Kishimoto Hopes Sonic Frontiers Will Take Sonic Team to the Top of the Gaming Industry

Open Zone is a space where freedom and experimentation will likely not clash with the intended game design very much, so I think it's a safe space to experiment and find a comfortable control style to suit you best. That doesn't absolve Sonic Team of the responsibility of making sure the default settings work well, but just having the option to customize does not connotate anything negative to me. 

3 hours ago, Cosmos Rogue said:

We know from Kishimoto's own words why Frontiers gives the player sliders for changing how Sonic controls.

(Apologies for two tweets showing up here, I'm not sure why it won't show just the one I'm trying to link)

Per Kishimoto himself he tried to find an ideal way for Sonic to control in Frontiers, but couldn't. 

I really don't see a charitable way to read this. Some parts of the game work best with Sonic-y feeling controls, some parts work best with more "general action" controls. Whatever controls the player settles on they are going to have a suboptimal experience because the player will always run into parts of the game that just don't play well with their control settings, or at least don't play as well as they could.

Also worth mentioning is that most players will likely just use whatever the default control settings are, meaning that Kishimoto and Sonic Team haven't really punted on designing a good control setup for Frontiers, they just seemingly lack confidence in their ability to do so.

He said he couldn't find a way for Sonic to control that would be perfect for every single person who played Frontiers (probably during the play testing sections). That doesn't mean he doesn't control well.

From the gameplay footage we have from Gamescom and TGS, it's pretty clear to me that most people who are not used to play Sonic games suck at Frontiers. For example, that guy that was struggling to use the ramps in the first Green Hill Act. I know people who think Sonic Colors is a difficult game.

Giving options for people who suck at playing Sonic is not a bad thing at all.

The main reason people grow frustrated with Sonic's controls, historically, is not being able to maneuver him through more intense situations like obstacle courses and bottomless pits. Letting players customize their controls ONLY in the open world and not in cyberspace when those exact challenges will pop up feels counterproductive. I wonder if more players will get frustrated by the cyberspace levels when they get dropped into them and they have a different enough game feel to throw them off.

4 minutes ago, Wraith said:

The main reason people grow frustrated with Sonic's controls, historically, is not being able to maneuver him through more intense situations like obstacle courses and bottomless pit. Letting players customize their controls ONLY in the open world and not in cyberspace when those exact challenges will pop up feels counterproductive. I wonder if more players will get frustrated by the cyberspace levels when they get dropped into them and they have a different enough game feel to throw them off.

Aren’t those cyberspace levels more linear anyway? What would adjusting the controls help with? 

What difference do the controls make from Unleashed to Colors to Generations to Forces make? Do you not care about the way those games feel different from each other?

On 9/17/2022 at 7:57 AM, Greatsong1 said:

I believe Frontiers can end up good but nowhere near good enough to Kishimoto’s dream here, not even close.

Their PR tactic for this game seems to be this level of arrogance and I think they know how well it plays with a certain subset of fans who have coddled them for years, If they embargo reviews until release day then it is controlled arrogance as this would be a sign that they aren’t so confident. All I can say for sure is that the subset of fans I’m talking about will go absolutely rapid over the first negative review, even just a 7 will make them launch a blitzkrieg of hate towards the reviewer.

On 9/16/2022 at 1:47 PM, Wraith said:

The sentiment is nice, on the surface but mostly reads as a red flag to me. Kishimoto is the latest in a long line of directors that can only see Sonic expanding if he diluted it with elements from more successful products. It hasn't worked yet and there's no reason to believe this time will be different.

You rarely get to the top of the industry by cribbing as many popular games and pandering to as many people as possible. You get there by doing what only you can do, as best as you can do. Mario isn't ever an action/RPG/exploration/platformer mix. It's a game about jumping, by the best 'game about jumping' guys in the entire medium. The only thing Sonic ever needed to be was so uniquely good at his thing that you couldn't get anything like it anywhere else. Frontiers is the opposite. There are many, many other products that come to mind even at a glance, which puts them at a higher risk for failure as more comparisons become obvious. Even if Shadow the Hedgehog was competent, it would never be considered an industry tipping trailblazer in an industry where Jak had already existed for years. If this is the target they've set for themselves their approach is actually counterproductive.

