Sonic Frontiers Retrospective

Sonic Frontiers has been one of if not the most polarizing game I've played so far this decade, which makes it very strange that I just haven't talked about it on here much. I did make that post ranking the Cyberspace themes where I called it "one of the most enjoyable 3D Sonics we've gotten in a while" and... well... let's just say my opinion on the game has changed a lot since then. Let's talk about it.

Before I start digging into Sonic Frontiers, I want to outline my history with the game. During Frontiers's infamous anti-hype cycle, I went through the same emotional rollercoaster the vast majority of the Sonic fandom was going through. I remember seeing that first all-CGI teaser and being skeptical, finding myself let down by that mediocre IGN gameplay showcase, and slowly being won over as increasingly more footage came out. I eventually decided to get the game on my Switch over the holidays, and at the perfect timing too because it just so happens that I ended up being sick that whole winter. Stuck in bed and with not much else to do, I sank a ton of time into that base version of Frontiers, coming close to fully 100%ing it, and I really enjoyed my time with it. However, when the first update came out a few months later, I went back to Frontiers and I just didn't enjoy it as much. I was still mostly positive on the game, but Frontiers was losing a bit of its luster. I skipped the second update and hopped back on board for The Final Horizon out of curiosity, and it kinda broke me.

But let's start with the base game. Sonic Frontiers is Sonic Team's first attempt at making a fully open and nonlinear Sonic game, which they called "Open Zone". This is because instead of exploring a singular vast overworld, Sonic explores several large islands not too dissimilar from a game like Super Mario Odyssey. I actually really like the concept of Open Zone, it allows for the nonlinear exploration of an open world game while still giving Frontiers some level of progression. With one exception, each island is more complex and challenging than the last and you need to complete them in order so the difficulty never feels like it ends up fluctuating wildly. Frontiers actually manages to get a few aspects of open world game design surprisingly right. Due to being a Sonic game, you get to play as a character who runs fast which inherently makes traversing each island feel really fun and seamless. If your character moves too slow, it can be easy to want to just resort to fast travel, but I rarely felt the need to do that in Frontiers because manually running to your destination was way more fun. I don't even think Frontiers needed fast travel since you'd also unlock rails that can quickly take you around the map in real-time.

Unfortunately, for all Sonic Team got right in terms of the open world formula, there's one pretty big issue: What do you even do in these open worlds? Well, in Sonic Frontiers, you have to aimlessly roam around collecting memories and maybe a few gears from the Cyberspace levels to keep progressing the story until you reach a boss. Every once in a while, you might get a brisk minigame or setpiece that you also have to do (many of which by the way are straight-up unfun like the pinball game), but most of the actual story progression is just wandering around and collecting shit until you don't need to anymore. The mission and quest design in Frontiers is like 80% fetch quest and it gets really repetitive by the final island. I'll talk more about the DLC campaign, The Final Horizon, in a bit, but I just want to say that it has a very similar issue where most of what you do as Knuckles, Amy, and Tails is collecting memories and running to a dedicated point. If you're not actively going for 100% and trying to collect anything anyway, the simple process of progressing the story just feels really weak and dull.

The story itself isn't much to write home about either, to be honest. Even my first time playing it, I found myself skipping a lot of the cutscenes. I respect what Ian Flynn was trying to do here, offer a more dialogue-focused and character-driven story that righted the wrongs of previous games and in some areas, he succeeded. Sage was a great antagonist with a strong character arc, and every one of Sonic's friends got a few great character moments that helped them shine, with Knuckles in particular being a massive highlight for me. His banter with Sonic, the return to exploring his past, I honestly think I like Knuckles a lot more because of his depiction in Frontiers. However, the issue is primarily in the execution. So many of the cutscenes are just characters standing around and talking, the camerawork is static and the character animations are stiff and lacking in expression. And while there is a fair share of character moments, a lot of the story is composed of really dull exposition outlining the lore of the Starfall Islands. If you find this lore interesting, I'm happy for you, but the static delivery left it feeling really dry to me.

