The Sonic Frontiers *SPOILER* Thread (With Unmarked Spoilers)

https://gamebanana.com/mods/415798

This is a cute mod - Badnik styled mini bosses

 

Gamma!

 

Okay so like, it's taken me a good amount of time to get around to beating this (amongst Pokemon Scarlet/Violet coming out in between my playthrough of this).

It's really caught me off guard that they ended the base game on a uh, ikaruga immitation mini-game. I'm all up for shmups but lol this was so weird.

I'm looking forward to the DLC, and one day I'll eventually get around to spending some time and 100%-ing the islands and what not (I've only 100%'d the first one).

This definitely felt like the longest Sonic Game I've played though. I dunno specifics about playtimes, but the only competitors in length I can remember are probably the likes of '06's 3 Stories + final, and Unleashed's sun/moon medal collecting bollocks to prevent progression.

 

Beat the game today, let's see...

- The story after Chaos Island evidently got some last-minute knives to it. Unlike the prior islands, Sonic is not shown losing the Emeralds, you just start the level not having them. That combined with "wait, how did you even get to Ouranos Island without being Super", which, well, is explained by the leftovers showing it's just part of Kronos originally. I kind of wish they'd kept it being part of that - "Sonic has killed three titans but his friends aren't free, and these weird towers have appeared on Kronos" is a good hook for the last part of the game. "The first area but Fucked Up" is a pretty standard trope, and also one of my favorites.

- My issue with the "friends cure cyberspace affliction" was that the game didn't make it clear what exactly happened to his friends. At first I was like "wait, is Sonic a gestalt of all four of them now?" but then he just says thank you and runs off...but then, like, he has these really kind of sorrowful idle lines later, like "Ruins and treasure. You'd be at home right here, Knux" like they're dead?! I mean, they're not, but.

- Why is Supreme the only one with The End sealed inside it? In the cutscene, it just mentions that his pilot has been killed, and then the other three piloted titans go to fight it, and we don't get any clarification on why these things are basically on auto-pilot guarding these islands instead of...also possessed. Also, why doesn't Supreme explode and die like the other ones?

- The problem I had with the Supreme fight was that despite having all my stats maxed out, I was barely doing any damage aside from when I'd land that "X in the middle of the combo" move. And then after a point I just wasn't dealing any damage to the boss. The game finally decided to give me the QTE to proceed as I had like 20 rings left, and I barely managed to beat it.

- The End's mission text mentions fighting alongside the titans. Plural. I have no idea why Supreme's the only one here. It's always pretty funny to come across text that was probably written at a different point in development.

- Given that my JP is shaky and I was busy trying to not die, it's a bit annoying that the boss fight doesn't have subtitles for the non-stop monologue The End has. Can anyone give me a rundown on what its point is?

- I really wish there was a comically over the top final boss fight. Ikaruga's intense but mainly I just love the "vocal theme tune kicks in while Super Sonic does cool shit against the clock" aspect of Sonic final bosses.

- Seeing the Gang leave on the Tornado made me really happy. Honestly come to think of it, we don't get a whole lot of the core cast hanging out with each other, like, ever? Not even in SA1 or SA2. I wouldn't mind a game of the four of them just messing around.

- I'm pretty sure the foremost influence for the titans is Evangelion. Giganto is just a mass-produced EVA design, and it gets even funnier when you find out on Rhea that the titans were indeed piloted at one point. The End lurking inside Supreme is exactly how Unit 04 turned out, with the transport passing through a fog that was the angel, and proceeds to take over the Evangelion, with fatal (depending on the adaptation) consequences for the pilot. Giganto having tubes popping out of its shoulders when it goes nuts is 1-for-1 what "the beast" codeword does to Unit 02 in You Can (Not) Advance even.

