I love Sonic the Hedgehog.

Playing through Sonic Frontiers for the first time, it was hard not to have a big, dumb smile on my face when Kellin Quinn’s vocals for Undefeatable or Break Through it All accentuated some of the series’ most spectacular boss fights in recent memory. I appreciated talking to Amy, Knuckles, and Tails, and having these characters feel like characters again, for the first time in a long time. I loved the melancholic story and desolate environments. Although they felt incongruous with the last decade of Sonic’s output, it felt like another bold step forward for Sonic Team, a new horizon, uncharted territory – starting nearly from scratch and reinventing Sonic’s movement yet again was a big gamble, and one that I felt paid off.

Sonic Frontiers was not a perfect Sonic game by any stretch of the imagination. For every triumph there was comparable failure: everything from the stripped down boost gameplay in Cyberspace stages, to the lackluster combat, to the abhorrent pop-in, and obviously much more I won’t discuss here. You’ve probably heard all this before.

Sonic Frontiers was and is not a perfect Sonic game, but if not a step in the right direction - it's at least a proper reorientation, a much-needed weaning from the over-streamlined boost formula from Sonic Forces, and a manifesto that Sonic Team could still, in fact, create a game that - even at its worst - pushed the series forward.

I love Sonic the Hedgehog.

I’ve loved Sonic the Hedgehog since I was a kid. I met my best friend, Garrett, sixteen years ago on YouTube through shared interest in Sonic the Hedgehog. We used to play Xbox Live together. He visited me for my high school graduation. We played through Sonic ‘06 the Summer of 2015. We still visit each other every year or so.

I took a short break from the series when I couldn’t finish Sonic Unleashed, and then jumped back in with Sonic Generations. I remembered why I loved these games to begin with.

Sonic Mania is my favorite game of all time.

When the Sonic Symphony World Tour show was announced in Los Angeles, I asked Garrett to visit me again. We both took a week off work.

This is the same week that Sonic Frontiers’ third and last update was released: the Final Horizon. We agreed to play through it together.

For the first time since Sonic ‘06, we were able to play as Amy Rose in 3D. Exploring Ouranos Island and coming to grips with Amy’s moveset was a joy, at first. She has a triple jump again! She can glide now! We ran into a mini-boss that killed us immediately.

“Let’s just ignore that one,” I told Garrett.

We realized our speed/ring/attack/defense stats had returned to Level One. Amy Rose was a clean slate. No upgrades. We were certainly in no condition to fight an endgame mini-boss.

We hit the story beats we needed to, then the game let us control Knuckles. This was a surprisingly emotional moment. Although it hadn’t been sixteen years since we’d controlled Knuckles, it felt like meeting an old friend.

“Oh, God,” Garrett groaned suddenly as he started to glide around the map.

“What’s wrong?”

He handed me the controller, “Feel this.”

I picked up the controller and started to glide as Knuckles. I understood what he’d meant. The windup was unusual. The turn radius was abysmal. The input delay was horrific.

“What the fuck?” I said out loud. It took a few more minutes before I put the above criticisms into words.

“Yeah,” Garrett laughed, summating, “it doesn’t feel good.”

We spent the most time as Knuckles and, subsequently, experienced two Starfall events, which have a chance to occur randomly each night cycle and allow players to (essentially) farm Koco to upgrade their character’s stats.

The Final Horizon wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Multiple playable characters necessitate a highly varied moveset for each, but to balance it properly, any upgrade materials earned as Sonic do NOT carry over to other characters. Amy, Knuckles, and Tails have their own upgrade materials, their own upgrade trees, their own level progression. HOWEVER, the new Ouranos Island is built in such a way that every character must have a Cyloop ability, and each character must unlock their respective Cyloop ability using their upgrade tree, which requires exploring Ouranos Island and earning enough upgrade points to unlock the Cyloop ability for each character in the first place, so they can explore the island even more and, eventually, complete their main objectives.

It feels unusual, however, to block progression in such a way as to force players to upgrade their characters here. In the base game, Sonic learns new attacks through his skill tree, but none of these are essential to making progress (except for the Cyloop, which is the first ability that Sonic unlocks anyway).

