Whenever I fire up the Dreamcast with the first Sonic Adventure in the disc slot, I remember vividly how it felt to play in 1999. Its ambitious story, told through 3-D action platforming stages connected by larger "adventure fields" to explore, ensnared me till I reached its conclusion. I remember feeling a bit disappointed when Sonic Adventure 2 returned to a linear structure. While Sonic '06 promised a return to the Adventure formula, it famously failed to deliver.

So playing Sonic Frontiers doesn't feel to me like "Sonic meets Breath of the Wild." It feels like the true successor I've been waiting 23 years to play.

The "adventure fields" are now "open zone" islands. Gone are the mannequin-like NPCs, replaced instead with stuff to do... puzzles to solve, enemies to challenge, items to collect, springboards to bounce on and rails to grind. The purpose is the same... to connect levels and provide a sense of exploration... but their scope makes them massively more fun and interesting.

And the "action stages" are now "Cyber Space stages." As much as the open areas have expanded, these have contracted... and they're all the better for it. Completing each stage's checklist of objectives in just a minute or two achieves an addictive quality similar to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2: I could not rest till I'd mastered them all.

The story is dark but not dour, the script is arguably one of the series' best, the boss battles are wonderfully epic, there are many really fun acknowledgements of the franchise's history, the trophies are reasonably attainable, and the soundtrack slaps.

Sure, there's a lot of pop-in. There's also some familiar weirdness with momentum and certain lock-on targets. And I'm not sure why Sonic's voice is deeper now.

All minor quibbles! This is easily my favorite 3-D Sonic since the turn of the century. I couldn't stop smiling from beginning to the end.

Sonic Frontiers follows Sega's traditional of pushing out woefully unfinished games in time for the holiday season. Make no mistake, this is a hot mess. It's also the best hot mess Sonic Team have made since 1999.

Turning Sonic in to a spectacle fighter lands shockingly well. Enemy encounters are kinetic and well designed. They've been a highlight thus far, which was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately the platforming doesn't fare as well. There's serious issues with getting Sonic where you're trying to aim for, and trying to target loops in mid-air is needlessly imprecise and frustrating. The controls being designed for large environments makes them feel bad in the linear stages, and I'm not sure why the Sonic Generations component is even here. Frontiers could have easily gotten away with only being an open world game, and I think would have been better for it.

While the quality of the prerendered cutscenes is shamefully poor, in-engine gameplay looks phenomenal. Sonic feels right at home in the realistic environments in a way that Mario couldn't manage. It feels like this is what the team wanted Sonic Adventure to look like, and technology has finally caught up. Despite frustrating pop in issues and lack of extensive visual options, the presentation is very polished - and I've already said 'woah' out loud more than once.

There's some serious fanservice, and it feels like the game was designed with great care. Turning Sonic into an open world RPG is a big trick to pull off and I think they did a great job. The problems with Frontiers really come down to not being ready to ship. In principle, it's an incredibly cool new direction for the series - and I really hope we'll see a sequel that can expand on these ideas with less jank.

How much enjoyment you get out of Sonic Frontiers will largely depend on how big of a Sonic fan you are. If you're willing to meet the game half way, there's a lot to like here. It's not the best brawler, platformer, or open world game - but the way those elements combine is delightful. For the first time in years, Sonic feels imaginative and forward-thinking rather than a relic trying to catch up with modern times. It's not a perfect Sonic Adventure 3, but it's a better one than I was expecting - and I'm really looking forward to playing more.

To give some background on my perspective, I'm a bit of a lapsed Sonic fan. I was a Nintendo kid in the '90s, so I missed the boat on the original 2D era. I didn't get into the series until Sonic Adventure 2 hit the GameCube, and it made me an instant fan. Super Mario Sunshine was cozy and euphoric, but to my tween counterpart, it had nothing on the sheer cool factor of Adventure 2's fantastic rock soundtrack and flashy visuals. Sonic Adventure DX and the Sonic Advanced games further drew me into the series, and Sonic Mega Collection let me dive into the awesome classic Sonic games that I had missed.

After that point, though, things got a bit rocky. I was lukewarm to Sonic Heroes, and Sonic Rush didn't catch my attention. Things got worse with Sonic and the Secret Rings, a game I actively disliked. By the time Sonic Colors came around, I was so turned off by the entire series that not even it could keep my attention when I tried to play it. As an older teenager and young adult, no Sonic game could recreate that coolness that had hooked me when I was younger.

Fast forward several years later, and now we have the Switch. Now an adult with some disposable income, I was more willing to give the series another chance. That chance came in the form of Sonic Mania, a game that I thought amazingly recaptured the magic of the Genesis era. Then came Sonic Forces, which recaptured everything that I thought was aggravating and boring about the last 3D Sonic games I had played. After that game, I was fully ready to put the series on ice again.

