YMMV / Sonic Frontiers

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• Accidental Aesop:
  • Tails, Knuckles, and Amy all come to the conclusion that their association with Sonic to the degrees they've attached themselves to him has limited their potential, and make the decision to go their separate ways from him as a result. Notably, Sonic, who values freedom above all else, not only fully supports their decisions, but even encourages them to do so through their hesitation. The lesson being that distancing yourself from someone you associate yourself with so strongly, even if you care about them, is sometimes necessary to grow as a person.
  • The themes of moving on and opening new chapters present throughout the entire game could also be read as a Reality Subtext about the franchise (and some of its fans often living in the past by leaning into nostalgia); you can look back on the past, but you can't live in its shadow and hide from the future in it — you just have to move on to new frontiers.
  • You have to be willing to look past what your parents tell you and form your own opinions and perspectives, even if you look up to them. Sage and Sonic are only able to truly start working together in order to defeat The END when Sage begins to form her own opinions of Sonic rather than just going off what Eggman told her about him.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Alternative lyrical interpretation, in this case. Whose perspective is being sung from for the Titans' boss themes? "Undefeatable" in particular can easily refer to Sonic or Sage herself, especially the line, "You're crossing the line / Now we've run out of time", is a two-way street between Sonic and Sage.
  • Another interpretation is that the songs could be from both of their perspectives at the same time rather than simply one or the other. Since some lyrics do sound more in line with Sonic than they do Sage and vice-versa, it wouldn't be out of the realm of possible consideration.
  • Why is Sonic’s personality more subdued and serious in this game than in the other games? Is it because he’s secretly constantly worried about his friends being trapped in Cyber Space? Has he developed over the past two games and become more humble? Or is his corruption sickness affecting his body and mind by slowly eating him up from the inside and making him feel less confident, energetic, and cheery than usual?
  • THE END's Taking You with Me at the, no pun intended, end of its boss fight. Was it truly a Villainous Breakdown, or was it just making good on its word that it could end the fight anytime it wanted only to get foiled by Sage?
  • After Sonic becomes trapped between dimensions upon succumbing to cyber corruption, Eggman laughs gleefully and states that his only regret is that he didn't get to finish Sonic off himself. However, given his brief pause before laughing and the fact that in an earlier cutscene, he begrudgingly admits that he views Sonic as a Worthy Opponent, one can't help but wonder if he was truly satisfied with that outcome or if he was merely coping upon seeing his admirable adversary meet such a lamentable fate. It should be noted that Eggman only seems mildly annoyed by Sonic's recovery.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: When the game was first revealed, there was a fair bit of caution and skepticism from fans and critics, given the game was the first mainline Sonic game following the deeply polarizing Sonic Forces and that it was tackling an open world-like concept for Sonic, which many were unsure Sonic Team could pull off successfully, given their prior handling of the series. Even the involvement of Ian Flynn was met with skepticism from some fans given his controversial handling of the IDW comics. The IGN preview in Summer Games Fest 2022 did not help things and only soured many on the game due to the many technical problems and lack of polish featured in the footage. However, as more footage was shown and more details about the game were revealed, many began to slowly warm up to the game (only bolstered by positive impressions from critics and fans who have played the game). When the game was released, most of these concerns have largely faded away, as while the game isn't perfect (especially on the technical side of things), it would be regarded by fans and critics as both a good game and a much-needed step forward for the hedgehog after the mixed reception of his last few games, with many praising the gameplay and the story for being some of the best Sonic has had in years. The game's success even seemed to surprise Sega itself, leading to the team getting a significant 30% pay raise, and Takeshi Iizuka being promoted to the position of Executive Officer within the company, after having previously risked his position in the company just to get Frontiers more production time.
• Angst? What Angst?: In the base game's original ending, Sonic doesn't react whatsoever to Sage's Heroic Sacrifice. According to Ian Flynn, the reason for this was due to time constraints, above all else, but also because it was intended that Sage's death affected Eggman more than Sonic and his friends. The new ending added in The Final Horizon update avoids this, since Sonic's new power means Sage no longer has to sacrifice herself to stop THE END and gets to go home with her father.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The true final boss of the base game is underwhelming to some players. It’s an Ikaruga-style space shooter against a giant, unmoving moon, which feels lacking compared to the more creative designs and battles with the Titans that came before it, including SUPREME preceding the battle. This design choice was likely for story reasons, though, seeing how the entire battle is essentially a boisterous monologue explaining what it is, along with just how powerful it really is, and the fight itself being locked away with Hard Mode Perks makes it seem more like a secret Optional Boss. But on the other hand, it’s widely seen as hard and challenging (to the point that many players see it as That One Boss), so it all evens out.
  • Even the regular final boss in the base game is a bit of a letdown, lacking the kinetic setpieces of WYVERN or KNIGHT. It's a lot like GIGANTO with elements of Bullet Hell added, but GIGANTO was so exciting because it was the first Super Sonic battle — by the end of the game, it feels like a merely passable finale for the Titans. This isn't helped by late game stats; many a player will have either close to max or outright maxed attack by the time they face the boss, at which point many of Super Sonic's attacks can just melt through a whole phase of the boss in one combo.
    • The Final Horizon Update gives it a more threatening final form, having a much meatier health bar and mechanics the player should pay attention to (the Achilles' Power Cord attached to the boss that will keep regenerating its health until it is dislodged and the trigger for the second phase), but a Super Sonic with maxed out attack can still brute force it once those factors are out of the equation. The Coup de Grâce cutscene arguably makes up for it by its stellar presentation.
• Award Snub:
  • Despite Frontiers' music being universally praised, it didn't get nominated in any of the best music categories at The 2022 Game Awards.
  • Although it did get nominated for the Players Choice award at The 2022 Game Awards, Frontiers would ultimately lose to Genshin Impact, a game many felt didn't deserve to be nominated in the first place, given that it was a game released in 2020.^note It got nominated due to it being a active live service mobile game that continues to be updated and get new content today. Other games such as Minecraft, which also weren't 2022 games, were potential candidates for similar reasons.
  • It also got nominated for Best Soundtrack in the 2022 Steam Awards, but would ultimately lose to Final Fantasy VII Remake.
• Awesome Art: Sonic Frontiers Prologue: Divergence has amazing animation, especially with its beautiful scenery and phenomenal fight scenes.
• Awesome Bosses:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog is no stranger to epic boss fights, but all of the Titan boss fights in Frontiers have been a highlight of the game, containing innovative and thrilling methods of obtaining the Chaos Emeralds and becoming Super Sonic to cathartically destroy the Titans.
