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

Felt like 30 to me when I played this weekend. Not that I care I have a PS5 and have been playing at 60fps.

 

Lol but I have never seen more pop-in in my life. It's so bad it confuses me sometimes.

 

I've played for about 7 hours, almost done with Ares Island.

I'm giving it my honest shot, but... not feeling this game very much at all. The excitement and flow is engaging at the start, but the sheer amount of the game that's just "interact with these clusters of rails and zip-lines" has become increasingly grating. And although it's better than expected I still don't really want to engage with the combat as much as the game wants me to. This game is absolutely obsessed with mini boss encounters.

I think the controls are fairly good (could be better but it's well balanced), exploring and collecting is a load of fun, and the spirit of something great is in here (particularly for a sequel), but I just don't think it's coming together for me. I'm glad others are enjoying it, but it's already worn me thin just two zones in and I'm not sure if I'll keep playing to the end. The game's just too monotonous so far. We'll see, I guess!

Spoiler

Also as I expected, was not a fan at all of the Kronos Titan boss. Very disorienting camera, QTEs and loud screamo music are a match made in hell for me specifically. lol

 

Finished Ares and...

Spoiler: Ares + Boss Spoilers

the Wyvern fight was SICK. A little bit finicky, but Super controls very smoothly along these preset tracks and the fight was a lot of fun. I normally hate QTEs, and I still do tbh, but I didn't mind them here as much as I normally do. My one annoyance is probably the cutscene that plays when you get hit, taking control away from the player for like 5 seconds. The music delivered YET AGAIN, I can't overstate how crazy it is to be a metalcore and SWS fan since childhood and to randomly hear Kellin Quinn singing Sonic boss themes like it's nobody's business. I've seen a bit of positive reception to the songs, so I hope they have him back. Ohtani's writing and the guitar solos go crazy every time... not to mention the Cyberspace tracks on Ares are just as fantastic as they were on Kronos. I know Sonic soundtracks are always good, but this OST feels like something phenomenal... at least to me. As for Ares itself, I was pleasantly surprised at how big it seems compared to Kronos. Took quite a bit to get from one side of the island to the other, and I had a bit of fun sequence breaking The Sky Rail level is pretty fun to sequence break as well if you can nail down a few rail skips. Loving this game still. I can definitely see how some folks have found the platforming bits to be repetitive and the rail grinding and collectathonning to be a bit tiresome. I've felt that a little bit, but it hasn't been enough to really turn me away at all, and I even took a fishing break to listen to Egg Logs and buy some memory tokens, which helped alleviate the feelings of repetition. This could all change with time obviously, who knows.

 

poking my head in quickly to say that I just watched the prologue video in anticipation of starting the game up, while it was mentioned that SKY SANCTUARY IS A HUGE CHAO GARDEN 10/10 A++, I didn't know that it was so explicitly tied to SA1! What with the much-better version of the Tikal flashback and Tikal showing up. hahahahah it's somehow made for me

don't like Knuckles' EN voice all that much but I was already planning on doing JP-only voices if I can anyway since I prefer that long-running cast.

 

Played for an hour and a half. It's pretty fun but god is it janky:

• I keep clipping through the Asura boss
• At one point when engaging the squidthing the camera freaked out and went underneath the map
• It's very hard to tell what Sonic can and can't stand on
• Homing attack is really unreliable: it sometimes reaches ridiculously far onto the wrong target and sometimes won't let me attack what I think I should be able to hit
• The physics mostly feel good but the sudden losses of speed when doing certain things can feel really bad

So far, I've killed Asura twice, fought the tower thing, fought Squid, done three cyberspace levels, done a bunch of scattered little puzzles, and encountered Big for the first time.

 

Wow. I'm stunned. After the void of fun that was Forces and the lackluster trailers for Fronteirs, I had very low expectations going into this. I played 5 hours today and didn't even finish the first island because I was having too much fun just running around. Cranked all the movement sliders up, held on to the max number of rings, and sped through the world like a damn Sonic CD cutscene. I'm having a blast, and I don't believe it. I'm playing a fun 3D Sonic game??? What???

Sure, it's got jank, and the environments are generic, and I deeply want a fully fledged Sonic Utopia style outing, but the mechanics in Fronteirs are solid.

You can chain movement and combat options together so quickly and fluidly that it really feels like you're playing as Sonic in the opening cutscene to Unleashed. This is the fastest he's ever been and the tightest controlling.

