It Was Announced On Twitter.

Just started a full read of Naruto after reading Boruto and I'm already back in love with the series lol, 8 chapters in so far and Team 7's dynamic is great, once I get farther in I hope to do an analysis on what makes their group dynamic so enjoyable to watch and read so maybe be on the lookout for that? It's been a while since I've made any longer posts on her but being honest that's mostly just because I forget I have this account a lot lol

Farewell Sensei #ThankYouToriyama

Sonic Frontiers Review: Aptly Crossing a New Frontier.

Sonic Frontiers is the latest 3D platforming game to be released in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, following the releases of Sonic Forces, Sonic Colors Ultimate (SCU), and Sonic Origins, their previous three 3D platforming titles. Forces, SCU, and Origins’ releases were met with a lot of criticism due to not meeting the fanbase’s expectations for a variety of reasons, so in the days before Frontiers’ released, I was excited but chose to keep a healthy level of skepticism just in case the game wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Suffice to say, the hype for the game was extremely well earned, as I had an absolute blast playing through Frontiers. To help me get all my points across as to why I like this game so much, I’ll be dividing this review into two parts: the gameplay segment and the story segment. I’m doing this for two reasons: the first being that I believe both need to be talked about separately so I can really dive deep into what makes them so good, and the other is so that people who only want a gameplay review aren’t spoiled on some of the more major plot points of the game. With that being said, here are my thoughts on Sonic Frontiers!

Future Updates

As I was in the process of putting this review together, Sonic Team revealed that over the course of 2023, the game would be getting a series of 3 free updates, and the last of those updates would contain a story update involving more playable characters, showing pictures of Tails, Knuckles, and Amy. Obviously, this is massive and very exciting, but since it’s not out I can’t exactly factor any of what’s coming in updates into this review. Hopefully if I have the time and remember to do so, I’ll make an addendum to this review or separate posts going over each update. Anyways, NOW this review can start!

Gameplay

Sonic Frontiers sets out to tackle a new style of gameplay it calls Open Zone gameplay. Sonic Frontiers takes place on a series of islands, with each island being an open zone. As soon as you unlock the island, you’re able to go anywhere on the island right from the start, defeating minibosses and collecting Memory Tokens wherever you please, but more on that in a moment. The zones are fairly big in size, giving you plenty to explore at Sonic’s mach speeds and never really feeling cramped.

While exploring the islands, Sonic will be able to find rails, springs, and other such platforming obstacles that you’d find in your typical Sonic level. These will lead Sonic into short platforming segments, and by completing them he can earn Memory Tokens, which are essential to completing the game. Think of them as bite-sized levels. They’re typically pretty fun, though some of them lock you into playing in 2D, which kind of defeats the point of an open zone, but outside of that I enjoy these small chunks of platforming.

Memory Tokens are used not only to progress the story, but also to have smaller, more bite-sized interactions with other characters. Engaging with characters doesn’t take away any Memory Tokens from you, so if you have enough to initiate a conversation, go have a chat with them! However, every island has a different type of Memory Token, meaning that tokens you collect on the first island won’t help your progress on the second. Sometimes collecting the tokens felt like a pain, but I enjoyed the experience of exploring the islands regardless.

Scattered around the island are various puzzles that, as a reward, give you seeds. These seeds can be taken to an NPC to increase your attack or defense, depending on the type of seed you have. While I’m sure it isn’t necessary to raise your stats, I’d highly recommend doing so, as some enemies towards the end of the game are quite difficult.

The Cyloop is Sonic’s main new ability in this game and it’s used for puzzle solving and combat. The Cyloop is essential to solving many puzzles in the game, and using it on enemies can put Sonic in an advantageous position during combat. Simply drawing a circle will give you rings and drawing an infinity symbol will give you infinite boost in the open zones!

Exploration in this game is a breath of fresh air for the franchise, helping to break up the monotony of just playing level after level after level. I keep finding myself thinking of how cool previous games in the franchise, namely Forces, could have been if they had tried a similar Open Zone system. I hope the development team behind future Sonic games try and implement Open Zone gameplay into their future games, as I had a blast with it in Frontiers.

There is one more ability that Sonic has to use to help him explore, and that’s the Dropdash. I think it’s really cool that it’s in this game, even though I don't think it contributes a ton as I rarely found myself using it. The one oddity about it though is how it handles speed: the Dropdash uses momentum similar to how the classic games do, as in when you go down a slope, you gain speed, and when you go up a slope, you lose speed. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a complaint! It’s fun to roll down various hills to see how much speed can be built up. But if they’ve implemented that kind of design for the Dropdash, why can’t the whole game play this way? Why limit it to exclusively the Dropdash? I know that this is definitely more of a nitpick but as soon as I noticed it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Shifting focus more on combat now, inhabiting the islands are many strange looking robots for Sonic to take on with his myriad of new combat abilities, and by defeating them he can earn skill points to unlock more abilities. The only ability essential to beating the game is the Cyloop, but the others can help speed up combat in very flashy manners so long as you know how to combo them together properly.

