New Review: Better than I ever expected it to be, Sonic Frontiers is a fun, addictive, and fully-realized Open Zone Sonic concept that easily approaches greatness

 

Even after over thirty years in existence, Sonic can still manage to surprise. Taking bold cues from modern open world games and incorporating them firmly with boost-style 3D Sonic gameplay, Sonic Frontiers is a game that, despite numerous cut corners and odd storytelling, is a real crowd-pleaser of an action-adventure game. After the almost shockingly underwhelming Sonic Forces, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that Sonic Team is, thankfully, still capable of developing not just a competent entry in the long-running series, but a nearly great one.

The game begins with Sonic and his friends becoming separated, with the blue mascot finding himself alone on a deserted island, and it’s easy at first to spot Frontiers’ obvious Breath of the Wild influences, from the somber piano music to the atmospheric flourishes that hit you almost from minute one. While I feel it would have been better and helped Frontiers feel more original to have had a graphics style and art direction more in the style of the Sonic Universe than the Legend of Zelda, the game still finds a way to differentiate itself in a pretty major way from other open world titles, and a couple hours in, I was fully able to understand what Sonic Team was attempting with their “open zone” concept, and it’s one that, for the most part, completely won me over.

There’s something so addictive about the flow of gameplay with your arrival on each of Sonic Frontiers’ five islands, four of which are fully-realized massive open world playgrounds. (One of them is a bit of a cop out, but is at least pretty fun as far as cop outs go.)  A mission marker guides you to where the game suggests you go next to progress the story, but you can explore the islands and accomplish your goals however you see fit. Similarly to the likes of Breath of the Wild and Immortals: Fenyx Rising, there’s a lot of inherent fun in the idea of completing an objective to fill in a portion of your map, allowing you to see what each area has to offer and exploring it. In the case of Sonic Frontiers, you complete bite-sized puzzles, most of which are simple but fun exercises, and the feeling of satisfaction upon then seeing your visible map expand is hard to put into words but it’s one thing that makes this formula so compelling. Frontiers goes a step further by then changing the world itself, adding a series of roller coaster-like grind rails to the areas that you Reveal, making traversing the island as you fill in your map even faster.

The controls feel great and very fluid, and while Frontiers still uses the boost mechanics that have become fairly tiresome in other recent modern Sonic entries, somehow the open zone setting suits them very well, and getting around, solving puzzles, zipping across the islands on speed boosts and grind rails, along with fighting the various enemies, all feels, for the most part, nearly perfect.  Though the traditional Sonic “levels” exist in the form of the Cyber Space segments (more on those a little later) they’re a fairly small portion of what Sonic Frontiers has to offer, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t miss them as much as I thought I would. In a sense, the world you explore feels almost like a giant Level, and though you follow the same formula upon arriving on almost every island, the feeling of progression, from defeating mini-bosses, to completing the Cyber Space levels, to filling in your map, to leveling up your character, to talking to your friends to progress the story, it all flows very well and feels not only addictive but truly fun.

Cyber Space levels are the closest Sonic Frontiers comes to featuring your typical end-to-end Sonic stages, and though many of them are fairly short, and they all use the same (re-used) visual templates, their platforming is surprisingly fun and very well-paced, with your goal not only to just reach the end of the stage but to complete various objectives, none of which feel like a chore and the short length of the stages works very well in this sense. The music, too, during many of these stages, is almost unspeakably awesome.

Upon collecting all the chaos emeralds, you fight a massive boss encounter before clearing the island and getting to move to the next one. These bosses are huge and are generally fairly fun to play, though there are some frustrations associated with them that I wish had been addressed. You fight each boss as Super Sonic, which means you have a time limit, as the amount of rings you have depletes second-by-second. It’s important therefore to go into each boss battle with a full collection of rings, and dying on a boss and having to retry it doesn’t save this progress, forcing you to collect the rings (and then having to journey back to the boss encounter) all over again. The bosses also include something that I really wish video games would abandon by now, which is the Sudden Death QTE. Yes, failing those dumb QTEs will cause you to lose the boss fight and have to start it all over again, which is as frustrating as it sounds.

