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Sonic Frontiers - Blog Posts
I've been really inspired by the Sonic art all over my dash so here's a redraw despite literally having never drawn this zoomy hedgehog ever before this and having little to no knowledge of the lore :))
(Original under cut!)
Sonic Frontiers Review: Aptly Crossing a New Frontier.
Sonic Frontiers is the latest 3D platforming game to be released in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, following the releases of Sonic Forces, Sonic Colors Ultimate (SCU), and Sonic Origins, their previous three 3D platforming titles. Forces, SCU, and Origins’ releases were met with a lot of criticism due to not meeting the fanbase’s expectations for a variety of reasons, so in the days before Frontiers’ released, I was excited but chose to keep a healthy level of skepticism just in case the game wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Suffice to say, the hype for the game was extremely well earned, as I had an absolute blast playing through Frontiers. To help me get all my points across as to why I like this game so much, I’ll be dividing this review into two parts: the gameplay segment and the story segment. I’m doing this for two reasons: the first being that I believe both need to be talked about separately so I can really dive deep into what makes them so good, and the other is so that people who only want a gameplay review aren’t spoiled on some of the more major plot points of the game. With that being said, here are my thoughts on Sonic Frontiers!
Future Updates
As I was in the process of putting this review together, Sonic Team revealed that over the course of 2023, the game would be getting a series of 3 free updates, and the last of those updates would contain a story update involving more playable characters, showing pictures of Tails, Knuckles, and Amy. Obviously, this is massive and very exciting, but since it’s not out I can’t exactly factor any of what’s coming in updates into this review. Hopefully if I have the time and remember to do so, I’ll make an addendum to this review or separate posts going over each update. Anyways, NOW this review can start!
Gameplay
Sonic Frontiers sets out to tackle a new style of gameplay it calls Open Zone gameplay. Sonic Frontiers takes place on a series of islands, with each island being an open zone. As soon as you unlock the island, you’re able to go anywhere on the island right from the start, defeating minibosses and collecting Memory Tokens wherever you please, but more on that in a moment. The zones are fairly big in size, giving you plenty to explore at Sonic’s mach speeds and never really feeling cramped.
While exploring the islands, Sonic will be able to find rails, springs, and other such platforming obstacles that you’d find in your typical Sonic level. These will lead Sonic into short platforming segments, and by completing them he can earn Memory Tokens, which are essential to completing the game. Think of them as bite-sized levels. They’re typically pretty fun, though some of them lock you into playing in 2D, which kind of defeats the point of an open zone, but outside of that I enjoy these small chunks of platforming.
Memory Tokens are used not only to progress the story, but also to have smaller, more bite-sized interactions with other characters. Engaging with characters doesn’t take away any Memory Tokens from you, so if you have enough to initiate a conversation, go have a chat with them! However, every island has a different type of Memory Token, meaning that tokens you collect on the first island won’t help your progress on the second. Sometimes collecting the tokens felt like a pain, but I enjoyed the experience of exploring the islands regardless.
Scattered around the island are various puzzles that, as a reward, give you seeds. These seeds can be taken to an NPC to increase your attack or defense, depending on the type of seed you have. While I’m sure it isn’t necessary to raise your stats, I’d highly recommend doing so, as some enemies towards the end of the game are quite difficult.
The Cyloop is Sonic’s main new ability in this game and it’s used for puzzle solving and combat. The Cyloop is essential to solving many puzzles in the game, and using it on enemies can put Sonic in an advantageous position during combat. Simply drawing a circle will give you rings and drawing an infinity symbol will give you infinite boost in the open zones!
Exploration in this game is a breath of fresh air for the franchise, helping to break up the monotony of just playing level after level after level. I keep finding myself thinking of how cool previous games in the franchise, namely Forces, could have been if they had tried a similar Open Zone system. I hope the development team behind future Sonic games try and implement Open Zone gameplay into their future games, as I had a blast with it in Frontiers.