I think the problem here is that SEGA doesn't acknowledge there is anything wrong with Sonic's core speed-focused gameplay as currently made, so no mind is paid to improving it.  For over a decade--some would say over two decades--Sonic Team has moved to "improve" Sonic's gameplay style mostly by streamlining it.  Automate acceleration at almost every possible opportunity, reduce the hindrance posed to your progress by enemies and slopes, even automate steering around corners in the worst case.  Kishimoto at least acted like he was doing people a favor by making Sonic's physics in Forces so embarrassingly fudged, and while it seems like they won't be as terrible in Frontiers--though in an open-world game they have to be better in order to get something playable--without any admission that this decision in Forces was for the worse, you shouldn't expect him to want to improve the series by improving its core, as in what the Sonic fandom sees as improvement.  Instead, it's back to the search for bells and whistles that expand the game's scope without people hating them.

On 9/17/2022 at 4:14 PM, D.H said:

If Frontiers does it's job & delivers an experience that defines Sonic for a whole new crop of fans the same way the likes of Sonic 1-3K/Adventure-SA2 or Unleashed-Generations were for previous groups of players, whatever complaints some older fans of the series may have about elements that they consider to be "un-Sonic" will be seen as something that's just as Sonicy as elements we've come to associate with the games during our time coming into the series. And honestly, I don't mind that. 

The Sonic Adventure games also defined this series for a whole new crop of fans, and even many of them, the same ones who want to play as multiple characters again, still despised Big's levels and Security Hall.  The chao garden is pretty widely loved by the fandom but also universally acknowledged as a very different experience to the rest of the game.  Even if you have no familiarity with the sorts of Sonic games that were only speedy levels, it's not hard to see that some styles of gameplay are quite dissimilar to others in the same game. 

And it's one thing if a lot of fans end up liking the non-Sonic sorts of gameplay, but what happens if that ends up being their favorite part in the whole game?  It has not happened yet, but if it does, then it's likely to prompt another wave of scrambling to overhaul this series, with all of the risks that entails. 

On 9/17/2022 at 7:15 PM, Shaddy Zaphod said:

Where does the line fall between "the thing you're a fan of isn't a real Sonic" and "you're not a real Sonic fan"?

I'm starting to think Sonic fans don't really exist.  What exist are people who are fans of some of the things the Sonic series has done, but by now it has done so many things that nobody is a fan of everything it has done.  SEGA's reckless experimentation with this brand is directly responsible for that, and it's annoying to every segment of the fandom that SEGA will not own up to that or take any steps to correct it.  We need more games like Sonic Mania, games that choose one segment of the fandom to shoot for and then try as hard as possible to please them.  Ideally, this series would have concurrent subseries for Classic, Adventure and Boost era fanbases, with a different development team assigned to each.  But instead, you get non-answers like Sonic Frontiers, which instead of trying to cater to any segment of the fandom, are shooting for people outside of it in hopes they come in, as if they have no understanding that such a move will make the fandom into an even bigger mess.

On 9/21/2022 at 1:16 PM, light-gaia said:

A lot of games let you customize this kind of stuff, and that doesn't have anything to do with the developers "not taking responsibility". When it comes to optional content, the main inspiration of Frontiers is Zelda Breath of the Wild, the whole Zelda game is optional. You can go straight to the final boss right in the beginning of the adventure and skip the whole thing. I've never seen one single person saying that's because "the developers are not taking responsibility".

That's not the best example because this philosophy was actually present in the very first Zelda game.  It's possible to get to the final boss without doing anything else and without getting a sword, though not possible to beat him.  And the game also makes no demands of which order you do the dungeons, nor does it limit where you can go on the map.  But soon after that, the Zelda series settled into a bunch of lock-and-key mechanics, meaning even if games had big environments and you could move in many different directions, the sequence of events was still linear.  BOTW was born partially of desire to ape other open-world games like Fallout, yes, but also an understanding that Zelda had gotten a bit too overdesigned and in the process lost something it used to have.

It's not fair to assume everything that worked in BOTW works in Sonic because they're different franchises.  I concede that making more things optional probably would have helped the Sonic series at many points in history.  Most notably, we'd probably still have the option of playing as other characters if they had stayed optional instead of the mandate they became in the Adventure era, which gave them such a backlash that SEGA also removed the option of playing as them in many cases.  I can only assume that going fishing with Big wouldn't be in this game at all if it wasn't optional this time.  But when "you can skip this element if you don't like it" is a boast developers make, it feels like an admission that many people won't like that element.  And when that's said about multiple elements, I can't help but think they'd be better off making a game with less elements but ones that have an obvious fandom.