As far as puzzles are concerned, most of those featured are quick and fun, though there’s a very difficult puzzle towards the end of the first island that needs to be completed before you can fight the boss, and it’s such a tedious puzzle that I could easily see many, especially younger fans, quitting the game right there and never going back to it, which would be a real shame because it’s the only such puzzle in the whole thing and it happens so early in the story.

As far as the story goes, it’s pretty nonsensical and difficult to follow, eventually reverting to a strange series of flashbacks in a made-up language starring characters who you really don’t get to care much about. The moments with the Sonic characters interacting with each other at least fare a little better, and the series really has come a long way from the days of amateurish voice acting and strange dialogue that used to hamper the modern entries. Oddly though, while the acting’s mostly solid, some of the key roles were recast for unknown reasons, and even the voice actors who stayed on (such as Roger Craig Smith as Sonic) seem to have been instructed to give subdued, “more serious” performances. It all sounds a little weird and had I not known that Roger Craig Smith reprised his role, I’d have assumed that Sonic was being voiced by someone else, given how different the character now sounds. That said, the frequency of the cutscenes and the presence of the overall narrative itself is much greater than I was led to believe from the trailers, which is a good thing and keeps things interesting and well-paced, even if the story being told is, frankly, pretty bad. And the lack of a single boss fight against Eggman is also a little weird, though the character does play a big role in the storyline.

Really Sonic Frontiers’ only major stumbles (aside from the somewhat frustrating boss mechanics) are the obvious development short cuts. Whether budgetary or because Sonic Team didn’t have the time that they needed, evidence of cut corners rear their heads pretty regularly. One of the chaos emeralds you have to collect is basically given to you by each boss, while the enemy types and mini-bosses you face are limited to only a couple per island that you fight over and over again. You’ll fill in Sonic’s skill tree long before the game ends, and the Cyber Space zones aren’t given identities of their own, re-using assets from Sonic Generations and only having a couple variations (Chemical Plant, Green Hill Zone, etc.) It’s too bad because the Cyber Space zones are a lot of fun, and it’d have been cool if they were differentiated from each other by being fully-realized Levels, instead of re-using tired backdrops. Four of the islands look very similar to each other, even though they all play quite differently in terms of exploration, with only the desert really standing out from the pack on a visual level. The fourth island, as mentioned earlier, is basically filler and not at all like all the other ones in terms of things to do and exploration. Pop-in and framerate hitches are pretty rampant (on the PS4 version) and though not as big a deal as I thought they’d be, they do make the game feel a little rough around the edges. The ending, too, really disappoints, with a forgettable final boss that’s far easier than all the others, while the final cutscenes feel incredibly rushed as well. The ending does save itself in literally its final 10 seconds before the credits roll, with an emotional moment that comes across as meaningful, even if everything else feels like it’s on fast-forward.

It should be noted that playing on Hard mode unlocks an additional little “boss fight” during the final boss, but other than the game bizarrely cutting away from the fight on Normal and Easy and jumping right into the ending, I think people who would rather play Sonic Frontiers on Normal or Easy should rest assured that the Hard Mode-exclusive boss is more of a mini-game than a boss, doesn’t add much of anything to the game, and can be played after the fact by switching to Hard Mode after beating the game and trying the boss again. Still, the whole concept and execution of a “final boss” fight exclusive to one difficulty setting comes across as lazy and poorly thought out.