As for the gameplay, Sonic Frontiers is a bit of an interesting case. I actually have really mixed feelings on the movement in Frontiers, at least in the Open Zone areas. With this game, Sonic Team tried to combine the fast-paced boost gameplay with a wider range of movement befitting a large open world and I feel they mostly pulled this off fairly well. Simply dashing through these large landscapes can feel really exhilirating and satisfying, and I even kinda like messing around with the trick system. I've seen some complain about how easy it is to trip off a rock, but I do think there's a bit of fun expression when it comes to adapting to shifts in the terrain. When the environment is tailored around you moving fast and you're given a lot of space to breath, I think Frontiers' controls can be pretty fun to mess around with. 

However, where Frontiers' gameplay starts to falter is in the platforming. Sonic's jump arc is pretty wide and loose, so it's surprisingly hard to properly land a jump, even with the vast amount of moves at your disposal like a double jump. The movement in this game just can't handle precision and while the base game is easy enough that this rarely becomes an issue, it's a real problem come the DLC. I'm also not a fan of how the game just lets you tweak most of Sonic's stats to tailor the movement how you want. In theory, having so much freedom in customizing player movement is a good thing, but I don't want to spend minutes tinkering around in the options menu just to have Sonic control just as I like it. It displays a huge lack of confidence on Sonic Team's part, as if they gave up on trying to refine Sonic movement themselves and just said "Here, figure it out yourself". No other 3D platformer I've played has this issue, I'm not giving Sonic slack here.

Frontiers also has these Cyberspace stages which take place in more linear Boost style stages, and they have an almost entirely different game feel to them. Most of the issues I had with the open zone movement are pretty much amplified here, especially since there's quite a lot more precise platforming to deal with. Sonic's turning ability while boosting feels incredibly stiff, Sonic has a pause after homing attacking which makes it more optimal to not use them, and the jump arc feels even wider and more unwieldy to deal with. You could make tight circles in the Open Zone areas, hell you need to if you want to use the admittedly fun Cyloop (more on that later), but Cyberspace Sonic controls like a freaking tank and it really drags down the replay value for these stages.

Sonic Frontiers also introduces combat and it's... not great, to be honest. I actually think there are two solid nuggets here, but neither are really executed as well as they could be. First off, Sonic gets a new move called a Cyloop that lets him generate a trail, and if you connect that trail into a circle, you can use it to generate rings, solve puzzles, and deal damage. This is a really cool concept, it reminds me of that one powerup in Pac Man World 3, and it feels really fluid and satisfying to use. There are two issues, though. First off, not many enemies flat-out required you to Cyloop, and for the ones that do, you can quickly learn an ability that lets you Auto Cyloop with a simple button combination entirely removing the need to actually put effort into Cylooping enemies. Secondly, as mentioned, YOU CAN GENERATE RINGS. I have zero idea why Sonic Team thought it was a good idea to give you an ability that lets you endlessly give yourself health because it just trivializes combat in this game. Frankly, it trivializes everything, it's damn near impossible to die in the Open Zone area as long as you remember to Cyloop the ground every once in a while. I still really like the Cyloop as a concept and for solving puzzles, it can be really fun, but it could've been so much better.

Outside of the Cyloop though, Sonic Frontiers also tries to implement DMC-inspired character action combat with staple features like a combos, skill tree, and a parry. Unfortunately, all of this is pretty horribly implemented. While most of the combos you can do are certainly flashy, the vast majority of them lock Sonic into an animation that you can't break out of, which often makes fights feel more like cutscenes than anything else (especially since enemy health is so small that they'll rarely get a hit in edgewise). In addition, as you unlock more stuff with the Skill Tree, you'll start to notice that certain moves have overlapping button inputs which makes it really finicky and annoying to use the combo you want. Some moves even overlap with the homing attack, so you can accidentally trigger a combo in the middle of a platforming sequence screwing everything up. As for the parry? Well, it's... infinite. You can use the parry for as long as you want without consequence which removes any sense of timing. Once again, the base game is so easy that none of this will particularly impact the average playthrough, but it leads to a combat system that's entirely lacking in depth. If you try to push up that skill ceiling, or if the game would ever try to challenge the player, it all falls apart.

