yeah, pretty sure it works as a list and all it does is it starts at a random place on the list good for completing the fishing but makes it more mindless and boring after lmao
@@SplashDash_ At least the data carries over between files so you can't just milk the darn thing every time you restart the game. Though there is an option to delete the data I think, so that kind of negates that fact.😅
Frontiers is somehow super bold and confident with the bosses , but it’s also so scared and uncertain of it’s own identity that they have all these shortcuts to make it so you don’t have to play more of the game 🤣
Why gatekeep a story tho? And what if someone just wants to relax in a virtual world or briefly live a power fantasy? Video games can be so much now that the term "video game" is no longer universally appropriate. And you can still choose to be challenged. That's never going away. And those who don't care about gitting gud aren't for the most part going to care to pretend to be gud, and accessibility can actually act as training wheels for some who do want to git gud. Besides, it's clear that simply navigating the overworld was never intended to be part of Frontiers's real challenge, and the game has tons of problems the control customization can't do anything to mitigate. And I'm no gaming slouch, having beaten and even one-lifed many a gaming classic without accessibility helps be they part of the game itself or not. So don't go saying I don't know my shit.
One of the many, many baffling oversights(?) that Sonic Team didn't bother to fix in any of the post-launch updates. It's such a glaring visual bug so I have no clue why they didn't put any resources into fixing it.
It's not a bug, it's called a space screen reflection. Its used in other games and it's a cheap technique to achieve water reflections. That's why when your camera looks down, it doesn't 'see' the trees and it stops reflecting them, it's ugly, yes, but it's the same water that is used on the overworld, it saves you from rendering the screen twice or having to ray trace the reflection
@@BlackXixo Some people out there call screen-space effects "legalized bugs" or something of the sort. They're meant for small objects with high roughness values that you move past quickly, not highly reflective things you stare at all the time like water in a fishing minigame where the camera moves this much. In the overworld it's whatever. In the one tiny isolated area where you can't even move Sonic or the camera around freely, they could totally afford to render those trees twice. And if they couldn't, they should've made the camera closer to a top-down angle
i had fun with the fishing cause i was streaming the game in a discord vc with a friend and we were laughing our asses off over the extremely realistic fish models paired with the absurdity of the kind of things you can catch from a simple lake like saltwater fish, alligators, deep sea creatures, the old testament in its original form, and the extremely cartoony robotic fish enemy from the classic games.
It's funny cos this was a concern I had when I first saw the fishing. But I didn't actually think it would be feasible for the entire game. I just sorta view it as way to skip the game as a sort of, accessibility option I guess. It's basically a "skip" button in the guise of fishing.
Obviously not as a… _hedge_ against bad design, but that could be a good application for a New Super Mario Bros. Wii-style Super Guide-like system; show "mere" story enjoyers reasonably smooth combined gameplay/story sequences.
The idea of Sonic Team not being confident in you wanting to actually play Sonic has become more prevalent in thought. In so many 3D Sonic games they actively find ways for you to have as little control as possible with stuff like dash panels, quick time events, automation and now them either handing the wheel to you and not bothering to make a good controlling Sonic themselves or give you a way to not interact with the platforming whatsoever. It shows a lack of faith in design chops they should have refined by now considering we've had time to refine a 3D controlling Sonic since the mid 90's with 3D Blast. "What, we did a bad job again? Don't worry, we know."
For me that’s the real core of all the “momentum” discussion. With the last 10 years or so of Sonic Team’s output I really can’t help but feel like they’re really scared of trying to add mechanical depth. It feels like the movement and systems are made up of a bunch of compromises made in place of just making truly dynamic core systems that feel good to play. For all the praise I saw of the control sliders, to me it feels like Sonic Team just throwing in the towel on trying to make the game feel good themselves. Also, at risk of sounding like I’m pointing fingers, I can’t help but notice how Kishimoto’s games seem to particularly have these issues. I mean, just look at how he clearly defaults to giving Sonic a double jump instead of just making the platforming control feel more precise (seriously, there’s zero excuse for a professional developer in the 2020s to not be able to make 2D platforming feel good, let alone a developer meant to specialize in platformers). Honestly, my #1 problem with Frontiers is that Sonic’s movement just doesn’t feel natural to me. It feels like I’m just translating a player object around, not moving a character.
You're criticizing the 3D games for some stuff that always existed since the classics, automation was always there in some parts (especially in Sonic 2 and 3), dash panels were a thing since Sonic 2, and the actual new additions, like QTEs, weren't easy to pull off in Unleashed And I don't blame Sonic Team for just letting players use custom sliders for the controls, since the gameplay (like any other discussion in this fanbase) are constantly divisive and complaints would've been there no matter what, so let everyone customize it to their liking
@@ayrtonjoga I mean honestly you have a point although some of the stuff the 3D games get criticized for definitely became more apparent after the classics even if they did exist in the classics.
I'm pretty sure the reason they made it so that you can change movement settings is because everyone has a different idea of how they think sonic should move, so no matter what they do people are going to complain. And why does it even matter if you can change settings? Is freedom of choice a bad thing now? People will find anything to complain about
I think the tedium of catching a lot of fish in a row is what balances things out. On Kronos, you can only really get one to six coins at a time (eight with the two scrolls), and that's really not enough to break anything. For example, getting seven Vault Keys requires 105 Fishing Coins, which is maybe around 25 fish. The alternative is to just play a Cyberspace level for a few minutes and get the same seven keys. The only time it really felt "broken" is when Ouranos gave you 48 Fishing Coins for certain fish. That's three keys, but with 33 keys required to get all six emeralds, that's still 495 Fishing Coins, or about 15-20 fish (as some fish only give you like eight coins on Ouranos). That's definitely a lot of time spent just sitting there playing the same fishing mini-game over and over.
You're right, my channel name *does* suck. Cheers for the shoutout! Oh and thank you so much for reiterating why the custom controls are SO bad. It's such a failure on the developer's end.
WHAT I LIKE FROM FISHING IN SONIC FRONTIERS: 1- The mechanic itself is simple and fun for just a little side activity 2- They are hard to find in the map, rewarding you for finding them 3- It gives you a sense of freedom, letting you just fish and relax for a while when having trouble in a part of the game WHAT I DON"T LIKE ABOUT THE FISHING: 1- Too easy 2-way to overpowered
Okay, no joke, SEGA Bass Fishing is legitimately a really good game! Obviously, it's better than the fishing mini game in Sonic Frontiers, but it's more than that. It actually provides an a real challenge to fishing, and it feels good when you catch fish just right!
This problem of ‘giving you too much freedom to the point of not needing to do any of the content’ extends to ‘Another Story’, where you are able to cyloop random areas and get the lookout koco, which are used to unlock the lookout towers (you need 15 for all of them), the things that you can get by beating and completing the extra challenges in the cyberspace, which need portal gears from the revamped and hard boss fights you defeat. The fact you can skip all of that just by cylooping a random area to get the objective collectable just makes all the stuff they put into it feel like a waste of time
It's also possible that a player never finds the fishing spots before leaving the island. Especially on Ares where you have to go through a side path in an optional tunnel way off on the edge of the map somewhere.
A Sonic-Tuber finally saying DON'T skip over the entire level? I'm so glad you also mentioned the whole "choose your own character control settings" thing is just a bit of a cop-out. "It's not the player's job to make the controls feel good", which is something I said after hearing the idea. When I was working on gameplay mechanics in Assassin's Creed Nexus (programmer), everything from movement speed to the exact slope angle allowed for walking was specified by the designer, and relayed over to level designers to guarantee that levels were built with the exact player movement specs in mind. The player control is part of a game's identity, in fact I'd say player control is almost the entire point of gameplay in a platformer. Having the player fiddle with fundamental character control elements is indicative of "playing it safe", which is completely contrary to the inherent nature of Sonic The Hedgehog!
Hi Nimso! Yeah I find it really weird when I see all these SonicTuber videos talking about some new movement addition or something in a fangame or mod that just lets you skip over all of a game's level design and they're like "This is what Sonic _should_ be in 3D!" or "They finally FIXED this Sonic game." Like...giving you the ability to just skip everything that's...actual GAME, especially when said skips can end up being easier than going through what you're skipping, is FIXING the game? Nah, that just sounds lame.
honestly i do kind of like the idea of the sliders to control your movement because no matter what your game will not appeal to everyone. some people will say sonic is too fast and others will say he's too slow, regardless of what speed you actually put him at. however i do see the issue with it and think that maybe the sliders should've been locked behind beating the game once or something.
Heh. Yup. Accessibility to let non-gamers see the whole game or tweak control layouts or simple movement sensitivity=good, accessibility as a crutch for crappy design=bad. But I'd say Sonic also needs to maybe play things a bit less unsafe when it comes to actual series identity. It does seem like there are signs toward the franchise getting back on track, mainly with the impression of a metanarrative about Sonic's friends having gone through a downfall, as they had starting with Adventure 2 because Iizuka didn't want Sonic to be outdone at his own game by his friends even if there was a way to keep him on top without nerfing said friends. "Fans" whine that Tails's flight is broken and that the character needed to change because of that, yet chant "HIRE THIS MAN SEGA!" when Sonic jumps over a whole-ass level at once because "that takes AcTuAl sKiLl!". What, boost-jumping off a bump in the ground? And ofC some of it is just a cover for MC bias/hatred for child characters like Tails because of what Sega marketed Sonic as in the old days. Yay exaggeration.
@@CarbonRollerCaco I believe it becomes a problem if Accessibility bleeds into the skill ceiling, depending on the game. Let’s say for instance the A Rank in Metal Harbor is very tight and you can get it via reaching top rocket level or doing very good in the stage itself. Now imagine if there was a trail of rings you can take all the way to the end and you get the A Rank that way. Just one push of a button and suddenly you’re seen as a Top Player because of one single action. Not the best analogy, but you get the point. The fishing gives the premise of “Hey, I can take the easy route and not feel bad”, mostly due to the options the game gives you aren’t that good or just boring. And obviously that’s on the fault of the devs/company if they didn’t have the recourses or done poorly. And for a game like Sonic where you have to balance so many things in a game at once, I can see how something like the Fishing is praised for. It’s not the concept of Frontiers can’t work, but it needs ALOT of restructuring and careful crafting to make it work better. You’d need a team like what Nintendo has, because THEY know their gameplay philosophy inside and out.
Not all games need to have their controls and mechanics set in stone. A sandbox game like Sonic Frontiers makes having sliders a fun thing to mess around with at the very least. It's fun testing out all the different ways you can traverse the islands, and the sliders only increase those possibilities. Sandbox games leave a lot of things in the players' hands by design, and this is not a bad thing. It's just different from your area of expertise and what you think is "correct".
