SEGAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Give ME SONIC FRONTIERS 2!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Sonic franchise continues with games utterly confused about what kind of games they are or should be. This time you are granted islands to run freely around, where you'll be treated to the Breath of the Wild, Genshin Impact, Ubisoft collectable special. Complete with map towers.

Collect gears, keys, coins, experience, friendship tokens, korok seeds koco, defense seeds, attack seeds, and purple coins to catch fish to turn into fishing tokens to trade for the above. As silly as that last one sounds, it at least features Big the Cat and is far less aggravating than the rest of the game's design.

Playing the game remains as inconsistent as ever. Is your camera locked or free? Should you be holding a button down right now so that Sonic keeps moving or is it an automated sequence? Are you even holding the right direction. Can you see where you're going to tell? This changes from moment to moment, sometimes working just fine, other times throwing you into the void. This begs the question, just how should Sonic control. Well, I can tell you the game designers aren't completely certain as they've instead decided that you should have a range of settings in the option menu to figure that out for yourself. When you're not camera locked, that is, then you're probably moving at a somewhat set speed. Or in an actual mission area where these do not apply. The koco you collect can even be traded for speed upgrades: that seem do nothing, sorry, that's still set by the options menu.

The movement all seems to work best when you're literally stuck on a rail, occasionally clicking the homing attack button or deciding on a direction. A lot of the time you aren't in control, you aren't moving Sonic yourself. When you are moving Sonic yourself you often have to wrestle control into something sensible. Or you can't see and you're making guesses at what to do next, or failing and using past knowledge to proceed. You're running at three doors, picking one until it works. Should you boost or not? Jump? Did you use your air boost because that doesn't reset and you might actually need that for the final part of this segment. It's... frustratingly inconsistent. Or, what is consistent is that it is frustrating.

Having the missions be a separate thing makes some sense. This means the speedrunning aspect of the game can be contained into short bursts, where the idea of failing or retrying for a better time, learning different paths actually works. At the same time, it's still designed for that all that well.

Combat is weird. You have your standard obstacle enemies that you run into or bounce off of as a normal Sonic game, then others out in the wild including bosses that take multiple hits and you have a whole skill tree of extra moves to unlock for.. that.. can often be tiresome rather than enjoyable. If you didn't like the fight the first time thankfully they respawn so you can be interrupted by their mini title sequence when trying to run past them later. The combat also has a skill you unlock to use all the extra moves for you, albiet weaker, so that it can largely return to being spam attack button.

Every map tower comes with a nuisance mini-game to make exploration take longer and pretend to be more engaging and fulfilling. It takes longer to fall into the water/retry than it does to quick travel to somewhere else on the same island. The developers know the Escape button exists, but decided that P should be for the menu. It also takes so long for the menu to finish animations that you can push buttons, recieve input noises that it has accepted your input, but not actually done so. So many small bits and pieces like this that just hurt more with every addition.

Perhaps I just .. hate video games or something. I don't know. Sonic Frontiers upsets me. I can imagine a game where Sonic is fun to play, controls nicely but is still fast. Where you make decisions about where you're going, but still have jump pads and rails to grind. This one still isn't it. Yet I still enjoy seeing Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Eggman. Extra friends too when they appear. It sounds like in the dialogue the gang actually wants to.. move on from their stereotype roles, do things. That sounds neat. There are references to past games and events, also sensible and solid decisions.

Guess I'll.. see if whatever next Sonic game I play still sends me off the rails. Sonic Battle, that game worked reasonably well. Also they have a pinball minigame in this, and for a franchise that has pinball games in it, this one feels horrible. It's like the ball is in water or something.

This is the most 7/10 game I've ever played.