Here, having to use the skill tree to unlock basic abilities for characters like “melee attack” and “parry” that were already regular abilities for Sonic feels arbitrary. It’s not like it takes too long to unlock these abilities anyways, players need only find two or three special Koco to obtain these abilities, but it feels unnecessary.

It’s disappointing. I play with Knuckles for a certain amount of time and learn that he can only climb on certain surfaces, so as to keep the game balance intact. It makes sense, but it doesn’t cushion the blow any. I discovered a challenge that requires Knuckles’ ability to latch onto walls and climb. A cannonball hits me and I fall to my death. I try again. A cannonball hits me. I try to recover and latch onto the wall, but Knuckles doesn’t respond. I fall to my death. I try again.

I remember playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on my Nintendo Wii. The year is probably 2007 or 2008. I remember playing through the Hero Story for the first time and finally being able to play as Knuckles. I remember Knuckles’ second level: Pumpkin Hill.

You know me, the fighting freak Knuckles, and we’re at pumpkin hill. You ready?

Nostalgia is a potent drug, strong enough to trick us into believing that even the most unremarkable chapters of our lives are golden, perfect snapshots. Only when we return to these chapters, we find reality is oftentimes much less kind than our memories tend to be.

I’ve replayed almost every mainline Sonic game countless times. I know that I love Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 in spite of their flaws.

I know that I love the sensation of gliding through the air as Knuckles, the pure joy of nose-diving in rapid circles, of sticking to each and every surface, of burrowing underground to find hidden treasure. Rats. I know that I love playing as Knuckles. I know that I was disappointed when I played as Knuckles in Sonic Frontiers because it wasn’t the Knuckles I remembered. It wasn’t the Knuckles I fell in love with.

“You’d think they would’ve figured this out by now,” I said to Garrett, mostly out of frustration after another cheap death, “it’s like… I’m thinking about, like, sewers.”

He didn’t know what I meant by that. I tried to explain it and probably ended up sounding like a doofus – completely unintelligible.

“I’m sure there are people who know how to make sewers, and maintain them,” I waffled around the point I was trying to make, “but, you know, I’m not sure that we know how to make them.”

“What?”

“Like, you don’t think about this? That making sewers isn't common knowledge?”

“What are you talking about?”

“How many people know how to make sewers? How many people will know how to make sewers? Imagine everyone who knows how sewers work – one day, they all die, and nobody wrote it down. Like, imagine it’s all tribal knowledge, or something.”

What I meant is that I’m worried. I have so much anxiety about the future. Sometimes I’m worried that nobody is worrying enough. There are entire lexicons, pillars of society, professions, sectors, that will be lost to time – just slowly fading out, forgotten, and by the time somebody realizes that nobody put the fundamentals down to paper, it’ll already be too late.

Another library of Alexandria is lost, every day, for the rest of time, forever.

Somehow, Sonic Team remains incapable of emulating the movement of either Sonic Adventure. It eludes them even now.

In a series where increasingly chaotic galaxy-ending terrors converge on an anthropomorphic hedgehog who has the ability to go Super Saiyan, with each entry escalating in scope, ambition, and performance – the ease of basic movement remains a foreign concept.

The sewers are overflowing with noxious waste. Vile, repugnant sludge. The streets are drowned in garbage. Your home is sinking into bedrock. It’s always been like this.

I remember Knuckles’ second level: Pumpkin Hill.

I remember gliding between the stony mountaintops, scaling the rocky pumpkin obelisks, evading ghosts, chasing oscillating signals of the shattered Emerald. It’s closer…

I remember the sunset skybox. I remember the JPEG artifacts eating the edges of the stony pumpkin mountain faces like sweet fire. I remember the background music, looping around back to its first verse.

We finally got to play as Tails. There was catharsis, exhalation. Our baby boy could fly again. Another finger of the monkey’s paw curled inward.

Our opinions of the Final Horizon diverged much more around this point. Garrett was content to play these characters again, and I couldn’t hide my disappointment.

We traded the controller often. Sometimes one puzzle or platforming section was too difficult or obtuse and either of us would tap in while the other tapped out. Some platforming challenges were puzzles in and of themselves. Every time we died or found ourselves at an impasse, we’d give each other a look, or laugh out loud.