Though I don't at all agree with the critique about the sliders since the default controls are good and the players have two clear and obvious presets. I also don't agree that the mere idea that sliders are somehow a proof of a lack of confidence, that's a critique I fundamentally don't understand at all. The sliders don't influence the controls to any point that it's significantly different from how the default controls work. It's a limited range built for those who genuinely may not handle how fast Sonic could be. You point out how you read reviews where people basically skipped the final island with fishing, but I've never seen anyone screw themselves over with the sliders or even feel like they were necessary to be enjoyable. Anyone who has a significant issue with the controls wouldn't be helped by the sliders anyway. The slider critique is related to your critique about too much freedom, but while the fishing allows you to skip everything and not engage with the game, the sliders only allow tweaks for preference and doesn't change anything about the core experience or even how the player approaches the game. The sliders can't make you cheese the platforming or make combat easier or break the level design (and notnjust because a lot of it is automated; the DLC has more involved level design and the sliders don't break that). The idea that the existence of sliders means the default controls aren't good flies in the face of practically every form of customization on a mechanical level. There are many games with sliders that fundamentally change controls or physics that I never see get criticized the way Frontiers does for allowing you to make Sonic slightly slower or turn slightly sharper. The sliders need better names, though. Also, worse voice direction? Nah, that's cap. For one, it's one of the best, and two, it HAS voice direction, which is practically unheard of for Sonic.
And that’s a concern for the sequel if they do the same thing again, but the work is doubled and superfluous. You do not want your game to get boring, which Frontiers unfortunately falls into the trap during later half of Island 2 and after. I get what they were doing with the fishing, but still it invokes that “I can just walk around everything”. And that bleeds into the combat once you hit MAX lv., it’s not that hard to get to.
NO! DON'T! Sega might actually be reading in and taking you seriously! In all honesty, I think they're building up to ditching that Sonic-is-just-a-random-joke-drizzled-with-verbatim-self-reference-drops-franchise-now-deal-with-it crap. God knows they have to in order to save their radical roller.
Pretty good video all around, but I have to critique you on the custom controls bit. Before this game, I literally would have only been against it because I thought it would have been too complicated to implement, but Frontiers proves that it really isn't. Just add some sliders in check boxes, no different then audio and graphical settings. As long as the developers make sure the minimums and maximums don't break the game, then there should be no problem with the implementation. And since I imagine implementing these features would be very helpful for fine tuning the games controls in the first place, since you don't have to close and reopen the game every time you want to make a slight adjustment, all it would take to implement it is to just not remove it. You say it's the same kind of thing as the fishing, but I honestly don't see the connection. The fishing mini game is way simpler, way easier, and way faster than normal gameplay, and so it's objectively more efficient than normal gameplay. And so not doing fishing is effectively a self imposed challenge you have to consciously decide to do. But literally none of that can be said for custom controls. There might be some points on the slider, or some combinations that are objectively worse, if you get like really specific, but overall I would say there is no objectively best settings. Because it turns out, there isn't one perfect set of controls for every game, but rather each game has a range of controls that are ideal for it, and so there's plenty of room for preference. And it can easily be the job of a designer to figure out where the limits of this flexibility are, and that can easily be considered "designing the game", because it still takes a good understanding of gaming design to understand what would trivialize the gameplay, what would make it too annoying or frustrating, and where the golden mean lies. And of course, choosing the default is still designing the game, because that's literally what every other game does anyway, but without the option to change it. I honestly don't see any reason to be against Frontiers' customizable controls and yet be fine with control remaping. No seriously. If you were to boot up NieR: Atomanta or Smash Bros and notice that the options menu contains settings for changing which button on the controller does what, would you complain that the designers are "making" the players "design the game for them"? Would you argue that the designer should just "come up with a control schema stick with it"? Because of all I have a feeling you wouldn't, I don't see why when you're also against the custom controls of Sonic Frontiers. At what point are we not essentially arguing That settings should only exist to allow for physical compatibility with different machines and monitors/TVs? At what point are we do we end up making the argument that audio language and text language should it be adjustable separately because "if you want to play the game in English, then why would you want Japanese voices"? They're very clearly reasons to have the options menu outside of things like "my speakers are broken, so I need to turn up the in game volume" and "my monitor is too bright", so if developers can implement it (and implementing it early would make it easier to finetune the controls anyway), then why not implement them? You appear to have brought up Jump Deceleration as an example supporting your point, but I view it as the opposite. Well granted, when the game was updated, the default jump deceleration should have been set incredibly low for both styles, that's a valid point, I'm not going to argue with you on that. _However,_ objectively, the fact that it's a slider is a purely good thing, because it means it's possible to regress it back to what it was before the update without having to somehow regress back to that previous version. I think we all know what it's like for a game, or even just a generic program, to update in a way that you don't like, I've heard enough people on the Internet complain about that sort of stuff (especially with Minecraft) to know how universal it is. Thought the game was perfect with the jump deceleration it had? Then just change the slider to something similar to what it used to be. Think jumped deceleration is an abhorrent abomination that should be nowhere near any Sonic game at all? Then just turn the slider all the way down. No harm no foul, everyone is happy. I've actually seen another UA-camr (who's actually really good) complain about the custom controls, and on my comment about it, someone disagreed with me. So a minimum of three people don't like the custom controls, and I honestly don't get why. There's an argument to be made that game should be made to conform to the creators vision, and not to the whims of the masses, which is a sentiment I can agree with, but I think my point about settings in general pretty handily count as this, because it turns out the creator's ideal vision can actually be quite flexible, and might even include people being able to play they want to play. For all these reasons, ever since I learned that frontiers had these options, along with button remapping for console games, separate text and voice language options, and mod support for pc games, I think it should become the industry standard. Even if they only added them because they were uncertain as to how good their controls were, so what? That led to them proving something was possible that I think would only benefits the industry. I legitimately don't see any reason why this shouldn't become standard in every AAA game going forward.
Absolutely agree. I think having more accessibility options is a great idea especially for sonic. It gives players who might regularly struggle with sonic games a chance to tune the game to fit their playstyle.
Hi, I've been a gameplay programmer for a decade and been studying Mario and Sonic games for the past 2 decades, I also wrote a large portion of the character control system under the hood for an Assassin's Creed game as a developer at a AAA studio. I'll try to explain to you the reason this concept of customisable physics is very very bad. The physics of a player is one of the most fundamental structures that the game is built upon in a platformer, even in other types of games it's fundamental but far more important in a platformer. In development, the micro-details of character control are tweaked many many times over to a very precise result in order to provide a perfect balance for how the character should move... This is then used to determine how the actual levels will be built. For example the "Jump deceleration" has a direct impact on the horizontal speed that the character moves in air, therefore affecting the total jump distance that can be achieved from a specific running jump. Platforms have to be placed at a specific distance based on the capability of the character to jump a certain distance, hence the level design is directly impacted by the jump distance, and therefore directly impacted by jump deceleration. What this means in practice is that if they are not doing the work to perfectly tweak the character controller in development, then the levels are not being designed with an understanding of the character's capability, resulting in effectively bad level and gameplay design. When working on the Assassin's Creed game I can give the example of slope limits, my gameplay lead told me that the specific angle limit where the player was able to control the movement properly was 45 degrees exactly. Any slope even 1 degree higher than that would result in forcing the player down the slope until they fall or reach a playable ground angle. This information was provided to the level designers, because some roof tops that were not supposed to playable ground were allowing the player to walk on them. It was necessary for the level designers to guarantee that any non-walkable roofs were at 46 degree slopes or more... If the player had control over the slope limit... even if they were given only 1 degree of range, the level design would break. Most importantly though, the examples I've given are miniscule parts of a character controller, especially a platformer. I've built Sonic fan games before, I even made the Mario 64 reimagined project, I've made my own platformer games... The acceleration values for movement shouldn't even be this simple. While studying Mario Odyssey's movement I recognised that the acceleration actually changes depending on how fast Mario is moving, so that means for a more advanced controller like Mario's, these settings would be absurdly complicated. The physics of a character are extremely intricate and require highly detailed study and tweaking to get right. Sonic Team should not be making controllers so simple that the average consumer would be able to even understand the variables involved.
For some details on how Sonic games handle character control, you can check out my "How It Works" video on Sonic games that discusses Adventure, Heroes and Generations.
@@NimsoStudios-.-I think you argued your point very well, and have made me soften up on my position. However, I still feel it is possible to limit controls to arrange, and then design around that range, but acknowledge that might be more complicated to do well than what it feels it would be. I noticed you used Mario Odyssey as an example, and, well, I went into it wanting to believe that what everyone said about its controls being so good was correct, tried my best to like it, telling myself "I just need to get used to it", and finished despising the game. The entire time I only ever felt half in control of Mario, and I absolutely hate it when games are what I would call a "dexterity check", and that game's controls make it nothing but dexterity checks. I hate it so much, I felt so betrayed by the fan base, that I literally want to make an entire mod fixing that game's controls, just so I can write a multi-hour long video essay explaining why I hate the controls so much, and how it ruined the game for me. If you didn't bring it up, I was legitimately going to ask you why Odyssey's controls were so bad. Mario Odyssey is on my list of games to _avoid_ controlling similar to (along with Sonic 06, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Yoshi's Island, and potentially spirit of the North, but I haven't finished that game yet, so I'm withholding judgment). I sincerely, honestly fined the controls to be indefendabl. So yeah, if Odyssey does something, that is immediate cause for me to be suspicious of it. The few things I was able to notice about the controls are the fact that Mario's acceleration from a standstill feels like, as one redditar described it "the Scooby-Doo run", in that Mario starts sluggishly slow, before being able to pick up to a reasonable pace, which makes it impossible to dot from a standstill, which I view as a pure bad thing. The second thing I noticed is that turning is not instant, it is actually slightly delayed, which is a decision I can only imagine they made so that people can't do a back flip in the direction they're heading, which I think is stupid because, well I already mentioned how I hated when game require high dexterity, if a speed runner wants to put it in their kit, I think left them, as long as it's not required, it shouldn't affect casual play. All my other complaints are either motion controls not working or more obvious over the hood stuff, like the fact that you can't drop from a ledge by pressing the crouch button. But one of these over the hood problems I like to point out is the fact that the ground pound does a little flip before before executing, which only has utility in being able to do the lunch, which could easily be assigned to the jump button, since pressing jump in mid-air does nothing anyway. (This has the consequence of making the lunch require every action button but the one button it makes sense for.) As a consequent, it is objectively completely useless as anything other than a glorified inspect button. However, if it didn't have this flip, then it would be possible to use it to easily attack enemies without needing to predict where they're going, and be usable as a sort of air dodge (during the segment of the soda beach level with all the fuzzies, I actually instinctively used it as a way to avoid damage, which caused me to take more hits, which I do not blame myself for do to how unintuitive the flip is). For these reasons, I consider the flip to be a purely bad thing, I think it's removable in order to make the ground pound instantaneous like the Sonic stomp would be a purely good thing. This flip also apparently exists for as far back as Yoshi's Island at least, so all of this makes me think the designers weren't very careful when making the controls, sense I honestly cannot comprehend how a designer with attention to detail and that cares about making, a control system that's fun to just control alone, could make such an obvious mistake. I honestly don't know why the ground pound isn't a meme. Given how useless and prevalent it is, it seems like it obvious punching bag. I can either see people going "cyie loop is the ground pound of Sonic Frontiers", and everyone instantly getting what they mean by that. So yeah, if you couldn't tell, I have kind of a hairpin trigger for bad UX. (I'm not even mad while writing this, these are just neutral statements of why Odyssey's controls make me angry when I play it.) And I honestly cannot understand why anyone would find Odyssey's controls tolerable, outside of things no one praises it for, and that makes it anything but "tight", "smooth", or "responsive". It's honestly feels like trying to move a trailer attached to a car you're driving. But anyway, given your credentials, it sounds like you comfort a niche I've been wanting to see for a long time. I definitely have to check out your channel! It sounds super interesting!
