The Worst Part of Sonic Frontiers

woah

Just popping in to say, the fish you get is actually not random at all, the order you get them is completely set in stone

All of Sega’s budget for Frontiers went into designing photorealistic fish

Frontiers is somehow super bold and confident with the bosses , but it’s also so scared and uncertain of it’s own identity that they have all these shortcuts to make it so you don’t have to play more of the game 🤣

3:13 I swear the glitching water in some of the area’s can to a point to where it starts hurting my eyes.

That octopus did nothing wrong stop accusing him of such things

The idea of Sonic Team not being confident in you wanting to actually play Sonic has become more prevalent in thought. In so many 3D Sonic games they actively find ways for you to have as little control as possible with stuff like dash panels, quick time events, automation and now them either handing the wheel to you and not bothering to make a good controlling Sonic themselves or give you a way to not interact with the platforming whatsoever. It shows a lack of faith in design chops they should have refined by now considering we've had time to refine a 3D controlling Sonic since the mid 90's with 3D Blast. "What, we did a bad job again? Don't worry, we know."

It's funny cos this was a concern I had when I first saw the fishing. But I didn't actually think it would be feasible for the entire game. I just sorta view it as way to skip the game as a sort of, accessibility option I guess. It's basically a "skip" button in the guise of fishing.

12:45 Are you really expecting high speed platforming as a way to advance the story from a Sonic game? Are you nuts or something?

Don’t worry I will stay

Last joke is about Sega Bass Fishing, then plays a song with a sweet bass line

A Sonic-Tuber finally saying DON'T skip over the entire level? I'm so glad you also mentioned the whole "choose your own character control settings" thing is just a bit of a cop-out. "It's not the player's job to make the controls feel good", which is something I said after hearing the idea. When I was working on gameplay mechanics in Assassin's Creed Nexus (programmer), everything from movement speed to the exact slope angle allowed for walking was specified by the designer, and relayed over to level designers to guarantee that levels were built with the exact player movement specs in mind. The player control is part of a game's identity, in fact I'd say player control is almost the entire point of gameplay in a platformer. Having the player fiddle with fundamental character control elements is indicative of "playing it safe", which is completely contrary to the inherent nature of Sonic The Hedgehog!

I think the tedium of catching a lot of fish in a row is what balances things out. On Kronos, you can only really get one to six coins at a time (eight with the two scrolls), and that's really not enough to break anything. For example, getting seven Vault Keys requires 105 Fishing Coins, which is maybe around 25 fish. The alternative is to just play a Cyberspace level for a few minutes and get the same seven keys. The only time it really felt "broken" is when Ouranos gave you 48 Fishing Coins for certain fish. That's three keys, but with 33 keys required to get all six emeralds, that's still 495 Fishing Coins, or about 15-20 fish (as some fish only give you like eight coins on Ouranos). That's definitely a lot of time spent just sitting there playing the same fishing mini-game over and over.

The worst part of frontiers was the fact that Sonic never said Bababooey 😢

i had fun with the fishing cause i was streaming the game in a discord vc with a friend and we were laughing our asses off over the extremely realistic fish models paired with the absurdity of the kind of things you can catch from a simple lake like saltwater fish, alligators, deep sea creatures, the old testament in its original form, and the extremely cartoony robotic fish enemy from the classic games.

do NOT let him play NieR

It's also possible that a player never finds the fishing spots before leaving the island. Especially on Ares where you have to go through a side path in an optional tunnel way off on the edge of the map somewhere.

You're right, my channel name does suck. Cheers for the shoutout! Oh and thank you so much for reiterating why the custom controls are SO bad. It's such a failure on the developer's end.

Nah, the worst part was Chaos Island. The layout of that map made me want to die.

This problem of ‘giving you too much freedom to the point of not needing to do any of the content’ extends to ‘Another Story’, where you are able to cyloop random areas and get the lookout koco, which are used to unlock the lookout towers (you need 15 for all of them), the things that you can get by beating and completing the extra challenges in the cyberspace, which need portal gears from the revamped and hard boss fights you defeat. The fact you can skip all of that just by cylooping a random area to get the objective collectable just makes all the stuff they put into it feel like a waste of time