But then along came Sonic Frontiers. My original intention was to skip this game, but the wildly mixed reception made me so curious that I just had to pick it up. I gave in and bought the game for the Switch, going in with little expectations, and was blown away by what I found. Sonic Frontiers fully recaptures that coolness and fun that I loved about the Sonic Adventure games, and then some. It is every bit of the mess that people may accuse it of being, but it is also a good mess.

Dropping Sonic in open zones that you can freely run around in is insanely freeing. Each zone is full of the bits and pieces that normally make up a Sonic level--grind rails, springs, loop-de-loops, rings, et cetera. The structure of the zones lets you simply enjoy the sheer awesomeness of running fast, while freely gathering collectibles that will progress the game. The level structures have a Super Mario Odyssey feel in that respect. You have to collect tokens that let you advance the story, gears that let you unlock linear Cyberspace levels, which give you keys for unlocking Chaos Emeralds, and so on.

The linear Cyberspace levels are where the game feels most like "old" 3D Sonic, but the short length of these levels usually keeps any kind of frustration from settling in, even though the camera and controls can be a pain during these sections. I ended up enjoying them very much as short breaks from the open zone exploration that makes up most of the game.

The messiness of Sonic Frontiers comes into play in a few ways. This game definitely feels like an experiment for Sonic Team, and as such there are a lot of things being thrown at the wall. The core gameplay works extremely well, but some of the peripheral elements of the game don't fare so well. Combat is greatly expanded in Frontiers, but it still ends up feeling shallow and simplistic. The forced mini games that appear throughout the game completely kill the pace of the experience at many points (With one particularly notable pinball-related case being extremely egregious). The introduction of 2D elements to the open zones in some of the later levels is very annoying, with Sonic becoming randomly locked on to 2D perspectives when all you want to do is run free. The visuals are also a notable weak point, with bland visual design for every zone and widespread pop-in issues.

Despite these issues, Sonic Frontiers was easy for me to appreciate. Sonic Team is trying to reinvent the franchise, and that ambition is infectious even when it's not perfectly executed. The music, bosses and exploration all came together to make this the most enjoyable 3D Sonic game that I've played since the Adventure games. If this is the path that they plan to follow into the future of the Sonic series, then you can count me in for the ride.

Really great game! I was prepared to dismiss this game as 2022's laughing stock... A 3D Sonic game copying Breath of the Wild? Sounded like a joke.

However, Sonic Frontiers is not that. At all. In marketing, the game was described as "open zone" game design. And that's honestly an incredibly apt way to describe it. This isn't a braindead open world map marker hunter, nor is it a 3D platformer collectathon. This is an entirely different beast. This is a game where most of your time will be spent with exploration puzzles - using platforming and movement tech to navigate toward your waypoint while also completing challenges to unlock new pathways. And frankly, that formula WORKS. I don't like open world games, I don't like 3D Sonic... But I love this.

Nyooming around the world and reacting to button prompts, jumping between rails and springs with quick timing, optimizing your speed to clear obstacles... This is so much FUN. It's not a carbon copy of, say, Sonic Generations. This is a different system. The freedom of movement and huge playing fields with tons of options for motion on all three axes greatly improves the formula - relying less on cheap deaths and perfect runs, and more on quick eyes and planning routes.

The bosses and combat in this game are equally phenomenal - and pleasantly accessible. If you want a complex character action game with special move combos, you can do that. But if, like me, you have trouble with mechanics like that, there's an auto-combat system that will let you spam cool moves while focusing on evasion and watching the cool set pieces unfold.

Accessibility also plays into the fishing mini game - if you're bad at traditional 3D Sonic mechanics seen in the cyberspace stages, there's an entire fishing mini game that lets you collect coins found around the world and use them to fish for points that can be redeemed to unlock keys and other trinkets that might otherwise halt progression. If you want the challenge, you have it. If you want to take your time and forage... You can!

Those cyberspace stages though... Those are ROUGH. Some (or all?) of them are lifted straight from past Sonic games, and they are frequently at odds with the controls and mechanics of the open world segments. The cheap deaths and poor camera angles of traditional 3D Sonic games are here in force, and there seems to be an issue with the physics that makes the controls vary wildly moment to moment... Sometimes pushing left on the stick will tilt Sonic to the side, sometime it will throw him wildly to the left, and often off the stage completely. It's messy. Probably 50% of the technical issues I had with the game come with these segments.