  • The ASURA is an absolute blast to fight, being something of a lite-Titan battle with the sheer fun of flying up into the air, landing on it, and giving it an absolute beatdown, and a great way to obtain portal gears.
  • The NINJA, being relatively smaller Guardians, come across as offering a more "hand-to-hand" battle for Sonic and dodging and parrying their attacks is just so satisfying.
  • The SUMO, firstly for the sheer coolness of a sumo robot, and secondly, making it richochet across its own "wrestling ring", electrocuting it, then bashing it senseless.
  • The SPIDER's battle sees Sonic getting launched into the air and surging back downward, avoiding a relentless barrage of obstacles while passing through blue rings to counterattack. It's a thrilling spectacle, accompanied by one of the most bombastic and memorable Guardian themes.
  • The GHOST, due to its amazing theme, tense atmosphere, and memorable gimmick.
  • THE END has its ups and downs, but ultimately comes out on top in the base game. Sonic and Sage come face-to-face with the very entity that brought about the end of the Ancients, as it delivers a booming monologue about how powerful it is and how the pair's efforts to defeat it are futile. It all works out, and it makes for an incredibly climactic final battle. Make no mistake, THE END is definitely one of Sonic's most formidable adversaries to date.
  • The Final Horizon Update's final boss, for all its faults and conveyance issues, is this: beside both amazing reprises of "I'm Here" (an orchestral rendition in the first phase and a triumphant cover with Kellin Quinn on vocals in the second), the fight is full of high energy and depicts Sonic and his super form at its strongest. This includes the sight of Sonic's parry being a more nonchalant backhand, the Cyloop attack on SUPREME/THE END being a maelstrom of power that crushes the Titan after a short while, and his Grand Slam attack consisting of him pulling off what is essentially Akuma's Raging Demon, while keeping Sonic composed, with little hints of smugness here and there. The cherry-on-top of this is the Coup de Grâce Cutscene, where after Sonic punches SUPREME into THE END's physical form, Eggman charges up its own rifle, with Sonic as the projectile. After Sonic unleashes all of his power, transforming him into the cybernetic blue-and-black "Super Sonic Cyber," Eggman fires the hedgehog straight into the Titan and the eldritch moon, destroying them both at once.
• Awesome Music: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Awesome Video Game Levels:
  • Kronos Island is a solid introduction to the open zone format, with an epic boss fight to cap it off.
  • Ares Island is generally considered to be the highlight of the game due to its massive size, distinct visuals, numerous challenges, and the Friendly Rivalry between Sonic and Knuckles throughout its campaign.
  • Cyber Space 4-4 is widely seen as the best Cyberspace level in the base game, due to its substantial length, decent challenge, original theme, and beautiful music. 4-2 and 4-3 are also highly regarded for their originality and good level design. Unsurprisingly, all three of them were remixed in Update 3's DLC Cyber Space stages.
  • Among the Cyber Space levels in Final Horizon, 4-G and 4-I stand out in fun factor due to the former's unique gimmick of having Sonic accelerate through a gear-shifting mechanic and the latter for its surreal, low-gravity landscape formed entirely of floating cars.
• Base-Breaking Character: Is Amy's more introspective All-Loving Hero behavior in this game a much-needed evolution of her character that makes her more respectable? Or is it a boring airbrushing of her character that leaves out the bombastic optimism, fiery temper, and obsession with Sonic that made her fun in the first place?
• Broken Base:
  • The Titan bosses. Some view them as one of the highlights, if not the highlight of the game due to their sheer spectacle and Awesome Music, while others see them as easy, repetitive, and tedious button mashers that rely too much on spectacle over substance. There's also the overabundance of do-or-die QTEs, with some loving them for the fantastic spectacle, while others see them as Fake Difficulty leading to unfair deaths.
  • Dr. Eggman being a father figure to Sage. Some love the idea of Eggman having a kid and consider it to be a great way to humanize him. Others, however, find it to be a forced development that is too out of character for him, arguing that he is too egotistical for him to be affectionate towards anyone (especially considering his willingness to hurt children in past games). Some fans, however, have argued against this, arguing that while Eggman is an egotist, he has shown varying degree of affection towards his own creations (particularly those that serve him well, like Metal Sonic and E102 Gamma) in the past and given that Sage is one of his most successful creations to date (and his most human), it makes sense for him to show affection towards her. A few have also taken an in-between approach, arguing that Eggman's affection towards some of his prior creations was mostly reserved for when they helped him further his plans, and that Eggman's affection towards Sage is therefore a roundabout way for him to pat himself on the back for creating a competent underling, something which even writer Ian Flynn has also argued in an episode of the BumbleKast.
  • The Cyber Space levels are seen as either a fun diversion from the open zone gameplay and a clever way to integrate more traditional Sonic stages into the game, or the worst part of the entire game due to their reliance on reused assets and level design, wonky physics, and clunky controls.
  • The constant references and Continuity Nods to past Sonic media in the game's dialogue. Some like the callbacks to past games and other media like the IDW comics and consider them to be a good way to properly unify the series' notoriously loose continuity, while others saw them as obnoxious and forced Pandering to the Base that distracts from the main story as opposed to adding to it.
• Camera Screw: The Final Boss of The Final Horizon has a pretty nasty case of this, as the fight takes place surrounded by a forest but the camera is pointed upwards near-constantly since the game wants you to look at energy ball attacks coming from above so you can Parry them. The end result can result in the trees constantly blocking your vision by focusing on Sonic while the attacks are fired, obstructing the very attacks that the game wants you to focus on, or the camera will be zoomed out to have the attacks in view, but Sonic is obscured by the trees. Either way, it is surprisingly hard to see anything and very frustrating to make progress, especially when getting hit by said energy balls also reduces Sonic's overall ring count.
• Character Rerailment: One of the reasons that this game's story was so well-received was its portrayal of the cast in light of the 2010s. Sonic's playful and snarky attitude is still present, but done in moderation while also highlighting his empathy and dedication to his friends (Roger Craig Smith even gives him a more mature tone). Sonic's friends are also given more introspective scenes, with Knuckles in particular having his heritage readdressed for the first time in years, and Eggman builds up a sympathetic relationship with his "daughter" Sage.
• Common Knowledge:
  • The Ancients did not create the Chaos Emeralds. The game only states that they were native to their home planet, and that they were their original owners, primarily used as a power source for all of their technology.
