I can’t believe I’m about to say this considering how rough its initial reveal made it look, but Sonic Frontiers has had an anime comeback arc you typically only dream of It slowly changed the public’s reception from disgust to mild interest to outright hype. I’m not quite the Sonic superfan that 🐬News Edit🐭or Rhiannon Bevan is, 🌜but I’ve still been looking forward to trying out Frontiers for myself and finally got a chance at EGX 2022.
Now you can lump me in with the rest of Sonic’s superfans, because Frontiers has instantly turned into my secondඣ most anticipated gam🅺e of 2022, even after only playing through the first 20 minutes or so.
The main reason that Frontiers is so exciting is that it barely feels like a Sonic game. Outside of the Cyberspace levels, going fast,🔯 and the fact that Sonic and friends are in it, everything about Frontiers feels far removed from the series that we know. From the free movement to the energetic comb🅺at, all the way to the peaceful Breath of the Wild-esque world full of puzzles to solve and Kocos to discover, it doesn’t feel like Sonic – and that’s a good thing.
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It’s clear that Frontiers isn’t afraid to change the meaning of what a Sonic game is, but there’s one🍰 mechanic that feels like it’s clinging on for dear life as it quickly becomes more and more of a relic of the past - Rings.
In Frontiers, Rings work like they always have, acting as a shield for Sonic that then needs to be recollected once he’s hit. I’ve never been a massive fan of how they’ve been used in the series, often making the flow run i♌nto a brick wall and leaving the world’s fastest creature pickiওng his pocket change up from the sidewalk to stay alive.
As much as I didn’t appreciate the mechanic, I still understood what it was trying to do by g💧iving platforming more of a risk and incentivising the player to get through without being hit once.
Only, now that Frontiers is basically an open-world, or an open-zone as🌺 Sega likes to call it, Rings are pretty much everywhere and have no value. There’s no longer any tension involved when you can head in any direction and find more Rings with zero trouble. Not that you even need to have more than one on you at once, though, as they still all 🥃spill out no matter how many you have or what kind of damage you take.
Not only are Rings strewn about the place like they’re going out of f💜ashion (they are), but Sonic even has a new move called the Cyloop that lets him instantly summon Rings from out of nowhere by running in a circle. There’s no cooldown for the move and no challenge involved - just run around with a ꦜbutton held and get rid of the danger.
There also doesn’t seem to be a use for the Rings outside of acting like a shield, either, which begs the question of why there are so many of them around and why the player should care about having more than one. Outside the light-speed dash (a move that lets Sonic use Rings as a sort of connector between platforms)🍷, there’s simply no need for them to be here.
It’s not even just about the fact that Rings feel inconsequential - they just don’t fit the kind of game that Frontiers is trying to be. With combat this fast-paced and kinetic, it doesn’t make sense to only be able to take a few hits, or to slow down and have to catch any Rings that fly out of you if you do mess up - a health bar simply makes more sense h💃ere, and it✃’s strange for a game so willing to revolutionise itself to hold back on just one archaic mechanic.
This is only further compounded by the Cyberspace levels, which place Sonic in more traditional levels with linear paths and movement. Here, Rings do make sense because they again incentivise goin🌺g as fast as possible and learning levels enough to never get hit, something that only really works if there’s a clear start and end.
I underst🍸and why the Rings are in Frontiers. They’re one of Sonic’s mainstays and arguably just as iconic as the hedgehog himself, but they only highlight how outdated of a feature they really are, something that doesn’t feel right when Sonic is clearly trying to break free of its cliches and move forward to a new era.