Sonic Frontiers, while not perfect, is a breath of fresh air to the 3D Sonic Franchise. However, with a large emphasis placed on Open-World gameplay instead of level based gameplay, how did we get here and is this the future for Sonic games going forward?
The mainline Sonic Games up to this point
I'm not going to sit here and talk about Sonic's "fall" from grace. I've been a huge Sonic fan since early childhood. Playing through Sonic 1-3&K was a huge development to my early video game experiences and perception of video games. One of the best things about the classic trilogy of games was the emphasis replayability. With Sonic's roots being well established in 2D side-scrolling (which was the popular genre of games at the time), classic 2D Sonic games were the format for many years of what Sonic should be. Focusing on just the mainline Sonic games, Sonic 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles and CD gave fans excellent level design with multiple paths and a gameplay time of roughly 3 - 5 hours depending on how much the player invests in fully completing the game.
As with many franchises, the need to adapt to 3D was a crucial step that needed to be done right. Sonic's leap into 3D was official with Sonic Adventure, which focuses a lot on story, a semi-open world and multiple characters giving many different playstyles and experiences. This shift into 3D platforming (for the most part) was further refined in the sequel Sonic Adventure 2, trimming away a lot of the fat, streamlining the gameplay, story and features that 3D Sonic brought. The "Adventure" style of 3D Sonic was simplified even further with Sonic Heroes, taking away most of the multiple playstyles to leave mostly straightforward platforming with a character switching mechanic to solve puzzles and obstacles in the level.
Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is an important title for a myriad of reasons. It was the final game of the "Adventure" style of gameplay and marked the beginning of a different direction for the franchise. I won't mince words, Sonic 06 was bad. Historically bad. So bad it literally was the death of the Adventure formula. Some of the things that marked the "Adventure" formula was an emphasis on story, a level hub overworld, multiple playable characters and the need to make it a "AAA" experience (more on that later). So from the ashes of Sonic 06 a new direction had to be made for the franchise, and with that Sonic Unleashed rose from the ashes.
I think the first thing we realize with Sonic Unleashed is the much smaller emphasis on story and the lack of playable characters. With Sonic Adventure it was a cool aspect to have multiple characters to play with in the new 3D space. Sonic Heroes arguably took this to the extreme level by having 12 playable character in total, even though they were only playable in pairs of 3. One of the conclusions that Sonic Team came to is that the Sonic franchise is cluttered and needs a genuine reboot of the gameplay elements. Sonic Unleased was the start of the "Boost" era as fans called it.
One of the unique elements of the "Boost" era of Sonic games was the insane sense of speed that they brought to the franchise. 2D Sonic was fast sure, compared to other platformers at the time, but it was never an uncontrollable speed. With the "Adventure" era, Sonic was significantly slowed down for the sake of being a controllable character. Sonic needed to be able to explore the hub of Station Square effectively, so Sonic as a character needed to be slower for both explorability and character control. The level design in the Adventure era (on the exception of Heroes, which went for more of a 2D in 3D level design that was mostly linear) expounded on this, having open areas for the player to explore and find secrets in. The Boost era did a way with most of this.
Sonic Unleashed was fast, like really fast. Gone are the open areas, and instead narrow pathways with multiple pathways either up or down, but rarely left and right. With level design like this, the player could focus on learning and quickly adapting to set pieces in the level and quick reactions to access other areas in the level. And with the new "boost" mechanic, Sonic could blaze through these sections at blistering speeds. The term I hear a lot to describe these sections are "rollercoaster" like sections, which I fully agree with. It is a sense of speed and excitement that is rarely found in many other video games.
With the "Boost" era, Sonic Team produced Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations and Sonic Forces. A small detour was with Sonic Lost World. In a seemingly different "sub" era or genre of 3D Sonic, Sonic Lost World slowed down Sonic again, arguably slower than the "Adventure" era and focused more on slower platforming in a mostly linear level design format. Similar to Sonic 06, Sonic Forces marked the beginning of a shift for the Sonic franchise. While Sonic Forces maintained the "Boost" formula, it arguably was the worst use of the formula. Extremely short levels, continued use of "Classic Sonic", and a terrible story all plagued Sonic Forces. Is this what we have to expect for the "big" Sonic game release? What is the solution?