But the technical issues, sadly, do not end there. The most aggressively irritating segments of Frontiers come when, for some reason, the game locks you into a 2D plane in a 3D space. This would be fine... If it worked. The automation for this transition is incredibly finicky. Sometimes the camera stays locked to this plane, but the controls do not... So you fly right off the back of the platform. This ALWAYS breaks when the game plays its obnoxious "you are at max rings" animation that plays EVERY SINGLE TIME you hit max rings. This scene breaks the game's automation 100% of the time, and it's incredibly annoying to boot.

Worse still are these "wall running" surfaces Sonic is supposed to be able to cling to and run along. Sometimes these work... Often, they don't. Sonic will often not stick to the surface, and often wind up on top of the floating wall instead of running on its face. These are fundamentally broken, to the extent that I dreaded seeing them.

I also had a boss late in the game that took 5 attempts to defeat. Not because I died, but because the boss got stuck under the map twice, despawned completely while in frame once, and had another instance where its "control tower" disappeared and could not be attacked.

All that being said... These technical issues, while irritating, do not define the game. They really only become a problem in the last 25% or so of the game, and they can still be overcome with patience. I think the game has some issues with automation and programming, but these will hopefully be resolved with time. The game is incredibly ambitious, and I'm honestly shocked the automation works so well as often as it does.

The story is a little scant, but honestly really interesting. Robotnik has a great character arc, Sonic is a likeable hero, and Sage is the best new character in years. This isn't the aggressively edgy "way past cool" era of Sonic... This is something, while not revolutionary, is smarter and more compelling than I could have ever expected from this series.

Overall, Sonic Frontiers is a great time, and there's really nothing else like it. It's a bold and downright fun new direction for the series, and I love it. While I'd love having another Sonic Mania 2, I'd gladly accept another Sonic Frontiers as well. Really recommend this one, with the caveat that it's got some warts.

Sonic Frontiers is another new attempt to bring Sonic games into the 3D space. There are a few really neat ideas here, but the whole formula of Sonic needing to go fast doesn't translate well into an open world 3D space. It's still a pretty fun game if you can look past jank, and thankfully not too long so it won't sidetrack you for too long.

The story here is pretty nonsensical even by Sonic standards. There's something about a cyber space area that some of his friends are trapped in, yet he was transported to some other world that coexists with the cyber world? I don't know. I don't think people out there pick up Sonic games for the story. There's a new character in here with some major implications to Sonic history, but I didn't fully understand it.

Gameplay throws you into these large open world areas (5 open, 1 linear) where initially your map is completely obscured. You must find and complete challenges to obtain materials or collectibles that help you progress the story. Completing these challenges will also make pieces of the map visible. These challenges can be anything from your typical go from point A to point B in a certain amount of time to parrying a large orb shot at you, solving various puzzles, using your dodge to step on a number of lit up platforms in a time limit, etc. Some of these are fun and challenging, others are really wtf and can be completed in a few seconds. There are 5 or 6 portals then in each world that take you to a more old school style of Sonic level where you have to get to the end in a mostly 2D or linear 3D space. Each have a few additional challenges (finish with # of rings, collect all 5 red rings, reach the end in a certain time) to get more of the collectibles needed to advance. Eventually, you will have to face a boss fight at the end of each zone which are "Titans" that typically have some kind of puzzle aspect to complete the battle. These were never too difficult, just frustrating at times as it's not always entirely clear what you need to do. The Titan designs were interesting enough though.

I completed the game in about 16 hours on Normal difficulty. The final boss "fight" and sequence seemed really abrupt and lackluster. Looking it up after the fact, you only get the "true" ending if you complete the game on Hard mode. Unless I was really oblivious, this was never mentioned when selecting the initial difficulty or at any other point throughout so that was really annoying. I'm not going to replay the entire game for an additional boss fight and cutscene. The game itself is pretty dang janky at times. Sonic will try and snap to certain environmental objects when running around whether you want him to or not. This sometimes leads you to just yeeting Sonic off the entire map and needing to load back in (thankfully this is pretty quick at least on PS5). Even though it's a 3D open world game, in some spots the camera forces you into a 2D perspective that you need to get to either end of that little sequence before you can move around in 3D again...even if you can see rings or other areas you want to get to right behind the 2D space. Really weird design choice there. Final complaint there's some crazy graphical pop in at times. For a game relying on speed, this forces you to be running around then often backtracking after you can see where you are actually trying to get to. I heard it was even worse at launch, which I feel would make this near unplayable. It's frustrating now, but at least you can still get through it.

It's a janky, fun distraction I used between major releases and would have not touched this game had it not been on Playstation Plus to play. I'm glad I played it, but more glad that I never purchased the game itself to play it.