Sonic Frontiers has five Open Zone areas and they're a pretty mixed bag in terms of quality. I actually think the first two areas, Kronos and Ares Islands, aren't half bad. Kronos Island is a solid tutorial area to get your bearings, and it boasts a lot of wrecked scenery to really sell an abandoned feel. Ares Island is far and away the best one in the game, with an abundance of cliffs, valleys, and tunnels to explore giving it the most naturalistic feel (and it just so happens to be the Knuckles island so it's the strongest in terms of story as well). Sadly, on top of just looking bland, Chaos Island drops the ball by smattering around boost pads that force Sonic into 2D sections... in an open world game. Rhea Island is an interesting case as it's basically an asset reuse of an inaccessible part of Kronos Island which has you climbing up a few towers, but it has a really intense atmosphere for its place in the story and I think it could've worked as a solid final gauntlet. Sadly, Ouranos Island exists, and it's the point where Frontiers 100% overstays its welcome. It mostly repurposes stuff from Kronos Island once again which leaves it feeling really repetitive and anticlimactic for a final island. It's not as unfun to play as Chaos Island, but it feels particularly cheap and lazy.

Though beyond the level design, I think the worst thing about the Islands in Frontiers is the art direction, as in there is none. Each island feels like a realistic Unity asset flip, with most of the set decoration like the towers and wrecked Eggman bases being repeated across every island, and most of the vertical platforming challenges being crafted out of the same soulless metal railings and platforms. I'm not inherently against Sonic games looking realistic, I actually love the way Sonic 06 and Black Knight look, but they do need to look cohesive and natural. Sonic Frontiers doesn't look cohesive at all, it looks like a hodgepodge of ripped and reused assets which in turn makes the Open Zones less fun to explore.

Speaking of asset flips, the Cyberspace stages, amiright? I don't think there's much I can say here that hasn't already been said. It's bad enough that Sonic Team mostly resorted to recreating levels from prior Sonic games that often aren't build around Frontiers' stiff cyberspace controls, but it's even worse that they all use the same four level themes: Green Hill, Sky Sanctuary, Chemical Plant, and a city. This all makes the Cyberspace stages blend together and prevents them from developing the sense of place that literally every other Sonic game has in their stages, even the more maligned ones like 06 and Forces. There are actually a few entirely original Cyberspace stages and they're not half bad in terms of layout, often boasting a variety of shortcuts and branching paths, but they still feel held back by the fact that they're constructed using the same few level assets copy-pasted. It's pretty obvious that Sonic Frontiers had a tumultuous and rushed development with a low budget and I do feel for the developers here, but there's only so much leeway I can give to the game itself. One of my favorite things about Sonic is its strong sense of art direction and that just does not exist in Frontiers.

Okay, I know this has been a lot, but there is one last thing I need to talk about with Frontiers and it's the boss fights. Ooh boy... So, Frontiers has its fair share of minibosses called the Guardians and in a vacuum, they can be pretty fun. There's a nice variety to them and while some fights like Asura can be a tad janky, a good amount of them aren't half bad. The chasing fights like Squid and Fortress can be quite exhilirating, I adore the Sumo fight, and guardians like the Ninjas and Towers offer a beefier health bar that does let you really go to town with your combos. However, a fair amount of these minibosses can also take a long time to defeat and drag the game to a halt whenever you run into them. Having to stop and deal with the lengthy animations of Shark or being locked in with Tank just isn't fun to do multiple times over.

One of the most praised elements of Sonic Frontiers are the huge kaiju boss fights where you climb your way up these giant Guardians, Shadow Of The Colossus style, transform into Super Sonic, and go to town on them. I absolutely loved these at first, they make such a great first impression. Every major boss fight being a Super Sonic fight is a great subversion of expectations, and the shameless bombast and wild QTE events make for a wonderful spectacle that's only complemented by the incredible metalcore boss themes. However, like with the combat, upon replays I quickly found that all of these fights are all style and zero substance. You're expected to just be wildly mashing random combos because if you actually try to engage with the fight and properly dodge and parry their attacks, you'll realize just how poorly telegraphed a lot of them are. And like with the base combat, these fights are incredibly cutscene-heavy, between Sonic's locked attack animations and the QTEs, so the actual gameplay side of these fights can often feel really thin. But once again, the base game is so easy that I didn't really mind at first. These fights were cool, that's all that mattered, right?