There is one more ability that Sonic has to use to help him explore, and that’s the Dropdash. I think it’s really cool that it’s in this game, even though I don't think it contributes a ton as I rarely found myself using it. The one oddity about it though is how it handles speed: the Dropdash uses momentum similar to how the classic games do, as in when you go down a slope, you gain speed, and when you go up a slope, you lose speed. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a complaint! It’s fun to roll down various hills to see how much speed can be built up. But if they’ve implemented that kind of design for the Dropdash, why can’t the whole game play this way? Why limit it to exclusively the Dropdash? I know that this is definitely more of a nitpick but as soon as I noticed it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Shifting focus more on combat now, inhabiting the islands are many strange looking robots for Sonic to take on with his myriad of new combat abilities, and by defeating them he can earn skill points to unlock more abilities. The only ability essential to beating the game is the Cyloop, but the others can help speed up combat in very flashy manners so long as you know how to combo them together properly.
The combos in this game are incredibly stylish and perfectly fitting of the blue blur, it’s always a blast to experiment with linking different skills together against different enemies. You can tell that the developers really put a lot of thought into making these skills and their effort certainly were not in vain.
One skill you don’t need any skill points to unlock is the ability to Parry. Parrying lets you deflect any enemies attack right back at them and counter with a flurry of your own. While having the ability is nice, it has a very noticeable flaw: you can hold your parry for as long as you want. In my opinion, this does ultimately take away from the combat as it means that as long as you hold your parry, you’re not in any real danger. Holding it in midair also causes Sonic to awkwardly float which, while funny, definitely looks just a little strange.
While exploring the islands you’ll encounter named opponents that serve as minibosses, one such example being found in the gif above, named Ninja. Being minibosses, they’re naturally tougher than the generic enemies Sonic will run across in the open zones, but defeating them is essential, as they drop Portal Gears. The bosses come in many different shapes and sizes and will attack Sonic in many different ways, so you should be ready for anything. These can range anywhere from incredibly fun to just a slog to fight (looking at you, Tank).
Overall, the combat in this game is incredibly flashy and fun, and I hope we see more combat like this in the future. There are a few key areas where it can be improved, such as the aforementioned issues with the parry and some of the less enjoyable minibosses, but ultimately it’s a very well done system that I hope makes a return in future games.
Oh yeah Big’s fishing is also fun and the theme that plays is an absolute vibe, easily the most important part of the game.
Story
Alright, story time. If you don’t want to get spoiled about the story, now’s the time to leave. The story of Sonic Frontiers is 100% best experienced blind and I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. I’ll also be omitting gifs from this section as well.
So I’m just gonna pad this out a little bit in case someone scrolls a little too far on accident.
Ok, still here? Cool, I’ll just dive right in then.
The story of Sonic Frontiers is, without question, the best story we’ve gotten since SA2 or Unleashed. The characters are written absolutely incredibly in a setting filled with unique mystery that culminates into some of the biggest lore developments the series has ever gotten. I genuinely believe that this is the best that these characters have ever been depicted, and the addition of Sage to the cast of characters is one of the biggest Ws the franchise could have possibly gotten.
The dynamic between Sage and Eggman is one of the best parts of the story by far and it really spices up Eggman’s characters, something that he’s been needing for a long, long time. You can really feel the connection the two of them have together, from the way Eggman talks about her in his memos to his scenes at the end of the game. Watching Eggman look up at the falling stars, hoping to see his AI, his daughter, return to the planet and watching him realize that she’s not coming back almost made me genuinely cry. Then watching him work to restore her in the final scene after the credits and seemingly succeeding was such a good moment for the doctor. I hope Sage comes back for future games, it’d be such a shame if she didn’t.
The Ancients not only being from space, but bringing the Chaos Emeralds with them from their homeworld and being the ancestors of Chaos is an interesting development to the lore, and I’m excited to see if they go anywhere else with it. The Ancients being related to Chaos was pretty obvious by just looking at their appearance, but them bringing the emeralds from outer space was a development I definitely was not expecting. They’re still a very mysterious civilization that we may never learn more about, but what we do know about them is absolutely fascinating. They did so well with integrating the Ancients into Sonic’s World.