I would honestly even say that they might be more inspired by BOTW's giant magic stone mecha - that you climb around and inside of! - than SOTC. And of SOTC, most people remember the game's central conceit - climb big things and kill them - than they do the game's plot. This is, like, the first time I've thought of that game's plot in at least a decade. Meanwhile, Evangelion's plot is that the angels are trying to reach an eldritch creature sealed inside the earth, which is closer to what we get in the last fourth of Frontiers. Sonic is the dumbass that freed Lilith and now we're all tang. (Alternatively, with the titans taking on the roles of the Evangelions themselves, Sonic, being an outsider with great inexplicable power, is an angel that manages to reach Lilith and our plucky high schoolers couldn't save us...where was I going with this again?)

- If I had a nickel for every game I've played in the past year that involved a spaceborne existential threat that wiped out the series' highly advanced precursor civilization, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's kind of funny that it's happened.

- It is a criminal waste that nothing is made of the ancients basically being Chaos people.

- I think the biggest issue I have with this story-wise is that there's very little actually connecting it to stuff we already know. The lore makes all these callbacks to prior games but at the same time is inconsequential to those callbacks, which is an infuriating "so close but so far" moment. It's almost like they were so unsure of what players would make of it that they made it so that it could just be readily ignored by future games with minimum consequence if people disliked it.

Sonic Adventure 1 goes into detail about the origin of...basically what we see in Hidden Palace in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the altar with the Master Emerald and who made it. If SA was plotted like Frontiers, we'd only get "Echidnas like Knuckles made the altar" and "something wiped out the Echidna civilization and it's time to fight that something right now". As opposed to "yeah so this vaguely mayaintec civilization had an altar to the Emeralds and Chaos guarded it with his little Chao buddies. Tikal went to the altar one day out of curiosity or piety and became friends with them. The leader of the civilization, who is also Tikal's dad, wanted to do the unthinkable and despoil this literal divine power so he could conquer his nation's enemies, and for that hubris Chaos completely obliterated that civilization, only being sealed up by Tikal using the Master Emerald, which controls the Chaos Emeralds, before he could kill the entire world". So the questions you might've had in Sonic 3, "whoa what is this Master Emerald, how does it relate to the Chaos Emeralds, and why is this altar here?" are neatly answered.

Frontiers goes "hey, the ancients that built this place are Chaos people" which made me go "holy shit! tell me more" and all I got was "yeah they came from space, the Chaos Emeralds got drawn to the Master Emerald, they tried to fight off an eldritch abomination and lost, and took the emeralds to the Master Emerald" and that was it. What is the Master Emerald and its relationship to the Chaos Emeralds in this new context? What is Chaos?? What happened to the survivors who took the Emeralds off of Starfall? Did they build the altar or was that the product of later civilizations like the Echidnas? Are there more than one planet-sized moon laser aliens out there? TELL ME, I NEED TO KNOW


All in all, my criticisms and praise I had for the game when I started Chaos Island still stand - the game doesn't dramatically change itself, it's just more of what it was giving you. Cyber levels are fine, running around the environment is fun, cheesing the token puzzles is also fun, I really like the character interactions, and Eggman calling Sage his "dear daughter" made me pretty happy. It's a pretty solid 7/10 yeah. I had more fun than I didn't, and more importantly, it's a 3D Sonic game that didn't make me hate the concept of 3D Sonic games like Heroes did. The soundtrack is killer as hell and I really liked the bosses and mini-bosses, but the last fourth really shows the pressures the game was under to exist in a finished form. I really hope they continue with this general gameplay concept and tighten it up a bit, maybe give us some answers to the questions I still have after beating this game LMAO

 

Yeah, I had trouble with that too. I don’t get much practice anymore outside of games and The End’s voice can be hard to decipher without subs especially while gameplay sounds and music are playing at the same time (they also didn’t have subs for SAGE in the opening cutscene). I played it again with English so I could understand fully.

Basically,
“You will die. I am nothingness, you will be consumed.”

 

And not so basically, the full transcript:

 

I liked the villainous monologue a lot, actually. It might have been a bit generic, but it was threatening enough. My Japanese listening skill outside of everyday life is also pretty lacking so I can’t catch most of that version either, but I’m really curious about it.

 

wow that's actually pretty metal. now if only we had a very lengthy Super Sonic boss fight to go with it...