On 9/17/2022 at 11:16 PM, ZinogreVolt said:

Tonally it lines up with what Japanese Sonic fans like to see out of Sonic, with the Adventure duology (especially Adventure 2) being consistently regarded as favorites from Japanese fans for its stories, casts, and gameplay variety.

I'm struggling to see anything that reminds me of the Adventure games' tone in this game.  I guess it has a similar approach to story in that it's a "play this game to figure out what the hell is happening" sort of story, but so do many other Sonic game stories.  So do many other non-Sonic game stories.  On an emotional level, nothing here seems like it is going for anywhere close to the same vibe as the Adventure series.  The Adventure games have flamboyantly colorful graphics that focus on details; this has bunches of natural terrain that go for realism and scope meant to be admired from a distance.  The Adventure games have energizing soundtracks; this one has ambient music that is very arguably depressing.  The Adventure games led with cutscenes that teased that big and loud things were happening; this game is actively proud of how little seems to be happening in its world.

Maybe there are Japanese people who love hauntingly vacuous experiences like this, but it doesn't feel reminiscent of what Japanese media is overall; a lot of Japanese media is if anything more flamboyant, colorful and loud than much of what is produced in the USA.  This feels like the latest open-world game to try to imitate the Fallout series.  Not a fan.

Just now, Scritch the Cat said:

I'm struggling to see anything that reminds me of the Adventure games' tone in this game.  I guess it has a similar approach to story in that it's a "play this game to figure out what the hell is happening" sort of story, but so do many other Sonic game stories.  So do many other non-Sonic game stories.  On an emotional level, nothing here seems like it is going for anywhere close to the same vibe as the Adventure series.  The Adventure games have flamboyantly colorful graphics that focus on details; this has bunches of natural terrain that go for realism and scope meant to be admired from a distance.  The Adventure games have energizing soundtracks; this one has ambient music that is very arguably depressing.  The Adventure games led with cutscenes that teased that big and loud things were happening; this game is actively proud of how little seems to be happening in its world.

Maybe there are Japanese people who love hauntingly vacuous experiences like this, but it doesn't feel reminiscent of what Japanese media is overall; a lot of Japanese media is if anything more flamboyant, colorful and loud than much of what is produced in the USA.  This feels like the latest open-world game to try to imitate the Fallout series.  Not a fan.

The story is something taken piecemeal, but it also has a cutscene very early in where Sonic quite literally gets jettisoned into a mountain in a way that's incredibly evocative of DBZ and the anime-isms that helped to inspire the Adventure games' stories. That isn't even mentioning the tributes to Evangelion in the form of the Titan, who grapples onto Sonic in a way that is almost a shot-for-shot recreation of a famous scene from that show. Sage herself being voiced by the same voice actress as Rei wasn't something that happened by coincidence, either. There's also Sonic himself being loaded with new attacks that feel like they've jumped right out of the page of shonen manga. One of them is him literally firing volleys of ki blasts from his hands.

As for music, I'm just going to assume you haven't been paying much attention to what's been said and shown about it. "Vandalize" and "I'm Here" would be right at home in the Adventure games, and the Cyberspace level themes are very upbeat, with some of them even featuring lyrics. The music is not 1:1 with the Adventure stylings, simply because the composers now are not the same as the composers back then, but it is definitely still Sonic music. While there are more moodier tracks like "Theme of Starfall Islands", it shares that space with more upbeat tracks that changes depending on what the mood of the game demands at the time. 

It's also incredibly weird to suggest that Japan doesn't like moodier, more somber and contemplative media. Breath of the Wild (what is clearly Frontiers' biggest inspiration) and Elden Ring are both Japan-produced games that are massively popular with Japanese audiences. Seeing as Frontiers has thus far proven to be the most popular Sonic game in Japan during pre-release in a long time, what the game is currently is clearly resonating with people.

