Sonic Frontiers

"What you see is what you get- just a guy who loves adventure!"

I don't think there has been a single moment in my life where I've degraded myself to such a point whereas I would self identify as a 'Sonic connoisseur'. (The very prospect sickens me to my core.) But I have certainly had the time and wherewithal to play through the vast majority of Sonic games in existence, and complete most of them, and through osmosis have learnt everything there is to know about all the other games in the series, so I've ended up with more series knowledge about the little blue cretin than I care to admit. Ask me to name the most obscure Mario title I can think of from the top of my head and I'll juggle about the sports-themed titles trying to pick which is the weirdest, (I guess the Football game 'Strikers' was pretty out there) my point is I won't pick a good one. Ask me about Sonic and I'll just be spoiled for choice, maybe you want to go back to the woefully misjudged perspective swap of Sonic 3D blast, or the spin-off reskin of Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, or perhaps I should delve the true realms of antique horror in order to rouse the spirits of that most eldritch of cosmic horrors: Sonic Eraser.

With all that history, all those branches, it seems insane to me, nah- unbelievable to me, that the Sonic series could be the verge of doing something new. It's been Thirty years, and those years haven't been spent remaking the same base product like Pokemon have done, what could possibly be left to try out? Well, actually quite a few avenues. For one, despite having a prototype in the works at some point, Sally Acorn never made her videogame debut alongside the Sat AM world, there's yet to be an XCOM style strategy role-based sonic game (Although Chronicles was an RPG, so that counts) and there has never once been a fully openworld Sonic ga- no they couldn't. After all this time, surely it's too late. And yet here I am, getting actually excited for a Sonic game despite myself, which means they could only be doing one thing. Open world Sonic after all this time.

It seems like a no-brainer, does it not? Sonic, with all of his speed and manoeuvrability, is always struggling each entry to let the extent of his speed be known. And it's pretty important that speed is present in the games he appears in, because that's kind of his whole shtick. That, eating Chili dogs and going toe-to-toe with Ash Ketchum in competition for who can stay a teenager for the longest. (It's a close contest!) Sonic 4 famously messed up the speed equation and made Sonic feel like a weightless, momentum-free dash meter, the aforementioned Sonic 3D Blast failed to represent any of Sonic's speed whatsoever and the Boom series constrained Sonic's speedy exploits to tiny running sections and made him a boring platformer bot for the rest of the gameplay. Even Sonic Forces has me a little suspicious of it just because of the fact that fan OCs are apparently capable of keeping pace with the Blue Blur. What's that about, huh? Fastest thing alive, matched by a self insert? No thanks.

All the time it's felt like the constraints of the game design has been holding him back. When we got the chance to go all out in the originals, Mania or the speed sections from the 3D era, you felt like the proper Sonic, and when you had to tune things down in order to fit some strange restraint with your group of animal dunces, or stomp around for a stage as a 'Werehog' (Were means Man!) something felt off about the situation. The obvious solution would be either to make a game purely about those speed sections, but that would get old fast, or rethink how we approached Sonic games altogether so that the control of the navigation is handed over to the player. And what genre of games epitomises player choice navigation and exploration like an open world does?

The Game Awards trailer for this bold new hedgehog direction was certainly evocative to say the least. Building from that teaser released a few months previously, I'll be honest in saying I wasn't expecting anything at all. In fact, judging from the coloured flashing geometric shapes that flashed briefly, I though this was a trailer for Sonic Colours Ultimate: but thank god I was about as off base as I feasibly could have been. Instead what we got was a sweeping and ponderous trailer, focusing on rolling green hills and angelic emerald expanses. A quiet restful score also diverged widely from the increasingly outdated poprock-bait soundtracks that Sonic had been embracing in recent years. (Crowned, of course, by a character theme so nakedly 2000's that it's the first result on Youtube if you type in 'Edgiest Song ever'.) But what exactly was the trailer evoking? Breath of the Wild. It was obvious, they practically copied that trailer's storyboard beats, only they lacked the bit when the music goes still and then releases into a swelling orchestral suite that never fails to swoon the heart. (Maybe they'll save that for the gameplay trailer.)

Unfortunately we're sitting in that stage where what we can definitively say about the game and what it will contain is decidedly limited, SEGA want to keep this as close to the chest as possible and haven't even come out to officially call the game open world. (The marketing does use the functionally meaningless phrase 'Open zone' however, so we can call that proof enough.) All we can be certain about is that the game will take place over a set of landmasses called the Starfall Island, which I guess forms the set-up for biome segmentation typically expected from 'zones' in our Sonic games. Also, we know that this will herald a return of the 'entire' Sonic voice cast, not too long after they were all apparently recast for some Sonic TV show or something. Or rather, we know that Sonic, Tails and Amy are back but come on... you can't have a game with Amy in it and just not include Knuckles, that'd be silly.

As for what we want from the game- well that's not much... we just want a world with comparable depth and scale to Hyrule. Okay, that's likely not possible, but given that SEGA is at least looking that way for inspiration we can least hold hope that they're taking this seriously. And why wouldn't they, this is a big step for the world of Sonic that is no doubt going to turn all heads, even those who wrote off the franchise years ago are folding their arms, leaning back and saying "Okay, lets see what you got!" I want to see challenge areas, I want to see natural hubs, I want to see character based side quests, I want exploration zones that reward- what I don't want to see is a single lesson of open world design that has been pioneered by Ubisoft in the past 10 years- god, no maps full of meaningless icons next to checklists. (Be better than all that, SEGA!)

Of course, all this influx of hope in the Sonic fandom does conveniently slide in to wash away the bitter disappointment of SEGA breaking up with Sonic Mania's creators. (At least it does for everyone else, clearly not so much for me.) I just think it's kind of grim to discard creators who did so much for you that they built up the plot device of your big 3D game in their big 2D game, do you know how long it had been since any Sonic title had connecting story elements, they did you a damn service! I suppose Frontiers means an official end to the kind of 'have your cake and eat it' era of 2D and 3D Sonic crossing over, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, I just wish it didn't have to come with the axing of 2D Sonic in his entirety. Seeing as we have until December next year for this game to be inevitably delayed, I suppose we can expect to hear more at E3. (If it doesn't show up at E3, just scrub the game from your calendar because it will not make it out in 2022.)