I feel like bickuribox12 put it best in his review of the game: “You have a lot of freedom in how you approach progression to the point where nothing holds that great of value.” Everything from fishing, to those shiny ramps that can be spammed indefinitely to get skill points, to the various exploits via glitches, and the treasure signs holding lookout coco in final horizon, there are so many ways to skip the gameplay. A lot of this game’s appeal is borderline optional, and I don’t think it’s worth more than one play through.
the worst thing of the fish mini game is the fact that all of eggman's story development is hidden in that store, which can be unlocked in the first island
I gotta be honest - for me personally, Cyberspace was so genuinely horrible and atrocious sit through at launch that the ONLY way I finished the game at all was to exploit BIg's fishing game and skip my way past the Cyberspace stages. Nowadays, Cyberspace is at least as good as the islands themselves from a gameplay standpoint, and at times even more fun. Consistent control and stellar movement will do that......but at launch? Easily the weakest part of the entire package for me. Even as (or perhaps because I am) someone who has long considered the Boost gameplay to be my favorite style in the series, the way Cyberspace played before the updates/patches/DLC dropped felt like an absurd, sick joke. So being forced to play so much of it in order to progress would have absolutely prevented me from doing so, because for as much as I love Sonic, I could just as easily be playing a Sonic game that doesn't feel like a painful chore. And I'd probably think far less of the game in retrospect if I hadn't been able to bypass the parts I hated most. It's abysmal game design incarnate don't get me wrong, but truth be told, even with the sheer amount of baffling oversights in this game and across this series, I honestly think Sonic Team knew that, going in. I think this was mostly there for people like me (and the critics) who would simply rather not be playing the game at all if it meant enduring that consistently unpleasant tedium in such repetition.
@@dyland1842 Guys I don't know what game you've been playing these last couple years, but uh . . . - Spindash. Like fundamentally this changes the entire flow of the gameplay and the scope of movement, something even Sonic Team acknowledged when implementing the - New Cyberspace Challenge stages. Which are in many cases a full rethink of the design, difficulty or even objective of various existing stages, and at other times, entirely new challenges with entirely new mechanics at play like Animal rescue and Rocket Boosting. And speaking of boosting - Maintaining boost in a jump. That massive fix for the handling in this game that came with Update 2 carries over to Cyberspace and it makes all the difference. I'm kinda bewildered that anybody playing Frontiers would not notice it. And on the matter of jumping - Jump Deceleration, more specifically the ability to turn that garbage off. I mean, it's night and day when it comes to flow and speed. I mean there's a plethora of videos out there titled things like "Cyberspace Spin Dash is insane!" not to mention countless new speed runs that highlight the difference between how Cyberspace plays now vs back then, you don't need to take my word for it, guys, there is plenty of it out there throughout UA-cam. Most reviews from the earliest months after the game's launch (or basically any reviews from before the DLC started dropping) cite Cyberspace stages as a consistent low point due to its control and handling, and the tedious lack of flow created by the fact that Sonic wasjust regressively, embarrassingly slow in them with no sense of momentum and a ridiculous degree of clunky weight. In a post DLC Frontiers, I dare say Cyberspace can actually be the highlight of the game at times.
I recently played through this game and didn't have a good time with it at all, the repetitive exploration process and constant self-referential dialogue bothered me constantly
I believe during the development of Sonic Frontiers, the team morale at Sonic Team was *astronomically* low. Decisions like the fishing minigame being a skip from actual game design only come from a studio that is just as cynical & worn-down as its fandom.
11:20 yea, that was me! I had no interest in doing the copy/pasted Cyberspace stages from old games. Because if I wanted to play Rail from Sonic Adventure 2, I'd just play Sonic Adventure 2. Nor did I want to go through the hassle of trying to find memory tokens by digging up the same spring, or dash pad, I'd dug up three times before which locks me into a 2D section from which there is no escape! So much for the claim of total player freedom, in an Open Zone. (Also if Cyberspace is supposed to be Sonic's memories, why is he in Sky Rail, when that was one of Shadow's stages)
I like how you don’t just limit your discussion in this video to “fishing bad,” but use it as a primary example of the greater fundamental flaws you see in Frontiers.
On repeat playthroughs, I use the fishing to get a bunch of skill points early on in the game. Since the games combat is so shallow, I at least want it to look flashy as soon as possible.
Not gonna lie, I actually enjoy 100%ing Sonic Frontiers multiple times, even after update 2 made you collect every memory token. But Big’s Fishing completely ruins it. You have to catch 32 fish per island (except Rhea) to 100% the game and the process is EXHAUSTING and single-handedly ruins my drive to want to 100% this game more than I do.
@@vampire_catgirl Well, it’s easy, it just isn’t fun. You have to do the same timing minigame 32 times on every island and there’s no way to speed it up. And since I lose count of how many I’ve caught easily, I gotta bring a counter up.
@@RyderPlatinumWarpstar I find it relaxing, so I love doing it. But you know... you could always just not? You 100% the game once, you don't have to do it multiple times
@@vampire_catgirl I don’t have to, you’re right, but I do get enjoyment out of repeat 100% playthroughs of the game, and I could skip that part of the process, but then I don’t get the shiny gold banner for the island on the menus. I like obtaining that shiny gold banner to feel accomplished for all I’ve done. It can be relaxing and a nice break from the standard gameplay, but I just wish it wasn’t required for 100% completion.
"It never hints that all you have to do is hold the analog stick down" ACKSHULLY it tells you just that if you select the instructions for Big on the character select.
If the fishing part wasn't there, grinding would've been a bigger drag then it was. Sure its boring and very repetitive but at least you get through the boring collectinh quicker...by doing more boring collecting...well then. Now I never just fished to get through the game, but after I did most of the work myself and got bored I'd do that to keep my retention. However, I would have begged for it to be more then just PRESS A
Ive been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think its become one of my biggest issues with frontiers. The gameplay loop has so much potential but there's so many ways to skip parts of it that there's no reason to even bother engaging with it normally. Hopefully they'll lean less into that the next go around.
When I first heard about that fishing will be added to Sonic Frontiers, I legit just went saying in my head "Oh no, not Sonic Adventure fishing all over again"
The fishing isnt the worst part, the repetitivity of the tasks and the whole game working as a checklist with the same puzzle system and same kind of gameplay happening over and over again is, when its not, its a broken 2d. Fishing nullifies it which makes parts of the game feel dull, however, thats only there because the designers knew how boring the game design was in general.
Imo cyber space is even worse With the open zone, I can at least appreciate them trying something new. It's not executed very well, but it has some bright spots and fun moments, nice environments Cyberspace looks like dreary shit. Plays like it was tacked on the same way as Classic Sonic in Forces, made to satisfy a certain audience and not even doing that job well. AND on top of that it's Green Hill and Sky Sanctuary AGAIN. With re-used level maps from old games. Wtf sonic team
imo the fishing is the best part of the game because i really can not be bothered to do all those shit ass open zone platforming segments to unlock stuff
11:03 Gee I wonder why they put that in there in the first place it's almost like we're in a fan base that likes to tear each other apart for a different opinions
If they made it so you could only get fruits and kocos through fishing, i think it would’ve been completely justified, because there aren’t really enough kocos on each island to level up proportionately to how much you explore, and the enemy fruit drops are also so random that it also makes it hard to bring up your defense and shit consistently, so if fishing meant you got a little extra edge in leveling up, but you still had to play the game to progress, then it could’ve been worthwhile
3:54 I pin it squarely on them not reading the freaking manual. Or the in-game tutorial menu. People complain about games inserting tutorials in the gameplay, but this kind of thing is exactly why they do that.
The fishing is the best part of the game for the same reason as the cutscenes. They are the only parts of the game where you don't have to play the game. The fact that sonic fans will look at "sonic in unreal engine 4k 60fps" and call it peak really speaks to how dead in the water the series has been since generations.
Responding to controls and toggles - I don’t think it necessarily implies a lack of confidence of how Sonic should control, more so it just adds to the sense of freedom. Being able to control how Sonic should move is a way of the player being able to stylize Sonic to their liking. I don’t really see that as a loss. I think it’s really more about Sonic being able to control well and being able to get through the whole no matter what customizables you have at your disposal. Yes, you could argue why should it be up to the player, but you can also argue why CAN’T it be up to the player, you know?
Well in Mario Odyssey you CAN grind for moons in a boring way. Just collect a bunch of coins and keep purchasing moons, you need to do this anyways if you want to get up to 999 (though I think it's fine there since the Luigi Balloon minigame is more involved than the fishing minigame, oh and that 999 thing is just one aesthetical acknowledgement that isn't required for anything really)
That's only after you've already beaten the final Bowser boss, though. It's a post-game thing, only progression it helps you with is unlocking Dark Side and Darker Side, not the rest of the main game. It's still weird and I'd rather it not be there, but at least it's post-game only.
@@boydixonentertainment No actually, you can't do this until AFTER beating the final boss, thankfully, it's only a post-game thing. And also the way Odyssey's main game is structured such that each kingdom has a separate moon count and some kingdoms' missions are forced and scripted without any connection to a moon count would have at least made it not as bad if you could use this feature pre-final boss.
I would argue that the fishing itself isnt the problem, but starfall. Without starfall you wouldnt have nearly enough tokens to skip everything except for maybe Ouranous where I think that would be okay. I do think that another similar problem lies in how irrelevant so many of the collectibles are. The enemies in Frontiers are so weak and easy that I never upgrade my attack or defense just to have a bit more fun with them, and if you new game+ then skill pieces become useless, and no one cares about the extra boost upgrades from the new koco. I dont think I even need to mention the problem with TFH exclusive collectibles. Frontiers is my favourite game in the franchise btw, and I want Frontiers 2 to surpass it.
Objectively the fishing is an awful inclusion Subjectively tho anything that lets me skip the halfbaked normal gameplay to get to the bosses which is seemingly where the effort was put in is good to me
The worst thing about Sonic Frontiers was the... was the Dementors! They were flying all over the place and they were scary and then they'd come down and they'd suck the soul out of your body and it hurt!
The only things I would say are worth buying are the egg memos, for lore obviously, and the level upgrade collectibles since it takes forever to level up his speed or defense
The Control Toggle was honestly a genius idea because what does and doesn't feel good to control is subjective. Just because you think a game controls well doesn't mean everyone else will. So giving players the ability to adjust controls to their liking was a good thing and something that I hope not only comes back in future Sonic games but become a standard thing in video games. Although the default should be in the middle, not an extreme.
10:30 Most of the platforming wasn't built in mind with the jump deacceliration turned off. Plus it's not "hidden" in the options, it's just there along with the rest of the control sliders.
