Amazon.co.jp and Kroger's Offers "Comic Style" Skin for Sonic Superstars

Oh yeah. That's certainly been true with other games. I'm not usually good at spotting them but one of the biggest developer mistakes that comes to my mind is from Balan Wonderworld underestimating children by simplifying the controls at the expense of the game. Another is Paper Mario since Sticker Star, opting to abandon experience points which removes any sense of progression and encourage avoiding battles as the rewards for winning are often not worth the effort. They improved Origami King by not forcing you to use expendable attacks which can run out but that game still suffers from the same battle issues the other two did.

I do think Sonic Team are hacks to be honest, because nearly everything that resembles any form of "level design" is just a bunch of props awkwardly stitched together. It's no miracle it functions though, after all it's stuff they've already programed ages ago. Rails, springs, wall running, balloons, boost pads, launchers... frankly, Chaos Island honest to God feels like it was made by an algorithm that studied Sonic Colors' levels. Basically everything else "new" to Frontiers is just messy, repetitive, unpolished... like the combat, the other playable characters, the open world itself. Not to mention stuff that worked fine in 2010/2011 getting absolutely f'd here because of their incompetence. Now that I think of it, it is a miracle that most of those props work considering how badly they broke the boost levels... heh Sonic Frontiers is a prettier (being gentle here) test level. Empty area full of props. At triple A price. To anyone who ever complained about Utopia being too sparse, or lacking any sense of where to go/what to do, but has no problem with Chaos Island... lmao. If any lesson is learnt from this and we get another open world game where Sonic interacts with the world instead of props awkwardly floating around, then we talk. 

I'll just say this. No game whatsoever is perfect. Even the best of the best games have their share of issues. Just look at this clip of me playing Horizon Forbidden West (which also had a shockingly difficulty spike for the entirety of every difficulty setting, compared to the previous game) on a PS4 Slim, and it's got varying degrees of pop-in. This being the worst example. Does this automatically make the game bad? No. It's just not entirely suited for the console. But that's besides the point. It doesn't mean Guerilla, a 1st party PlayStation Studio, are incompetent at making a solid game. Which they did! Blew it out of the park! Did it win a lot of awards? Only 2, but still. Sonic Frontiers has it's issues. I'm not ignoring that fact, but I'm also forgiving of such issues, due to some of the things Sonic Team's had to deal with. Including getting the game pushed back for another year 'cause Sega wanted them to push it out much earlier. Not to mention the smaller team & budget over the years. A type of thing that's happened time & time again, to more studios than just Sonic Team. You guys remember the 1st few Crash & Spyro games post Insomniac & Naughty Dog? Exactly what happens when you rush a project out the door, despite how much I enjoyed Twinsanity. Now I'm not here to debate objective or subjective (don't ask me which is which, 'cause I'll forget by next week) opinions within the Sonic fandom. 'Cause that's a minefield. But truth be told, I really enjoy the Werehog sections of Unleashed, which are the most hated part of the game for most people. Colors was pretty good, but not my favorite 3D Sonic game. Lost World, also pretty good, tho I only played the 3DS version not developed by Sonic Team. Generations, up there with Unleashed! Forces...uh...I don't think I really need to go there. Heck, I can say better things about Sonic '06 at this point, least I got all the achievements in that one. Not sure what that says about me, but it is what it is. So Frontiers was a breath of fresh air for me personally, and still is. It's a much better feeling than playing Forces, issues and all. There's a lot of good, but sometimes you get some bad, unpolished things as a tradeoff. Everyone also has their own opinions on everything, and nobodies will be the same. But the fact Frontiers did sell as much as it did, and convinced Sega to increase the team size, or even allow all this DLC support in the 1st place, and so on, so forth. I don't think the game would technically be considered a failure. All they gotta do is build upon what's already here, for the next title (which hopefully Final Horizon gets patched before then). And how that goes, only time will tell.