51 minutes ago, ZinogreVolt said:

The story is something taken piecemeal, but it also has a cutscene very early in where Sonic quite literally gets jettisoned into a mountain in a way that's incredibly evocative of DBZ and the anime-isms that helped to inspire the Adventure games' stories. That isn't even mentioning the tributes to Evangelion in the form of the Titan, who grapples onto Sonic in a way that is almost a shot-for-shot recreation of a famous scene from that show. Sage herself being voiced by the same voice actress as Rei wasn't something that happened by coincidence, either. There's also Sonic himself being loaded with new attacks that feel like they've jumped right out of the page of shonen manga. One of them is him literally firing volleys of ki blasts from his hands.

As for music, I'm just going to assume you haven't been paying much attention to what's been said and shown about it. "Vandalize" and "I'm Here" would be right at home in the Adventure games, and the Cyberspace level themes are very upbeat, with some of them even featuring lyrics. The music is not 1:1 with the Adventure stylings, simply because the composers now are not the same as the composers back then, but it is definitely still Sonic music. While there are more moodier tracks like "Theme of Starfall Islands", it shares that space with more upbeat tracks that changes depending on what the mood of the game demands at the time. 

It's also incredibly weird to suggest that Japan doesn't like moodier, more somber and contemplative media. Breath of the Wild (what is clearly Frontiers' biggest inspiration) and Elden Ring are both Japan-produced games that are massively popular with Japanese audiences. Seeing as Frontiers has thus far proven to be the most popular Sonic game in Japan during pre-release in a long time, what the game is currently is clearly resonating with people.

You didn’t really contest my point about whether this is similar to the Adventure series, though, except for the music, but while I grant some more upbeat stuff is in the game, that has not been what SEGA has publicized up-front about the game; rather it’s that glum piano track.

Of all things, "Not Japanese" and "feels like Fallout" are the last things I expected to read towards Frontiers today.

Japanese media being self-serious is arguably what causes shonen Manga/Anime to be the way it is, at least compared to its western counterpart in young boy's media. There are still plenty of gags emphasizing cartooniness included, but it regularly comes in second place to the show taking it's central tone completely seriously, be that idealist optimism, oppressive horror, or wistful adventure.

If rambunctious energy, hyperactivity, or flamboyance were what sold the Japanese market on Sonic games, every Sonic game would be a runaway success in their home country by now. You should instead be looking for the elements of the adventure games (and 06 iirc) that the rest of the series lacks, if you want to understand what the difference in cultural identity/influence actually means for the Sonic series in totality. 

I can't lie Kishimoto, Iizuka, and Sega are all setting themselves a huge light focusing on them and I think that they absolutely have to deliver on this one. In Forces they were generally silent and never really pushed the hoped up in the ways that they're doing now, same with all the other more "mediocre" games. I feel like Sonic Team finally has ambition and that makes me happy, they're trying something new, original, and challenging, they aren't aping trends like they did in the 2000s (and even a bit in the 2010s), they actually realized how powerful the Sonic IP is with the movies, they now know that their audience is big enough to the point where all they need is to make games that audience likes and glue in all the new fans that came in with the movies. I feel like the games should do that, keep the new fans from the multimedia interested with great games, and of course attract other 'gamers' and new people in (if they're that good).

8 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

I'm starting to think Sonic fans don't really exist.  What exist are people who are fans of some of the things the Sonic series has done, but by now it has done so many things that nobody is a fan of everything it has done.  SEGA's reckless experimentation with this brand is directly responsible for that, and it's annoying to every segment of the fandom that SEGA will not own up to that or take any steps to correct it.  We need more games like Sonic Mania, games that choose one segment of the fandom to shoot for and then try as hard as possible to please them.  Ideally, this series would have concurrent subseries for Classic, Adventure and Boost era fanbases, with a different development team assigned to each.  But instead, you get non-answers like Sonic Frontiers, which instead of trying to cater to any segment of the fandom, are shooting for people outside of it in hopes they come in, as if they have no understanding that such a move will make the fandom into an even bigger mess.

Three groups of high budget platforming series running at the same time isn't realistic for a genre a lot of people believe is on it's backfoot anyway. Sega only has so many resources and they have more IP to take care of than just Sonic now. You've gotta wonder if it's worth splitting hairs and potentially splitting revenue by saying 'this sonic is for your specific niche favorite' when most sonic fans already purchase all of the content that there is. Theres still a lot of overlap between customers of the modern games and Mania even if stringent fan debates paint a different picture.

