#I haven't posted about Bayo 3 cuz I'm still so mad by what they did with it

[gravedice]

okay, some quick sonic frontiers thoughts

If you like Sonic, you'll like this game. If you you're not already a fan of Sonic, I don't think you'll enjoy it.

The story is fun, it's not particularly well written or executed, which is kind of par for the course in a Sonic game, but what I think is important is that I wish it was written better or executed better? It has a lot of potential, which most Sonic games can't say. Usually the story is very one dimensional, but it tried super hard to be multidimensional.

The game play is your normal glitchy weird physics Sonic gameplay. Which I'm not complaining about, but they really over engineered this game. There's like, 7 different collectibles all used for different things, when they didn't need that to be the case. They could have easily only used like, 3 or 4 things. Like, there's four stats of Sonic's you can upgrade, there's 3 collectibles you can use to upgrade them, and there's two different guys you give these collectibles to in order to upgrade these stats. It really should have only been one guy, especially because one will let you reallocate the stat levels that the other guy gives you, they should have just been the same guy.

My biggest point of contention with this game is the collectibles. You're given an expansive world to explore. Normally with this set up you'd have X number of items to collect that are scattered around, which finding these items would reward you for exploring. But any items you can get from exploring, you can also get by not exploring. There was a point near the end of my run where I actually had to do some hunting for some items, and it's cuz I got a little lazy and was ignoring things, but otherwise you don't need to explore the game at all, you can just go from mission objective to mission objective.

A lot of these collectibles are marked on the map too, which at first I was trying to check all of them off on the map, and trying to 100% things, but eventually realized that my efforts were useless, and that the game didn't care if I checked this off the map or not, and that the optimum way to play the game was just doing the mission objectives.

Which, once I stopped trying to explore and stopped trying to collect everything, and just followed the mission objectives, the game got way more enjoyable for me. I still tried to fill the map in, because that unlocks fast travel, and I still tried to S rank all the cyberspace tracks cuz they were fun traditional Sonic gameplay, but the main point they tried to make for this game was it's open world, and the open world was unnecessary.

And there's also like, a blood moon type event where the enemies respawn, but they added in falling star chunks you can pick up that activate a slot machine that takes up an important chunk of the screen so you can't comfortably do anything else when this is happening. There's a lot in this game that is begging for your attention, and too many things that forcefully stop the game and say LOOK AT ME, and this is the worst example cuz you can't just walk away from it.

Final thoughts, the game is just majorly over engineered. Like they kept trying to expand the scope of it and got lost in the sauce. It's got a lot of charm, and it was nice seeing them attempt to take flat Sonic characters and give them depth and drive. They seemed to indicate in the story that we might get spin offs with Amy, Tails and Knuckles, but that could have just been them giving them the feel of depth and not actually hinting at anything.

I'd be tempted to replay it at this point, tbh.