  • The form that THE END takes in the final boss battle is neither fully confirmed nor disproven to be its true form. Although Sage makes mention of THE END escaping from SUPREME in order to assume its original form, it isn't elaborated whether or not this evolution is entirely completed, as Sage also states that not even Super Sonic could defeat it in its true form, whatever it may be. In the end, Sonic was seemingly able to defeat THE END with Sage's assistance in its moon form. There was therefore an urgency to defeat it before its transformation was complete. To add to the ambiguity, although it has claimed having multiple incarnations, we have yet to see any other possible forms it may take after this, and even then this doesn't fully guarantee any of them are its actual true form. It would later be confirmed in a Japanese interview that THE END doesn't actually have a "true form" at all. It instead projects itself as what its victims perceive death to look like.
  • Several fans have mistaken one of THE END's lines, where it was boasting about how finite all previous Sonic villains were, during its monologue to mean that they were actually the villain Infinite. In actuality, no such indication of this is ever made in the game, and the entity was merely making a comparison in an attempt to startle Sonic while fighting it.
  • A common piece of misinformation on the internet (including This Very Wiki at one point) is that THE END's final boss fight gives you more hitpoints the more you die to the boss. This is not true, and your health stays the same no matter how many times you die to the boss, which you will a lot.
  • It is claimed to be an open world sandbox game by many fans and critics, to the point that it is often compared to titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, while the game is more open-ended than previous Sonic titles, its design and overall structure aren't entirely non-linear and it has more in common with Collect-a-Thon Platformer games such as Banjo-Tooie and Super Mario Odyssey than it does with large open world sandbox games like BoTW, as it consists of several small non-linear playgrounds filled with collectibles and platforming segments as opposed to one huge open sandbox for Sonic to traverse. This is the reason why Sonic Team prefers to use the term "open zone" when referring to its design.
  • The Final Horizon update features two new variations of Super Sonic that are referred to by fans as "Super Sonic 2" and "Super Sonic Cyber" per names found in the game's internal files. That said, the game itself merely refers to these variations as "Super Sonic's true power" rather than with any explicit names. In-story, the "Super Sonic 2" variation is the result of Super Sonic harnessing some of the energy of his cyber corruption to give himself a boost in strength, and the "Super Sonic Cyber" variation is Super Sonic utilizing all of this energy at once— indicating that, unlike with Hyper Sonic, these variations are more the result of Sonic using a power-up rather than achieving any distinct transformations outright.
• Complete Monster: THE END is a cruel and powerful entity that desires to destroy all of existence out of sadistic pleasure. Having destroyed countless worlds and lives prior to the events of the series, The End eventually invades and destroys the Ancients' home planet before following the survivors to Earth, where it kills many of them before being imprisoned in Cyberspace. Many years later, The End manipulates Sonic into freeing it by having him tear down the wall between dimensions keeping it imprisoned, claiming it will help him save his friends. As Sonic progresses in his mission to save his friends, the Cyber Energy that The End has Sonic absorb starts to slowly and painfully corrupt him. Upon being freed, The End allows the Cyber Energy to fully corrupt Sonic, resulting in his mind being trapped between reality and Cyberspace, before proceeding to resume its goal of destroying all of existence. Upon being defeated, The End spitefully attempts to blow itself up in one last attempt to destroy all of existence.
• Critical Dissonance: While most critics didn't hate the game, they were largely lukewarm towards it, with many giving it mixed scores. Fans, however, were far more positive towards the game and considers it to be one of Sonic's best games in years. This is reflected in the Metacritic scores, as the Metascore is an average 71, while the user score is a much more positive 8.2.
• Crossover Ship: Sage gets shipped with Bowser Jr., due to both being children of the famously known video game villains. (In the case of the former, Eggman considers her as his own child).
• Difficulty Spike: The Another Story scenario has gained a reputation for being significantly more challenging than the otherwise-easy base game. Much of the platforming segments are more involved and require the use of every technique from every character to progress, Guardians are much stronger than in the base game, the Cyber Space levels are trickier and more open-ended, some new segments suffer greatly from Checkpoint Starvation, and the game introduces a new mechanic very late that is extremely difficult to use (if you're playing on Hard or Extreme).
  • A patch would release several months later addressing several of these difficulty complaints: namely making the platforming on the Towers of the Masters much simpler than before on Easy mode, buffing the damage for Amy, Knuckles, and Tails while leveled up, and extending the length of the Perfect Parry across all difficulties. That being said, except on Easy, the Perfect Parry still requires tight timing, much tighter than anything you'd need in the base game.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final two islands, Rhea Island and Ouranos Island, are regarded as being underwhelming. Due to both islands being remixes of Kronos Island as opposed to having distinctive themes like Ares Island and Chaos Island do. Not to mention Rhea Island is literally just the other half of Kronos Island; one of the towers even being situated in the same pit where the player fought GIGANTO at the very beginning of the game. Even worse, there was already early trailer footage for both Rhea and Ouranos Island mixed with the footage for Kronos Island, making it seem like they were potentially all part of the same open-world level. It was later confirmed to be true after hackers have recovered an early version of Kronos Island, which can be viewed here.
• Ending Fatigue: You've had to tackle Kronos Island, which acts as something of a slimmed down tutorial region, followed by the more complex and dense Ares and Chaos Islands that each contain one of Sonic's friends. This then gets followed up by Rhea Island, a rather straightforward yet empty series of platforming challenges that hit the story's big climax. Time for the Final Boss? Nope, the game then just suddenly drops the player on Ouranos Island without much context whatsoever, and now you have another large and dense location to collect things and progress on, just without much in the way of any significant plot or development; Sonic already has all of his skills by this point, there are a grand total of two new Guardian types to face, and all the island conversations are mostly incidental chats between Sonic and Sage over story tidbits leading up to this point; Sage even reuses Amy's heart-shaped Memory Tokens wholesale. The location also induces a minor plot hole because of development issues splitting it from Kronos. It ends up feeling like unfinished Padding before you finally confront Supreme and THE END.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While the game’s story and character writing (courtesy of Ian Flynn) have been widely praised as some of the series’ best, the gameplay, while generally praised for injecting some new juice into the series, has seen significantly more mixed responses due to the wonky physics, Cyberspace stages reusing level designs from previous games, and having very little visual variety, and the open world design being seen as somewhat sloppy and undercooked. The game does accommodate for this by encouraging players to switch to Easy if they just wish to experience the story (though you cannot fight the base game's True Final Boss on any difficulty but Hard).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Big the Cat makes his return to the main series in this game, and he's become incredibly popular among fans due to his helpful fishing minigame and his sudden, inexplicable presence on the Starfall Islands.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Sage is a popular character due to her father-daughter relationship with Eggman, how she tries to stop Sonic, and the fact that she's a Rei Ayanami Expy. It helps that she's much less of a villain than she appears to be and is genuinely sympathetic.