Sonic Mania wasn't good because it was focused on a specific niche of the fandom. It was good because it was focused. It had a strong focal point in momentum based platforming that it was able to polish into a fine sheen and deliver on because it's development team wasn't split six different ways. Sonic needs more singular games like that for the sake of quality control, not just pleasing slightly different demographics. 

8 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

That's not the best example because this philosophy was actually present in the very first Zelda game.  It's possible to get to the final boss without doing anything else and without getting a sword, though not possible to beat him.  And the game also makes no demands of which order you do the dungeons, nor does it limit where you can go on the map.  But soon after that, the Zelda series settled into a bunch of lock-and-key mechanics, meaning even if games had big environments and you could move in many different directions, the sequence of events was still linear.  BOTW was born partially of desire to ape other open-world games like Fallout, yes, but also an understanding that Zelda had gotten a bit too overdesigned and in the process lost something it used to have.

It's not fair to assume everything that worked in BOTW works in Sonic because they're different franchises.  I concede that making more things optional probably would have helped the Sonic series at many points in history.  Most notably, we'd probably still have the option of playing as other characters if they had stayed optional instead of the mandate they became in the Adventure era, which gave them such a backlash that SEGA also removed the option of playing as them in many cases.  I can only assume that going fishing with Big wouldn't be in this game at all if it wasn't optional this time.  But when "you can skip this element if you don't like it" is a boast developers make, it feels like an admission that many people won't like that element.  And when that's said about multiple elements, I can't help but think they'd be better off making a game with less elements but ones that have an obvious fandom.

I don't have any reason to believe this structure cannot work with Sonic

There's nothing wrong with catering to wider styles of gameplay... so long they do this well.

This has primarily been the issue with previous games (which can be traced back to the adventure series) as one element of the gameplay was always superior over the others and the less than enjoyable aspects were usually unavoidable and required to progress the story. 

That's why I prefer Sonic Team's games in the ilk of Generations, Colours and Lost World because they focused in on the specifics. 

With Frontiers, the freedom seems to lies with the content or gameplay styles being largely for progression - want to proceed through the story via Cyberspace? Fill your boots. Rather stick to the open zone format of gameplay? Run with it. This shouldn't be seen as a detriment on the developers side, especially when they are experimenting with new ideas (and Sonic Team are ALWAYS doing this). So to have some thing familiar, and something new, but change the progress bar by means of the player choice, I'd say is rather revolutionary of them. 

It still remains to be seen if either of the gameplay styles are any good of course, but judging from all the video content and reactions so far things are looking polished and fun overall. A friend of mine played this at EGX over the weekend and said it was a solid 8 based on what he played (which is high praise from him).

So personally whilst some lingering doubt remains, I'm not that concerned (or plain blindly optimistic) like every other release. 

 

3 hours ago, Wraith said:

Three groups of high budget platforming series running at the same time isn't realistic for a genre a lot of people believe is on it's backfoot anyway. Sega only has so many resources and they have more IP to take care of than just Sonic now. You've gotta wonder if it's worth splitting hairs and potentially splitting revenue by saying 'this sonic is for your specific niche favorite' when most sonic fans already purchase all of the content that there is. Theres still a lot of overlap between customers of the modern games and Mania even if stringent fan debates paint a different picture.

Three high-budget sub-series are a risk, yes, but I see no good reason that we haven't had a Sonic Mania sequel yet.  That sort of game is relatively cheap and easy to make, by a smaller team, and furthermore, Sonic fans used to expect a relatively constant stream of 2D side games thanks to Dimps.  We have a time-tested team that can make them and many people are eager to see a Headcannon Sonic game that is all new levels.

As for the Adventure games, they're harder...but not by too much.  Fans have been able to duplicate their engine pretty well with now widely-available assets, and I think if a for-profit game approached it like that, it wouldn't cost very much to make.  Reuse graphic assets when possible, simply make the choice to have multiple playable characters, and Adventure fans will be satisfied.  The game doesn't need to be groundbreaking; it just should exist.

3 hours ago, Wraith said:

There's still a lot of overlap between customers of the modern games and Mania even if stringent fan debates paint a different picture.

