Sonic Frontiers Thread - PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC

Interestingly enough, a good Chao Garden with real-time elements (daily check-in rewards, time of day dependent functionality, seasonal events and items) could be a deciding factor in making the Switch version the best platform thanks to handheld mode depending on the player's preferences and enjoyment of the feature. This is assuming respectable performance for the broader package, which -despite the open world factor- I don't majorly doubt as being possible looking at what they've managed with Forces.

 

I loved the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2. Shame about the side game where you have to play as a hedgehog to get rings and animals to feed them.

 

Yeah, way too many people miss this aspect of Chao raising. It's not enough to just sit there in the gardens, you have to actually play the game and explore the levels in order to find the stuff needed to raise their stats or get anything other than normal types. They added a level of replayability that gets overlooked a lot.

Probably not, considering we always get a handful of people mentioning how much they can't stand Chao everytime the subject comes up. Lol.

 

I think the massive success of Animal crossing last year is a reminder that slow, low stakes games still have large appeal. A chao garden where you raise chao, rearrange the garden layout, and pay for upgrades with arbitrary currency could definitely still have massive appeal in 2022. And if it gives replayability to the main game like farming rings in City Escape, even better. Sonic games are meant to be played over and over until you master them.

On the topic of a chao garden mobile game, I think something like Pokemon Go would work really well with Chaos. Walking to raise chao, finding items/berries/animals/chaos drives and then being able to race or karate other players' chaos. Obviously it doesn't have to be a Pokemon Go clone, but I think the model lends itself well to chao garden. Since raising and collecting are main tenets of chao garden gameplay. (Much better than the whole Harry Potter Go game.)

 

This reminded me, though I've never played Animal Crossing, I think a game where you play as Cream and run a chao garden, while doing sidequests for other Sonic characters and such, would be very popular.

 

I know they’re a fairly shallow time sink but goddamn I love Chao and I reckon they would work best in a seamless open-zone game, especially if you can find the eggs or hatched Chao dotted around the landscape and take them back to the Chao garden yourself and they can have an impact on gameplay proper as described by others.

Also seen someone on Twitter suggest this game should have a photo mode, which is something I’m totally down for. We’ve barely seen anything of this game but it has some absolutely gorgeous vistas and I think a photo mode in the vein of Mario Odyssey would fit a flashy character like Sonic very well.

 

On this note, you could totally fuse Chao and a photo mode. We already know Omochao is as fast as Sonic (see: Sonic Generations), so why not have Chao be the ones canonically taking the pictures of Sonic from a 3rd person perspective? The more Chao you collect, the more camera filters you get.

 

I think that this point is a bit overblown; I have never gone through the trouble of unlocking GHZ, nor have I even played it, and haven't lost a second of sleep for it. From what I've seen, it isn't worth getting all the emblems, nor is it worth complaining about not getting easier, in my opinion. I could see if Last Story was locked behind Chao raising, but I don't think GHZ is worth the fuss.

 

I unlocked it on some version of the game, but I'm struggling to remember if it was for Dreamcast or Gamecube. Either way I have memory cards for both, only no copy of SA2:B anymore. I'd say it was worth unlocking for the sake of having unlocked it, but the stage itself was fairly underwhelming.

Going forward, I am totally okay with content like that being gated behind an optional feature like a Chao Garden or a Big Fishing Derby, but would be not be cool with any actual progression being gated in such a manner.

 

Yeah GHz is also locked behind getting A ranks in all the garbage kart racing and emerald hunting stages. Those are much harder and less fun. GHz is a fun completionist reward rather than part of the game.

 

I mean at least it's a neat easter egg as the reward for completion and not some in-your-face first level nostalgia pandering.

 

I don't particularly agree. I view the chao garden of SA2 as the actual main game and the rest of it as a slightly tedious grinding spot for the garden. Let's be frank here: SA2 isn't that amazing: I don't particularly hate the hunting and shooting stages, but they're pretty mundane, and of the speed stages I think SA1 is better and more varied than SA2's extremely linear spectacle-focused ones. Even if the campaign were amazing...I've also played it like literally 50 times at this point, and its emphasis on scripted setpieces means that it's hard to wring that much enjoyment eventually as opposed to something like Sonic GT, Spark 2, Utopia, Mania etc.