The problem of a "AAA" Sonic game
Please excuse me as I compare the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and the Super Mario franchise. In the 16-Bit era, the term "AAA" didn't exist. Gaming's roots was still very much established in the arcade style of gameplay. Outside of RPGs, it was common for video games to have short, replayable gameplay. Platformers typically had a few hours of gameplay in them, and even shorter if those speedran them. Sonic's gameplay had replayability due to the pursuit of completing the game with a "good" ending by collecting all of the Chaos emeralds as well as finding multiple paths and shortcuts in the levels. In contrast, Mario's platforming adventures instead had a bigger emphasis on "more" levels which were longer experiences due to the much slower gameplay styles.
However the shift to 3D was very different for Sonic and Mario. With Super Mario 3D, there was a big emphasis on large 3D sandboxes with multiple "missions" that could be completed. While the overall level count was smaller than the 2D games, the gameplay length came from exploring these sandboxes, completing all the missions and exploring the hub world of peach's castle. Sonic Adventure took a similar approach in many ways. Sonic Adventure reduced the amount of levels, and instead of having missions for each stage, Sonic Adventure featured multiple playable characters to interact in these levels for different experiences. Sonic Adventure also featured a large hub world but also had two distinct differences to make it a full "AAA" experience. One was the Chao World, which featured a virtual pet system, which encouraged a ton of replay value to the levels as you needed rings for currency and the animals from enemies to power up your Chao. This offered a ton of replayability to these games as fans fell in love with raising chao and competing them in the Chao Races.
The other feature was a large emphasis on Story, which is something till this day that the Mario franchise doesn't focus on. Sonic Adventure's story made it fell like a big deal. With apocalyptic level danger, Sonic Adventure did a fantastic job of putting some level of serious to Sonic's actions and purpose to everyone to the overall story. It really was a cool experience seeing this cast of characters have personality and voice acting and having them interact with each other. More than anything, Sonic Adventure felt like a worthy and full experience when compared to it's temporaries like Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy VII. Sonic Adventure was truly a full package. It wasn't just levels, it was story, it was the hub world, it was the Chao minigame and I think this is an overlooked fact about Sonic's transition into 3D, how fully featured it was.
Sonic Adventure 2 continued the trend of offering tons of content for the player. While the explorable hub world was absent this time around, each level had 5 missions to complete, a greatly expanded Chao World with new forms, new hub area and a new mini game with the Chao Karate mini game, Go-Kart racing mini game, and a full multiplayer mode. Once again Sonic Adventure 2 was a fully featured package with many things for the player to explore and playthrough. Storywise as well, SA2 probably offered the best storyline in the 3D Sonic series.
The next entry however, Sonic Heroes was a step back for the franchise. Gone was the large overarching story, gone was the Chao Garden, and gone was all of the mini games and extra modes. Instead we got a ton of characters teams that play through the same levels albeit with minor gameplay changes. Level design was also significantly different, providing much more linear gameplay and less emphasis on exploration and discovery. The end of the "Adventure" era was with Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, which did go back to more open ended design and multiple playable characters with different playstyles and big story emphasis, however the game was notoriously plagued with bugs, baffling level designs and an honestly unfinished product.
Now before I continue with the "Boost" era of games, I want to put a little attention on the length of these games. The website "How Long To Beat" will be used to give us a baseline for game length. For the sake of simplicity due to multiple re-releases of the Adventure games, I will use the definitive versions of these games (Sonic Adventure DX and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle) and I will use the website's "Main + Sides" metric as I feel like this would be what the average games would fall under. So let's look at some of these metrics:
Sonic Adventure DX: 14.5 Hours to beat (Main + Sides)
Sonic Adventure 2 Battle: 32.5 Hours to beat (Main + Sides)
Sonic Heroes: 18.5 Hours to beat (Main + Sides)
Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): 19 Hours to beat (Main + Sides)
This tells me one thing in particular, these are some meaty games with a ton of content. If you were a Sonic fan at this time, your purchase was justified in terms of content, even if some of that content was objectively bad (Sonic 06). Now for comparison, let's look at the Boost era games:
Sonic Unleashed: 17 Hours to beat (Main + Extras)
Sonic Colors Ultimate: 10 Hours to beat (Main + Sides)
Sonic Generations: 11 Hours to beat (Main + Extras)
Sonic Forces: 6 Hours to beat (Main + Sides)
A HUGE difference in playtimes. The most content in this spread seems to go for Sonic Unleashed, which makes sense as there is a full 3D hub world, and while the "daytime" stages are pretty short, being completed in under 10 minutes even during their first playthrough, the "werehog" or "nightime" stages take up the bulk of the playtime, sometimes reaching over 25 minutes of gameplay for a single stage. The werehog mechanic was very controversial and was removed from the following games, and it shows for gameplay time. Essentially taking out the "fat" from the Boost style of gameplay, that left only quick "daytime" style gameplay with tons of speed and shorter levels. Sonic Unleashed already had a smaller emphasis on story compared to the Adventure era games but the story in Sonic Colors and Generations is almost non-existent and mostly exists only to push Sonic to the next level, not necessarily to tell a good, engaging story.