Sonic Mania wasn't good because it was focused on a specific niche of the fandom. It was good because it was focused. It had a strong focal point in momentum based platforming that it was able to polish into a fine sheen and deliver on because it's development team wasn't split six different ways. Sonic needs more singular games like that for the sake of quality control, not just pleasing slightly different demographics. 

Yes, Sonic Mania has broad appeal, but its creation is the end result of people who wanted a specific thing out of Sonic that they weren't getting from the main series.  An early proof of Stealth's mettle was when he made a Game Boy Advance port of Sonic 1 that was actually good, in response to the official one that was shit.  And SEGA Retro consolidated bunches of fans of what Sonic had been before the Dreamcast era, encouraging them to recreate those mechanics.

The thing about the Sonic series is that its unruly experimental nature inevitably creates a lot of reactionaries.  People will like things and then be mad those things were discontinued, and they get discontinued too often.  The problem with Sonic Team is it very rarely sees a reason to take a step backwards.  It's one thing to not go back to something that clearly didn't work, but usually when Sonic Team tries something new that doesn't work, its attempted remedy is to try something else new in hopes that that will work.  When you approach a series that way, even if what you make isn't a broken mess, it doesn't reach its full potential; the way to make games reach their full potential is to resolve to do exactly what past games did, not much more, but do it better.

1 hour ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Three high-budget sub-series are a risk, yes, but I see no good reason that we haven't had a Sonic Mania sequel yet.  That sort of game is relatively cheap and easy to make, by a smaller team, and furthermore, Sonic fans used to expect a relatively constant stream of 2D side games thanks to Dimps.  We have a time-tested team that can make them and many people are eager to see a Headcannon Sonic game that is all new levels.

As for the Adventure games, they're harder...but not by too much.  Fans have been able to duplicate their engine pretty well with now widely-available assets, and I think if a for-profit game approached it like that, it wouldn't cost very much to make.  Reuse graphic assets when possible, simply make the choice to have multiple playable characters, and Adventure fans will be satisfied.  The game doesn't need to be groundbreaking; it just should exist.

I disagree. I think a big part of the appeal of the Adventures was that they were actually technically impressive games at the time, both in terms of visuals and content. You can't replicate that on a low budget, and a high budget Modern Sonic game releasing right next to it would only cause friction. You either go big or go home. Sonic Adventure 3 would need to be a full commitment if it existed.
 

1 hour ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Yes, Sonic Mania has broad appeal, but its creation is the end result of people who wanted a specific thing out of Sonic that they weren't getting from the main series.  An early proof of Stealth's mettle was when he made a Game Boy Advance port of Sonic 1 that was actually good, in response to the official one that was shit.  And SEGA Retro consolidated bunches of fans of what Sonic had been before the Dreamcast era, encouraging them to recreate those mechanics.

The thing about the Sonic series is that its unruly experimental nature inevitably creates a lot of reactionaries.  People will like things and then be mad those things were discontinued, and they get discontinued too often.  The problem with Sonic Team is it very rarely sees a reason to take a step backwards.  It's one thing to not go back to something that clearly didn't work, but usually when Sonic Team tries something new that doesn't work, its attempted remedy is to try something else new in hopes that that will work.  When you approach a series that way, even if what you make isn't a broken mess, it doesn't reach its full potential; the way to make games reach their full potential is to resolve to do exactly what past games did, not much more, but do it better.

There are a lot of reactionaries in every fandom, and it's generally a pretty bad idea to pander to them. I think Sonic fans get the idea that this is possible from the Megaman series, but it's not pointed out enough that those different sub divisions never ran at the same time and almost every single one of them ran until the wheels fell off and fizzled out. These days there aren't any new Megaman games to play. Just collections sold to enthusiasts on repeat.

Drawing on ideas from past games from fine, but you need to be critical in which are actually worthwhile and which only ever serve to cause problems. You can't just go by what the fans want because every weird or bad take Sonic has had has fans. The designers have to make commitments to what type of game they want to make, and what ideas actually serve that goal.

Now I know you might be thinking that you already basically solved this by splitting the series into three, but once you commit to something like that you run into your own problems. Do you really think the actual goal for classic fans was just something like Mania? Were all those 3D Classic Sonic demos just for show? What will happen when there's demand for more progression 3 Mania sequels in? That inevitability is why Sonic Adventure even exists in the first place. Players were growing weary of classic Sonic by the time Sonic and Knuckles came around. We don't just want these ideas to exist. The whole reason the future getting cut off of ball physics was disappointing was because it didn't get to evolve. I imagine that's true for fans of the Adventure series and modern games too, so safe, low budget sequels don't seem like the move.