I love Sonic the Hedgehog.

“This is… uh,” I stammered, “this is… like, the next Sonic ‘06.” I said.

Garrett laughed, “Don’t say that.”

Neither of us hated Sonic ‘06, not like a lot of people do. Then again, it was our childhood. Our biases were impossible to avoid. I couldn’t shake the thought. This was the next Sonic ‘06, I thought to myself. For better or for worse.

When we finally assumed control of Sonic and the game directed us to our first (of five) towers, we hit a wall. Although Rhea Island was notorious for its long, perilous tower ascents, it was at least kind enough to provide checkpoints; as we struggled upwards, only to come crashing down once more, we realized there would be no checkpoints.

Sonic Frontiers had become Getting Over It.

Every time we came hurtling back down to earth, I’d start singing $uicideboy$.

One last pic and I’ll be gone
Make it count
Put the flash on
Never really felt like I belonged
So I’ll be on my way
And It won’t be long

We continued, swapped the controller between each other for each attempt, each time a little closer to heaven… nearly an hour later, we’d finally conquered the summit.

We did this, again, and again, and again, until we finally reached the fifth and final tower.

To be fully transparent, there is a lot to like about the Final Horizon. Beyond the novelty of being able to play as Tails, Knuckles, and Amy in 3D again for the first time in over a decade is an achievement, and praiseworthy on its own. Once I was comfortable with Sonic’s movement again, the towers were actually very engaging and memorable platforming challenges that I felt were deserving of their endgame difficulty. Lastly, the additional Cyberspace stages were also fun, much more challenging and interesting ideas with unique gimmicks for each stage – I only wished these were part of the main quest, and not relegated to completely optional content.

That being said, the experience of the final “trial” is probably the worst Sonic Frontiers has to offer. This penultimate boss rush might be the most cynical idea of difficulty I’ve seen in any Sonic game ever. The perfect parry mechanic retroactively cheapens these encounters by demanding frame-perfect timing, and ruins the spectacle by requiring mechanical mastery to proceed.

I’ve finished every Fromsoft Souls game (except for Sekiro) and there wasn’t a single one with parrying mechanics that were this demanding. For my first two attempts, I grappled with Giganto and attempted only to learn the parry timing; if Sonic loses one ring as Super Sonic each second, and the game only gives you 400 rings total for this encounter, that means a regular attempt will average around six-and-a-half minutes. During the thirteen minutes I attempted to learn Giganto’s parry window, I only managed to successfully parry him twice.

This is straight up not finished. Nobody playtested this. Almost every user I’ve seen discussing this boss rush has mentioned that dropping the difficulty down to Easy “fixes” the perfect parry (and it does) but this is not how difficulty should be designed. If almost every player can unanimously clear 99% of the game on the hardest difficulty, but can only progress at the eleventh hour by dropping the difficulty down to Easy, that’s a huge problem.

The new final boss is also marginally better than the older one, by default. This updated final battle features a beefier Super Sonic with blue eyes(!) and a new second phase for Supreme. It also features the absolute worst camera for any Sonic boss fight I’ve played, a brand new targeting mechanic that isn’t explained anywhere, and a cutscene that outright kills you if you don’t have enough rings.

I love Sonic the Hedgehog.

Rolling the final cutscene on the Final Horizon and watching Sonic launch himself through the image of an Eldritch God should’ve been an easy victory lap, but it wasn’t.

“We’re so fucking back,” for better or for worse.

Garrett and I and our friend Jordan (another longtime Sonic fan) were strapped for time as we watched the credits roll. It was 6:15pm. The concert started at 8. We were ready to leave before the credits had finished. I wore the hoodie I bought at the Sonic Speed popup cafe in San Diego. It was 7pm when we hit serious traffic a mile away from the Dolby Theatre.

Garrett and Jordan took turns adding songs to a growing playlist of Sonic OSTs. I sat in near-gridlock, frozen bumper-to-bumper in an ocean of automobiles. Jordan played E102’s theme from Sonic Adventure.

“This makes me feel an emotion that doesn’t exist,” he said.