But gripes aside, Sonic Frontiers is a game that’s so much better than I ever thought it would be. It controls like a dream 90% of the time, the mechanics of bouncing around the environments and the Cyber Space levels feel refined and nearly perfect, and the wide array of things to do on each island and the freedom you’re give to do them, not to mention some incredibly good music and solid (if repetitive) graphical presentation, make Sonic Frontiers a near-great game. Had the Cyber Space levels been fully-realized levels and given their own identities, had the game not cut so many corners in terms of mini-bosses and visual design, and had the final boss and ending not been such a (mostly) let down, we’d be looking at a true Sonic classic. But Sonic Frontiers comes close enough and, I have to say, is such a near-great game in its own right, that it’s one I’d fully recommend to fans of the series and one that I’d even encourage non-fans who might be interested to check out. This iteration might not get the critical recognition that it deserves, but next time, if Sonic Team continues down this path, we might have something even more special.

4/5

Note; this review is based on the PS4 version.

New Review; Correcting the record on Grand Theft Auto V, a game I was wrong about all those years ago

 

There have been times where I’ve been completely wrong with my opinion on a video game, especially a video game that seems to be beloved by the rest of the world. In certain cases, my opinion changed upon giving the game another chance in the form of an HD Remaster, where various graphical boosts and quality of life improvements, along with maybe reduced expectations, have allowed me to love games that I previously struggled to get into.

Grand Theft Auto V on the Xbox 360 was a game that, for whatever reason, I majorly disliked upon its release in 2013, and for nearly 10 years, was the only modern Grand Theft Auto game that I’d never finished, my Xbox 360 Red Ringing as I neared the end of the game resulting in me having to watch the rest online. It was weird, as a huge fan of Rockstar Games and their iconic GTA series, that I didn’t like GTA V, and though my thoughts at the time were undoubtedly sincere, I have to admit, upon finally giving the game another shot nearly 10 years later, that I had no idea what I was talking about.

GTA V is of course a great game, one that has been beloved for nearly a decade and has remained a top-seller for nearly a decade. It still has its flaws, and though I haven’t gone back and re-read my review of the 360 version of the game before writing this one, I do remember some of what I wrote, and those flaws are still intact. But Grand Theft Auto V is an atmospheric, exciting, incredibly fun, and visually striking game that presents its city of Los Santos and its wild surroundings in a loving, very detailed way. Though it carries several of the weaknesses common in games from the 7^th generation of consoles, it in many ways stands above its fellow open world adventures from that area and largely holds up incredibly well today.

Grand Theft Auto V is unique so far for the series in that it stars 3 playable characters who you can switch between on the fly. You can do this when exploring the open world, each character often having their own available missions at any given time, even if the game more or less dictates which character ultimately needs to be selected in order to progress through the main story. During the missions, which often take the form of multi-part heists, the characters can also be switched between, all of this putting a fun spin on the typical GTA proceedings. GTA V may not really rock the boat in any major way in terms of the series’ famous formula, but changes such as the multiple playable characters and the frequent heists and setups help it to stand out, while returning a lot of the craziness and wackiness that was in short supply in the far more grounded Grand Theft Auto IV.

The game begins with three characters in the middle of a heist mission, something along the lines of a tutorial, and admittedly offers a less-than-impressive first impression; the grimy interior corridors, lack of awareness as to who the characters are, and the lack of ability to save for something like the first 30 minutes of the game feel like just as much of a bad start as they did to me on the Xbox 360. Once you do get set loose into the open world though, the magic of Rockstar’s incredible visuals and art direction, along with their great talent for immersive music and atmosphere, takes immediate center stage.

You play as Michael, a retired bank robber-turned family man, along with Franklin, a young man who repossess cars in South Los Santos, and of course Trevor, a deranged and truly psychotic individual who does have a certain charm to him that was completely lost on me the first time I played through the game. Each character is given their own fairly comprehensive setup before they all eventually team up, but admittedly the narrative doesn’t treat them all equally, with Trevor and Michael having a history together that ultimately plays a big role in the game’s events, while Franklin gets, without a doubt, the short end of the stick. His character’s likable and I was generally interested in his life and his friends, but unfortunately every time I switched to him, his map always seemed almost empty, without much to really do, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that GTA V’s really Michael and Trevor’s show.

