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 Current Episode  Art will be up shortly! About the Game Sonic Frontiers is a 2022 game released by Sega and is their next mainline Sonic title in their flagship series. When last Yorkshire Tea and I left Sonic, we had just completed Sonic Generations. We found that game to be a lot of fun, combining thrilling 3D sections with interesting 2D levels. But following the release of Generations Sonic lost his way. The maligned Sonic Lost world released in 2013, with attempts by Sega to ape Super Mario Galaxy going wrong as Sonic's speed made the game a confusing experience for everyone involved. A remedy came with the incredible Sonic Mania in 2017, a 2D Sonic game developed by Headcanon and Christian Whitehead aka the Taxman. An incredible fusion of old and new, it presented a new way for Sonic to move into the future. Unfortunately Sega ignored this with Sonic Forces, also released in 2017. Despite a fairly cool create a character system, the game lacked the complexity of level design that had came to characterise boost era Sonic, or any real depth to the 2D stages that were added. And so we arrive after five years of silence, here with Sonic Frontiers. Frontiers places Sonic in an open world, hoping that the wide space afforded will give better form to Sonic's speed. Initially derided as a cheap "Sonic in the Unreal engine" style fangame, Frontiers surprised as previews came back with positive feedback, suggesting that moving in the open world was thrilling and fun. Since its release, Frontiers has got the best reception for a Sonic Team game since Generations, with most critics having fun with the open world, whilst a few others have criticised it for not having enough to do. So how will Yorkshire Tea, the 2D sonic afficionado, and yours truly, the lover of the boost era, fair? I can't tell you the answer to that, but what I can tell you is that we're really excited to find out. About the LP This is a blind Co-op LP. Tea and I will play through the game and when possible (aka when Tea is at my house) we will swap controllers with each level and each life so you can see our different approaches to Sonic's world! Episodes will release on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11pm BST, 6pm EST (or as close to that as I can manage) with cheeky Patreon early episodes for those who are really invested. Art and banners, will, as ever, be handled by the amazing Bifauxnen. Episodes                  Episode 16.33333333333                       Art will be up shortly! Links Our Patreon! - In case you want to support our LPs and see episodes early! (Incidentally this is also the only place where I can actually time video releases, so if I need to delay posting a video here, it will show up on Patreon on its own.) Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Jan 20, 2023 14:45
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 09:25 |
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Breath of the Sonic? I am here for this.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:05
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I am reaching far across these new frontiers for this.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:27
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I want to like this game. I've been a sonic fan since I was a kid, and it was always disappointing to deal with the two steps forward, one step back nature of sonic games since the 3D era. I've heard really mixed things on this one, but haven't watched an LP yet.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:49
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I find the music, while yes you complimented it, to be very subdued in your video. Very environmental, and not the usual bombasticness I've come to expect from Sonic.
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Jan 20, 2023 20:38
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The music does indeed rule, and luckily enough the soundtracks up on streaming services. There's probably spoilers in the track titles. https://music.apple.com/us/album/sonic-frontiers-original-soundtrack-stillness-motion/1652668808
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Jan 21, 2023 03:51
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Wait, they want you to walk to the tip that tells you how to walk?
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Jan 21, 2023 09:42
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SelenicMartian posted:Wait, they want you to walk to the tip that tells you how to walk? It's reinforcing what you already know! Genius!
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Jan 22, 2023 02:11
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Colour me intrigued by this game. The premise sounded like utter nonsense that couldn't possibly work, but after watching the first episode, this actually looks kind of decent?
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Jan 22, 2023 02:40
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Frontiers' music has a few gears it shifts through and they're all really distinct, even by the already varied standards of previous games. The overworld music is very chill and low-key and leans on the orchestra, and even when it's finished adding all the layers it's still very laid back. The cyberspace themes are the opposite, all electronica and disconnected lyrical fragments and every other one loops the amen break. Sometimes an encounter in the overworld has its own theme and that's its own mood. There'll also be cutscenes and plot events, which have their own themes as appropriate. And, of course, there is one more kind of music. Anyway the reason it's so surprising to see that Frontiers is a pretty decent video game even if it's not mindblowing is that the marketing for the game was completely incompetent The first month of reveals consisted of like ten minutes total of the most tedious cuts of contextless exploration footage provided to one guy at IGN who was also given a preview build to play for like an hour but not allowed to record any of it and also not allowed to talk about it until the end of the month after which he had to answer a bunch of reader questions based on his memory alone and then release audio of that muxed over the same footage from before. Meanwhile there were demo builds at expos and people were pretty impressed but Sega banned basically any recording or capture of any of it. The result was that the buzz for the game was squarely in the toilet more or less right up to release.
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Jan 22, 2023 04:35
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That explains a lot. I feel like I saw a lot of very little of this game. Here's an open world where we copied BOTW's cast offs, then put in Sonic elements like grind rails and springs, and then added Sonic and Friends. And that alone didn't grab me. What I've seen here so far though, looks fun.