Your criticisms of the custom physics slider cannot be understated, it's how I felt about it since day 1. Seriously, imagine if 3D Mario had this sort of thing showhorned into their game. It would be pointless at best because the default controls are already good, and detrimental at worst because it's near impossible for the level design to account for whatever infinite possible combinations. There's a REASON literally no other platformer has this sort of thing. Like, having confidence in your own control scheme should be the BARE MINIMUM for a game.
@@Jackattack359 Because I'm a Sonic fan, goddammit. I WANT this series to be better, but that isn't going to happen when this fanbase keeps infantalizing Sonic Team and enabling their worst habits by suppressing criticism.
@@felixdaniels37 you do realize commenting multiple times on the same video getting more and more dramatic each time isn’t gonna help with that right? Go outside and get some fresh air. You honestly sound like you’ve been in doors for way too long
@@Jackattack359 You realize obsessively stalking anyone that even shows slight disdain over a video game is not healthy behavior in the slightest, right? How about follow your own advice and piss off.
@@felixdaniels37dude, how is this “slight disdain?” You are literally just yelling your ass off about a game not made the way you wanted it to be. Not just in one comment, but multiple upon multiple comments. If you don’t want people “obsessively stalking” you (like, god forbid anyone from simply replying to your overly dramatic whining), you can start by not complaining about something so much that you feel compelled to write multiple comments on it on the exact same video with such an angry demeanor and actually focus on something that actually matters. Simple as that
The incentive not to fish is that playing the game is more engaging and fun, and if you don't think the gameplay or the fishing is fun... then the simple solution is to stop playing the game. All fishing does is allow you to mitigate parts of the game that you personally might not enjoy or have time for. Developers *should* be confident enough in their game not to anticipate people wanting to skip parts of it, but its simply realistic to acknowledge that as truth. I love mario sunshine but I have never once gotten the watermelon festival shrine legitimately, I always do the speedrun clip. And that's kind of my whole point, even if there was no fishing in sonic frontiers, I'd find and learn another way to avoid the parts I simply didn't feel like playing, I really just think fishing streamlines that.
@@aperturius You're missing the point. I know how to do the entire speedrun route for mario sunshine, I could skip a whole lot more. But I don't, because I enjoy playing the game. I just skip the parts I really don't like. And its not even just mario sunshine, I will look into at least basic speedrun strats and glitches for most games I play so that I can incorporate it to mitigate parts I don't like, because every game has parts you aren't going to like, often for purely subjective reasons. Sonic Frontiers fishing just enables me to do the same kind of thing without looking anything up. To me, this whole argument also feels like saying "Why do people play fallout games? You can turn on god mode and no clip at any time and skip everything." but you never hear about anyone complaining about beating the whole game via console commands like that because...its more fun not to do that. And if you aren't having fun you aren't going to just walk to the end of the game. you're just going to stop playing.
@@Namingway248 I don't believe I'm missing the point. Glitches are unintended by the developers completely. Cheat codes are fun extras that not everyone knows about and are clearly not the intended way to play by the developers. This fishing game is the developers literally saying, don't like the game play? Here, do this boring thing for a while and we'll give you EVERYTHING. It shows, at best, a lack of faith in their own game.
@@aperturius What I'm saying is it literally doesn't *matter* if the developer is confident or not. If I don't like something, I'll find a way not to do it. There will always be a way, and there will always be things in a game that I don't like to do, no matter how good the game is or how confident the devs are. The devs of frontiers are acknowledging this fact by putting systems like this in the game. It just streamlines the process. To refer to fallout's console commands as cheat codes not everyone knows is also just... incorrect. Its developer tools, and the fix to basically any bug is to open them up and manually fix it yourself. And most playthroughs are going to require you to do so at least once if you don't want to lose hours of progress. These games are still popular and fun to play.
I only used the fishing to get the egg memos cause it felt like a cheap way to get stuff instead of working for it. I really hope they fix this issue in future games
I honestly think that the fishing would have been cool if with enough of the currency you get from fishing you can unlock some cosmetics, or if it let you buy some tokens that would have been used to unlock cosmetics, but of course there isn’t unlockable cosmetics so they can’t do that
During my first play through of this game, I got to the last island. And decided to go hang with Big. And I ended up getting all 6 key. So I beat the last island by doing nothing.
I have the same problem with how you can alter Sonic's controls (like his top speed, turning radius, etc). Instead of actually designing a good control scheme and physics that made Sonic fun to move around like Adventure 1 or even Adventure 2, Sonic Team just put a bunch of toggles into a menu and told the playerbase to figure out what sucks the least for themselves. Sonic Team's lack of confidence is well placed considering how strangely incompetent they are at making a 3D platformer but it's still pathetic to see. Instead of improving at their craft, they're telling players to fix it themselves under the guise of "player freedom".
@@beck_gaming1243 I don’t mind the world visuals. I guess I mostly mean the unappealing 20 year old reused assets, stiff and jittery animations, the random flying rails that pop in, and gameplay that feels like a tech demo
@@deanmoriarty6015 Mario Kishimoto: "Thank you for your feedback. We will consider it and try to be better Next Time™, and will strive to go in the Right Direction™"
i'm so glad someone agrees that oddessys postgame is just boring, i just couldn't make it through the content drought of 250-500 moons for the final level when i usually love completing everything in a mario game because surprisingly platforming challenges are fun but kicking every rock in a map isn't. but yeah i find it so baffling nobody comments on this mobile game design of a secondary currency that lets you skip the game, it's not even the fact the minigame is boring which, it is, it was the worst part of 100%ing the game because again, i wanna platform in my platformer, even big the cat understood this. i only used the fishing to get all the fish but even then i unlocked all the egg memos and nearly maxed out my levels. i only wound up buying the boss gears with the golden tickets so i could skip grinding bosses. and let me say skipping grinding with more grinding is just as bad, freedom in a videogame isn't about the choice to skip content it's the choice between content. you could choose to S rank every stage for extra keys so you don't need to fight as many bosses, or you could play each level once to ensure you're experiencing them all with fresh eyes. you should still have to engage with the mechanic of level shrines. it says a lot that the dlc's combat trials all set sonics level to 1, they genuinly didn't design the scaling, it's not like a kingdomhearts no exp run where you're given just enough of a safety net in not being 1shot and a damage floor high enough to make you deal chip damage instead of tickling the boss. in fronteirs leveling just trivialises the combat so i just stopped leveling until after i beat the final boss so i could experience the game. fronteirs really is a step in the right direction type game, i enjoyed it but only because my expectations were so drastically low i was considering leaving the fandom.
the game never tells you to fish until it’s over, the game tells you to get portal gears and keys to access cyberspace. i think i like the ‘freedom’ but idk i just like the fishing lol
The fishing is an optional way to collect these things but I can promise than 90% of gamers enjoyed the main game enough to engage with it and beat it regularly throughout a first playthrough. The fishing minigame made certain subsequent playthroughs fun because of how shit posty it is to use the fishing minigame to ignore the main game but that was something intentionally done. I love it personally and if you don't feel like engaging with the fishing mini game...don't.
“Me reads title” The presentation The controls The combat The story The level design The game’s structure The extra characters The bosses The English voice acting The character writing Big was good though. I like Big
I think that there shouldn’t have been all those story critical unlockables as fishing rewards and instead there should’ve been a more substantial fishing bestiary and more egg memos to flesh out lore and instead of it being a digital construct of big the cat, have it be the actual guy and you have to work your way up to fishing up froggy who was compelled to go to the islands due to chaos having once been inside him and big want to rescue him
yeah i felt very similar with it in that i enjoyed the gameplay loop but wasn't a fan of how it could be cheesed, i always prefer a kind of risk/reward type design where the most difficult option is the most efficient kind of like how in some rpgs you can brute force your way through grinding but doing so takes a lot longer than simply learning what you need to do.
woah
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skibidi
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Crash bandicoot : 1996
grass ahoy
Just popping in to say, the fish you get is actually not random at all, the order you get them is completely set in stone
That’s somehow even worse
yeah, pretty sure it works as a list and all it does is it starts at a random place on the list
good for completing the fishing but makes it more mindless and boring after lmao
Actually unbelievable.
@@SplashDash_ At least the data carries over between files so you can't just milk the darn thing every time you restart the game. Though there is an option to delete the data I think, so that kind of negates that fact.😅
“Just popping in” Frontiers reference?
All of Sega’s budget for Frontiers went into designing photorealistic fish
The fish be looking better and more expressive than the character models in cutscenes
Actually I think the fish are from the Yakuza games where there's a much tougher fishing system
@@GXP3000 *gasp* sega? reusing assets? nooooooo
Hello there fellow Kirby Bayonetta enjoyer
Did... did yakuza catch crocs too? If so that's great lmao@@GXP3000
Frontiers is somehow super bold and confident with the bosses , but it’s also so scared and uncertain of it’s own identity that they have all these shortcuts to make it so you don’t have to play more of the game 🤣
This is exactly how I feel
@@RTstudios-xs6fw bro how they’re given to you so easily there in every corner , you could be just jumping and you’ll get one randomly
Why gatekeep a story tho? And what if someone just wants to relax in a virtual world or briefly live a power fantasy? Video games can be so much now that the term "video game" is no longer universally appropriate. And you can still choose to be challenged. That's never going away. And those who don't care about gitting gud aren't for the most part going to care to pretend to be gud, and accessibility can actually act as training wheels for some who do want to git gud. Besides, it's clear that simply navigating the overworld was never intended to be part of Frontiers's real challenge, and the game has tons of problems the control customization can't do anything to mitigate. And I'm no gaming slouch, having beaten and even one-lifed many a gaming classic without accessibility helps be they part of the game itself or not. So don't go saying I don't know my shit.
I agree that the bosses are good even the mini bosses that u defeat to get portal gears feel great!
3:13 I swear the glitching water in some of the area’s can to a point to where it starts hurting my eyes.
One of the many, many baffling oversights(?) that Sonic Team didn't bother to fix in any of the post-launch updates. It's such a glaring visual bug so I have no clue why they didn't put any resources into fixing it.
@@WaddleDee105i don’t think it’s a bug, man
It's not a bug, it's called a space screen reflection. Its used in other games and it's a cheap technique to achieve water reflections. That's why when your camera looks down, it doesn't 'see' the trees and it stops reflecting them, it's ugly, yes, but it's the same water that is used on the overworld, it saves you from rendering the screen twice or having to ray trace the reflection
@@BlackXixo Some people out there call screen-space effects "legalized bugs" or something of the sort. They're meant for small objects with high roughness values that you move past quickly, not highly reflective things you stare at all the time like water in a fishing minigame where the camera moves this much.
In the overworld it's whatever. In the one tiny isolated area where you can't even move Sonic or the camera around freely, they could totally afford to render those trees twice. And if they couldn't, they should've made the camera closer to a top-down angle
i had fun with the fishing cause i was streaming the game in a discord vc with a friend and we were laughing our asses off over the extremely realistic fish models paired with the absurdity of the kind of things you can catch from a simple lake like saltwater fish, alligators, deep sea creatures, the old testament in its original form, and the extremely cartoony robotic fish enemy from the classic games.