Certain flaws like that do exist throughout Grand Theft Auto V, and they aren’t flaws that ruin the game in the same way that I once thought they did, but they come across as development oversights that I’m surprised this massive team didn’t catch. The driving controls and physics are all over the map, with driving greatly sped up from its sluggish handling in GTA IV, but cars still spin out with alarming frequency, and there’s no consistency whatsoever as to which types of objects you can run over and which ones will stop you completely in your tracks. It’s a true testament to the quality of the rest of the title that frustrating driving controls, despite cars playing a huge role in the proceedings, don’t hurt the overall game too much, even though they have the potential to.

Simple actions that could be done with the press of a button are instead given multi-step control prompts, leading me to constantly have to remind myself how to shoot from a vehicle, or how to check the current radio station, or how to change my weapon. It’s something that was common in the 7^th console generation and GTA V definitely reminded me of it. Other little things, like character conversations while driving continuing on long after you’ve reached your destination, feel surprisingly sloppy, as it forces anyone who wants to hear the whole conversation to sit at the location and wait for it to end before exiting the car and proceeding to the mission, making me wonder why they didn’t better match the length of the conversations to the expected drive time. The game can also be frustratingly unclear as to what exactly it wants you to do, especially during any section that involves flying a plane or a helicopter, and Rockstar seems to under-estimate how difficult certain things are, such as in a particular mission where you have to land a plane, and in another where you have to drive a motorcycle on top of a train. That the game isn’t more forgiving during missions like these makes them frustrating in a way that I don’t think was intended by the development team.

The characters, though, I found to be genuinely likable this time around. Michael and his horrible family are a constant source of laughs, while Trevor, terrifying as he is, managed to win me over, at least in a sense. Franklin’s under-utilized but he serves as a decent anchor between his two crazy cohorts, and the way they all function together is compelling. The argument can certainly be made (and I’m sure it’s one I made back in 2013) that the cartoonish characters are a step down from the more realistic, human casts of GTA IV and GTA: San Andreas, but I find myself able to appreciate the entertainment value of GTA V’s characters too. Maybe as I get older, it’s becoming easier for me to appreciate things for what they are instead of wishing they could be something else, or maybe I didn’t appreciate them with an open mind back then, it’s hard to say. But I did feel a genuine affection towards these characters by the end of the game, though it has to be said that one of the three available endings is significantly better than the other two.

Where GTA V shows its age is mostly in the size of its world. The size of the map is absolutely huge, but the portions that exist outside of the city of Los Santos dwarf those of the game’s signature city by such a huge margin that it has the effect of making Los Santos feel so much smaller than intended. The game as a result takes you outside the city so frequently that it makes it feel less developed than the cities in other Grand Theft Auto titles, whether or not that’s actually the case. It’s a design choice that makes sense in what was a notoriously difficult generation for open world games, and it undoubtedly made it possible to release the game before that generation ended, but it’s the one thing that stood out the most to me as someone revisiting the game all these years later. If you have any familiarity with the city of Los Angeles it’s hard not to notice how much smaller Los Santos feels than the real thing, with the omission of the San Fernando Valley entirely, along with your ability to clearly see the Downtown skyline from the Santa Monica Pier, both standing out in a pretty major way.

Otherwise though, GTAV does a great job at capturing the set and setting of LA, or at least, the LA as it existed in 2013, when the game originally released. Though Los Santos feels quite small by today’s open world standards, it still leaves a great impression by the game’s end, as do at least two of the three main characters. It may not have the emotional weight of some of the other GTA installments, but its over-the-top craziness and top-notch atmosphere, along with many incredibly fun missions, help GTAV stand out despite its occasional frustrations and strange game design oversights.