  • THE END is a genuinely terrifying new villain that embodies Nothing Is Scarier, delivers a long and compelling Badass Boast during its boss battle, successfully manipulates Sonic all throughout the story, and is responsible for practically everything in the franchise thus far.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • One immediately popped up between Sonic fans and fans of God of War after the release date of "Frontiers" (November 8, 2022) was revealed, which happened to be the day before the release of God of War Ragnarök. This quickly resulted in plenty of mud-slinging between fans of both games.
  • Another one had arisen in Early December of 2022, and it's, of all things, with Genshin Impact. This is thanks to the both of them being the top two voted games in the 2022 Player's Voice awards. Throughout the votes, many posts on social media from fans of Frontiers strongly promoted voting for the game due to it not being nominated for other Awards. On the other hand the developers of Genshin had given extra Primogems to all players of the game after it had won "Best Mobile Game" in the previous year and again for the "PlayStation Partner Awards" in 2022, leading Frontiers fans to believe that the votes for Genshin came from a desire to obtain them, considering it bribery^note It is important to note that the developers of Genshin actually did give out Primogems for winning the vote; a paltry 800 of them, barely enough for 5 pulls on the in-game gambling system. It had even gotten to the point where a vicious rumor started within both fanbases, in that the votes for both games were primarily from bots as a means of sabotaging their potential spots in first place. ^note Ironically, after all of the bot votes were disqualified, it turned out that both games actually did bot significantly, specifically during the third round, and Genshin still won. This was the result of a temporary glitch on the website that prevented votes for some of the games, Frontiers and Genshin being two of them. That both fandoms began to act really aggressive, snooty and outright racist at times did not help matters in the slightest.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: One fanfic scenario that has quickly garnered a ton of traction following the game's release is Sonic becoming possessed and used as a vessel by THE END after succumbing to the cyber corruption. Such fics would usually either have Sonic's friends (as well as Dr. Eggman and Sage) attempting to rescue him from THE END's possession or Sonic having to fight THE END from inside.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The Reveal that the Chaos Emeralds are extraterrestrial has been met with confusion and disapproval from some fans since it raises more questions than answers, such as how the Master Emerald and the special stages (which take place in another dimension) are connected.
• Fanfic Fuel: What if Sonic had fully succumbed to the cyber corruption? Unsurprisingly, many a Dark Fic was made based on this scenario, with the usual result being THE END using the corrupted Sonic as a vessel.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Sonic: Breath of the Wild", due to the heavy similarities between this game and BotW.
  • Sonic of the Colossus, due to the game's setting of wide-open fields populated by dilapidated ruins looking similar to that of Shadow of the Colossus, along with presence of a Humongous Mecha at the end of the reveal trailer. It goes even further with the main plot, with THE END taking the role of Dormin, manipulating Sonic to destroy the Titans to save his friends, just so it can free itself. Sonic even takes Wander's role, slowly getting corrupted thorough the story.
  • "Sonic the Hedgehog: New Genesis", given the trailer reveals a striking number of similarities to PSO2NGS, being a long-time SEGA icon making the transition to a Science Fantasy Wide-Open Sandbox environment with vaguely post-apocalyptic elements.
  • Before its name was officially revealed as the "Cyloop", many called Sonic's new trail move the Paraloop due to the similarities in appearance and usage. Another common name for it was the "Spin Cycle".
  • Before Sega officially named the technique "Homing Dash", the trick where you cancel a Homing Attack with a boost was given various names, such as "magnet dash", "M-Dash" (inspired by the name of a similar glitch in Unleashed), or more eloquently the "Homing Attack Boost Cancel."
  • The Final Horizon Update teaser trailer had Sonic going Super Sonic, but then shows him being covered in a reddish aura with lightning bolts, along with gaining glowing blue irises. It didn't take long for people to make the comparison to Dragon Ball Z's Super Saiyan 2 transformation, with some also using the term "Super Sonic 2." This is supported with the internal data of the game, which refers to the blue-eyed Super Sonic transformation as "Super Sonic 2."
• Fanon: A lot of this is directed towards THE END due to its mysterious nature, as well as it arguably being the overarching antagonist for the series.
  • After it was revealed by Morio Kishimoto that the appearance of THE END depends on who sees it, and that Sonic and Sage saw a different form than what the player saw, many fans have quickly theorized that from Sonic's POV, THE END took on the appearance of Mephiles the Dark, since he is the only villain to succeed in killing him, on top of THE END's purple color being similar to Mephiles' color scheme.
  • Some fans have also theorized that when Eggman resurrected Sage after supposedly defeating THE END, it essentially took over her programming due to the fact that when he resurrects Sage, she exhibits the same staticy effects THE END did when it was released from Cyber Space.
  • A lot of fans also theorize that many of the ultra-powerful monsters that Sonic had fought, such as Dark Gaia, Solaris, and the Time Eater, may actually be connected to THE END in some way due to their similar colorations, and having functions that'd serve THE END's goals. Adding to this is how THE END actually has sapience compared to the former three, who are just monstrous beings with no moral agency.
  • When Sage reveals that the symbol which appears multiple times throughout the game is meant to represent the god of the Ancients, it became a common fan theory that Sage herself was actually said god resurrected by Eggman. Giving more credence to this is how the camera zooms in on her when she ponders if this God is still around today.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Kena: Bridge of Spirits, thanks to the presence of Kocos — little coconut-shaped creatures that resemble the Rot, including their plot purpose.
  • In an odd case, with Xenoblade Chronicles 3, due to videogamedunkey's antics on both games, leading to his fanbase to attack both games.
  • Also has a strong friendship with both Devil May Cry 5 and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, as all three games are linked through the addition of extremely hype "status songs" for phenomenal boss fights^note  Devil May Cry has "Devil Trigger" and "Bury the Light", Metal Gear has "Rules of Nature" and "The Only Thing I Know For Real" and Sonic has either "Undefeatable" or "Find Your Flame", opinions vary. To that end, fanart of Jetstream Sam, Vergil and Super Sonic being friends has made the rounds.