The combos in this game are incredibly stylish and perfectly fitting of the blue blur, it’s always a blast to experiment with linking different skills together against different enemies. You can tell that the developers really put a lot of thought into making these skills and their effort certainly were not in vain.

One skill you don’t need any skill points to unlock is the ability to Parry. Parrying lets you deflect any enemies attack right back at them and counter with a flurry of your own. While having the ability is nice, it has a very noticeable flaw: you can hold your parry for as long as you want. In my opinion, this does ultimately take away from the combat as it means that as long as you hold your parry, you’re not in any real danger. Holding it in midair also causes Sonic to awkwardly float which, while funny, definitely looks just a little strange.

While exploring the islands you’ll encounter named opponents that serve as minibosses, one such example being found in the gif above, named Ninja. Being minibosses, they’re naturally tougher than the generic enemies Sonic will run across in the open zones, but defeating them is essential, as they drop Portal Gears. The bosses come in many different shapes and sizes and will attack Sonic in many different ways, so you should be ready for anything. These can range anywhere from incredibly fun to just a slog to fight (looking at you, Tank).

Overall, the combat in this game is incredibly flashy and fun, and I hope we see more combat like this in the future. There are a few key areas where it can be improved, such as the aforementioned issues with the parry and some of the less enjoyable minibosses, but ultimately it’s a very well done system that I hope makes a return in future games.

Oh yeah Big’s fishing is also fun and the theme that plays is an absolute vibe, easily the most important part of the game.

Story

Alright, story time. If you don’t want to get spoiled about the story, now’s the time to leave. The story of Sonic Frontiers is 100% best experienced blind and I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. I’ll also be omitting gifs from this section as well.

So I’m just gonna pad this out a little bit in case someone scrolls a little too far on accident.

Ok, still here? Cool, I’ll just dive right in then.

The story of Sonic Frontiers is, without question, the best story we’ve gotten since SA2 or Unleashed. The characters are written absolutely incredibly in a setting filled with unique mystery that culminates into some of the biggest lore developments the series has ever gotten. I genuinely believe that this is the best that these characters have ever been depicted, and the addition of Sage to the cast of characters is one of the biggest Ws the franchise could have possibly gotten.

The dynamic between Sage and Eggman is one of the best parts of the story by far and it really spices up Eggman’s characters, something that he’s been needing for a long, long time. You can really feel the connection the two of them have together, from the way Eggman talks about her in his memos to his scenes at the end of the game. Watching Eggman look up at the falling stars, hoping to see his AI, his daughter, return to the planet and watching him realize that she’s not coming back almost made me  genuinely cry. Then watching him work to restore her in the final scene after the credits and seemingly succeeding was such a good moment for the doctor. I hope Sage comes back for future games, it’d be such a shame if she didn’t.

The Ancients not only being from space, but bringing the Chaos Emeralds with them from their homeworld and being the ancestors of Chaos is an interesting development to the lore, and I’m excited to see if they go anywhere else with it. The Ancients being related to Chaos was pretty obvious by just looking at their appearance, but them bringing the emeralds from outer space was a development I definitely was not expecting. They’re still a very mysterious civilization that we may never learn more about, but what we do know about them is absolutely fascinating. They did so well with integrating the Ancients into Sonic’s World.

Unfortunately, this is where the story admittedly falls apart a little bit. The End is interesting, to say the least. I don’t think it’s ever made clear whether it’s a god or a mortal, but what we do know is that it’s powerful enough to destroy the Ancients’ home. Then it follows them to Sonic’s World and forces them to trap it inside an entire digital dimension showing that despite how advanced their technology is, they couldn’t even kill it, which makes this thing feel menacing. So with the reveal of The End being the villain, I was really hoping that the boss battle would be the best we’ve ever gotten. It was… not that. The boss battle itself was unfortunately a let-down, which was a massive shame because Frontiers’ has absolutely incredible bosses at the end of each island. There’s a lot in game that points to The End being rushed, such as Sonic’s speech to the Ancients he gives just before the fight itself, and the instruction screen telling you to fight with the Titans, plural. It seems like they really wanted to do more with The End but for whatever reason couldn’t, which is a big shame. It’s definitely not enough to sour the whole story for me, just a bit of a let down.

Sonic Frontiers’ story heavily relies on the mystery of the Starfall Islands, and it uses said mysteries to craft an absolutely incredible story only held back by the gameplay of its final boss. This is the type of story I hope we get to see more of from Sonic games in the future.