The most controversial fight in Sonic Frontiers is the final boss fight against a giant moon called The End. Unlike the other Super Sonic fights, it's a lot more understated. The gameplay eschews the usual character action for an Ikaruga-style bullet hell you've previously experienced in a few earlier hacking minigames, and the metalcore music has been replaced by a more somber instrumental piece. I understand why many found this final boss to be underwhelming, and I don't think it's perfect. Since Sonic Team wanted to make sure the fight was pared with The End's dialogue, there's no real way to speed up your damage output making the fight pretty much an autoscroller. However, as a bullet hell fan, I think this is actually the best boss fight in the game. For all Frontiers got wrong, the controls for the Ikaruga minigame is actually on-point, it's super tight and responsive. The bullet patterns are fun to dodge, it's not underwhelmingly short but not punishingly long either, and the sheer scope of fighting a giant moon is reminiscent of a Treasure game or even Kirby: Planet Robobot. I also think the more solemn tone that the fight holds is a perfect payoff to the game's more melancholic tone, and Sage's sacrifice was a perfect culmination to both her character arc and Eggman's character arc about becoming a father. Pre-Frontiers Eggman probably would have turned a blind eye to one of his inventions being destroyed, but after the events of Frontiers, Eggman got genuinely sad for Sage and sought to repair her. It's genuinely affecting character work. For all my issues with Frontiers, I wouldn't change a thing about the ending.

Of course, then Sonic Team went and changed the ending. Around a year after the original release, we got a huge and free update called The Final Horizon which offered an alternate version of Ouranos Island where you got to play as Sonic's friends and experience a more "climactic" ending. Unfortunately, when I got around to playing The Final Horizon, I flat-out despised it. It quickly became one of my least favorite pieces of Sonic media in years, and it made me think a lot less of Frontiers after playing it. Sonic Forces is a game that gets a lot of flack for a variety of reasons, but I think one of its core issues is that it feels like it's trying to please everyone, but because it lacks a central vision, it ends up pleasing no one. The Final Horizon similarly feels like a direct response to the fanbase's criticisms towards the series, but instead of putting in the work to properly address these criticisms, it feels like Sonic Team was checking boxes off a list.

Amy, Knuckles, and Tails are all playable now, but none of them feel as good as Sonic does. Amy's moveset is kind of bizarre as she almost exclusively uses Tarot Cards as attacks rather than her iconic hammer. I'm not against Amy having another thing in the form of her interest in Tarot Cards, but they just don't feel as satisfying to use as swinging around a giant mallet. Otherwise, I'd say Amy controls mostly fine but a big issue when I played TFH at launch was that whenever she'd do a glide, the camera would pan up so you wouldn't be able to see where you're landing without contorting your fingers. Tails is the least bad of the three, he has a silly wrench spamming attack and can even spawn the Tornado and fly around with it, but also being able to just fly around with no limitations is way too broken. Knuckles is easily the worst of the bunch, as at launch, his glide had a lengthy delay that made it not worth using, and he's only able to climb up specific walls. Sonic Dream Team does the latter too, but it's a more linear game so I can see why they chose to do this. In an open world environment like Sonic Frontiers with lots of mountains and cliffs to explore, I have zero idea why Sonic Team thought this was a good idea. While these side characters vary in quality, they all feel quite undercooked in terms of their moveset, either feeling too broken or too gimped.

The Sonic stuff is even worse, though. Like with Rhea Island, there's a bunch of towers you need to climb with each leading to a combat challenge. These towers often demand incredibly strict and precise climbing that, as you'd expect, the loose jumping controls just aren't equipped to handle. The combat challenges aren't much better, posing restrictions on your moveset that really just shows off how limited you truly are. The worst instance of this is of course the Boss Rush that immediately precedes the new final boss, which forces you to actually time your parries. In concept, this is a good idea (and the whole game should've been like this frankly) but it only shows off just how poorly telegraphed most of the bosses' attacks are. This is a constant issue with The Final Horizon, it tries to challenge the player and pushes Frontiers' mechanics to their limits, but it only ends up demonstrating that they just can't hold up under all that strain. Sonic Frontiers always felt like playing a tech demo, but at the time, it seemed like a hopeful vision of the future of the franchise. But after The Final Horizon, I never felt less hopeful, because what I thought was a framework with potential quickly collapsed under the slightest bit of difficulty and friction.