  • That fans of Sonic the Hedgehog and Dragon Ball Z have a long-standing friendship isn't exactly news - however, this relationship is taken to a new level with Frontiers: the Titan boss fights have a huge DBZ-esque atmosphere, so strong that fans who played Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot are changing the music from battles with bosses like Vegeta, Frieza, Cell and Buu with Titan boss musics like "Undefeatable" and "Find Your Flame". Here's an example. This gets further amplified in "The Final Horizon" DLC when Sonic gets an advanced state of his Super form, Super Sonic 2, which fans have compared to Super Saiyan 2.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Getting your rings to max capacity puts you into a Power Boost mode that is effectively Sonic's Level 99 Speed, and it lasts until he takes a hit and loses even a single ring. This level of speed is meant to be unlockable for a reason, being Difficult, but Awesome, but full mastery of it turns Sonic into something many enemies struggle to hit, not to mention chops down some of the tedium of many a "Get Back Here!" Boss. A masterful player who simply never gets hit won't even need to raise their Ring Capacity or Speed stats to maintain it and stay fast all game long. However, some enemies that drain Rings, like GHOST, might throw a wrench in this.
    • Tapping the Boost button as opposed to simply holding it will also allow Sonic to cover distance from island to island very quickly, on top of not draining the Boost gauge as fast (if at all if you mash it) compared to holding it. YMMV depending on the platform, though; not every controller is built the same.
  • There are several places where you can easily perform tricks, like specific springs with blue aura, and even more places when you can perform tricks hitting the ramp. Quickly gaining points to level up, you can have the full skill tree before getting to the 2nd island.
  • Boosting immediately after a Homing Attack starts will not only cancel the attack, but send Sonic sailing ahead with the speed and momentum of the Homing Attack, which is significantly faster than the regular Air Boost. Not only that, but Sonic will soar in any direction you were holding when you canceled the attack, including backwards. Exploiting this "Homing Dash" will turn even the dreaded Portal 1-2's S-Rank time into something much more feasibly achievable. It's such a game-breaker that, as of the "Sights, Sounds, and Speed" update, the game actually puts an asterisk next to your time if you used it.
  • Big's fishing minigame not only lets you purchase the items you need to upgrade your stats, including Lost Kocos, but also lets you buy Portal Gears, Vault Keys, and even the current island's Memories. With a little luck from a starfall shower for an excess of fishing coins, you can reasonably fish away on later islands for their higher tokens per catch and effectively break the game's progression in half, skipping over most of the Cyber Space stages entirely or buying your way in story progression while overpowering Sonic well ahead of time. The Monster Hunter: Rise DLC adds the BBQ Spit minigame, which takes only marginally longer than fishing but generates Tokens for free, giving you an alternate method of farming materials to break the game.
  • While the Cyloop can be used to get rings quickly (thereby making it easier to unlock the Power Boost), where it truly shines is its ability to generate Skill Pieces, Memory Tokens, and even Seeds of Power/Defense at random. Simply making a loop on the ground can generate any of these items (no matter how small the loop is), meaning that a patient player can spend half an hour or so running loops around the terrain, and they will have enough rings, speed, power, defense, and skills to last throughout most of the game.
  • Rather fittingly, given that it's an Infinity +1 Sword, the Spin Dash, acquired from S-Ranking all of the action chain challenges, trivializes Cyber Space levels due to essentially being a better version of the Boost (except in midair). To this end, the Spin Dash also places an asterisk next to your Cyber Space time if it's used, similar to the Homing Dash (except the Spin Dash's specific asterisk is red, rather than the Homing Dash's white.)
  • One of the settings added in the "Sonic's Birthday Bash" update is Jump Deceleration, which controls the rate at which Sonic slows down while in midair. Cyber Space was clearly not designed to be played with this setting at anywhere below default values; setting it to 0 allows Sonic to fly across stages a la Sonic Forces with minimal resistance, which can be exploited for extremely blatant Sequence Breaking. Combine with other techniques like the Cyber Space Power Boost and the Spin Dash to crush stages under your heel.
  • The parry system allows Sonic to parry almost any attack in the game. This is standard fare for an action game, but what makes it broken is that timing or positioning is not required at all. The player can infinitely hold the parry, which makes Sonic hang in the air, functionally invincible to any incoming attack. A successful parry also gives Sonic Bullet Time, making combat even easier. The parry also has utility outside of combat, as using it halts all of Sonic's speed even after getting hit (which is important becausee Sonic will only lose Rings if he hits the ground in his "hurt" animation), making it easier to platform and recover from mistakes.
  • "The Final Horizon" adds Amy, Knuckles, and Tails as playable characters, and they all have their game-breaking abilities:
    • Amy has a triple jump that doubles as a hover, which makes platforming significantly easier.
    • Knuckles can upgrade his glide into the Infinite Glide, which allows him to fly at Power Boost-speeds at Max Rings with no loss of altitude. Unlike the other Power Boost skills, Infinite Glide does not cost Boost energy at all.
    • Tails can gain the Cyclone Boost skill, which allows him to ride the Cyclone from Adventure 2. The Cycline allows you to fly literally anywhere you want, trivializing not only Tails' platforming, but Amy, Knuckles, and Sonic's. The only downsides are that it requires Boost energy (which can be circumvented by getting unlimited boost for a time by making an infinity symbol with the Cyloop) and that you can only boost once in the air, which means that if Tails is hit out of the Cyclone or releases the boost button, he can't use the Cyclone again until he lands. This is on top of his regular flight, which gains high altitude as well as endurance far longer than any other game where Tails can fly.
    • On release, the combat for the three of them was severely lacking, however a balance patch released in December made it so they're damn near game-breaking in combat too on higher levels.
• Genius Bonus: The max number of Memory Tokens you can get from Big's fishing minigame is 255, the integer limit on 8-bit computers.
• Goddamned Bats: The Jellyfish on Ares Island, the enemy that launches rows of drones you have to homing attack to reach while avoiding the spiky ones. Unlike other examples of this trope, the issue isn't fighting it, the issue is ignoring it. Unlike every other Mook encountered, getting near or even just seeing the thing will cause the camera to lock on to it, forcing you to run away or destroy it if you want to do anything else. And even running away is a pain since you can't see where you are going.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The SQUID, almost memetically so. Its flying, roaming nature means it can easily get in your way when you least expect it (and, simultaneously, make it really hard to track down when you're in the mood to fight it). Also, depending on how high your speed stat is, the initial phase can take eons to complete and getting tossed out of the "ink path" for whatever reason will force the player to start over the chase once more.
