It’s 2022, and it’s been jaw-dropping 31 years since I first met the little blue bastard.I’m in the middle of a noisy trade show and the latest Sonic the Hedgehog The game showed me how to open a switch door, in a tutorial level that looked worryingly like Death Stranding—a post-apocalyptic island game about delivering Amazon packages to Geoff Keighley. Is that what 31 years as an asexual mascot did to mf?
Thirty-one years.
Yet, somehow, Sonic has the upper hand. In the face of insurmountable possibilities decades past, the SEGA console arm he initially disappeared as a mascot disappeared under mismanagement, and (perhaps most egregiously) there was a general feeling that, Since then, the game has been kind of like a spool of, well, 1998, if you’re a philanthropist, or 1994, if you’re not.
After all this, he shines as always. Because despite all the blunders, missteps, and seemingly dogged commitment to never quite reach his goals, we love Sonic. We’ve loved him since childhood, in the most optimistic decade we’ve ever lived: we love his sharp ’90s style, which makes him a real threat to us rather than culture Dennis handed down from Scottish pensioners .
We love the fact that he solves a lot of problems by running really fast, which makes him a superhero like The Flash, but without those old DC characters in time (Aquaman’s greatest cultural claim to fame this decade is in the Chris Rock routine quip, long before he was played by the sexiest man on earth).
Sonic the Hedgehog isn’t just SEGA’s mascot—he’s a totem of youthful infinity, which is why he’s endured far longer than the knees of those who witnessed his birth. My kids love him and don’t care what the Mega Drive is or was (nor should they).
The media franchise and meme economy emanating from him is still in rude health, the star of several hit cartoons and now two hugely popular film adaptations. Who would have thought that Sonic the Hedgehog — the bloody Sonic the Hedgehog — would finally break the curse of bad video game movies? But, having said that, who else could it be?
Sonic has a knack for defying expectations.
Despite his many appearances, he prevailed, not because of their quality, which is a notoriously mixed bag. But every now and then, the series releases a new game that turns this stagnant trend of mediocrity upside down: usually by subtly evoking nostalgia, but remixing the best and most popular elements of the old classics into new and exciting stuff. The critically acclaimed Sonic Mania is a case in point: on the surface, it’s a direct continuation of the Mega Drive games – but in terms of technology and design, it’s much more than that, launching a number of games that can be found in that old game. It’s simply not possible in hardware.
Likewise, Sonic Generations mixed old and new with great success back in 2011. It combines the modern gameplay of the previous year’s Sonic Colours with the character and level design of those vaunted originals, and borrows elements from just about every game in between, creating the perfect “Greatest Hits” pack for lifelong fans. My eldest daughter’s all-time favorite video game to this day (to be fair, she hasn’t played Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, a visionary masterpiece that makes a difference with every playthrough) Improve).
Sonic Frontiers is on par with Generations in 2022. It pulls Sonic kicks and screams into an era where everything was open-world action games with RPG elements, and a lot of effort went into it, but really, the Starfall Islands area is a perfect Sonic playground and a hub world with portals to past levels: remixes of stages from previous games, new paint, altered layouts and more.
SEGA’s approach to Sonic’s open world is far from what some disgruntled fans feared. In fact, in much the same way as it has been for generations, it aims to honor and celebrate the past while offering players something new to indulge in.
And, here’s the basic, important thing: it feels good in the hand, like a Sonic game. The raw sense of speed is there. Acrobatic homing attacks, orbital sliding, easy-to-learn, hard-to-master movements where you can bounce around pre-planned areas like pinballs to collect power-ups: all are present and correct. Many of the additions to his basic moves are perfect and brilliant.
For example, in the Cyloop attack, you hold Y (or the triangle or whatever, it’s on everything) and run a text ring around the enemy to deal damage, stun, or break defenses, which is a master blow. It’s one of those rare moments when your control of a video game character feels as cool and powerful as the way it’s portrayed in a cutscene, cartoon, or major movie. Your speed is now a weapon, not just a means of traversing, when you successfully perform a Cyloop attack on an enemy whose attack mode lets you perform an attack in nanoseconds? It’s exhilarating because that’s how things should be when you’re a crazy little blue guy who’s running fast and doing cool flips all the time.
Granted, we’ve had very little to do so far beyond a brief hands-on and a few trailers, but for those of us lucky enough to experience it, hands-on is crucial: in many cases (Mine included) completely upended our impression of the game, which we initially thought was an obvious bad idea.
As Alex and I discussed in the video above, Frontiers Is Damned is a difficult game to show. It has a variety of biomes, some less vibrant than others, and Sonic’s characteristic speed making long open ground tracks a necessity for level design. As such, it doesn’t have screenshots or trailers, and SEGA is sure to love it. But the proof is in the pudding, and from the games we’ve played so far, Sonic Frontiers is pretty awesome.
Sonic Frontiers releases on November 8 on PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