So gameplay length for a "AAA" Sonic game is now a huge problem. When it comes to the Boost era levels, while they are insanely enjoyable to play, they take up a ton of development resources to create and the actual content lasts minutes for the player, which could take months to create for Sonic Team. The worst of this was seen in Sonic Forces, with stages being as short as a minute even during the first playthrough of the level. Forces offered terrible compensation for the players money even at the reduced $40 pricetag. Something had to be done. These stages take an extremely long time to develop and results in low content. Story couldn't pick up the slack as Sonic Team made the decision to focus less on story in the Sonic games. This didn't help the fact that outside of the character creator in Sonic Forces, all of the Boost era game ONLY featured Sonic as a playable character, so multiple characters couldn't provide different playstyles and more content as such. Also the baffling decision to drop the Chao Garden mechanic also takes a ton of side content out of the 3D Sonic games (seriously, why haven't we had a Chao Garden since Sonic Adventure 2 Battle?). So what was the solution? Sonic Frontiers.
Is Sonic Frontiers gameplay style the best for the franchise going forward?
Sonic Frontiers at first seems polarizing critically. Metacritic puts it firmly at an "average" score at 71, while the user/fan score places it at 8.2. Anecdotally I've seen the fan reception generally very positive for Sonic Frontiers, and I'm one of those fans. Sonic Frontiers is a fresh revival for the Sonic Franchise that I feel was extremely needed. As discussed before, the problem with the "Boost" style of gameplay was that it took a ton of resources and time to produce very little amount of content for the player. While the "Boost" style of gameplay is definitely still present in Frontiers, it isn't the large focus gameplay wise. That honor goes to Frontier's exploration and "open-zone" gameplay. Scattered around the various islands featured in Frontiers are portals to the "cyber-space" which hosts the traditional "Boost" levels, although more so in the Forces style, with them being short bit-sized levels that can be completed in less than two minutes, rather than the expertly crafted and meaty levels seen in Unleashed, Colors and Generations. While this is disappointing, it's made up with the "open-zone" concept.
What Frontiers brings to the table is an open world format dubbed "open-zone" which gives Sonic a huge playground to explore and run around in. While off-putting at first, seeing random grind rails and platforms scattered all across the sky, Sonic Frontiers open-zone has been some of the most fun I've had with 3D Sonic since Generations. Frontiers makes you want to explore the world, find where this grind rail brings you, find out what on the top of that platform and continues to push you forward with exciting design elements. It's extremely addicting and satisfying clearing the map, taking on challenges and besting the large enemy encounters. Yes, the traditional gameplay that defined the Boost era is taking a massive backseat to the overall game, but this open-zone gameplay opens up so many new avenues for the Sonic fan AND solves the problem of content for the games.
Honestly, I think the format Sonic Frontiers established is the best format going forward for the series. I definitely want a better quality levels for the levels and levels with some more length and design, but at this point we know that the Boost levels can only be so much in terms of substance. Frontiers definitely needs some more refinement. Performance wise I think the potential sequel to Frontiers needs to leave the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles behind as the pop-in and poor draw-distance is very distracting to the overall experience. Going forward, 60 FPS should be the bare minimum for performance metrics for the franchise, and for a series so focused on speed, pop-in and draw distance shouldn't be an issue at all. But content wise, Frontiers is it. I've already spent 12 hours in Frontiers and only middle of the third island, so content wise there's no doubt that I've gotten my money's worth. According to How Long To Beat, Sonic Frontiers with the Main story + sides offers 20.5 hours. Compared to Sonic Forces, it's a immense difference of content and something worthy of an "AAA" experience. I'm excited to see what Sonic Team can do with this concept, build on it, and bring forward a new positive era of the Sonic franchise. Now Sonic Team, please for the love of God, bring back the Chao Garden.
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