This is obviously not a review that’s going to get much attention now in 2022, as almost everyone’s played the game by now, but it’s a review that I felt compelled to write, if for no other reason than to correct the record left by my review of the original GTAV back in 2013, a game which I was entirely wrong about. Though it’s always better when studios focus on new releases as opposed to remasters, the beauty of remasters is that they can give games second chances, and in my case, more often than not, the second chance has allowed me to appreciate a title that I just didn’t back when it originally came out.

Not a perfect game, but truly a great one.

 

4/5

Note; This review is based on the PS4 version

New Review: Repetitive, ugly, and incredibly boring, No More Heroes 3 is probably the final nail in the coffin for Grasshopper Manufacture.

Repetitive, ugly, and incredibly boring, No More Heroes 3 just might be the final nail in the coffin for me as far as any hopes that Grasshopper Manufacture will ever go on to recapture the magic that made them such an interesting studio during the era of Killer 7 and the original No More Heroes.

It hurts to say, especially as someone who was once a huge fan of Suda 51 and his crazy, stylistically violent games, but I haven’t enjoyed anything his studio’s put out since 2008.

There were glimpses here and there of fun and cooky artistry in games like Shadows of the Damned and the James Gunn-penned Lollipop Chainsaw, but to increasingly diminishing results and not nearly enough to have overcome their rough gameplay and lack of depth and polish. After trying twice but being unable to force myself through the unbearable Killer is Dead, I’d all but written off the indie studio, though I couldn’t help but give them one more shot with No More Heroes 3, which promised the return of Suda 51 to the Director’s chair, (albeit as a co-director) something he hadn’t been for the majority of Grasshopper’s output following the original No More Heroes.

On a very surface level, No More Heroes 3 feels more like a sequel to the original game than to the far more limited No More Heroes 2; returning from the 1^st game is the ability to explore the world of Santa Destroy, the GTA-like hub where you travel from place to place and embark on missions and side missions. You are Travis Touchdown, the incredibly nerdy and angry main character who, as is series tradition, must move up the ranks of Assassins by challenging and killing various bosses, each complete with their own backstories, the pre-boss conversations with Sylvia also returning after their absence in the previous game. As with the original No More Heroes, you spend time in between assassination missions taking on odd jobs around town to earn the money necessary to qualify for the missions themselves. No More Heroes 3 replaces the traditional pre-boss hack and slash levels with individual combat missions scattered throughout the open world that also have to be completed to unlock the Ranked Assassin Missions, which now just takes you directly to the boss fight. It’s a choice that makes sense in the context of today’s open world games, but one that ultimately makes this third installment feel more slow-paced than the others. Still, it’s something different, and the studio bringing back many of the features that were removed from No More Heroes 2 was a reason for me to be somewhat interested in giving this a shot.

The results, unfortunately, are depressingly bad. Almost from minute one, I found myself struggling to follow the lengthy, jumpy, confusing cutscenes that open the game up. Once I finally did catch up and manage to figure out exactly what was going on, I was able to somewhat appreciate the interesting dynamics between the game’s villains, and there are a couple somewhat humorous moments throughout, though the majority of No More Heroes 3’s attempts at humor land with a thud. Sadly however, despite this being the first return of Travis Touchdown (spinoff aside) to his own proper game in over 11 years, I was hit with a wave of indifference from almost the minute the game began. The open world’s ridiculously fragmented into tiny, poorly-designed pieces that are unlocked like levels and just aren’t any fun to explore. The “alien” theme’s both generic and under-developed at the same time, while the graphics are bathed in a dark, dreary, blue tint that makes this easily the worst-looking numbered No More Heroes game yet, despite it being the first in HD. Santa Destroy in the original game had a bright, fun, cel shaded summer vibe to it, but the open world in No More Heroes 3 (where you spend the majority of your time) feels entirely devoid of life and atmosphere outside of the Perfect World section of the map, and never managed to immerse me or develop any sort of sense of place.

