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

Well, that's a relief! I've said it before: Like anyone, I have my preferences when it comes to Sonic's various English VAs. But I'd have gladly taken any of 'em if we could've enjoyed the same consistency Japan has since 1998. Every time they did it just seemed to cause a fissure in the community. We've had largely the same cast for over 11 years now (or at least, similar-sounding replacements). We're hopefully gonna hit the point before long where the JP cast has always been, and where Mike Pollock's Eggman is at now, where they're so iconic in their roles and enough fans grew up with them that there's no drama about it anymore.

 

Yup, Distorted Cindy like I said. Guess they figured there was no point keeping it hush at this point.

I pretty much with you, though part of me wonders if part of the issue is just how little of the character she has actually done in the actual games. At this point, Cindy has donr more voice work for Boom Amy than Modern Amy and I cant help but feel that has an effect on both public perception of the performance as well as the actors grasp of the character. It's to the point that I find myself appreciating her Generations performance on Amy relative to what we got now, which is saying something because I really didn't like it when we got it and still kinda don't.

I think a bit of that applies to all the new voice cast that came in since Free Riders. I personally find Kirk sounded quite a bit better in Forces for example.

 

Robinson has totally won me over as Amy. She was awful to begin with in Free Riders, Generations and Lost World, but from Boom onwards shes been great. TSR is her best showing in a game, with the obvious caveat that all of the lines of dialogue are disjointed by long, awkward silence as game slowly swaps out the character art in the "cutscenes". She gets a better range of emotions in that game than in Forces. But yeah, if you've not warmed up to her following on from Boom and later games, that's not going to change anytime soon. Even though she's not my favourite voice for Amy, she does a really good job of the role, especially when Amy is supposed to be angry/ticked off.

I'm glad to see some outright confirmation that this game will include more existing characters than just Sonic, Eggman and Tails. With Flynn writing instead of Pontac and Graff, I'm also hopeful that the rest of the characters in the game will be well-written and be relevant to the plot. Still yearning for the day when they'll actually be playable again mind you, but everything we know about Frontiers at this point suggests that its a Sonic-only experience and that the game wouldn't benefit from additional playable characters either. Just having them around and involved in the plot is fine in this scenario.

 

Sonic Adventure 3 is a different game depending on who you ask. But the fact that nobody has said that yet should tell you that no, it's not SA3 to those that want it. What makes it seem like SA3 to you?

 

Needs more playable characters

 

Didn’t we get Sonic Adventure 3 back in 2006?

 

there will always be that subset of people who believe Adventure 3 can only truly exist when SEGA start making consoles again lol

 

I think you're missing the point of what "Adventure" means to a lot of people, that being multiple playable characters with multiple styles, multiple storylines that interconnect, "Adventure formula" gameplay and possibly the Chao Garden. From the looks of it, Frontiers has none of those things and leaks suggest that it even has boost gameplay in certain areas. You can tenuously make Frontiers sound like the common interpretations of SA3 if you twist it enough, but you could do the same for Unleashed, Forces, Heroes and others.

I got over the idea of SA3 a long time ago. And with Frontiers, I think it's pretty clear to just about everyone at this stage that it's not really like anything that came before. If it's SA3 some people, then fine, whatever. But I don't think you'll get many people barking up that tree.

 

No. Because it isn't named that. Therefore it isn't that game for those people.

 

Speaking as I guess an "Adventure fan", it generally refers to the specific tone and aesthetic those games had than the actual gameplay.

Defining Adventure gameplay is incredibly nebulous compared to defining Classic gameplay because fans don't really define it beyond "Dark tone, multi-playable characters and "sense of adventure" (what does this even mean?)"

Its more of a feeling than anything concrete

 

People wishing for Sonic Adventure 3 directly from SEGA/Sonic Team seems to be almost entirely dead from what I can tell. The people who really wanted it are either attempting to make what they think it would be (which is almost always frustratingly off the mark) or just growing up/away from the concept.

for people's attempts, they show that none of them really want what Sonic Adventure 3 *would* be (since it would probably just be Heroes without having fucked up SA2's controls) but they end up wanting or adding more "classic sonic" concepts that weren't and probably never would be in Adventure's controls... or somehow making boost gameplay without the boost. For some people, any mix of those is good enough to be called Sonic Adventure in their minds.

06 gets close by mixing in elements from everything before it but it ends up with throwing the big ball with just one thing, that being it doesn't play like Adventure or Adventure 2, and obviously that's not something you really want with these things. It all comes down to how it plays. So, people reject it as "Sonic Adventure 3"

Or we could put it this way. from a technical standpoint, there's nothing stopping "Sonic 4" from being Sonic 4. It can be named it, it can imitate people's idea of it, it could even be better than what came before it, but people don't consider it "Sonic 4" because it doesn't have the retro aesthetic and has different mechanics / its mechanics are different just enough to piss the people who want it to be "Sonic 4" off. So we have a game that is literally called Sonic 4 that people reject as Sonic 4.

It's more than a name, it's a collection of ideas, and while the name is included, it's possibly the least important aspect that will only be accepted if many, many other criteria are met. And currently, I don't think we have enough information to correctly determine if Sonic Frontiers is properly "Sonic Adventure 3".

 

So Sonic '06.

 

That, plus, "big open hub from which you access more traditional levels" could fit both Adventure 1 and Frontiers, if the hyperspace levels are indeed "replayable high-speed action stages", as Josh put it a few pages back.

(would fit 06 and Unleashed, to an extent, too; both commonly cited "Adventure 3" 'Episodes' )

 

Makes me wonder if they were impressed with the game's visuals or its gameplay. Really hoping that Frontiers delivers.

 

Yeah I kinda want to get back to this because it makes me wonder about what was actually shown. Was it just more extended fly-over shots of the environment or full gameplay? Did they get to see the cyberspace levels?

Really curious to hear what specifically they found impressive, because it really is cool to hear that Frontiers is getting good reactions.

 

Its a bastaridized version of it, but yea.

 

The point of Sonic Adventure, to me at least, was to create a cohesive explorable world for Sonic to run around in, particularly based in urban fantasy. Because it seemed like a really cool and logical next step for an adventure-platformer to take. The only games since Sonic Adventure to even come close to this thought are 06 and Sonic Unleashed.

and I mean, I guess Frontiers sort of fulfills that, sort of, except I'm really hesitant to call it a conceptual successor because now it just seems like they're just blatantly copying Breath of the Wild instead of even bothering to do their own spin on things because it feels right.