![]() There are Portals, which lock the old linear Sonic level design behind instanced one-off two minute challenges much like Zelda ’s Shrines, and there’s some astoundingly mediocre and subdued music that will exit your mind the second you stop playing (although the Portal music is all bangers). ![]() While the initial pitch made things seem a lot more like Breath of the Wild than Frontiers has ended up as, there is still some connective tissue. ![]() You carouse about a set of five islands, doing all sorts of ridiculous open world puzzles on “Ancient Technology” which mostly amounts to the same sorts of rails and goofy walls that make up your standard Sonic levels of yore, except for some reason this is all taking place on top of a map that feels like it was pulled directly out of Death Stranding. Sonic Frontiers is a game about going fast, which some might say is the core tenant of Sonic. I spent the entire run-up to Sonic Frontiers’ release with this sort of depressive mirth, expecting something either truly bad, or just outright insane, and while I did get roughly what i expected in the sanity department, I was surprised to see…they actually made a pretty good open world Sonic game? While I’ve enjoyed the occasional open world game ( Sleeping Dogs, Assassin’s Creed ), surely you can understand how terrifying it is to hear that the new Sonic game was actually going to abide by gaming trends for once, and on top of that, go deep into a genre notorious for making games wear out their welcome (the last thing you want from a series that can often feel like it’s stretching itself thin with an average 10 hour playtime). ![]() I had to play a god damned open world Shin Megami Tensei, and a Bayonetta that was mostly suffering because it was originally designed to be open world (both of these on the Switch too!!! Why would they do this!), and I’m more than a little done with the sickness GTA V and Breath of the Wild have wrought. I will not hide my derision for what the expansion of the open world genre in the 2010’s has done to game design. …So imagine my horror when Sonic Frontiers is announced as an open world game!!! There’s been a lot of talk about how modern trends in larger budget titles have resulted in games being locked into a slurry where everything is either:Ī) Live Service ( Destiny, Warframe, etc)ī) Prestige TV (Anything Sony Puts Out Anymore) Each game ends up being similar to each other in the sense that Sonic is there and he goes fast (though even this isn’t always true!), but they end up feeling a lot more like a series of ideas that Sonic Team wrote on a napkin 15 minutes before development started, and that owns. The series bounces between 2D and 3D seemingly at random, Sonic becomes a werehog, they giveth the chao garden then taketh away, and (my personal favorite), Sonic gets arrested so you just play as a god damn Sonic OC with a gun. Where the Marios of the world quickly optimized their game design process by iterating on what is fundamentally the same base game over and over again with a new gimmick, Sonic has no such loyalty or constraints. While I’ve never been too crazy about the 2D entries in the series ( Sonic Adventure 2 Greatest of All Time by the way), if there’s a new Sonic game to be played, you can fucking bet you’ll find me there on the front lines everytime.īut why? I ask myself this each time I experience the next level of madness that Sonic Team has cobbled together seemingly at the last minute, and though I’ve never quite found a convincing answer, I have still reached an acceptance of sorts. Where the prettiest and most well polished games can bring out the worst of my critical side, somehow-SOMEHOW-this series that continually makes the most insane decisions in every conceivable way has gotten a near free pass in my heart. There’s something about Sonic the Hedgehog that evokes a sympathetic understanding within my soul. That all said, I think that Sonic the Hedgehog is really good. We are all different, but we are all the same and the beauty of the human condition is found within all that chaos. Some of the worst days of your life might be the best of another’s, your favorite food might taste absolutely horrible to your closest friend. The world, as we see it, is ever changing limited by our own perspective which is in turn constrained by our circumstances and the perspectives of those who formed the basis of our individual understanding. ![]() What does “good” truly mean? Whether it’s morality or judgment of worth, the answer is never quite so simple. ![]()
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