People only like him because of his design! And the same people act like it's shallow to like Infinite in this way even though he's A. Funnier, B. has a hilarious cheesy nu-metal theme, and C. is a sexy jackal man
My unpopular opinion of the night I guess is that Frontiers has little-to-no redeeming qualities and is a damning direction for Sonic. Ugly art direction, dull presentation, boring story & characterization, clunky controls, busted physics, messy combat, empty and featureless environments, amateurish object / platform placement, horrible optimization issues (ie the pop-in), and ludicrous heaps of asset-flipping, all wrapped up with a dour and embarrassingly tryhard vibe. Any part I hold any positivity for is usually wrapped in a giant "BUT". The concept itself is a misunderstanding of a genre of game I already didn't like (open-world) and a bare minimum shot at making a cohesive game in general. And it's all offered to it's audience with such confidence that they made the best game they could offer, with full fan support teeming behind it. All under pretense of a false promise. That this is their "first try" and "it's gonna be great in the next one, trust me". People who say it's the best 3D Sonic yet make me feel like I'm on a different planet. Probably the most negative I've felt about a Sonic game since 4 or '06, like really it feels dire as hell lol. I have a feeling of dread knowing this is where the future of the series is going to go gung-ho into. At least Superstars (and hopefully other projects like Murder of Sonic) is something to look forward to, but I kinda wish I didn't, cuz it just means I'm gonna be within earshot of whatever is next haha. Damn.
Does the effective Satan of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe need to make sense with his timeline of events? I've always taken it as he does pretty much everything we see him do in 06 in what is to him a short amount of time (time travel and all that) but to the viewers could be a couple of days. I think that making him out to be anything more than a Shadow villian doesn't work (they didn't even try with Sonic, but really it seems like they were just trying really hard to tie all the stories together for the final one) but as a Shadow villian he's S++ and probably has even more potential to be effective than Black Doom. Maria is the Angel telling him to give humanity a chance and Mephiles is the Devil telling him nothing he does for them matters because they will eventually betray him. It's just such a perfect setup. Aside from having just said the reasons I think he doesn't suck, I think part of having a good character on your hands is people liking them for what they are and what they have yet to be. Mephiles has a little of the first and a lot of the second which makes him pretty valuable, at least from my perspective. Infinite WISHES he was Mephiles. He has everything Mephiles has, except reasonable ties to Shadow, or even a well characterized Shadow to bounce off of, and instead of loving Chaos for the sake of Chaos, he wants everything to suffer because he's suffered. No well-produced song can change that.
I'm in agreement with you, though not to the full extent. On a train right now so typing out a long post on my phone just isn't going to happen. But in short, I find Frontiers to be somewhat refreshing and exciting after the very dry/tame/unambitious 2010s (Mania notwithstanding). Tonally, it attempts something radically different and I enjoy it for that. Whilst not totally successful at it, I don't think that it falls flat on its face either. But it's about as extreme as I'd ever want Sonic to go into the dark, serious and realistic realms. Whatever comes next, I sincerely hope that it dials the "mature" and "epic" tone down significantly. Let Frontiers stand on its own in that regard, particularly in regards to the level of realism. Ngl, I like seeing Sonic in more realistic environments just as much as I like seeing him stylised, wacky ones. Where Frontiers falls short though is that the environments are lacking any character whatsoever, and the colour palette is very desaturated. In terms of gameplay design, that's where Frontiers struggles the most. Sonic Team clearly think that they struck gold with Colours and Forces design, because that's exactly what Frontiers is. In the Open Zone, it's just cut up level chunks of floating boxes and platforms over a totally inconsequential map, and in Cyberspace is just Forces work even worse controls (and I'm not even going to get started on the C&P layouts). Then they added in the spindash and holy fuck the DLC Cyberspace stages are even worse for it. Frontiers is starting to play more and more like every "launch Sonic through the air with pHySiCs" fan game and that's not a good thing. I don't hate Frontiers (apart from the final DLC pack). I liked it enough, but always thought it showed his much Sonic Team weren't capable of. They were confident in and clearly proud of their mediocrity, not helped by the fact that the loudest feedback is inane praise for the game. It does make me worried for the future. I don't trust Sonic Team to make the right decisions going forward. Mark my words; I a few years and we'll start seeing the pendulum swing in the other direction when Sonic Team fail to improve upon Frontiers and people realise that they liked "the potential" more than the actual products.
This is the story of Sonic's whole 3D career isn't it? Release a game with a proof of concept that people like and praise until a product comes out so bad that they can no longer do that. Happened when we went from Adventure to 06, and then it happened again when we went from Unleashed to Forces. A lot of these games aren't inherently bad, but the sheer lack of quality control from Sonic Team means these games will never reach their full potential. And it doesn't help when the hard-core fans are so devoted to this franchise and its aesthetics and ideas that they just overlook all of this because their preferences and nostalgia are being catered to. I don't wanna be Doom and gloom, and I don't really hate Frontiers as much as Azoo does, but is it really asking a lot got a game from this series that isn't buggy or jank AND that the fanbase can actually see past their obsessions and judge the quality of the game for what it is? It's just personally annoying that we're stuck in this endless loop of quality and fan reactions. I wanna go back when Mania was out...