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Jan 23, 2023 03:42
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Okay, so, notes. 1) The control setting choice is Very Weird. Frontiers notably gives you an astonishing amount of control over extremely fundamental aspects of how Sonic controls, like the turning circle. This seems like it should be very good, except... well, that's the kind of thing that games usually set to a constant and then design around so already you're kind of into the weeds. And the game designers acknowledge this... by using completely different values for these parameters when you're playing an action stage, throwing your personally tuned control scheme in the garbage. I do not understand why they allow so much tuning if this is how they handle the levels that put you to the test. 2) You should shift to Hard difficulty, for precisely one very arbitrary reason which I don't think anyone will explain, possibly because it'll be funnier to reveal when the game's over what the reason was. The general difficulty bump isn't much. 3) The game forgot to explain it but Light Speed Dash is now mapped to L3, and thank gently caress for that, because having it mapped to the same button as bounce was always a recipe for disaster. 4) Sonic the Comic crew represent.
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Jan 23, 2023 05:10
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From watching various streamers the secret to enjoying this game seems to be taking it at face value. I've seen a couple who wanted to engage with it like Generations and treat the main world as just something to get unlocks for the stages. That doesn't work. The main world's where the game is.
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Jan 23, 2023 05:29
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The real best way to enjoy this game, and my patented advice for the later game is to [only open this if you get bored of the overworld and just want to beat the game] go hard into the fishing minigame and exchange for resources
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Jan 23, 2023 14:59
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Jan 24, 2023 00:35
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I don't have anything to say about controls, but I will say the time limit on that stage is INCREDIBLY tight for some reason.
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Jan 24, 2023 01:41
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Ah, 1-2. Yes, of course, the S-Rank time will be very doable. It's only the second stage. *game show eh-err sound* S-Ranking 1-2 is probably the second most demanding challenge anywhere in the game. Also the process of getting that S-Rank kinda lays bare a lot of the problems with Frontiers, or at least with the control profile they make you use in Cyber Space. It feels... extremely wrong. The all-fabled sense of speed is all wrong. All kinds of things that feel like they should flow with momentum just kinda dampen your movement for no discernable reason. The boost feels extremely anaemic, and holding it down doesn't really do much for you, but mashing it gets you a tiny bit of extra speed? Homing attacks are appropriately snappy and the bounce is welcome when you need to just get on the ground right now, but the air control generally somehow manages to feel floaty when it needs to be weighty and air boosting is an extremely weird thing to get a grip on... it's all so weird. Also, your intuition about the ground route is correct. You'll go far faster sticking to the ground than nailing all the jumps and taking what look like the shortcuts. The ground route is faster! The ground route! What is happening? The open world and Cyber Space are basically two different games. Cyber Space uses its own settings profile as mentioned, and, no, your speed/etc levels don't work there either. There's only one Cyber Space difficulty. Open world good. Cyber Space... eh? Music slaps though. I made a playlist of the Cyber Space themes. They're great for getting stuff done to.
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Jan 24, 2023 02:53
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1-2 is the hardest s rank due to the time but you dont need to 100% s ranks.
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Jan 24, 2023 03:17
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every other stage i did a time run and a red ring run, 1-2 took me about 40 tries for time. I didn't have to do it
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Jan 24, 2023 03:18
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I just want to tell you that every time I see Sonic Frontiers I read it as SaGa Frontier and get very sad that that's not being LPd
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Jan 24, 2023 04:33
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I couldn't put my finger on what exactly bothered me about the voice acting and then it occurred to me that they all sound way too similar to something you'd hear from a 90s anime dub. Like Ocean Group Dragon Ball or something.
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Jan 24, 2023 07:25
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Namtab posted:1-2 is the hardest s rank due to the time but you dont need to 100% s ranks. It looks like Neon White for a reason
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Jan 24, 2023 20:15
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Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jan 26, 2023 |
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Jan 26, 2023 00:24
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I'm'a say what I said the first time I heard Kronos Island 4th Movement: You can't fool me. This is an Ace Attorney testimony theme.
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Jan 26, 2023 03:18
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This game is incredibly weird so far. I liked what I saw in the first episode or two, but this one's starting to lose me through sheer proliferation of collectibles. I was starting to feel overwhelmed and exhausted just watching you guys play it. (Oh, look, a distraction! On the way to that, another distraction! Watch your to-do list proliferate and quickly become unmanageable.) On the other hand, moving around the overworld as Sonic looks incredibly fun. I wouldn't have imagined they could build open-world-type environments that would be well-suited to Sonic's movement style, but so far it honestly looks like they've nailed it? I just think they needed to litter less poo poo on it, you're absolutely right that this game is starting to have DK64 energy.
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Jan 26, 2023 03:33
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You have 5 skill points right now, don’t forget to use them for some new abilities. Edit coming back I bet you already noticed this in a future episode. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Jan 26, 2023 |
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Jan 26, 2023 03:57
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Referencing the collectibles discussion, I feel like they're a crutch used when devs aren't confident in the world they've made. A good open world game thrives on creating a feeling of "what's that over there" - seeing an area you haven't seen before should be a reward in and of itself, and potentially claiming specific special rewards (as opposed to Hidden Package 43/100) is a bonus. Generic collectibles (aside from things like rings in this game that are part of the franchise legacy) are the devs basically saying "we don't know how to make players want to visit this spot, so we'll throw some crap around to grab their attention".