  • SHARK on Ares Island isn't exactly threatening or tough to take down, but in order to make it vulnerable you have to sit through a very long cutscene and Quick Time Event sequence, and missing the Homing Attack at the end forces you to repeat the whole thing.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • A physics exploit officially known as the "Homing Dash" per the official "Speed Strats" video is virtually identical in execution and function to the "magnet dash" technique from Spark the Electric Jester 2. By performing a Homing Attack then immediately cancelling it with a Boost, Sonic will boost forward with the momentum from the Homing Attack added on, launching him at extremely high speeds. Depending on the angle that the Homing Attack was performed at, you can also slingshot Sonic to areas and heights not normally possible, which is very helpful for Sequence Breaking.
  • The Homing Dash existing lends itself to a variety of other derivative exploits that can be used to launch Sonic in ways not normally possible. The most famous of these is the "Slingshot" a technique that can be performed in the Open Zone by Homing Dashing away from an enemy and locking onto them while airborne. Once you are locked on and grounded, you can then perform a dodge (which puts Sonic in the "combat" state), then activate a Stomp Attack, then Boost in the middle of the Stomp Attack. If done correctly, the Stomp Attack momentum will be converted into Boost momentum, shooting Sonic at impossible angles and speeds. A variant with the Spin Dash can be performed by using the Spin Dash at the end of the sequence instead of Boosting, which not only flies even farther but also lets you Air Boost out of it to correct your movement.
  • In "The Final Horizon", Tails has the Cyclone Cannon skill, which allows him to fire a Power Laser from the Cyclone. It's easily Tails' best option for combat and is required for at least one challenge, but it's one of the most expensive skills in the skill tree at 50 Skill Points after buying the Cyclone Boost. Except you don't need to buy the skill at all: you can use it as early as you buy the Cyclone Boost.
  • Knuckles' memetic infinite jump glitch from Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric returns; simply press the jump button to jump, execute his three-point combo in mid-air, press the jump button again after he uppercuts to start his glide and temporarily hover, execute the three-point combo again, and repeat ad nauseum until you reach wherever you're trying to go.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The game's villain being referred to as The End and its speech about how it will come for Sonic no matter how hard he tries take on new meaning with the revelation that Sonic Team was under so much pressure during the game's production that Frontiers was essentially their "last chance" at making a mainline Sonic game. Had they failed, it would have become a Creator Killer and this really would have been The End for Sonic.
• He Really Can Act: Dave B. Mitchell replacing Travis Willingham as Knuckles in Team Sonic Racing and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 was seen as a downgrade by many, with his tone of voice in that game coming across as goofy-sounding and almost like a concussed surfer dude. However, with the more somber script of Frontiers Prologue: Divergence, he was able to show off a deeper and more moody Knuckles voice that has been much better-received.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Jim Sterling rather infamously named the game as their worst game of 2022. Their original review was extremely harsh, and had a lot of major complaints about the game, such as the physics and camera controls, and the feeling that the open world was barren and lifeless. While fair enough, the controversial part was their insulting of Sonic Team as "lazy hack fucks", which was seen as in incredibly poor taste since the review came out shortly after reports of the amount of crunch that the team developed the game under came out, in addition to being seen as hypocritical due to Sterling themselves making workplace mistreatment in the industry one of the most recurring topics of criticism in their videos. Further intensifying the controversy, Sterling thook a pot shot at the game's fans during their annual listing of the year's worst games, saying that they have "zero standards" and "will eat up anything Sonic Team shits out".
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "Chao in Space" has been a Show Within a Show since the Chao first appeared in Sonic Adventure. This game definitively establishes that the Chao did, in fact, ultimately come from space.
• Ho Yay: The cheesy grins and smirks that Sonic and Knuckles give each other are meant to be taken as playful ribbing per their Friendly Rivalry, but memes have largely spun them into bedroom eyes.
• I Knew It!:
  • Many fans have predicted that Ian Flynn would write a Sonic game at some point thanks to his past work on the franchise, long before it was confirmed that he was this game's scriptwriter.
  • Fans have predicted that the voice that guides Sonic throughout the game is the true Big Bad who was using Sonic to achieve its goals. This ended up being correct, as the voice is revealed to be The End, a malevolent entity that intends to continue destroying worlds upon being freed.
• Iron Woobie: Sonic. The poor hedgehog really gets put through the wringer in this one. As the game progresses, he's slowly dying due to THE END's cyber-corruption, with him being in visible pain starting from Chaos Island, and it only gets worse from there. By the time he finally frees his friends, he's become so corrupted that he winds up trapped between dimensions. Even after being saved and defeating THE END, Sonic still has to grapple with his friends going their separate ways from him after all these years. The game even adds a unique Stepford Smiler take on Sonic's usual upbeat attitude:
  Sage: How can you smile when you can barely stand?
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The most common complaint about "The Final Horizon" update is that it ramps the difficulty up into a steep cliff that might as well be flat vertical.
  • For starters, the platforming challenges require a deeper understanding of the game's mechanics and controls in a way the base game rarely did; namely the climb up the Tower of the Masters, which have Sonic scale small and precise platforms with precision, where the slightest mistake results in the player falling down and losing progress. Unlike the towers in Rhea Island, there are no checkpoints or pulleys to help you get back up. Thankfully, like Rhea Island in the second update, playing on Easy mode adds balloons and other items to help make platforming easier. A subsequent update in December of the same year (1.41) decreased the Towers even further, adding new level design elements to made it a breeze.
  • At the top of the towers are the Master Trials, which has Sonic fight souped-up versions of common enemies and Guardians, all at Level 1 and sometimes lacking key skills. The final trial has Sonic face GIGANTO, WYVERN, and KNIGHT at Level 1, in a row, with only 400 Rings, with a Perfect Parry (despite the game informing and encouraging the player to not worry about timing beforehand) and includes the Colossus Climb preamble. Again, losing at any point requires the player restart from the beginning. Again, the 1.41 eased up the difficulty, especially for the final trial, where Sonic now has buffed stats on Easy mode, and Perfect Parry has had its timing increased (drastically on Easy, slightly on others).