It's funny cos this was a concern I had when I first saw the fishing. But I didn't actually think it would be feasible for the entire game. I just sorta view it as way to skip the game as a sort of, accessibility option I guess. It's basically a "skip" button in the guise of fishing.
Last joke is about Sega Bass Fishing, then plays a song with a sweet bass line
Hey, Bass, why must we fight? We are not enemies!
12:45 Are you really expecting high speed platforming as a way to advance the story from a Sonic game? Are you nuts or something?
Obviously not as a… _hedge_ against bad design, but that could be a good application for a New Super Mario Bros. Wii-style Super Guide-like system; show "mere" story enjoyers reasonably smooth combined gameplay/story sequences.
Don’t worry I will stay
I hope this comment gets 100 likes.
He will stay
Thank you my fellow friends
The idea of Sonic Team not being confident in you wanting to actually play Sonic has become more prevalent in thought. In so many 3D Sonic games they actively find ways for you to have as little control as possible with stuff like dash panels, quick time events, automation and now them either handing the wheel to you and not bothering to make a good controlling Sonic themselves or give you a way to not interact with the platforming whatsoever. It shows a lack of faith in design chops they should have refined by now considering we've had time to refine a 3D controlling Sonic since the mid 90's with 3D Blast. "What, we did a bad job again? Don't worry, we know."
For me that’s the real core of all the “momentum” discussion. With the last 10 years or so of Sonic Team’s output I really can’t help but feel like they’re really scared of trying to add mechanical depth. It feels like the movement and systems are made up of a bunch of compromises made in place of just making truly dynamic core systems that feel good to play. For all the praise I saw of the control sliders, to me it feels like Sonic Team just throwing in the towel on trying to make the game feel good themselves. Also, at risk of sounding like I’m pointing fingers, I can’t help but notice how Kishimoto’s games seem to particularly have these issues. I mean, just look at how he clearly defaults to giving Sonic a double jump instead of just making the platforming control feel more precise (seriously, there’s zero excuse for a professional developer in the 2020s to not be able to make 2D platforming feel good, let alone a developer meant to specialize in platformers).
Honestly, my #1 problem with Frontiers is that Sonic’s movement just doesn’t feel natural to me. It feels like I’m just translating a player object around, not moving a character.
You know i can respect this opinion although i personally do not agree.
You're criticizing the 3D games for some stuff that always existed since the classics, automation was always there in some parts (especially in Sonic 2 and 3), dash panels were a thing since Sonic 2, and the actual new additions, like QTEs, weren't easy to pull off in Unleashed
And I don't blame Sonic Team for just letting players use custom sliders for the controls, since the gameplay (like any other discussion in this fanbase) are constantly divisive and complaints would've been there no matter what, so let everyone customize it to their liking
@@ayrtonjoga I mean honestly you have a point although some of the stuff the 3D games get criticized for definitely became more apparent after the classics even if they did exist in the classics.
I'm pretty sure the reason they made it so that you can change movement settings is because everyone has a different idea of how they think sonic should move, so no matter what they do people are going to complain. And why does it even matter if you can change settings? Is freedom of choice a bad thing now? People will find anything to complain about
I think the tedium of catching a lot of fish in a row is what balances things out. On Kronos, you can only really get one to six coins at a time (eight with the two scrolls), and that's really not enough to break anything. For example, getting seven Vault Keys requires 105 Fishing Coins, which is maybe around 25 fish. The alternative is to just play a Cyberspace level for a few minutes and get the same seven keys.
The only time it really felt "broken" is when Ouranos gave you 48 Fishing Coins for certain fish. That's three keys, but with 33 keys required to get all six emeralds, that's still 495 Fishing Coins, or about 15-20 fish (as some fish only give you like eight coins on Ouranos). That's definitely a lot of time spent just sitting there playing the same fishing mini-game over and over.
yeah, this feels like a really dumb thing to complain about tbh lol
You're right, my channel name *does* suck. Cheers for the shoutout!
Oh and thank you so much for reiterating why the custom controls are SO bad. It's such a failure on the developer's end.
Hey, KineticTheTelemarketerMan!
I actually liked your channel's name :)
That octopus did nothing wrong stop accusing him of such things
I mean it did beat the great white shark in the hit 2015 book "Who Would Win: Ultimate Ocean Rumble" but that's unrelated
Yeah bro tell him
Yeah, lay off my teammate, or you're going from Splash Dash to Splashed Down.
@@CarbonRollerCacoSplash Crash was RIGHT there Roller 😔 I'm disappointed in you
WHAT I LIKE FROM FISHING IN SONIC FRONTIERS:
1- The mechanic itself is simple and fun for just a little side activity
2- They are hard to find in the map, rewarding you for finding them
3- It gives you a sense of freedom, letting you just fish and relax for a while when having trouble in a part of the game
WHAT I DON"T LIKE ABOUT THE FISHING:
1- Too easy
2-way to overpowered
Nah, the worst part was Chaos Island. The layout of that map made me want to die.
do NOT let him play NieR
It’s fine he likes all his games the same he’ll never play that
[Ending K Achieved]
Okay, no joke, SEGA Bass Fishing is legitimately a really good game! Obviously, it's better than the fishing mini game in Sonic Frontiers, but it's more than that. It actually provides an a real challenge to fishing, and it feels good when you catch fish just right!
This problem of ‘giving you too much freedom to the point of not needing to do any of the content’ extends to ‘Another Story’, where you are able to cyloop random areas and get the lookout koco, which are used to unlock the lookout towers (you need 15 for all of them), the things that you can get by beating and completing the extra challenges in the cyberspace, which need portal gears from the revamped and hard boss fights you defeat. The fact you can skip all of that just by cylooping a random area to get the objective collectable just makes all the stuff they put into it feel like a waste of time
It's also possible that a player never finds the fishing spots before leaving the island. Especially on Ares where you have to go through a side path in an optional tunnel way off on the edge of the map somewhere.
A Sonic-Tuber finally saying DON'T skip over the entire level?
I'm so glad you also mentioned the whole "choose your own character control settings" thing is just a bit of a cop-out.
"It's not the player's job to make the controls feel good", which is something I said after hearing the idea.
When I was working on gameplay mechanics in Assassin's Creed Nexus (programmer), everything from movement speed to the exact slope angle allowed for walking was specified by the designer, and relayed over to level designers to guarantee that levels were built with the exact player movement specs in mind.
The player control is part of a game's identity, in fact I'd say player control is almost the entire point of gameplay in a platformer.
Having the player fiddle with fundamental character control elements is indicative of "playing it safe", which is completely contrary to the inherent nature of Sonic The Hedgehog!
Hi Nimso! Yeah I find it really weird when I see all these SonicTuber videos talking about some new movement addition or something in a fangame or mod that just lets you skip over all of a game's level design and they're like "This is what Sonic _should_ be in 3D!" or "They finally FIXED this Sonic game." Like...giving you the ability to just skip everything that's...actual GAME, especially when said skips can end up being easier than going through what you're skipping, is FIXING the game? Nah, that just sounds lame.
honestly i do kind of like the idea of the sliders to control your movement because no matter what your game will not appeal to everyone. some people will say sonic is too fast and others will say he's too slow, regardless of what speed you actually put him at. however i do see the issue with it and think that maybe the sliders should've been locked behind beating the game once or something.
Heh. Yup. Accessibility to let non-gamers see the whole game or tweak control layouts or simple movement sensitivity=good, accessibility as a crutch for crappy design=bad. But I'd say Sonic also needs to maybe play things a bit less unsafe when it comes to actual series identity. It does seem like there are signs toward the franchise getting back on track, mainly with the impression of a metanarrative about Sonic's friends having gone through a downfall, as they had starting with Adventure 2 because Iizuka didn't want Sonic to be outdone at his own game by his friends even if there was a way to keep him on top without nerfing said friends. "Fans" whine that Tails's flight is broken and that the character needed to change because of that, yet chant "HIRE THIS MAN SEGA!" when Sonic jumps over a whole-ass level at once because "that takes AcTuAl sKiLl!". What, boost-jumping off a bump in the ground? And ofC some of it is just a cover for MC bias/hatred for child characters like Tails because of what Sega marketed Sonic as in the old days. Yay exaggeration.
@@CarbonRollerCaco I believe it becomes a problem if Accessibility bleeds into the skill ceiling, depending on the game. Let’s say for instance the A Rank in Metal Harbor is very tight and you can get it via reaching top rocket level or doing very good in the stage itself. Now imagine if there was a trail of rings you can take all the way to the end and you get the A Rank that way. Just one push of a button and suddenly you’re seen as a Top Player because of one single action.
Not the best analogy, but you get the point. The fishing gives the premise of “Hey, I can take the easy route and not feel bad”, mostly due to the options the game gives you aren’t that good or just boring. And obviously that’s on the fault of the devs/company if they didn’t have the recourses or done poorly. And for a game like Sonic where you have to balance so many things in a game at once, I can see how something like the Fishing is praised for. It’s not the concept of Frontiers can’t work, but it needs ALOT of restructuring and careful crafting to make it work better. You’d need a team like what Nintendo has, because THEY know their gameplay philosophy inside and out.
Not all games need to have their controls and mechanics set in stone. A sandbox game like Sonic Frontiers makes having sliders a fun thing to mess around with at the very least. It's fun testing out all the different ways you can traverse the islands, and the sliders only increase those possibilities. Sandbox games leave a lot of things in the players' hands by design, and this is not a bad thing. It's just different from your area of expertise and what you think is "correct".
Though I don't at all agree with the critique about the sliders since the default controls are good and the players have two clear and obvious presets. I also don't agree that the mere idea that sliders are somehow a proof of a lack of confidence, that's a critique I fundamentally don't understand at all. The sliders don't influence the controls to any point that it's significantly different from how the default controls work. It's a limited range built for those who genuinely may not handle how fast Sonic could be.
You point out how you read reviews where people basically skipped the final island with fishing, but I've never seen anyone screw themselves over with the sliders or even feel like they were necessary to be enjoyable. Anyone who has a significant issue with the controls wouldn't be helped by the sliders anyway.
The slider critique is related to your critique about too much freedom, but while the fishing allows you to skip everything and not engage with the game, the sliders only allow tweaks for preference and doesn't change anything about the core experience or even how the player approaches the game. The sliders can't make you cheese the platforming or make combat easier or break the level design (and notnjust because a lot of it is automated; the DLC has more involved level design and the sliders don't break that).
The idea that the existence of sliders means the default controls aren't good flies in the face of practically every form of customization on a mechanical level. There are many games with sliders that fundamentally change controls or physics that I never see get criticized the way Frontiers does for allowing you to make Sonic slightly slower or turn slightly sharper.
The sliders need better names, though.
Also, worse voice direction? Nah, that's cap. For one, it's one of the best, and two, it HAS voice direction, which is practically unheard of for Sonic.
Exactly
Yeah, this wasn’t really one of his best vids tbh. I’m surprised he’s still even complaining about this game a whole year later lmao
And that’s a concern for the sequel if they do the same thing again, but the work is doubled and superfluous. You do not want your game to get boring, which Frontiers unfortunately falls into the trap during later half of Island 2 and after.
