I'm coming at this as someone who unironically loves the original Sonic Adventure, so there's a lot that I want to love here. One such thing is the reckless sincerity with which Sonic Frontiers approaches its narrative, which (when combined with the musical score) reminded me of Kingdom Hearts of all things at times. I also surprisingly enjoyed the discount Devil May Cry-esque combat, even if it could use a bit more depth, as well as the shameless inspiration taken from Shadow of the Colossus. Like, c'mon, that's a trio of extremely interesting (and nostalgic) influences for a Sonic game, is it not? I'll even say that this feels much closer to Sonic '06 than anything has in a while, and I mean that in a good way: I maintain the opinion all of these years later that Sonic '06 is an alpha build of a game that could've been a truly great Sonic Adventure 3 with an extra year or so of polish and fixes.

But one of my ultimate annoyances in gaming is when a game overpopulates itself with completely pointless collectibles and other tedious, meaningless guff, and this game has tons of that - some of the collectibles even respawn! And the amount of times this game aggressively wrestled control from me in order to lock me into one of the four different running style controls/systems really started to get on my nerves. Just let me run across the environment freely, dammit! And that's saying nothing of the overall lack of polish on display here - hell, some of the "hype" cutscenes are so poorly stitched together that it reminded me of all of the SA2 audio bugs. This leaves the game feeling extremely ambitious but unable to hit the heights it's aiming for, and that's a shame for me personally. Gotta give it props for trying though.

But one thing's for sure: it should be considered a crime to include a mandatory pinball minigame with physics that awful, holy hell.