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

This will surely include more time for quality assurance and general polish, right?

Right?

 

The investor Q&A seems to indicate that SEGA has finally realized that putting out actually good games with resources behind them sells way bigger than a game like Forces. Shocker /s.

I just hope this means good things for the future.

 

“A: It’s true that the Metacritic Score was slightly lower than we expected, but the user’s score was very high. With that, we believe we have found a title that is widely accepted by a lot of people around the world.”

“slightly lower”

Dont tell me they really expected just 75 MC lol

 

Why not? The last 10 years they averaged below 75. Remove Mania and Mania + and they averaged far lower. 75 seems like a reasonable and realistic number to shoot for especially if they're accounting for dumbass reviewers like Jim that will tank their average.

 

It’s a thing i was saying at release tbh, just didn’t expect them to really say it, also how corps usually really overestimate things, good to know they had their expectations in check, and also how the game sales actually managed to do way better than their expectations , so all in all those are some really good results

 

Oh that’s absolutely a factor. Given the current economic uncertainty and Sega’s long history of screwing over their devs I don’t think it’s at all pessimistic to write this off as Sega responding to inflation. Now Kishimoto has expressed the desire to expand Sonic Team so it’s possible the extra money could be to do that. But it’s not fully up to him if that’ll happen as funding is a corporate decision.

Personally I’m neutral about this news. We prob won’t know for 3-5 years if Sega invested more money and resources in the next Sonic game. Ask me how I feel about this then when Frontiers 2 is out

 

Apparently Kishimoto has played Spark the Electric Jester 3 (or is at least aware of it on some level)
https://twitter.com/moq_46/status/1626909365252022274?s=46&t=0ypIHOPTELxB9rByuScp_A
this is crazy to me lol

 

I really can’t wait to see what they’re cooking up for these updates. This long-term commitment to a single game could prove beneficial to them refining their vision for series rather than bouncing between higher-concept ideas.

I should probably try to play more Spark 2 today. It hasn’t really grabbed me yet but I still hope 3 comes to Xbox and/or other consoles in the future. I hate dragging out my gaming PC and would like to avoid doing so at least until the next P-06 update.

 

That is positively fucked up. What kind of world are we living in? (in a good way)

It is very nice to see him so receptive to feedback. Obviously it doesn't mean much if the end result is dookie, but I'd be lying if I said this isn't building my confidence in them.

 

Kishimoto seems like a good sport. Obviously a lot of that is probably what SEGA will and won't allow, but I commend him for his efforts at dealing with fans. Even after all the shit people gave him, he clearly loves his craft and wants to do well. I hope the games are good, but I hope things stay good for him too.

 

I think a lot of people forget that creative individuals are still normal people. I'm not surprised that Kishomoto has played Spark. Someone like Yu Suzuki, who never plays games, is unusual. He's famous in the industry as unusual for never playing games. Kishomoto has probably played all kinds of games you don't even know. He is a professional game developer. People think that Sakurai is unusual for his passion for games and he's probably on the extreme end but he's also probably largely representative of a lot of creative directors. Why wouldn't you be a fan of the creative industry which you work?

I do worry about how the fandom may react to the next Sonic game if it continues automation and recycling tropes. I think a lot of people are interpreting Kishomoto as having some kind of ephiphany when he's probably always enjoyed a wide range of games and has a passion for fast paced Sonic esque games. I think a lot of people are assuming that Kishomoto has never thought about momentum or classic gameplay in 3D when he almost certainly has done so. So when the next Sonic game comes out and is not going to be Adventure 3 or Utopia then I worry people are going to have a knee jerk reaction to Kishomoto, call him a liar, and drive him away from social media.

This ties in to the fact I've always interpreted Kishomoto's penchant for automation and recycled trope designs as an artistic philosophy. A lot of thought goes into his games and I think a lot of people condescendingly interpret him and Sonic Team as just never thinking about things like 'momentum'.

 

I finished the game last night and wow... people aren't kidding about that final boss being a let down if you're playing on any difficulty other than hard. I didn't want to stress myself out anymore though, so I decided to call the game done and will be returning it to the library today.