I get what they were doing with the fishing, but still it invokes that “I can just walk around everything”. And that bleeds into the combat once you hit MAX lv., it’s not that hard to get to.
The worst part of frontiers was the fact that Sonic never said Bababooey 😢
True
NO! DON'T! Sega might actually be reading in and taking you seriously!
In all honesty, I think they're building up to ditching that Sonic-is-just-a-random-joke-drizzled-with-verbatim-self-reference-drops-franchise-now-deal-with-it crap. God knows they have to in order to save their radical roller.
Pretty good video all around, but I have to critique you on the custom controls bit. Before this game, I literally would have only been against it because I thought it would have been too complicated to implement, but Frontiers proves that it really isn't. Just add some sliders in check boxes, no different then audio and graphical settings. As long as the developers make sure the minimums and maximums don't break the game, then there should be no problem with the implementation. And since I imagine implementing these features would be very helpful for fine tuning the games controls in the first place, since you don't have to close and reopen the game every time you want to make a slight adjustment, all it would take to implement it is to just not remove it.
You say it's the same kind of thing as the fishing, but I honestly don't see the connection. The fishing mini game is way simpler, way easier, and way faster than normal gameplay, and so it's objectively more efficient than normal gameplay. And so not doing fishing is effectively a self imposed challenge you have to consciously decide to do. But literally none of that can be said for custom controls. There might be some points on the slider, or some combinations that are objectively worse, if you get like really specific, but overall I would say there is no objectively best settings. Because it turns out, there isn't one perfect set of controls for every game, but rather each game has a range of controls that are ideal for it, and so there's plenty of room for preference. And it can easily be the job of a designer to figure out where the limits of this flexibility are, and that can easily be considered "designing the game", because it still takes a good understanding of gaming design to understand what would trivialize the gameplay, what would make it too annoying or frustrating, and where the golden mean lies. And of course, choosing the default is still designing the game, because that's literally what every other game does anyway, but without the option to change it.
I honestly don't see any reason to be against Frontiers' customizable controls and yet be fine with control remaping. No seriously. If you were to boot up NieR: Atomanta or Smash Bros and notice that the options menu contains settings for changing which button on the controller does what, would you complain that the designers are "making" the players "design the game for them"? Would you argue that the designer should just "come up with a control schema stick with it"? Because of all I have a feeling you wouldn't, I don't see why when you're also against the custom controls of Sonic Frontiers. At what point are we not essentially arguing That settings should only exist to allow for physical compatibility with different machines and monitors/TVs? At what point are we do we end up making the argument that audio language and text language should it be adjustable separately because "if you want to play the game in English, then why would you want Japanese voices"? They're very clearly reasons to have the options menu outside of things like "my speakers are broken, so I need to turn up the in game volume" and "my monitor is too bright", so if developers can implement it (and implementing it early would make it easier to finetune the controls anyway), then why not implement them?
You appear to have brought up Jump Deceleration as an example supporting your point, but I view it as the opposite. Well granted, when the game was updated, the default jump deceleration should have been set incredibly low for both styles, that's a valid point, I'm not going to argue with you on that. _However,_ objectively, the fact that it's a slider is a purely good thing, because it means it's possible to regress it back to what it was before the update without having to somehow regress back to that previous version. I think we all know what it's like for a game, or even just a generic program, to update in a way that you don't like, I've heard enough people on the Internet complain about that sort of stuff (especially with Minecraft) to know how universal it is. Thought the game was perfect with the jump deceleration it had? Then just change the slider to something similar to what it used to be. Think jumped deceleration is an abhorrent abomination that should be nowhere near any Sonic game at all? Then just turn the slider all the way down. No harm no foul, everyone is happy.
I've actually seen another UA-camr (who's actually really good) complain about the custom controls, and on my comment about it, someone disagreed with me. So a minimum of three people don't like the custom controls, and I honestly don't get why. There's an argument to be made that game should be made to conform to the creators vision, and not to the whims of the masses, which is a sentiment I can agree with, but I think my point about settings in general pretty handily count as this, because it turns out the creator's ideal vision can actually be quite flexible, and might even include people being able to play they want to play.
For all these reasons, ever since I learned that frontiers had these options, along with button remapping for console games, separate text and voice language options, and mod support for pc games, I think it should become the industry standard. Even if they only added them because they were uncertain as to how good their controls were, so what? That led to them proving something was possible that I think would only benefits the industry. I legitimately don't see any reason why this shouldn't become standard in every AAA game going forward.
Absolutely agree. I think having more accessibility options is a great idea especially for sonic. It gives players who might regularly struggle with sonic games a chance to tune the game to fit their playstyle.
Hi, I've been a gameplay programmer for a decade and been studying Mario and Sonic games for the past 2 decades, I also wrote a large portion of the character control system under the hood for an Assassin's Creed game as a developer at a AAA studio. I'll try to explain to you the reason this concept of customisable physics is very very bad.
The physics of a player is one of the most fundamental structures that the game is built upon in a platformer, even in other types of games it's fundamental but far more important in a platformer.
In development, the micro-details of character control are tweaked many many times over to a very precise result in order to provide a perfect balance for how the character should move... This is then used to determine how the actual levels will be built.
For example the "Jump deceleration" has a direct impact on the horizontal speed that the character moves in air, therefore affecting the total jump distance that can be achieved from a specific running jump. Platforms have to be placed at a specific distance based on the capability of the character to jump a certain distance, hence the level design is directly impacted by the jump distance, and therefore directly impacted by jump deceleration.
What this means in practice is that if they are not doing the work to perfectly tweak the character controller in development, then the levels are not being designed with an understanding of the character's capability, resulting in effectively bad level and gameplay design.
When working on the Assassin's Creed game I can give the example of slope limits, my gameplay lead told me that the specific angle limit where the player was able to control the movement properly was 45 degrees exactly. Any slope even 1 degree higher than that would result in forcing the player down the slope until they fall or reach a playable ground angle.
This information was provided to the level designers, because some roof tops that were not supposed to playable ground were allowing the player to walk on them.
It was necessary for the level designers to guarantee that any non-walkable roofs were at 46 degree slopes or more...
If the player had control over the slope limit... even if they were given only 1 degree of range, the level design would break.
Most importantly though, the examples I've given are miniscule parts of a character controller, especially a platformer.
I've built Sonic fan games before, I even made the Mario 64 reimagined project, I've made my own platformer games... The acceleration values for movement shouldn't even be this simple. While studying Mario Odyssey's movement I recognised that the acceleration actually changes depending on how fast Mario is moving, so that means for a more advanced controller like Mario's, these settings would be absurdly complicated.
The physics of a character are extremely intricate and require highly detailed study and tweaking to get right.
Sonic Team should not be making controllers so simple that the average consumer would be able to even understand the variables involved.
For some details on how Sonic games handle character control, you can check out my "How It Works" video on Sonic games that discusses Adventure, Heroes and Generations.
@@NimsoStudios-.-I think you argued your point very well, and have made me soften up on my position. However, I still feel it is possible to limit controls to arrange, and then design around that range, but acknowledge that might be more complicated to do well than what it feels it would be.
I noticed you used Mario Odyssey as an example, and, well, I went into it wanting to believe that what everyone said about its controls being so good was correct, tried my best to like it, telling myself "I just need to get used to it", and finished despising the game. The entire time I only ever felt half in control of Mario, and I absolutely hate it when games are what I would call a "dexterity check", and that game's controls make it nothing but dexterity checks. I hate it so much, I felt so betrayed by the fan base, that I literally want to make an entire mod fixing that game's controls, just so I can write a multi-hour long video essay explaining why I hate the controls so much, and how it ruined the game for me. If you didn't bring it up, I was legitimately going to ask you why Odyssey's controls were so bad. Mario Odyssey is on my list of games to _avoid_ controlling similar to (along with Sonic 06, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Yoshi's Island, and potentially spirit of the North, but I haven't finished that game yet, so I'm withholding judgment). I sincerely, honestly fined the controls to be indefendabl.
So yeah, if Odyssey does something, that is immediate cause for me to be suspicious of it. The few things I was able to notice about the controls are the fact that Mario's acceleration from a standstill feels like, as one redditar described it "the Scooby-Doo run", in that Mario starts sluggishly slow, before being able to pick up to a reasonable pace, which makes it impossible to dot from a standstill, which I view as a pure bad thing. The second thing I noticed is that turning is not instant, it is actually slightly delayed, which is a decision I can only imagine they made so that people can't do a back flip in the direction they're heading, which I think is stupid because, well I already mentioned how I hated when game require high dexterity, if a speed runner wants to put it in their kit, I think left them, as long as it's not required, it shouldn't affect casual play.
All my other complaints are either motion controls not working or more obvious over the hood stuff, like the fact that you can't drop from a ledge by pressing the crouch button. But one of these over the hood problems I like to point out is the fact that the ground pound does a little flip before before executing, which only has utility in being able to do the lunch, which could easily be assigned to the jump button, since pressing jump in mid-air does nothing anyway. (This has the consequence of making the lunch require every action button but the one button it makes sense for.) As a consequent, it is objectively completely useless as anything other than a glorified inspect button. However, if it didn't have this flip, then it would be possible to use it to easily attack enemies without needing to predict where they're going, and be usable as a sort of air dodge (during the segment of the soda beach level with all the fuzzies, I actually instinctively used it as a way to avoid damage, which caused me to take more hits, which I do not blame myself for do to how unintuitive the flip is). For these reasons, I consider the flip to be a purely bad thing, I think it's removable in order to make the ground pound instantaneous like the Sonic stomp would be a purely good thing. This flip also apparently exists for as far back as Yoshi's Island at least, so all of this makes me think the designers weren't very careful when making the controls, sense I honestly cannot comprehend how a designer with attention to detail and that cares about making, a control system that's fun to just control alone, could make such an obvious mistake. I honestly don't know why the ground pound isn't a meme. Given how useless and prevalent it is, it seems like it obvious punching bag. I can either see people going "cyie loop is the ground pound of Sonic Frontiers", and everyone instantly getting what they mean by that.
So yeah, if you couldn't tell, I have kind of a hairpin trigger for bad UX. (I'm not even mad while writing this, these are just neutral statements of why Odyssey's controls make me angry when I play it.) And I honestly cannot understand why anyone would find Odyssey's controls tolerable, outside of things no one praises it for, and that makes it anything but "tight", "smooth", or "responsive". It's honestly feels like trying to move a trailer attached to a car you're driving.
But anyway, given your credentials, it sounds like you comfort a niche I've been wanting to see for a long time. I definitely have to check out your channel! It sounds super interesting!
I feel like bickuribox12 put it best in his review of the game: “You have a lot of freedom in how you approach progression to the point where nothing holds that great of value.” Everything from fishing, to those shiny ramps that can be spammed indefinitely to get skill points, to the various exploits via glitches, and the treasure signs holding lookout coco in final horizon, there are so many ways to skip the gameplay. A lot of this game’s appeal is borderline optional, and I don’t think it’s worth more than one play through.