Unfortunately, this is where the story admittedly falls apart a little bit. The End is interesting, to say the least. I don’t think it’s ever made clear whether it’s a god or a mortal, but what we do know is that it’s powerful enough to destroy the Ancients’ home. Then it follows them to Sonic’s World and forces them to trap it inside an entire digital dimension showing that despite how advanced their technology is, they couldn’t even kill it, which makes this thing feel menacing. So with the reveal of The End being the villain, I was really hoping that the boss battle would be the best we’ve ever gotten. It was… not that. The boss battle itself was unfortunately a let-down, which was a massive shame because Frontiers’ has absolutely incredible bosses at the end of each island. There’s a lot in game that points to The End being rushed, such as Sonic’s speech to the Ancients he gives just before the fight itself, and the instruction screen telling you to fight with the Titans, plural. It seems like they really wanted to do more with The End but for whatever reason couldn’t, which is a big shame. It’s definitely not enough to sour the whole story for me, just a bit of a let down.
Sonic Frontiers’ story heavily relies on the mystery of the Starfall Islands, and it uses said mysteries to craft an absolutely incredible story only held back by the gameplay of its final boss. This is the type of story I hope we get to see more of from Sonic games in the future.
Final Rating
If I had to rate the game on a scale of 1-10, I’d give it a very solid 7. The team behind the game’s development very clearly listened to what people wanted from the franchise and gave it to us, and while it’s not perfect by any means, it’s 100% a step in the right direction. If the development team behind Sonic Frontiers keeps giving us games of this quality, I'm sure that the future of the franchise is a very bright one.
This is huge! Really excited to see what they do with that new story campaign!
New updates for Sonic Frontiers for 2023 announced, teases new playable characters
In an unexpected update, the official Sonic the Hedgehog social media has confirmed that three major updates are on their way to Sonic Frontiers in 2023.
The one that grabbed fans' attention the most was the third update that teased the possibility of Tails, Knuckles and Amy being playable in a future update.
First Update:
Juke Box
Photo Mode
New Challenge Modes
Second Update:
Sonic's Birthday
Open Zone Challenges
New Koco
Third Update:
Playable characters
New Story campaign
The new updates will be provided for free to all Frontiers players.
Aight I've thought about it and I'm gonna play through the game's story again and then do a review of the game
I played through Sonic Frontiers by the way, easily an 8 or 9/10, I think it's easily the best Sonic game that's been released in who knows how long, though it has its issues. Thinking of writing a full length review on it but we'll see.
I played through Sonic Frontiers by the way, easily an 8 or 9/10, I think it's easily the best Sonic game that's been released in who knows how long, though it has its issues. Thinking of writing a full length review on it but we'll see.
I tried the Sonic Channel style ✨
the casual backhand...
The Sonic Frontiers memes are KILLING ME!!
if i fall off another one of these goddamn towers im bringing sonic to the vet and having him put down
Like- FOR REAL REAL!! WHAT??
Why are people complaining about Amy and her tarot cards??? LET HER BE CARDCAPTOR SAKURA DAMNNN
Sonic Superstars came out a while back and I wasn't too fond of Trip's design so I made this✨
SONIC FRONTIERS: THE FINAL HORIZON IS OUT!!!
So here's an Amy drawing of her using her Tarot Card magic✨
One week until peak fiction.
hey um im rly sorry but i saved ur boyfriend in the wrong format and now his save file is corrupted. so he’s evil and weird now. sorry
I wanted to do something with a Halloween theme and so I decided to draw my favorite fox 😻💖
Amy (´∩｡• ᵕ •｡∩`) 🫶🏻💖
As the second season of Sonic Prime premiered 😻 I wanted to draw a picture of my two favorites from the series 🫶🏻💖✨ I hope you like it 👉🏻👈🏻
I couldn't stay without drawing the new metal Sonic 💖 🫶🏻
Silly little redraws for fun. ✨
Sonic Frontiers Comic
Did this quickly on a whim cuz I really like the story of Frontiers and the ways it pushed Sonic’s character. So here was an idea that as Sonic’s memories fade he might start going back to older memories, thus, classic designs!
hope you enjoy
facts
twitter sonic fans are fucking annoying lol like youve seen max 20 secs of gameplay and youre trying to form a definite opinion. theres something wrong with you genuinely.
100%ing Sonic Frontiers 😢
Worst decision in my life and also the reason i haven’t been posting more art here. The fact that my switch is still in one functional piece is a miracle.
I love this game but GOD S ranking a lot of the cyberspace levels and getting the new koco genuinely piss me off so much I might actually enjoy playing sonic 06 on my ps3 more.
Memes with amogus will never die.