What happens when Sonic changes again? Do fans of Open World Sonic deserve their own subseries along with the three already running? Who gets chopped off so that the RPG-lite fans can have their own series? It just doesn't seem feasible to me. Especially since the hardcore Sonic fandom that cares about all of these things is in the minority anyway.

Developers have to pick and choose, and to ME, the best choice for the series would be to focus on what's unique to it while it' still unique. Beat em up and shooting gameplay can be found in a lot of places, but combining platforming with ball physics is still a uniquely 'Sonic' idea.

On 9/24/2022 at 6:00 AM, Sonic's Shoes Blues said:

Their PR tactic for this game seems to be this level of arrogance and I think they know how well it plays with a certain subset of fans who have coddled them for years, If they embargo reviews until release day then it is controlled arrogance as this would be a sign that they aren’t so confident. All I can say for sure is that the subset of fans I’m talking about will go absolutely rapid over the first negative review, even just a 7 will make them launch a blitzkrieg of hate towards the reviewer.

I’m not sure I’m seeing “arrogance” here. They certainly are showing a level of confidence that… might be misplaced, but ultimately I don’t think you delay a game for a year out of arrogance.

It’s very hard to separate the history of Sonic from the history of Sonic’s marketing, because there’s a rather large chunk of SEGA’s history that’s more messaging than game design. One should ABSOLUTELY take Kishimoto’s words with a grain of salt, but regardless of the quality of the game, you’re not going to get a game’s director publicly speaking ill of the team and the project at a pivot point for the franchise.

As for the review thing… you’re just describing basically all game reviews now. Some of the audience will get mad that critical views don’t align with their pre-decided opinions, and others will review-bomb Steam and Metacritic because it has DRM they don’t like. Sometimes for better but mostly for ill, the internet tends to give a megaphone to small groups of loud people, that’s not purely a Sonic problem.

To be honest, a lot of the "problems" that Sonic fans like to point out about the series aren't actually unique to the series itself. A lot of legacy franchises have struggled making it to the modern day. Go ask a Rayman fan about the state of their series and see what type of responses you get.  Times change and creators have to adapt with the times, you can't rely on ideas that worked ten or twenty years ago just because your dedicated fanbase are mad that those ideas aren't being utilized the same as they were before. And yes, sometimes that change means leaving behind an old idea that might not be viable in the modern day. 

Yes, that inevitably means splintering your fanbase into groups and have them bicker amongst each other; it happens, there's nothing you can really change about that. I can't think of a single franchise that's lasted 20+ years that doesn't have some weird split fanbase going on. Yes, even Mario fans argue among themselves, so don't think Mr. Nintendo has it easy either, their games are just good is all. 

Overextending the series' resources by making multiple franchises isn't the solution; Mega Man tried it and all of those sub-series ended up cannibalizing themselves and now the future of the Mega Man series is up in the air given there hasn't been a game since 2018 and no word on a sequel. 

You get Sonic fans to shut the fuck up by just making a good game that marries as many old and new ideas as possible; the 2000 games drifted way too far from Sonic's core design into something else entirely, but was still a valid direction nonetheless. The 2010 games just kind of coasted on simple and budgeted design, while still failing to capitalize on the series' legacy outside of shallow uses of old iconic stages. So naturally neither the Classic or Modern crowds are really satisfied here. 

Now, to Frontiers' credit, it does seem to be attempting that again; can't remember the last time a Sonic game even tried to have rolling in it, in addition to the serious, Kingdom Hearts esc story that Adventure fans love, while still being a boost game at it's core. Its a game designed to touch as much of Sonic's history as possible, and that might explain why its starting to resonate with so many people. Its not perfect and it's certainly flawed in many areas, but it's the first real attempt in a while of trying to tie together the old and new in a way that mostly satisfies both parties. Whether its succeeds at that we will see in a little over a month, but all of the positive impressions do give the idea that Sonic might have something special here. 

That said, we've been burnt by this series before so jaded cynicism is of course understandable from people who aren't so easily taken in by hype. So Frontiers will have to prove itself come November if it lives up to the hype or is it just another dud. 