  • Amy, Knuckles, and Tails play differently from Sonic, not just in controls and mechanics, but in that they lack even the basic Attack and Stomp that Sonic had at the beginning of the game, and the lack of non-boss enemies to fight or an equivalent of Sonic's Air Tricks means they effectively only gain Skill Points by finding Skill Koco to hand them five or ten at a time. Their most useful skills are locked deep into their skill trees and can have costs as high as 50 Skill Points. In particular, Knuckles' first major climbing puzzle requires the Cyknuckle skill, which must be unlocked first, which means finding Skill Koco to bolster his skills, but the game does not make that explicitly clear besides having Treasure Icons with a purple color instead of blue.
  • Even when fully maxed out on skills and at level 99 in their stats, Amy, Knuckles, and Tails are all terrible at combat compared to Sonic: the three all have short and low-damage combos that are much less effective in the air than Sonic's melee combo, to say nothing of the damage he can output with special attacks that his friends simply can't match. Even against a stationary target dummy, Sonic's friends struggle to do even a fraction of the damage that he does, and against the enhanced Guardians found in the expansion they have no chance whatsoever. They're tailored more for puzzle-solving than fighting, but considering how it isn't hard to accidentally run into a Guardian, fighting becomes an inevitability. Once again, the 1.41 patch eased up the difficulty here, allowing them to deal massive damage when fully leveled up.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the most widely criticized parts of the game is the fact that most of the Cyberspace levels are copy and pasted from previous games in the series. This has been seen by many people as lazy given the levels aren't altered in any substantial amount to account for differing physics. Furthermore, most of the Cyberspace levels use Green Hill Zone and Chemical Plant Zone as backdrops despite both zones having been brought back numerous times already, including the two prior mainline games.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Some fans became interested in Frontiers just for including the Soap shoes as cosmetic DLC for Sonic if one subscribes to the game's newsletter, making Frontiers the first game since Sonic Adventure 2 to have him wear the shoes officially.
  • Many people are interested in playing the Final Horizon DLC because it's the first time since Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) that Amy, Knuckles, and Tails are all playable in a 3D Sonic game.
• Like You Would Really Do It: In a franchise that regularly sticks to the status quo and regularly introduces new characters, did Sega really think that anyone would buy them killing Sage off so suddenly? The franchise consistently adds new characters all the time and lets them stay without anything to do. The last time they tried to kill off a major new character (Shadow) they immediately brought him back for follow-up games. Not only that, The Golden Ending reveals Eggman obtained the means for her survival, and The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog gives her a Continuity Cameo as a Late-Arrival Spoiler. This is taken even further in the final DLC, where Sage's death doesn't happen due to the final fight with THE END making a massive change; when it seemed like she might die due to the barrier she's holding to protect her father, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy all come in to save her and hold the shield.
• Love to Hate: THE END commits a bunch of atrocities throughout the story including mass omnicide, but some fans enjoy it for being an Eldritch Abomination that came straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos, how surprisingly dark it is for a Sonic villain, while also being the Greater-Scope Villain of the entire franchise.
• Magnificent Bitch: Sage is an A.I. created by Dr. Eggman to research the Starfall Islands and help him Take Over the World. Detecting a dangerous entity on the islands, Sage sucks Eggman into Cyber Space for his own protection while she studies the islands, before trapping Sonic and his friends as well to keep them out of her way. Upon Sonic's escape, Sage summons the Titans to hunt him down, repeatedly shooting him out of the sky, hindering him at every opportunity, and lethally testing him to analyze his abilities as a potential ally, only withholding information due to Eggman's commands. After bonding with Eggman as his "daughter" and witnessing Sonic's love for his friends, Sage convinces her "father" to join forces with Sonic and collect the Chaos Emeralds to stop the destruction of Earth. After taking control of a Titan from THE END and battling alongside Sonic, Sage allows herself to be destroyed to stop THE END's rampage, telling Sonic to "look after Father."
• Memetic Mutation: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Memetic Troll: SQUID is infamous for its tendency to Jump Scare the player with its Boss Subtitles while they're in the middle of something else, and also has a habit of "photobombing" cutscenes if left alive. The fanbase has found this oddly endearing.
• Moe:
  • Sage. Despite being an antagonist at first until she has a change of heart later on, she's physically a child, which makes her so adorable, and it really helps with her voice actors making Sage sound like a stoic but still lovable young girl. Her rather tragic story of wanting love when she cannot even comprehend the concept, and her incredibly heartwarming Heel–Face Turn, and especially the moments where she smiles sweetly are all major factors that compliment her adorable cuteness.
  • The Kocos. They are adorable creatures that resemble rock-based Chao, make "aww"-inducing sounds, and have a heart wrenching backstory (they are soul jars of the long-gone Ancients).
• Moral Event Horizon: THE END breaks past this before the game began when it destroyed The Ancients' world, alongside having destroyed countless number of planets and stars before even that, killing countless amounts of people in the process.
• Narm: Has its own section on the series' page.
• Narm Charm:
  • A few of the previous Sonic games fell into Narm extremely easily, usually due to awkward voice acting, questionable writing, wildly inconsistent characterizations between games, and other decisions that neutered the potential seriousness of their stories. Frontiers, on the other hand, has much better voice direction and a major uptick in writing quality, making it feel like a properly serious Sonic story without crashing headlong into unintentional hilarity. The interactions between Sonic and Knuckles are considered especially charming and do an excellent job of showing how much they respect each other rather than just saying they respect each other.
  • This time, the nostalgia baiting makes a lot of sense for the game's 30th anniversary, and for many players is a welcome reminder of one of the biggest differences between the Sonic and Mario franchises — their focus on continuity. After several of the previous games just seemed to forget the machinations of various dangerous factions and the logical effect ancient civilizations would have on the world, few will deny Frontiers does an at least decent job of tying up old plot threads together that were originally Left Hanging — such as what Chaos even was in the first place, or how the Chaos Emeralds that have almost always been a central point of the various stories even got to Sonic's world in the first place. The various nostalgic locations that appear in the Cyber Space levels are also a welcomed addition, as they are the result of Sonic's memories being transferred into it.
  • A few people pointed out that the Titan boss themes, "Undefeatable", "Break Through it All" and "Find Your Flame" sound a bit like "edgy" metal music from the mid-2000s that you'd hear in a lot of fanmade AMVs. However, unlike in, say, Shadow the Hedgehog or with Infinite's theme, it actually works, partly because the lyrics of those songs come off as encouraging and confident in a way that fits with Sonic's character, instead of just being overly edgy for no reason. The fact that they are quite the bangers helps a lot too.
• Obvious Beta: Even at its release in 2022, certain elements fell obviously short.