My eyes glazed over in silent terror. It was 7:30pm. It was only a concert. I knew it wouldn’t be a big deal if we were late. I wanted death. Old habits made playthings of my emotions, paralyzed me. Old anxieties like nightmare tendrils, looming deadlines overhead – the hands of the clock a guillotine ready to drop. I bit my lip. I still wanted death.

Cars moved inches at a time, each red light another eternity. 7:45pm. We finally hit another artery, the lifeblood of the city flowed freely again, us along with it. I found the parking I reserved ahead of time after circling the area once. It’s 7:55pm.

We reached the Dolby Theatre at 8pm on the dot. The three of us walked inside the wide auditorium together as the final countdown began. We sat down. The lights dimmed. As the orchestra started playing, a wave of relief washed over me. We'd made it.

Watching the show, I had to appreciate the accompanying background montage which appeared on a massive monitor above the orchestra, as it highlighted the many flourishes and creative liberties of the performance. The music synchronized to Sonic as he took incoming damage in Labyrinth Zone, prompting audience laughter; or the dramatic flooding sequence in Chemical Plant Zone; or the first appearance of Metal Sonic in Collision Chaos and his eventual defeat in Stardust Speedway.

It was then I realized that Sonic’s greatest strength, as a series, was its many iconic moments. Not only the dramatic story beats, as in cutscenes, but its many instances of semi-interactive storytelling; as in the flooding sequence in Chemical Plant Zone, or running away from an Orca, or an oversized truck, or traversing an upside down castle.

After the intermission, however, was our main event. Not only what we’d been craving all night, but our entire lives.

I've been in love with this series for well over half my life now. When I was a kid, I always used to listen to Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks. I thought Zebrahead’s His World was the rawest thing I’d ever listened to when I was thirteen. I listened to Crush 40 religiously, each vocal track another unforgettable experience – a story’s climactic end heralded by Johnny Gioeli’s radical vocals.

As the second act began and the first chords of Shadow the Hedgehog’s (I am) All of Me filled the Dolby Theatre, setting the crowd alight, I remembered why I fell in love with the series again.

I don’t even like Shadow the Hedgehog anymore, man. That game sucked!

However, what I’ve always loved was Shadow’s soundtrack –its dark, industrial sounds and heavy metal ethos seeped into every crack and crevice of its experience. When I was a kid, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

So imagine the experience of seeing Crush 40 live, playing a song you’ve unconsciously memorized the lyrics to forever ago, backed by a full orchestra, in a room filled with Sonic fans screaming the lyrics alongside you.

I never thought I’d be here.

As a kid, I never thought I’d get to see Crush 40 live, and yet here they were. I’d fulfilled one of my oldest wishes. I was able to see Crush 40 live with my best friend.

Kellin Quinn made an appearance for the encore, and performed Break Through It All and Undefeatable. Better memories of Sonic Frontiers resurfaced.

For the final song, Johnny Gioeli joined Kellin Quinn for Live & Learn. Quinn provided backup vocals. Hearing him scream, “Hold on to what if?” cut deep into my soul.

The performance ended.

“Los Angeles,” Johnny addressed us, “we’ve made a beautiful memory here tonight.”

We made our exit shortly after. Garrett told me his only regret was not being able to attend the 3:30 showing as well. Rarely do we get to experience these moments twice.

I love Sonic the Hedgehog, and yet it was hard to not be disappointed by the Final Horizon.

What should’ve been a resounding triumph was neither an encore nor a reprise, but yet another new direction – an unwelcome challenge, a pale imitation of old glories. I was disappointed. But seeing Crush 40 live reminded me why I loved Sonic in the first place.

I’ll cherish these memories. They won’t always be perfect, but sometimes they are.

I know I’ll return to Sonic Frontiers again one day, but for now, yet another chapter of the blue blur’s legacy comes to a close.

In hindsight, I know that even if Sonic Frontiers ended up being poorly received, it wouldn’t kill Sonic. If Sonic ‘06 couldn’t kill Sonic, nothing can kill Sonic. Regardless of whichever new journey the hedgehog embarks on next, I know I’ll be there day one, eager to see what’s in store. After all, the adventure is never solely the end; the adventure ends up being the memories we take with us.