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Jan 26, 2023 10:45
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Jan 28, 2023 00:28
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Gnoman posted:Referencing the collectibles discussion, I feel like they're a crutch used when devs aren't confident in the world they've made. A good open world game thrives on creating a feeling of "what's that over there" - seeing an area you haven't seen before should be a reward in and of itself, and potentially claiming specific special rewards (as opposed to Hidden Package 43/100) is a bonus. Generic collectibles (aside from things like rings in this game that are part of the franchise legacy) are the devs basically saying "we don't know how to make players want to visit this spot, so we'll throw some crap around to grab their attention". Breath of the Wild as an example to support this, it made everywhere feel unique enough that you could say "what's over here", and finding a shrine or a korok or a cool sword or whatever was a bonus. At least for me. Helped that you didn't need anywhere near everything to finish.
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Jan 28, 2023 00:55
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There are careless design decisions everywhere in Frontiers, and if the vibe wasn't so strong they might be much bigger problems. Squid shows us a bunch. The title card screwing with jumping approaches is inexcusable. Why even bother with a title card, if the title is just Squid? (the enemy names in this game are really phoned in) The fight is dynamically presented but also has long stretches where nothing really happens and you just hold down Boost until you run out of meter and then wait a few seconds and then hold it down again. Also, that dynamic camera loves to screw with the one interesting thing that happens during the chase by preventing you from seeing where upcoming bullets are. When you get close, you see that there's absolutely no telegraphing for where bullets will appear, so you're like to get hit without recourse. And when you do, it's impossible to pick up your rings.
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Jan 28, 2023 03:59
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Ah, Sonic Frontiers. A game I thought I would not bother playing because the initial previews made it look horrendous. However, as time passed and new previews came out, the game actually began to look better. When it released, I picked it up and ended up loving it. Frontiers isn't perfect (not even slightly close), but it lays down an excellent foundation to build on in future games. I really hope Sonic Team can take what they've learned and make great strides with the next game.Explopyro posted:This game is incredibly weird so far. No spoilers, but Frontiers is smart enough to not make this as much of a problem as it initially appears.
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Jan 28, 2023 13:24
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Jan 31, 2023 00:50
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Them being Chaos creatures shocked me when I first started this
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Jan 31, 2023 02:18
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Oh drat, didn't know you guys had started a new LP! And a game I've been curious about too! Maybe it's just that I haven't kept up with any of the Sonic media from the last... decade or so, but all these voices feel just a bit off to me. Like they've taken all the voices the characters should have and, like, turned them twenty degrees. Not bad voice acting at all, just different. Meanwhile, I'm shocked that the writing is pretty decent. That I wasn't expecting from a Sonic game. Closest they've ever got to good writing is not having dialogue. STC crew represent, by the way. That comic was the poo poo back in the 90's. Still my favourite version of Amy, even if I recognise that its wily crackshot lesbian hero character isn't meaningfully related to the one that ended up in canon. All the comic team had to go off was "this character has a crush on Sonic, here's a promo art. It has wonky perspective so you'll be drawing her spikes going up for ten years."
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Jan 31, 2023 23:48
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Tenebrais posted:Maybe it's just that I haven't kept up with any of the Sonic media from the last... decade or so, but all these voices feel just a bit off to me. Like they've taken all the voices the characters should have and, like, turned them twenty degrees. Not bad voice acting at all, just different. Agreed. I think the Sonic voice that has stuck with me most is either hazy memories of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle in middle school or more likely Super Smash Bros, and his voice just sounds wrong in Frontier.
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Feb 1, 2023 02:07
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fatsleepycat posted:Agreed. I think the Sonic voice that has stuck with me most is either hazy memories of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle in middle school or more likely Super Smash Bros, and his voice just sounds wrong in Frontier. His Smash Bros Voice Actor is currently the same as his Frontiers Voice Actor.
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Feb 1, 2023 09:29
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Tenebrais posted:Oh drat, didn't know you guys had started a new LP! And a game I've been curious about too! I don't know about every character, but I know Sonic is voiced by the same guy who has been voicing him since Colors, or maybe Free Riders, that being Roger Craig Smith. He does a good job in Frontiers, though I think most people still prefer Jason Griffith. I think Eggman has his same VA too. As for the writing, Sonic Team got Ian Flynn to write the characters (not 100% on the story), so that's why the characters are much stronger than in the past.
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Feb 2, 2023 02:50
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Roger Craig Smith has definitely decided or been directed to come down an octave for Sonic and the whole cast generally seems to be going for somewhat of a softer tone than before, with less bombast and more sentiment. Even Eggman's turned down the ham a couple of notches. The cast is identical to previous outings but the vibe is night and day.
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Feb 2, 2023 03:30
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Feb 2, 2023 16:01
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 09:25 |
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Sonic's Air game really does feel lackluster here. I mean, it's not wrong in any way, it just feels lacking. I suppose that keeping Sonic to the ground was a deliberate design choice, and in the end, I think it works. It's just's odd.
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Feb 2, 2023 18:35
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