I feel like it's not even fair to Adventure 1 or Unleashed to make this comparison. Those games feature solid gameplay with strong level design, and to top it off well-defined art direction and presentation. They have their problems obviously (points at the alt gameplay styles), but it's obvious to everyone the framework was good. It's only the games that followed that see the quality in those gameplay styles degrade. IE 06 and Forces play like bootlegs of SA1 and Unleashed, respectively, and they get the shit they deserve for it. Meanwhile, Frontiers is a mangled mess from the jump. It has none of the convictions of strong gameplay, level design or visual presentation. It's just a Sonic (and now Tails/Knux/Amy!) that doesn't steer or react to the environment right half the time, thrown in a nondescript field, with floating platforms, bosses and collectibles crammed together over it to feign the idea of a video game. But you got Super Sonic suplexing Titans to nu-metal music, so I guess we got the young'ins distracted enough to get away with it. Idk. It's ass, lol. If they want to make this into something worth the time, they'd have to make a game so deep on the "improvement" end that it won't even resemble Frontiers anyways. Just kinda a bad way.
as someone who loves Adventure 1, I can safely say that there is not a single aspect of that game, save the music (and even then the character themes are trash), that is not absolutely 100% jank and objectively sub-par. The voice acting is mostly bad and is going off a pretty bad translation of a pretty dull script. Sonic is the least jank of all the characters, who otherwise range from "inoffensively jank" (Tails) to "why" (Amy). The bosses are piss-easy and repeating them over and over is a pretty easy criticism to level. The level design ranges from fine to questionable, as does the gimmicks (the fans in Final Egg are still my least-favorite part of that game, and the Lost World snake just has this tendency to send you to the abyss). but I fucking love Adventure 1. Liking a video game or being a fan of it doesn't mean having to go along with the objective qualities of it - it can mean going "yes, but--" and knowing that despite it you're having fun and you appreciate what it was trying to do, or appreciate even harder the things that do work for you despite it all. so uh, yeah. Frontiers. it has its issues, but I'm in the same boat with it as SA1, except that unlike SA1 it does do a lot of its ambitious stuff better and less buggy.
It is 1998. The new Sonic game is a flawed but enjoyable experience. The best outing the hedgehog has had in years! A step in the right direction. It is 2008. The new Sonic game is a flawed but enjoyable experience. The best outing the hedgehog has had in years! A step in the right direction. It is 2022. The new Sonic game is a flawed but enjoyable experience. The best outing the hedgehog has had in years! A step in the right direction.
I also don't think it's fair to say "yeah but the framework was good" while casually dismissing alternative playstyles because the many playstyles were the framework in both cases -- so much so that it carried on, mostly: the literal only Boost game without a counterpart is Colors, and the only Pure Platforming game in the Adventure era is Heroes. If you don't like them, you can't excuse the forefathers of the (sub)genre. So, the hot take for today is that Frontiers is as at least as solid as Unleashed, which is the second weakest Boost game and didn't even come up with the concept of the gameplay anyway.
I feel like I'm going to have to restate what I feel better, because it's just gonna be torn down to make these kind of arguments where we split hairs trying to argue with me why the games I like are just as "bad" as Frontiers. So here: When I play a Sonic game, I'm looking for a title with really bold visuals, exciting art direction, creative set-pieces, interesting level design, high replay value, and a feel-good vibe that keeps me coming back for more. Sonic Frontiers is not any of that, and then on top of it is functionally a mess and continuously proves Sonic Team doesn't know how to fix their own issues. Because of that I'm not looking forward to the future of Sonic. And I think that's an unpopular opinion, since (at least as of right now) the majority is fairly optimistic about this game and the road ahead. Hope that clears it up.
I don't know what to tell you man, but that's been the road for the last 10~ years. Nothing has changed on fundamental level. Sonic Team as a developer still does not know how to make a solid platformer that isn't riddled with baffling decisions. Even if they made something like an Adventure 3, I would not give them the benefit of the doubt that they can make something that feels good. Their days as a trusted developer have been long gone and it doesn't matter what vision they follow, they'll always under deliver. I stick around with this franchise because 1) Sonic is cool 2) It's always some new bat shit idea or spin. You're guaranteed not to play the same dribble twice
It feels like all roads in these arguments point to "don't like it, then leave", but 1) if we all did that we would've been out of here years ago, and 2) I do still like Sonic. Again, I still look forward to Superstars and the side projects like the Powerhouse animations, IDW comics and things like Murder of Sonic. So I don't leave. I'm just so exhausted with Sonic Team lmao.
Didn't you (try to) leave for real back when Forces revealed the custom character? Or was that someone else.
And you don't think any of us aren't? I'm just at a point where I'm just put my nostalgia goggles down and just see this shit for what it is. We've been getting these types of games since 1998. You can sugarcoat it however you want, and trust me, I love Sonic Adventure as much as the next guy, but the problems that game presented are still present to this day. And I don't see much point in waxing on about what could have been had they stuck with the framework established there, and technically speaking, they did in-fact, stick with that frame work and we see where there that went. It's the same story with Unleashed to Forces. At some point, you kind of have to start recognizing a pattern. For what its worth, I do agree with you on a lot of the problems listed with Frontiers but like... the fanbase doesn't really care that much given how much they're praising the game to high heaven and it being the best selling 3D game to date, with most just admitting that they like the game despite it's problems. Its the same rhetoric with every Modern game where the game is kind of shitty, but still love it nonetheless. So I'm like *Shrug* if I have the money, I'll check it out and if I don't, I'll just ignore it and play something else. I'm just exhausted from getting too worked up about this series anymore lol.
