![]() Or sometimes it can just be pointless like fishing. Sometimes it feels out of place and doesn’t match how Sonic controls, like Cyberspace and most mini games. Sometimes the variety is good, like with the space invaders-style mini game and the island bosses. They couldn’t just have the open zone gameplay, they have to have cyberspace, supersonic titan fights, fishing, and random mandatory minigames. This kind of padding and unintuitiveness seems to permeate the entire game. If you decide you want to change how the speed and rings are divided you need to leave the NPC that deals with those stats and go to the seed NPC, which makes little sense. ![]() It quickly becomes tedious to do and I ended up rarely bothering to actually upgrade either stat. Unlike the seed NPC which automatically upgrades both stats to the max availability, you have to run through several lines of dialogue for each Kocu trade. The Kocu NPC doesn’t feel particularly playtested however. Across each island are two NPCs, one who accepts seeds and one for the Kocu. What is annoying is the method of how you raise the stats. I feel like just one collectible to be used on every stat would be better, but it hardly detracts from the overall experience. Seeds raise their respective power and defense stats, and returning Kocu can raise either speed or rings. For example, Sonic has four stats that can be raised: speed, rings, power, and defense. Lots of collectibles isn't necessarily bad, but some feel unnecessary. There will probably be some Kocu, the local rocky inhabitants, for you to grab up as well. At the end of each open zone platforming segment you might find a portal gear, a vault key, a power seed, a defense seed, some fishing tokens, or some memory tokens. Every encounter is different and I think it was smart to set them up in this way as it is far more engaging than the combat itself. Over time bosses become more complex and the combat reveals itself to be more about solving a movement puzzle or platforming challenge to hurt the boss. At first I was underwhelmed by the combat, as the game’s first encounters simply boil down to pressing the same button a few times until you win. Combat is surprisingly fluid, albeit simplistic. As previously touched on, the first leg of that is my favorite aspect of the game. The gameplay loop for most of the game is to run around the world killing minibosses to collect gears, using the gears to enter cyberspace levels to collect keys, using keys to collect Chaos Emeralds, and using the emeralds to beat the island’s boss. It is unlikely more than a few seconds will ever be spent in the world without the option to do something. Each bit of platforming is set up in a way where you can launch off the ending and either straight into the middle of another section or the start of one. Each island is covered in all sorts of rails and bounce pads to create mini platforming stages. Of course, thoughtless running isn’t all there is in the game. The controls take some getting used to, but once you do it becomes addictive to run across the islands without a thought. Sonic Frontiers excels at giving me both. I’m also quite fidgety and am always looking for games where it’s fun to simply run around the world. Regardless of the game, I love feeling fast and hate slow gameplay. This new system is by far the highlight of Sonic Frontiers. This is effectively an open world Sonic game just with the open world cut into five islands, or zones. Sonic Frontiers features the franchise's new “open zone” gameplay system.
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