Final Rating

If I had to rate the game on a scale of 1-10, I’d give it a very solid 7. The team behind the game’s development very clearly listened to what people wanted from the franchise and gave it to us, and while it’s not perfect by any means, it’s 100% a step in the right direction. If the development team behind Sonic Frontiers keeps giving us games of this quality, I'm sure that the future of the franchise is a very bright one.

Goku will forever be my emotion support dad 🐉

Hey?

Figured making a pinned post would be a good idea while I try and think of an FAQ. I'm Freebie and I'm mostly into Dragon Ball and Pokemon, but I'll probably talk about other things! I also REALLY like Goku.

Since Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are coming out soon, I've been thinking about posting some Pokemon related content. I think it'd be fun to do stuff like ranking Pokemon based on how much I like them or reviewing Pokemon generations. Only time will tell if I actually do any of that stuff though

Pretty sure I'm almost through Pokemon Scarlet's story modes. At this point I'm not sure if I'll do a full on review of it like I plan to with Sonic Frontiers but what I can say right now is that the game is very enjoyable even despite its issues, but that doesn't change the fact that it needed more time in development.

CONQUER MULTIVERSUS

Bonus: when he gets there...

DBS Manga Return + New Arc Announced! Here's My Speculation:

Just yesterday, we were informed of the return of the Dragon Ball Super manga and the reveal of its next arc being an adaptation of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero set to start on December 20th. It’s speculated to start with prequel events that will lead up into the events we see take place in the film. While I don’t think anything that happens in the movie will change drastically in the manga, I think starting the arc with these prequel events is a fun way to adapt the arc!

The arc will feature Goten and Trunks becoming super heroes, and it’s nice seeing the two of them get something to do! I’m hoping we get to see other characters that appear in the movie like Android 18 and Krillin during these prequel events as well, as the Granolah arc really didn’t feature a whole lot of characters and it’s been a while since we’ve seen everyone else in the manga. I just wanted to take a second to theorize about what may happen during the “prequel” section of the arc as I think there’s a lot they could do there.

Videl

Videl hasn’t had very many moments to shine in DBS compared to other characters, so I think this could be a very good opportunity to show us more of her character. I’m not expecting her to fight Cell Max or anything, obviously something like that wouldn’t happen, I just think it’d be cool (and also pretty likely) that we’ll get to see a bit of her in this arc’s prequel events. We learn that she teaches martial arts at a school now during the movie, so maybe we’ll get a glimpse at the school? Who knows, I just think it’d be a neat addition to add in there.

Marron

Marron, like Videl, is another character who we haven’t seen a ton of in DBS, and I think we’ll see at least a brief appearance of her. If we do, it’s also very likely that she’ll have a new design similar to Goten and Trunks, as the last time we saw her was during the Tournament of Power if my memory serves me correctly, and at least 2 years have passed since then. If she does get a new design, it’s likely she’ll look similar to how she did during the End of Z, as the time when EoZ takes place is approaching in universe.

Gohan’s Makankosappo Training

Gohan states during the movie that he spent some of his spare time practicing the Makankosoppo in order to surprise Piccolo, but we never got to see him practice the technique. If the prequel events turn out to be more relaxed compared to the Granolah arc, it’s possible we could see him practicing the technique.

Gotenks

While Gotenks making an appearance in an arc that puts focus on Goten and Trunks makes sense, I doubt we’ll see him during the prequel events. The two of them messing up and merging into fat Gotenks during the movie tells me that the duo haven’t been practicing the technique much and have gotten rusty, so for them to pull it out during the prequel section, fuse into Gotenks perfectly, and then proceed to botch the technique during Cell Max would just be weird, at least in my opinion. The possibility of him appearing before the main events of Super Hero is still there though, so I figured I’d just bring it up. I’d definitely be nice to see a properly formed teenage Gotenks in action, though!

Final Thoughts

While I don’t think this arc is going to be anything mind blowing, I think doing a Super Hero arc instead of immediately diving into a “Black Frieza” arc is for the best. I’m hoping it’ll be a good mix of action and slice of life content without stretching on for too long like the Granolah arc did. Ultimately we’ll just have to wait until December when the arc starts to see how it goes, but regardless like I said originally, it’s nice to see Goten and Trunks getting something to do in the manga, it feels like it’s been way too long since they’ve been relevant.

If you read all this, thank you! I just wanted to spend some time speculating on this as I’m very excited to see the DBS manga finally return. I’m still planning on doing a Sonic Frontiers review like I stated previously and I’m still working on writing other Dragon Ball related things, I’m hoping to have at least one of those out soon!

I was gonna make a post about my personal ranking of every main Z Fighter (as well as a couple extra characters) as of Chapter 103, and it's almost done, but I'm not really feeling it anymore. I think I'll come back to it at another time and start something new instead