at all. The ending of the game is so hilariously abrupt (including the 'secret' Hard mode part) and out of left field that I was left very confused as to what at all happened. To reiterate, this is from the perspective of someone who has not played a Sonic game since Unleashed. I really just feel like there was not a solid backdrop for the game and everything just kind of happened and it was over. There was really only a couple points where I felt much of anything about the story, mostly regarding Sage.

Pretty solid 7/10. I did have a super fun time with this game overall, it was just hard to ignore all the possible areas of improvement.