 

1. The End is probably Sonic's most powerful opponent outside of perhaps Solaris, which arguably had the power to destroy a reality while the former still seems to mostly wreak havoc within a reality. As weird as the concept was executed, Sonic directly fighting an eldritch style horror, is at least an interesting premise. They could have given it an abstract, surreal super fight with Hideo Kojima like strangeness and perhaps a bit of 4th wall breaking if they really wanted to go all out. Imagine that monologue coupled with the game messing with the player which you fight. Wasted potential. Oh well.

2. The EggMemos do at least establish that Eggman realizes Chaos 0 and the ancients are connected. A direct answer isn't given, but if I had to guess, the ancients merged their DNA/energies with the Master Emerald's power and probably managed to spawn both Chaos 0 and the Chao based off of this effort. This was probably done as one of their last acts as their race died out. They wanted to give the Emeralds a protector even after their demise.

3. By extension, they've left the Master Emerald's origins deliberately oblique. The ancients have no idea where it came from and are surprised to find it. By extension, we only know that the Chaos Emeralds were once on their world. We don't know that they were 'created' there, or that they didn't exist there even before the ancients were born. I'd honestly say keeping a sense of mystery is for the best. They are magical gems, let them have some enigma to them.

4. All the same, an ancient super powerful race existing brings with it all sorts of questions. Did they impact more than just Starfall Island and Angel Island? Did they impact the evolution of the Echidna race? Of any other species on South/Westside Island? Even human civilization in some way? It's probably best not answered, but this is now at least something one can consider if one wishes.

5. One area where you could take some liberties to include them in the lore is Sonic 3's original Japanese manual, particularly this passage:

At that time, Sonic was taking a nap on the beach when he found a small ring washed up along the shore.
The small ring was engraved with what seemed to be ancient characters.
When he picked it up, he remembered an old legend about an "island."

A long time ago, when the island was still part of the continent.
There lived a people with a superior civilization.
That civilization had built a peaceful and prosperous society with the energy of a certain "power stone."
One day, however, a group of elders who wanted to make the energy of the power stone their own accidentally let the energy run wild.
In an instant, civilization was destroyed and disappeared from history.
It is said that after this event, the gods descended from the sky and restored a part of the civilization as an island and released it and the "power stone" into the sky.

The legend of the "island" and the ring that washed ashore...
For some reason, Sonic felt nostalgic and decided to go on another adventure.

The elders more or less seemed to refer to Tikal's father and her tribe, and SA1 wrote it as such. But what of the "god from the sky"? That passage has never had any context. The timeline doesn't entirely make sense, but one wonders if the ancients somehow still had a hand in raising Angel Island in some way. An alien species being a "sky god" does kind of make sense. Or it could be a new way to refer to Chaos 0, who was the ancients descendant and tied to their DNA, making it a "sky god" itself. This would resolve the old confusion of how Chaos, a water god, fits with this backstory about "gods from the sky", something which was never resolved before.

All in all, I'm not super impressed with this game's lore reveals, but it does give us some things to debate about at least and gives more context into the series history than we've had since Adventure 1/2.

 

Ian Flynn said the ancients evolved into other things in addition to the Chao, so who knows! I don’t think they became any of the names animal species personally though.

 

It'd be interesting if that was the explanation for things like Flickies or Small Animals while there's still "real" versions of those small animals, like the bats in SA2.

 

How the fuck are those things supposed to reproduce

 

Mitosis

 

Very carefully

 

Like Plorpus' avatar up there.

 

Radiation was the reason it was like this in Archie so you could literally just use the same explanation.

 

Lol in Sonic Boom one episode has Tails looking for the missing link between “animals and anthropomorphic animals”

 

This notion reminds me of creationists saying "if humans evolved from chimpanzees, why are chimpanzees still around???"

 

Maybe the elders divided into two groups before they disappeared. Some might have evolved into Chao and some might have evolved into echidnas. That would probably explain why echidnas lived very near the master emerald and knew about it's power. It still doesn't explain what happened to the kocos embedded into their torsos though.