Now, I do have the Chao World Extended mod, which admittedly does overhaul the garden by a factor like ten, but I no joke have spent like literally five hours sometimes just being in there and watching my chao and taking only two-minute detours to get more chaos drives or animals and coming back. I have started Prison Lane and Iron Gate like 100 times each but almost never actually finish them, because I view them solely as grind spots like an MMO that I enter and then leave the moment I have ten of the drives I want.

I don't care about the emblems either. It's always a bit odd to me when I see people go "chao suck so bad I have to grind them for the emblems rrrrggghhh" and here I am being an obsessed chao fan and not caring about them in the slightest lol. I like the chao garden literally just for the intrisic value of seeing my Funny Little Guys bumble around and be cute, as well as their various colors and evolutions, which has been enough for me to squeeze over a hundred hours in SA2 just watching them exist like an absurdly elaborate screensaver. Chao could literally have no gameplay purpose and be nothing but an entire timesink waste of time and I would enjoy them just as much.

It also just doesn't make sense. SA2's levels are incredibly short and not challenging in the slightest. The game is nowhere near stressful enough for chao to make sense as nothing more than a stress reliever or anything similar. Likewise, they don't serve as a very good replay incentive, because as my example shows, the optimum way to "replay" levels for them is just grinding levels and quitting out over and over again, not actually completing them. Forces' CaC rewards for getting S-ranks are honestly far better at that in my opinion--in Forces, despite the game's incredibly sloppy level design and controls, I felt a really strong pull to replay levels and grind S-ranks. This is opposed to SA2 where I just replay City Escape for rings and hard mode Prison Lane/Iron Gate for half a minute and then quit out.

I would never ever replay Sand Ocean, or Meteor Herd, or Mad Space, or Crazy Gadget for my chao. There's no point when the three levels mentioned above bring me the same rewards quicker. If anything, Chao incentivize grinding the same like three beginner levels over and over again, not replaying the rest of the game.

If Chao were a superfluous element, places like Chao Island wouldn't exist. There is an entire community of people, me included, who really do just unironically enjoy the gardens for their own sake and not because they are a fun minigame attached to the Sonic game we actually enjoy. I would say our opinion on the game is actually the direct inverse of that--the garden IS the main game, and SA2 is just a slightly tedious repetitive minigame we have to grind our skulls out to enjoy it.

 

At the risk of veering even further off topic, I would argue that a Chao Garden without any stage to go back to isn't quite as rewarding as it is with the rest of SA2 backing it. Chao Island Resort, for as impressive as it is, kinda shows the flaw in keeping the garden all onto itself. It's just the way it was designed, to be a supplement of the main game that allows players a chance to take a break. This is not to say it's tedious or superfluous, it just has to have a bigger game to go along with unless you do some radical redesign of how it works.

Veering back into topic though, I think Frontiers is a great opportunity to reintroduce Chao. Small Chao gardens sprinkled across the map would give players greater incentive to explore. I've always thought that the Treasure Hunting stages of SA2 lent themselves better to Chao gameplay since you're already scouring the stages for items. Searching for small animals and chaos drives lends itself very well to an open world environment and likewise gives players greater incentives to explore. Perhaps you could even take a raised Chao with you to explore and they could give you some sort of passive buff. There's definitely potential in adding them into Frontiers and I don't think people should be so quick to write off the idea as superfluous.

Now, will they add them? I honestly have no clue, but I have doubts in spite of the producer's history with Chao.

 

You forgot the garbage mech shooting levels.

 

I'm really struggling to care about this game without having been shown gameplay of it, tbh. It's open world, cool, but is it boost? Momentum? Parkour? Some combo of the 3? Do the cyberspace levels play differently than the open world? Are there power-ups/wisps/other characters that augment/supplement the core gameplay? None of these questions have been definitely answered, so my interest level is really low.

I'm glad that we have the movie (and presumably Origins) to look forward to before Frontiers releases.

 

Really want this year to end fast as possible because I need more Sonic content for my miserable life.

 

K.

 

Meanwhile I'm like "on 1/7 I get my tits done, so close!"

Sonic is fun too though