Everything, presentationally, about No More Heroes 3 feels like the wrong choice, from the constant stream of in-game credits sequences that begin and end each “chapter” to the bland, forgettable and often downbeat music that plays throughout. The homages to the 8-bit era that this series has always dabbled in are cranked up to 11 here, and serve as a complete distraction. The deliberately pixelated radar in the corner of the screen is so hard to use that I almost always had to pull up the full-size map just to have an idea of where I was going.  This map strangely displays a huge chunk of the world that you’re never actually allowed to visit, and the load times that take place through all of this feel abrupt, disruptive, and excessive. The game (which lacks an auto-save feature) once froze on me at the worst possible time, forcing me to repeat about a half hour of playtime over again. Chapters are bookended with pointless cutscenes featuring Travis and one of his friends sitting in his living room discussing Takashi Miike movies. In addition to the scenes being presented with all the visual flair of having been recorded off a security monitor, the dialogue between the two characters isn’t funny at all and doesn’t even seem to be attempting to be, and as someone unfamiliar with Miike’s movies, I of course had little idea what they were discussing. Even if I had, though, their analysis is incredibly shallow and not particularly interesting; I get the sense that I could find more in-depth analysis from high schoolers on a Miike-devoted message board. The payoff from having to sit through these puzzling cutscenes comes far too late to have been worth the effort.

That isn’t to say that everything about No More Heroes 3 is horrible; the combat system remains fun and fast, albeit veering into frustration a little too often and easily, just like it did in No More Heroes 2 and all of Grasshopper Manufacture’s games since. Still, battles are chaotic and visually striking, and the leveling up system for Travis offers a solid amount of customization. Boss encounters still don’t have the depth, personality, or the extravagance of the fights from the original game, but they’re more or less on par with its sequel in providing interesting personalities and solid gameplay variety. As with its predecessors, motion controls are integrated perfectly, in a way that isn’t even close to being excessive but one that feels so satisfying.

The quirky odd jobs, however, are tedious and lack any of the charm of either previous No More Heroes game. After trying a couple of them, I decided to focus entirely on combat challenges as a means to earn money instead. The characters you encounter around the world are strange in the usual Suda 51 way but lack a lot of the charm that existed in the original, with No More Heroes 3 often feeling like it’s trying desperately to grasp something that the studio just doesn’t seem to have in them anymore.

This is most clear in the storyline that propels the adventure forward. Every tone that it strikes just hits the wrong note; Travis seems angry and unpleasant, almost all of the likability he had in the first two games somehow nonexistent. The villains are both too menacing to be truly funny and yet too funny to be taken seriously, and the side characters (especially Shinobu) are given so little to do that I wondered why they were even included. The writing itself is oftentimes incomprehensible and never as funny as it seems to think it is. Travis yelling out the names of various fruits every 10 seconds in battle is supposed to be funny because of its randomness, but weirdness just for the sake of weirdness isn’t automatically deep or funny; it actually has to go somewhere, and No More Heroes 3’s just doesn’t. As with many modern GHM games, cutscene after cutscene ends with thoughts of “huh. That was weird,” with the studio seeming to think that weirdness alone makes them profound, or hilarious, or innovative. But as with all of their modern games, they simply come across as weird, but little else.  

It’s sad how far Grasshopper Manufacture seems to have fallen. As someone who loved the original No More Heroes and the divisive Killer 7 before it, nobody was hoping more than me that No More Heroes 3 would see a return to at least some of that former glory. Unfortunately, the aggressively confusing storyline, tonal inconsistencies, terrible visuals and presentation, a boring, soulless world along with repetitive, unexciting gameplay ends up leaving almost nothing for me to recommend about No More Heroes 3, even with a solid and usually fun combat system. I do hope that the studio can somehow manage to find its sweet spot in the HD era at some point, but I worry that they just don’t have the amount of people, the budget, or the focus to pull it off. As a former fan of Suda 51’s strange and inventive games, it’s a difficult pill to swallow, but something that just seems to be, for now, the way it is.

2/5