On 9/26/2022 at 1:41 AM, The Deleter said:

Of all things, "Not Japanese" and "feels like Fallout" are the last things I expected to read towards Frontiers today.

Japanese media being self-serious is arguably what causes shonen Manga/Anime to be the way it is, at least compared to its western counterpart in young boy's media. There are still plenty of gags emphasizing cartooniness included, but it regularly comes in second place to the show taking it's central tone completely seriously, be that idealist optimism, oppressive horror, or wistful adventure.

If rambunctious energy, hyperactivity, or flamboyance were what sold the Japanese market on Sonic games, every Sonic game would be a runaway success in their home country by now. You should instead be looking for the elements of the adventure games (and 06 iirc) that the rest of the series lacks, if you want to understand what the difference in cultural identity/influence actually means for the Sonic series in totality. 

Well, it's technically odd that this thread took on such a life of its own almost any way you slice it.  I'd expect such statements from a controversial franchise to be met with skepticism, sure, but hardly to deviate to debates about Japanese sensibilities. 

But on that note, do not misquote me.  I never said this game was "Not Japanese"; what I said is that not all successful Japanese media are melancholic like this, and you even corroborated that at the end of your very next paragraph.

I do maintain that this game feels at least a bit like Fallout, by simple extension of being like Breath of the Wild.  To me, it is overwhelmingly obvious that Breath of the Wild was widely inspired by Fallout; the story is about Hyrule getting very technologically advanced before civilization was all-but destroyed, it starts with Link emerging from a sealed vault, he has a portable computer with apps that trigger many of his abilities, the game goes for a loney vibe by having publicity shots of Link looking far into the distance and not seeing any civilization, and that depressing piano music drones on and on to enhance that feeling of loneliness.  Of course, it's far easier to see Fallout influence in another game that involves an inventory and weapons, but the point I am making is that Fallout has had a lasting influence on open-world games in that a lot of them these days shoot for that feeling of being cut-off from civilization, whether in the form of civilization being destroyed, it barely being established yet, you being in an odd realm where it doesn't exist, or otherwise.  The point is that it's an innately depressing feeling and I don't like it, and I also don't like that it has become so popular that series are aping it even when it doesn't necessarily fit them.

So again, nothing I said here implied that this sort of media don't exist in Japan; of course they do.  I'm not saying Evangelion isn't popular or that emulating it is a bad idea for business.  But at the same time, of all successful Japanese series, why is Evangelion the one that they chose for Sonic to emulate in order to sell better?  Why not Pokemon?  Why not One Piece?  Why not Naruto?  Hell, as obvious as this one's influence already is, why not Dragon Ball?  I understand that the existence and success of those franchises do not innately prove that being flashy and colorful and having memorable character designs are enough to make something a success in Japan, but I don't think those aspects hurt something's chance of success in Japan either, so I'm not convinced SEGA had to make the Sonic series into something lonely and quiet in order to succeed in Japan.  Give him a bunch of martial arts skills and ki attacks, fine.  Put a moe anime girl in, fine.  Give her a famous actress, fine.  Rewrite the dialogue for the Japanese script, fine.  They could have done all of those things and not made this game's atmosphere into such a lonely bummer, and again, the reason they did that is not because of Japanese culture, at least not directly; it's because BOTW is what's currently hip.  Once that sort of game is not hip anymore, where will this game be left in the eyes of future audiences?  Where will this series be left?

11 hours ago, Wraith said:

I disagree. I think a big part of the appeal of the Adventures was that they were actually technically impressive games at the time, both in terms of visuals and content. You can't replicate that on a low budget, and a high budget Modern Sonic game releasing right next to it would only cause friction. You either go big or go home. Sonic Adventure 3 would need to be a full commitment if it existed.

I'm sorry but when almost every Sonic Adventure-style fangame gets loads of people who say they like it better than what SEGA is making, you can't convince me there isn't money to be made by doing exactly that except with a pricetag.  I'm not saying that people who say that are the majority of customers or that it's enough money to sustain the brand, but when it potentially costs so little I don't think that matters much.  There actually are fans who would do that work up front for free, only stipulating in their contracts that they get a cut of the proceeds from the game's sales.  In fact, there are some who would do it just so their names became recognized.