I can see why people may not be vibing with it (no momentum, lots of combat, standard Sonic Team jank, subdued story tone, tired boost stages reusing tons of assets) but at its core, they've really done something right here. For probably the first time, moving around in 3D feels right, the combat is fast paced and varied, the level design is far more engaging than previous outings, and the story delivery hasn't been cringe. I'm in aw ya'll.

 

Spot on. I just wish SEGA gave users the 60 FPS option before you start the game, rather that hide it in-game option screen

 

I laughed when I first heard who was featured and thought there was absolutely no way it could happen.
For me music can be a massive dealbreaker and the tonal shift of oppressive strings to triumphant metalcore made my jaw drop.
I can’t wait till I hear the song in a few years and get that nostalgia rush.

 

And Sonic Team have just burned out all my good will in a single 'stage'. I won't say what, but I'm sure everyone who's gotten through Chaos Island probably knows what I'm currently wrestling with...

 

Just a heads up for the Linux-folk here - adding "DRI_PRIME=1" to your launch arguments for the game so that the game uses your dedicated GPU will make the game say your system specifications do not meet the minimum requirements. Keeping that variable out will allow the game to run, and it will use your dedicated GPU anyway

 

Played this for 7 hours straight and only stopped because the sun just came up and my eyes are sore. Huh????

 

after playing more I think another gripe I have is that Sonic's aerial combat is kinda boring and a bit of a momentum killer. I wish they lifted Sonic's combat moveset from Smash in the sense that it has a feeling of movement to it.

Sometimes the enemy ecounters in Frontiers can feel like a bit of a chore. The cyloop is pretty fun to use though and I'd still gladly take this combat over the Werehog any day.

 

So I've been playing the game some more and I'm on the second island so far, just taking it slow (and busy with life, argh). I have some thoughts.

I really, really hate any open world game that forces me to do specific side activities. That's why I loved BOTW - it has a lot of activities but it never makes you do anything specific to advance through the game. Obviously you have to do things to get further in the game, but it never says "you have to do X at Y and if you don't you fail". It's what I hate about open world games like GTAV and the opposite is why I love open world games like Saints Row 2. I'm just too stubborn to play games exactly like devs want me to. I think out of all open world games whose devs have (claimed to have) taken notes from BOTW, Frontiers is the game that paid the most attention. The devs really get the appeal of open world games, and they've done a good - not perfect - job adapting that formula for Sonic by mixing in some boost games and Ubisoft open world games, minus the crap bits.

I might still change my mind, but unless the game gets really really crap around the end I think it works. I don't think I'd want every Sonic game from here on to be about open zones, though.

 

I know this is only a small part of your post but it mainly comes from his tenure on the Archie Sonic comics, which had some genuinely nice storylines. Like how he turned Fiona Fox, a throwaway love interest for Tails, into an interesting hero > villain corruption story. But Sega has gotten more restrictive on their writers so his writing has lost its spark, for the most part. IDW Sonic for the most part just kinda feels like a fun popcorn flick (but in comic form). It's nice to have a strong sense of continuity but it's rarely allowed to go beyond that. It's why I didn't lose my marbles over Flynn being hired like most other people did, I figured he wasn't gonna be able to do anything that cool

 

Quick interjection, here's the PSN icon for the SA2 Shoes DLC.

 

So apparently I played the whole game thinking that you need to time your parry to actually get it, but all you need to do is hold the button...

 

I'm about 6 hours in and for me, this is the best Sonic game I have played since Generations. I honestly just love running around the map and messing around with the open zone areas. The Cyber levels are actually pretty fun too. I thought there was nothing more they could do with boost play but giving it a rechargeable meter is so much funner then the way it was handled in Unleashed and Generations. I'm a big metal head so hearing some of those crushing tracks with double bass pedal was awesome.

I really really really hope the next Sonic game just builds on this concept. Give us more varied Cyberstages, maybe get a better art direction with those open zone areas.....and a Chao garden in a game like this would work sooooooo freaking well.

 

My PS4 sounds like a jet engine when I boot this game up.

It's gonna burn up the damn furniture sooner or later.

 

JP translation is fucked apparently

https://twitter.com/DistantValhalla/status/1590307340204802050?t=UCYy70uhgo_nAHxh-20gtQ&s=19