But hey, was the final boss at least worth it? Pfft, NO. I've seen a lot of people praise this new The End fight as one of the best in the series and I honestly feel like I'm going insane, this fight blows! The first phase is a puzzle boss where The End endlessly heals itself and you just need to figure out yourself that you can switch targets to break its healing cord, and even in the generally better second half, the fight is bogged down by a horrid camera that repeatedly gets stuck behind the trees. And of course, Sage ends up not dying this time which ends up cheapening both her and Eggman's character arc. Sure, it's another metalcore Super Sonic fight like everyone wanted, but it doesn't feel as climactic or as fitting as the original final boss fight. That first fight was a Treasure-tier bullet hell against the moon itself, and this reimagining is just the already weak Supreme fight but more annoying. How is this an improvement, I genuinely don't understand?

The last thing I need to talk about with Frontiers is the music and it's generally pretty good. The Open Zone themes go for a more understated and melancholic vibe, but they can be really haunting and beautiful when you're in the right mindset for it. As you'd expect, the cyberspace tracks are easily my favorite ones in the game for their variety of EDM genres, the new wave of Sonic composers they introduced, and just how well they recapture the techno of the Y2K era of gaming. And of course, the metalcore boss themes are pretty freaking incredible. For as much as I've soured on the fights themselves, Undefeatable, Find Your Flame, and especially Break Through It All will always be bangers. However, when taken as a whole, I don't think Frontiers has one of my favorite Sonic soundtracks. These entirely disparate genres make for a score that feels pretty disjointed when taken as a whole. I frequently listen to just the cyberspace themes but never the entire Frontiers soundtrack like I would with most of the other 3D Sonic games, even Forces. Still, that's way more of a nitpick, the music here is still generally very high quality.

To continue giving credit where it's due, Sonic Team did make strides in fixing many of Frontiers' issues and I do commend that. As mentioned, they added an option that stopped jumps from killing your momentum in Cyberspace stages which is easily my favorite change. The spin dash was added as an unlockable, Koco trading was sped up and streamlined, the UI was tweaked to record your collection progress for each island, and several new modes and features were added which is all great stuff. Even The Final Horizon got a patch which rebalanced some of the difficulties, tweaked the perfect parry window, fixed a few oversights, and buffed the new characters, and once again, this is great. It's genuinely awesome that Sonic Team has been so dedicated to making Frontiers the best it could be... but here's the thing. I'm not someone who'll forgive and forget an earlier flawed version of a game because an update came out later and fixed all its issues, especially when the issues at play are so numerous and so blatant that their inclusion in the initial launch could only have been caused by a lack of playtesting. I'm fine with games getting updates that fix minor oversights, but the versions of Frontiers I experienced had problems so huge and plentiful that it felt like I was playing a beta, that I just so happened to spend $60 on. And even putting aside everything that did get fixed, my biggest issues with Sonic Frontiers like the combat, progression system, world design, and storytelling are so fundamentally entrenched in the game itself that updates alone just aren't enough to fully fix it for me.

For all of my issues with Sonic Frontiers, I can't bring myself to hate the game. The fact is that for all its issues, I still had a blast with my first playthrough with the game, and it helped me through a pretty tough time. That's never going to be erased. And still, I think Sonic Frontiers does get some things right and reaches some high highs at its best. The open world navigation is genuinely some of the best I've seen in the genre, the act of simply running around feels really fun, the character writing is pretty good, the soundtrack is fantastic, the boss fights have some impressive spectacle, there's a pretty addictive quality to searching for collectibles, and there are some genuinely stellar high points like a vast majority of Ares Island. Frontiers still has its fair share of elements that do stand the test of time.

However, a lot of Sonic Frontiers has only gotten more flawed the more I look back on it, and The Final Horizon only worsened this issue. And the fact that only a few months after TFH, we got Sonic Dream Team was pretty much the final nail in the coffin. Dream Team wasn't ambitious by any means, but it was one hell of a polished and well-crafted 3D platformer, everything that Frontiers wasn't. The fact is that in a lot of ways, Frontiers isn't what I want from a Sonic game. I want a more action-packed narrative, more naturalistic and original level design, tighter platforming, a more cohesive and stylish sense of art direction, and most importantly, I want a game that's just plain good. Not good for Sonic standards, not a "step in the right direction", just good.

2.5/5 Stars