Don't lump Bickuribox in with this dude. He provides actual criticism rather than just being miserable about everything.
the worst thing of the fish mini game is the fact that all of eggman's story development is hidden in that store, which can be unlocked in the first island
That water glitching kept having me worried that my GPU was dying until i found out other people had the same glitches.
7:01
"Sonic Frontiers has cooking"
Excuse me?
I just beat this game, and I never saw an option to cook, lmfao
12:15 did you forget you could buy moons a the shop
You can buy a moon at the shop, which costs currency that you have to run around the worlds to collect, not sure what your point is
I gotta be honest - for me personally, Cyberspace was so genuinely horrible and atrocious sit through at launch that the ONLY way I finished the game at all was to exploit BIg's fishing game and skip my way past the Cyberspace stages. Nowadays, Cyberspace is at least as good as the islands themselves from a gameplay standpoint, and at times even more fun. Consistent control and stellar movement will do that......but at launch? Easily the weakest part of the entire package for me.
Even as (or perhaps because I am) someone who has long considered the Boost gameplay to be my favorite style in the series, the way Cyberspace played before the updates/patches/DLC dropped felt like an absurd, sick joke. So being forced to play so much of it in order to progress would have absolutely prevented me from doing so, because for as much as I love Sonic, I could just as easily be playing a Sonic game that doesn't feel like a painful chore. And I'd probably think far less of the game in retrospect if I hadn't been able to bypass the parts I hated most.
It's abysmal game design incarnate don't get me wrong, but truth be told, even with the sheer amount of baffling oversights in this game and across this series, I honestly think Sonic Team knew that, going in. I think this was mostly there for people like me (and the critics) who would simply rather not be playing the game at all if it meant enduring that consistently unpleasant tedium in such repetition.
What was so bad about Cyberspace at launch? At least from my experience, it was fine
@LeoGaming55 yeah idk what they're talking about. Apart from unlockable super boost, cyberspace literally hasn't changed since launch
@@dyland1842 Guys I don't know what game you've been playing these last couple years, but uh . . .
- Spindash. Like fundamentally this changes the entire flow of the gameplay and the scope of movement, something even Sonic Team acknowledged when implementing the
- New Cyberspace Challenge stages. Which are in many cases a full rethink of the design, difficulty or even objective of various existing stages, and at other times, entirely new challenges with entirely new mechanics at play like Animal rescue and Rocket Boosting. And speaking of boosting
- Maintaining boost in a jump. That massive fix for the handling in this game that came with Update 2 carries over to Cyberspace and it makes all the difference. I'm kinda bewildered that anybody playing Frontiers would not notice it. And on the matter of jumping
- Jump Deceleration, more specifically the ability to turn that garbage off. I mean, it's night and day when it comes to flow and speed.
I mean there's a plethora of videos out there titled things like "Cyberspace Spin Dash is insane!" not to mention countless new speed runs that highlight the difference between how Cyberspace plays now vs back then, you don't need to take my word for it, guys, there is plenty of it out there throughout UA-cam. Most reviews from the earliest months after the game's launch (or basically any reviews from before the DLC started dropping) cite Cyberspace stages as a consistent low point due to its control and handling, and the tedious lack of flow created by the fact that Sonic wasjust regressively, embarrassingly slow in them with no sense of momentum and a ridiculous degree of clunky weight. In a post DLC Frontiers, I dare say Cyberspace can actually be the highlight of the game at times.
I recently played through this game and didn't have a good time with it at all, the repetitive exploration process and constant self-referential dialogue bothered me constantly
Ian Phlem: (poop-eating grin).
I believe during the development of Sonic Frontiers, the team morale at Sonic Team was *astronomically* low.
Decisions like the fishing minigame being a skip from actual game design only come from a studio that is just as cynical & worn-down as its fandom.
*lol* There was a time when Sonic morale was high?
12;15 If I remember correctly, you can buy multiple Power Moons in the shops.
You can
Maybe instead of having important collectibles in the item shop, how bout have some more cosmetics like the Soap Shoes
11:20 yea, that was me! I had no interest in doing the copy/pasted Cyberspace stages from old games. Because if I wanted to play Rail from Sonic Adventure 2, I'd just play Sonic Adventure 2. Nor did I want to go through the hassle of trying to find memory tokens by digging up the same spring, or dash pad, I'd dug up three times before which locks me into a 2D section from which there is no escape! So much for the claim of total player freedom, in an Open Zone.
(Also if Cyberspace is supposed to be Sonic's memories, why is he in Sky Rail, when that was one of Shadow's stages)
I like how you don’t just limit your discussion in this video to “fishing bad,” but use it as a primary example of the greater fundamental flaws you see in Frontiers.
fun fact, unless they changed it the fish isn't random. its in a set order
Fun fact: Sonic was named after a rare fish called "sonic and the black knight"
On repeat playthroughs, I use the fishing to get a bunch of skill points early on in the game. Since the games combat is so shallow, I at least want it to look flashy as soon as possible.
Not gonna lie, I actually enjoy 100%ing Sonic Frontiers multiple times, even after update 2 made you collect every memory token. But Big’s Fishing completely ruins it. You have to catch 32 fish per island (except Rhea) to 100% the game and the process is EXHAUSTING and single-handedly ruins my drive to want to 100% this game more than I do.
How is it exhausting? It's not even random, you're guaranteed to get every fish in a row, and it's a super easy minigame
@@vampire_catgirl Well, it’s easy, it just isn’t fun. You have to do the same timing minigame 32 times on every island and there’s no way to speed it up. And since I lose count of how many I’ve caught easily, I gotta bring a counter up.
@@RyderPlatinumWarpstar I find it relaxing, so I love doing it. But you know... you could always just not? You 100% the game once, you don't have to do it multiple times
@@vampire_catgirl I don’t have to, you’re right, but I do get enjoyment out of repeat 100% playthroughs of the game, and I could skip that part of the process, but then I don’t get the shiny gold banner for the island on the menus. I like obtaining that shiny gold banner to feel accomplished for all I’ve done.
It can be relaxing and a nice break from the standard gameplay, but I just wish it wasn’t required for 100% completion.
"It never hints that all you have to do is hold the analog stick down" ACKSHULLY it tells you just that if you select the instructions for Big on the character select.
If the fishing part wasn't there, grinding would've been a bigger drag then it was. Sure its boring and very repetitive but at least you get through the boring collectinh quicker...by doing more boring collecting...well then.
Now I never just fished to get through the game, but after I did most of the work myself and got bored I'd do that to keep my retention. However, I would have begged for it to be more then just PRESS A
Ive been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think its become one of my biggest issues with frontiers. The gameplay loop has so much potential but there's so many ways to skip parts of it that there's no reason to even bother engaging with it normally. Hopefully they'll lean less into that the next go around.
fishing is still more fun than navigating Chaos Island
The should’ve definitely dropped some cosmetics in the store.
When I first heard about that fishing will be added to Sonic Frontiers, I legit just went saying in my head "Oh no, not Sonic Adventure fishing all over again"
The fishing isnt the worst part, the repetitivity of the tasks and the whole game working as a checklist with the same puzzle system and same kind of gameplay happening over and over again is, when its not, its a broken 2d.
Fishing nullifies it which makes parts of the game feel dull, however, thats only there because the designers knew how boring the game design was in general.
Imo cyber space is even worse
With the open zone, I can at least appreciate them trying something new. It's not executed very well, but it has some bright spots and fun moments, nice environments
Cyberspace looks like dreary shit. Plays like it was tacked on the same way as Classic Sonic in Forces, made to satisfy a certain audience and not even doing that job well. AND on top of that it's Green Hill and Sky Sanctuary AGAIN. With re-used level maps from old games. Wtf sonic team
0:18 LS mark oh... I mean splash dash is getting more positive lately than I thought
(note this isn't any joke I am being honest)
imo the fishing is the best part of the game because i really can not be bothered to do all those shit ass open zone platforming segments to unlock stuff
11:03
Gee I wonder why they put that in there in the first place it's almost like we're in a fan base that likes to tear each other apart for a different opinions
Over a game series whose gameplay concepts were Never Good
@@TheSultan1470 Get lost, please
If they made it so you could only get fruits and kocos through fishing, i think it would’ve been completely justified, because there aren’t really enough kocos on each island to level up proportionately to how much you explore, and the enemy fruit drops are also so random that it also makes it hard to bring up your defense and shit consistently, so if fishing meant you got a little extra edge in leveling up, but you still had to play the game to progress, then it could’ve been worthwhile
3:54 I pin it squarely on them not reading the freaking manual. Or the in-game tutorial menu. People complain about games inserting tutorials in the gameplay, but this kind of thing is exactly why they do that.
I think for me the 3 pillars of sonic side content are
1-SONIC ADVENTURE 2'S CHAO GARDEN
2- SONIC FRONTIERS FISHING
3- SONIC FORCES CUSTOMIZATION
We need Sonic Team to show more confidence. I hope the next game doesn't use fishing as a way to skip 80% of the game.
The fishing is the best part of the game for the same reason as the cutscenes. They are the only parts of the game where you don't have to play the game. The fact that sonic fans will look at "sonic in unreal engine 4k 60fps" and call it peak really speaks to how dead in the water the series has been since generations.
SEGA Bass Fishing goes hard ngl
Responding to controls and toggles - I don’t think it necessarily implies a lack of confidence of how Sonic should control, more so it just adds to the sense of freedom. Being able to control how Sonic should move is a way of the player being able to stylize Sonic to their liking. I don’t really see that as a loss. I think it’s really more about Sonic being able to control well and being able to get through the whole no matter what customizables you have at your disposal. Yes, you could argue why should it be up to the player, but you can also argue why CAN’T it be up to the player, you know?
Well in Mario Odyssey you CAN grind for moons in a boring way. Just collect a bunch of coins and keep purchasing moons, you need to do this anyways if you want to get up to 999 (though I think it's fine there since the Luigi Balloon minigame is more involved than the fishing minigame, oh and that 999 thing is just one aesthetical acknowledgement that isn't required for anything really)
Yeah, but it still allows you to pretty much just skip straight to the final boss, doesn’t it?
@@boydixonentertainmentnot really
Luigi's baloon world dosn't show up intil you beat the story
That's only after you've already beaten the final Bowser boss, though. It's a post-game thing, only progression it helps you with is unlocking Dark Side and Darker Side, not the rest of the main game. It's still weird and I'd rather it not be there, but at least it's post-game only.
@@boydixonentertainment No actually, you can't do this until AFTER beating the final boss, thankfully, it's only a post-game thing. And also the way Odyssey's main game is structured such that each kingdom has a separate moon count and some kingdoms' missions are forced and scripted without any connection to a moon count would have at least made it not as bad if you could use this feature pre-final boss.
I would argue that the fishing itself isnt the problem, but starfall. Without starfall you wouldnt have nearly enough tokens to skip everything except for maybe Ouranous where I think that would be okay.
I do think that another similar problem lies in how irrelevant so many of the collectibles are. The enemies in Frontiers are so weak and easy that I never upgrade my attack or defense just to have a bit more fun with them, and if you new game+ then skill pieces become useless, and no one cares about the extra boost upgrades from the new koco. I dont think I even need to mention the problem with TFH exclusive collectibles.
