SONIC FRONTIERS Full Gameplay Walkthrough / No Commentary 【FULL GAME】4K Ultra HD

SONIC FRONTIERS Full Gameplay Walkthrough / No Commentary 【FULL GAME】4K Ultra HD

🌟 DESCRIPTION🌟

This is definitely a tough one to edit as a traditional walkthrough, because make no mistake, this game is truly open world. You can go anywhere on the map and you can do things in almost any order. There’s no fluid narrative guiding you other than you need to collect some things to unlock other things. So I tried to just compress my experience here in a 12 hour vid. Cut out most deaths. Cut down most failures in puzzles, although not all. Just wanted to give you an idea on the vid!

MY THOUGHTS ON THE GAME: I absolutely loved this game. The game is far from perfect, there are many issues that would drive me crazy in other games: grind-fest, constant texture pop-in, disjointed narrative. But ultimately, for Sonic Frontiers, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

The game took me about 30 hours to beat on normal, (I did the ending on Hard Mode to get the full ending) and got S Rank on all the old-school Sonic levels. I spent a lot of time gathering memory tokens to try and get as much of the side stories as I could. I also completely unlocked Sonic’s skill tree. But there is still more to do if I wanted.

For me, the thing that has always made Sonic what it is, is the beautiful feeling of visceral speed. Make no mistake about it, this game is truly an open world games, and there’s always been doubts to whether Sonic can translate into an open world environment. When I first saw the previews, I was skeptical. The world felt dead, empty. And indeed it is empty when comparing it to traditional open world games. There are very little NPCs, there not many activities, no sprawling side quests etc. But after playing it, what I’ve come to realize is that Sonic doesn’t need to be like other open world games, nor should it. What this game really is, is a sprawling playground to maneuver Sonic’s incredible speed and tight controls. He’s perfect. He FEELS perfect. (60FPS only!)
The 5 different maps are all fairly large and provide a huge canvas for you to paint with controller. The environment is chalk full of mini puzzles, rails lines, and secrets that all use Sonic’s moves in different ways. You can double jump, slide, speed boost, parry, cyclone loop and so much more. Looking back on it now, Sonic 06 and Sonic Adventure both tried to do Open world hubs and they didn’t work, because Sonic fans didn’t want to slow down the pace. The very thought of slowing down is anti Sonic. And now, they finally got it right. At least the barebones engine-of-it-all.
The combat is also a standout in Frontiers. It is a bit on the simpler side, to the point that if can feel like button mashing at times, but there is enough variety in skills that it never got dull throughout my entire playthrough. It’s always fun unlocking the new skill and using in your repertoire.

The last but not least, the soundtrack. OH MY GOD THE SOUNDTRACK. It’s so varied and eclectic and yet it all works. There’s mood-setting atmospheric hymns, as well as 90’s anime rock blaring during boss fights. There’s dubstep and Sonic elevator music. It all works. I don’t know how, but it is an absolute masterpiece of a soundtrack. Incredible.
All that being said, there’s major room for improvement. The pop-in in particular is very frustrating. In most games, a pop-in ultimately doesn’t mean much other than a graphical bug that might suck you out of the immersion. In this game, so much of how-you-see-the-world changes how you move around-in-it. The pop in can really throw off your rhythm and damper your experience. Draw distance is also pretty poor (played on the Xbox Series X). When you’re trying to traverse over long lines across islands, but you can’t see the rails in the distance, you find yourself wasting time looking for the right path because you couldn’t see something that is supposed to be right in front of your eyes.

The grindy-ness is pretty extreme, it takes a lot to level up your speed and ring capacity for example. In my 30 hour playthrough I only got my ring capacity to level 15 out of 99 for example. To be fair, it’s not something I particularly cared to grind for, but the requirement of hunting down Kocos around the map is not something that enticed me. I got my power and defense well over 50 in the same time, not even trying to level them up. It’s 100% padding, but truthfully I never minded because I enjoyed using Sonic so much it didn’t matter. From an objective point of view, I’d give the game a 7.5/10, acknowledging some of its missteps and bugs. But from a subjective point of view, I’d give it 9.5/10 for the incredibly joyful experience I had. It reminded me of the first time I played Sonic on the Sega Genesis. It was a new feeling with Sonic in an Open World, and yet somehow still felt fully nostalgic. I highly recommend you check out the game!

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