A few more thoughts:
- The quest mini-games are legit the worst aspect of this game. I get why they did them, though; it does break up the "get gears, get keys, get Emerald" pattern so the game doesn't get too monotonous, and I appreciate them doing that. I just wish the games were a bit more... fun? I dunno.
- While I enjoyed the Cyber Space stages (for the most part), I do wish we got to see more locations other than just the same five stages at different times of day/different layouts.
- Doing combos in this game is odd... like, I'm not sure exactly when you press a button to do one of the skill moves. Sometimes I press/hold a button and nothing happens, other times I press or hold a button and it works fine.
- The Titan and other boss fights are pretty fun, but some of them are pretty annoying. The Knight Titan fight was pretty bad when I got to the point where you ride on the buzzsaw; maybe I was doing something wrong but the buzzsaw just... wouldn't go forward. It kept swaying side to side despite my inputs. Also, the frame rate got really bad here, likely cause I was playing with the Switch in handheld mode. Definitely play this game docked when you can.
- Can Ian Flynn just... write every Sonic thing from now until he dies? This is the first Sonic game I recall playing where the characters all felt like actual characters that had depth to them (even Eggman!). Not an animated series, not a comic book, an actual Sonic the Hedgehog video game. Best example I can think of is during one of the cutscenes on the desert island (which I'm struggling to find on Youtube... I think it was an optional side story scene) where Knuckles + - is talking about the Koco going missing and he's not sure where they could have gone, and then he pauses for a brief moment before continuing. There's... surprisingly a lot of depth to that one little moment   . Also, references to previous games? I like.
- I figured out Light Dash; it wasn't the game, I was just a dumbass for not realizing you have to click inward on the L analog stick, not walk into them like I thought the game was saying to. ^_^; though it's still kinda awkward to do.
- Throughout the game I kept accidentally doing that Drop Dash move. The timing of that seemed very picky to me, or maybe I just needed to stop holding the jump button down for so long (habit from older games, I think).
- Also found times where I would hit a dash panel and Sonic would just stop moving. I guess I was inputting something when I shouldn't have (again, another old habit from the old games... perhaps they fixed it so I don't have to anymore lol).
- Was disappointed that the final boss is locked behind hard difficulty, but again, I didn't feel like putting myself through more stress, so I just called the game done. I plan to re-buy the game on Steam down the line (on sale, of course), and I can try it there.

In conclusion, I liked this! Was nice to see something done differently with Sonic that wasn't completely fucked up. I do think it would have benefited from another 3-6 months of development time, but then again another six months would have released this at the same time as the next Zelda, so I guess they didn't want that lol. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing another Sonic game in this style. I would give this a 7/10, maybe 6.5/10 if the mini games piss me off too much lol.

 

People already got on his case for the "20-30 hour" metric he gave before release. I am NOT prepared for the utter onslaught of Sonictuber headlines with "Kishimoto LIED" in the name.

That's why I was really not enthused about him being so active on Twitter, but hopefully he's able to recognize the dirtbags when he sees them and not to take it personally.

 

Maybe I'm just slow but I got like 25 hours out of Frontiers my first time around. To be fair, I did also do literally everything short of getting all the memory tokens, but still. Doesn't seem like that unreasonable of an estimate to me, how long did it take you guys?

 

I got 37 hours and I did the bare minimum to beat the game. Went back and played all of arcade did some fishing just for fun and finished opening the first 2 maps.

I agree about combos. Sometimes they seem to happen and sometimes not. It’s definitely a timing/catch thing because I can do them in training after a few tries. Fortunately they’re not exactly required.

Supreme in hard mode is not too bad. I enjoyed all the boss fights. Usually boss battles (especially later ones) make me nervous but because you can’t die I really got into them, haha.

To be honest I typically hate bullet hell shooters. I only have 2 others in my whole collection that I found to my liking so when I saw what The End was I was annoyed but that too is not as bad as I thought. It did take me multiple tries though. It’s a huge help that they award you 4 or 5 hits after dying a certain amount of times.

Although my second play through I only got hit once I think. Practice makes perfect.

 

I was disappointed that The End and Supreme weren't hard enough. Joke bosses.

Honestly though, the climax of this game was a let down. It didn't feel like it was properly built up narratively. The game just fucking ends. Forces stunk (especially with making us fight the God damn Colors final boss for the 3rd time) and the presentation was sub-par, but the rush from Mortar Canyon and on was satisfying enough to close that book. Permanently.

 

I've been thinking about if they plan on actually altering the game itself with the third major update, changing it so that you actually play as other characters at the Rhea Island section or something. A lot of people have also floated the idea that the final bosses might change but I don't know what all less than a year of development time will enable.

 

I could see them polishing up the unused Supreme QTEs and adding them, but I doubt there'll be any sweeping changes to the final bosses/climax in general.

 

Know i am late but just saying that changing difficulties is ez and can be done at any point of the game and that you can easily load the latest save file and it put you right before the final boss, so you can try it if you want, no replay of the game required