Frontiers is my favourite game in the franchise btw, and I want Frontiers 2 to surpass it.
12:16 I really thought that section was going to cut to a clip of you buying moons from the store and saying "oh..."
Objectively the fishing is an awful inclusion
Subjectively tho anything that lets me skip the halfbaked normal gameplay to get to the bosses which is seemingly where the effort was put in is good to me
The worst thing about Sonic Frontiers was the... was the Dementors! They were flying all over the place and they were scary and then they'd come down and they'd suck the soul out of your body and it hurt!
The only things I would say are worth buying are the egg memos, for lore obviously, and the level upgrade collectibles since it takes forever to level up his speed or defense
The Control Toggle was honestly a genius idea because what does and doesn't feel good to control is subjective. Just because you think a game controls well doesn't mean everyone else will.
So giving players the ability to adjust controls to their liking was a good thing and something that I hope not only comes back in future Sonic games but become a standard thing in video games.
Although the default should be in the middle, not an extreme.
10:30 Most of the platforming wasn't built in mind with the jump deacceliration turned off. Plus it's not "hidden" in the options, it's just there along with the rest of the control sliders.
Your criticisms of the custom physics slider cannot be understated, it's how I felt about it since day 1. Seriously, imagine if 3D Mario had this sort of thing showhorned into their game. It would be pointless at best because the default controls are already good, and detrimental at worst because it's near impossible for the level design to account for whatever infinite possible combinations.
There's a REASON literally no other platformer has this sort of thing. Like, having confidence in your own control scheme should be the BARE MINIMUM for a game.
Dude, calm down already. Why are you getting this angry over a freaking video game?
@@Jackattack359
Because I'm a Sonic fan, goddammit. I WANT this series to be better, but that isn't going to happen when this fanbase keeps infantalizing Sonic Team and enabling their worst habits by suppressing criticism.
@@felixdaniels37 you do realize commenting multiple times on the same video getting more and more dramatic each time isn’t gonna help with that right? Go outside and get some fresh air. You honestly sound like you’ve been in doors for way too long
@@Jackattack359
You realize obsessively stalking anyone that even shows slight disdain over a video game is not healthy behavior in the slightest, right? How about follow your own advice and piss off.
@@felixdaniels37dude, how is this “slight disdain?” You are literally just yelling your ass off about a game not made the way you wanted it to be. Not just in one comment, but multiple upon multiple comments. If you don’t want people “obsessively stalking” you (like, god forbid anyone from simply replying to your overly dramatic whining), you can start by not complaining about something so much that you feel compelled to write multiple comments on it on the exact same video with such an angry demeanor and actually focus on something that actually matters. Simple as that
10:27 I play this game 6 months and had no idea this was in the game. Definitely should have been the default controls
The incentive not to fish is that playing the game is more engaging and fun, and if you don't think the gameplay or the fishing is fun... then the simple solution is to stop playing the game. All fishing does is allow you to mitigate parts of the game that you personally might not enjoy or have time for. Developers *should* be confident enough in their game not to anticipate people wanting to skip parts of it, but its simply realistic to acknowledge that as truth.
I love mario sunshine but I have never once gotten the watermelon festival shrine legitimately, I always do the speedrun clip. And that's kind of my whole point, even if there was no fishing in sonic frontiers, I'd find and learn another way to avoid the parts I simply didn't feel like playing, I really just think fishing streamlines that.
Bypassing one shine via glitching does not equate to bypassing 95% of the game by spamming a boring fishing activity.
@@aperturius You're missing the point. I know how to do the entire speedrun route for mario sunshine, I could skip a whole lot more. But I don't, because I enjoy playing the game. I just skip the parts I really don't like.
And its not even just mario sunshine, I will look into at least basic speedrun strats and glitches for most games I play so that I can incorporate it to mitigate parts I don't like, because every game has parts you aren't going to like, often for purely subjective reasons. Sonic Frontiers fishing just enables me to do the same kind of thing without looking anything up.
To me, this whole argument also feels like saying "Why do people play fallout games? You can turn on god mode and no clip at any time and skip everything." but you never hear about anyone complaining about beating the whole game via console commands like that because...its more fun not to do that. And if you aren't having fun you aren't going to just walk to the end of the game. you're just going to stop playing.
@@Namingway248 I don't believe I'm missing the point. Glitches are unintended by the developers completely. Cheat codes are fun extras that not everyone knows about and are clearly not the intended way to play by the developers. This fishing game is the developers literally saying, don't like the game play? Here, do this boring thing for a while and we'll give you EVERYTHING. It shows, at best, a lack of faith in their own game.
@@aperturius What I'm saying is it literally doesn't *matter* if the developer is confident or not. If I don't like something, I'll find a way not to do it. There will always be a way, and there will always be things in a game that I don't like to do, no matter how good the game is or how confident the devs are. The devs of frontiers are acknowledging this fact by putting systems like this in the game. It just streamlines the process.
To refer to fallout's console commands as cheat codes not everyone knows is also just... incorrect. Its developer tools, and the fix to basically any bug is to open them up and manually fix it yourself. And most playthroughs are going to require you to do so at least once if you don't want to lose hours of progress. These games are still popular and fun to play.
I only used the fishing to get the egg memos cause it felt like a cheap way to get stuff instead of working for it. I really hope they fix this issue in future games
I honestly think that the fishing would have been cool if with enough of the currency you get from fishing you can unlock some cosmetics, or if it let you buy some tokens that would have been used to unlock cosmetics, but of course there isn’t unlockable cosmetics so they can’t do that
I will not tolerate the Super Mario odyssey moon slander
you catch the fish in the same order every time you catch the entire catalogue
SIR, just don’t do that
I legit love fishing with big. Mostly because of the Easter eggs that you can fish up
I actually don’t care your right
I’m too lazy to leave.
Big the Cat being the worst part of a Sonic game?
They're consistent I'll give them that lol
Sonic Frontiers is the worst part of Sonic Frontiers.
?
"B-but it has SOUL!" - Sonic fans that grew up with 06 and Black Knight
@@SuperS64
Did I stutter?
@@felixdaniels37 yes
God bless the fact sonic team put fishing in to let you skip the bad part. The whole game.
this is a good feature because it allows me to play less of this godawful game
I managed to avoid all rhe cyber levels almost because you can redeem EMERALD KEYS from fishing
Modern sonic from what i've seen is really just press the A button huh
During my first play through of this game, I got to the last island. And decided to go hang with Big. And I ended up getting all 6 key. So I beat the last island by doing nothing.
Me who only played this fishing game once and couldn't find it again 💀
"Something's biting!"
I have the same problem with how you can alter Sonic's controls (like his top speed, turning radius, etc). Instead of actually designing a good control scheme and physics that made Sonic fun to move around like Adventure 1 or even Adventure 2, Sonic Team just put a bunch of toggles into a menu and told the playerbase to figure out what sucks the least for themselves. Sonic Team's lack of confidence is well placed considering how strangely incompetent they are at making a 3D platformer but it's still pathetic to see. Instead of improving at their craft, they're telling players to fix it themselves under the guise of "player freedom".
I got a Garfield movie ad played before the video
Lasagna
Oliver Garden
@@NinjaElectroUA-camr Chuck E. Cheese
Nah, big was my man because the cyberstages are ass
I wanted to play the Fish game for only 20 minutes, I sat there for 3 hours and had around 1000 tickets
man everytime I think I’ll finally buy this game I see footage of it again and i’m like “oh, yeah. that’s what it looks like”
?
@@beck_gaming1243 I mean it looks pretty bad
@@deanmoriarty6015 I'm gonna have to disagree I think Sonic looks best in a realistic setting
@@beck_gaming1243 I don’t mind the world visuals. I guess I mostly mean the unappealing 20 year old reused assets, stiff and jittery animations, the random flying rails that pop in, and gameplay that feels like a tech demo
@@deanmoriarty6015 Mario Kishimoto: "Thank you for your feedback. We will consider it and try to be better Next Time™, and will strive to go in the Right Direction™"
Im here for big
's cok
I love Sega Bass Fishing, it's my favourite Sonic game 🙃🐟
i'm so glad someone agrees that oddessys postgame is just boring, i just couldn't make it through the content drought of 250-500 moons for the final level when i usually love completing everything in a mario game because surprisingly platforming challenges are fun but kicking every rock in a map isn't.
but yeah i find it so baffling nobody comments on this mobile game design of a secondary currency that lets you skip the game, it's not even the fact the minigame is boring which, it is, it was the worst part of 100%ing the game because again, i wanna platform in my platformer, even big the cat understood this. i only used the fishing to get all the fish but even then i unlocked all the egg memos and nearly maxed out my levels. i only wound up buying the boss gears with the golden tickets so i could skip grinding bosses.
and let me say skipping grinding with more grinding is just as bad, freedom in a videogame isn't about the choice to skip content it's the choice between content.
you could choose to S rank every stage for extra keys so you don't need to fight as many bosses, or you could play each level once to ensure you're experiencing them all with fresh eyes. you should still have to engage with the mechanic of level shrines.
it says a lot that the dlc's combat trials all set sonics level to 1, they genuinly didn't design the scaling, it's not like a kingdomhearts no exp run where you're given just enough of a safety net in not being 1shot and a damage floor high enough to make you deal chip damage instead of tickling the boss. in fronteirs leveling just trivialises the combat so i just stopped leveling until after i beat the final boss so i could experience the game.
fronteirs really is a step in the right direction type game, i enjoyed it but only because my expectations were so drastically low i was considering leaving the fandom.
the game never tells you to fish until it’s over, the game tells you to get portal gears and keys to access cyberspace. i think i like the ‘freedom’ but idk i just like the fishing lol
The fishing is an optional way to collect these things but I can promise than 90% of gamers enjoyed the main game enough to engage with it and beat it regularly throughout a first playthrough.
The fishing minigame made certain subsequent playthroughs fun because of how shit posty it is to use the fishing minigame to ignore the main game but that was something intentionally done.
I love it personally and if you don't feel like engaging with the fishing mini game...don't.
Honestly this part of the game is really good because it keeps me from rage quitting
“Me reads title”
The presentation
The controls
The combat
The story
The level design
The game’s structure
The extra characters
The bosses
The English voice acting
The character writing
Big was good though. I like Big
we hating fish now
Idk. But Cyclooping is what breaks the game. You can get overpowered kust by SPINNING around
I think that there shouldn’t have been all those story critical unlockables as fishing rewards and instead there should’ve been a more substantial fishing bestiary and more egg memos to flesh out lore and instead of it being a digital construct of big the cat, have it be the actual guy and you have to work your way up to fishing up froggy who was compelled to go to the islands due to chaos having once been inside him and big want to rescue him
yeah i felt very similar with it in that i enjoyed the gameplay loop but wasn't a fan of how it could be cheesed, i always prefer a kind of risk/reward type design where the most difficult option is the most efficient kind of like how in some rpgs you can brute force your way through grinding but doing so takes a lot longer than simply learning what you need to do.