  • The Elder and Hermit Kocos could originally only improve Sonic's abilities one level at a time, which made hitting the maximum level of 99 a slow and clunky process. Not until later updates were released did they give the Kocos the ability to boost Sonic's level any faster.
  • Frontiers has boasted a long list of glitches, only some of which have been patched.
• Obvious Judas: The mysterious voice in Cyberspace that guides Sonic to destroy the Titans was predicted by many players as being the real Big Bad even before the actual game came out, due to how ominous the voice sounds, how cryptic it is, how it does not want to divulge too much information about itself, and how Sage constantly tells Sonic that he is putting the world in danger by following its orders- by the time she outright tells him the voice is deceiving him, Sonic just says he will fight against them too if that is the case, as if even he was suspicious of it. Sure enough, it turns out to be THE END, an Eldritch Abomination who tricked Sonic into freeing it.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The idea of a blue video game character being sucked into cyberspace to play through memory-themed nostalgia levels was previously done in Mega Man Xtreme.
  • This isn't the first time One OK Rock have collaborated with Sega before, as their song "Clock Strikes" was used as the intro for Ryū ga Gotoku Ishin!.
  • Tangle and Sticks aren't the first Sonic characters to be incorporated into the main games after appearing in spinoff material. Long before them, Amy and Charmy appeared in a Sonic manga before making the jump to canon in Sonic the Hedgehog CD and Knuckles Chaotix respectively.
    • This also isn't the first time Sticks has been included outside of the Boom canon; she was playable in Mario and Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and Sonic Runners, and was also shown interacting with the main series cast in Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Unite and gag comics written for the series' 25th anniversary. Likewise, Tangle had previously appeared in Sonic Dash and Sonic Forces: Speed Battle as a playable character.
  • The Inugami Korone cosmetic DLCs are indeed the first Virtual YouTuber collaboration content in a Sonic game, but Korone is not the first YouTuber overall, whether virtual or flesh-and-blood, to have an in-game collaboration with Sonic; that honor goes to Simon Lane with his DLC Guest Fighter appearance in the PC version of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.
  • This isn't the first time the Chaos Emeralds have been suggested to be from another world. In the pre-Continuity Reboot Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) continuity, the green Chaos Emeralds came from a massive meteor in space and other areas throughout the cosmos had them until A.D.A.M. dragged them all to Mobius.
    • Archie also gave Dr. Eggman a daughter there as well, Mecha, though she was a fully-adult humanoid robot than what Sage was and she only lasted until Ian Flynn took over the title.
    • In a way, it also acts as an homage to Sonic the Comic as the Drakon Empire, of whom Chaos is a member of, are stated to have been the creators of the Chaos energy stored in the Emeralds, in addition to leaving relics behind on various islands, notably on Westside Island and Flickie's Island. Much like the Ancients, whom Chaos is descended from, the Empire are stated to be from another Planet, although, unlike the Ancients, they certainly do not come in peace.
  • Many were caught off guard by the True Final Boss in the base game taking place in an Unexpected Shmup Level. This isn't the first time Sonic Team has done this, as seen in the final level of Burning Rangers.
  • Sonic gaining a life-threatening supernatural condition (cyber corruption) and converting it into a new power was previously done in Sonic and the Secret Rings over a decade ago (Erazor Djinn's flame arrow).
• One-Scene Wonder: "Super Sonic Cyber" in The Final Horizon. Sonic attains this form for mere seconds in the final showdown, when Eggman fires him at SUPREME/THE END using SUPREME's railgun; all the same, it has wowed fans with its cool, unique appearance and sheer power.
• Player Punch: Sage is the first major character in the series that wasn't a Monster of the Week to die on-screen in a Sonic game since E-102 Gamma (or Emerl, if one considers Gemerl a separate entity). In a way that wasn't Uncertain Doom, an off-screen Disney Death, or long dead beforehand, and the sheer suddenness of it is likely to catch even a Genre Savvy player off-guard when playing the base game. Thankfully, the Golden Ending of the base game allows Eggman to rectify this, while the "Final Horizon" update avoids her fate entirely; Sage managing to stay alive thanks to Tails, Amy, and Knuckles' help, where she then goes home with her father.
• Porting Disaster:
  • While the Nintendo Switch version is playable, many found it to be very poorly optimized for the system, as it suffers from egregiously bad pop in (even for a game already known for having bad pop-in), an unstable performance that is prone to frequent stuttering and can barely hold 30fps, muddied and blurred graphics, and various bugs not found in the other versions. Thanks to the port's poor optimization, some outlets ended up giving it a lower score than the other versions (like Nintendo Life, which gave it a 4/10 partly due to the port's issues).
  • While the PC version fares much better on the technical side of things, keyboard and mouse controls are clearly an afterthought. There's a lot of small things about how the keyboard controls were handled, including pausing being on the P key rather than escape and/or enter as standard for most modern PC titles, but much like the PC port of Persona 5 Strikers, this game has negative mouse acceleration (or, in other words, the mouse acts like a joystick, which is the worst way to handle it and in some ways poor programming), and it makes controlling the camera with the mouse feel terrible to play. Which really sucks, because one would think KBM would actually work really well for this game, especially in the open areas, where the speed and precision of mouse camera controls would work amazingly well for steering at high speed, but the negative mouse acceleration actively makes that impossible.
• Salvaged Story: Tails' part of the story directly addresses the criticism many fans had with his previous characterization being inconsistent and his Character Development seemingly being reversed. Tails feels guilty that he's a burden to Sonic, and the moment where he cowered in fear from Chaos (considered by many to be his low point) is treated as a significant source of shame for him. Sonic reminds Tails of his past achievements and motivates him to strike out on his own, giving him a bolstered sense of confidence and rerailing his personality.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Getting the Ring and Speed upgrades from the Elder Koco is extraordinarily clunky and time-consuming, as you have to do each upgrade one at a time which takes the better part of ten seconds. If you're leveling in bulk, you will potentially waste minutes upon minutes sitting there watching the same animations play over and over. Thankfully, the Sights, Sounds and Speed upgrade allows the Elder Koco to upgrade stats all at once, fixing this problem.
  • The game attempts to align Sonic with all the various mini-challenges and courses strewn about on the islands, and 2D sections get more prevalent the further you get in the game. This means you can just be exploring or heading for your next destination, only to accidentally skim a spring or dash panel and suddenly get rocketed in a completely different direction with no way out of it but either going backwards or completing the section. This is bound to happen a lot.
  • Sometimes boosting around as Sonic, especially at max speed, can be really fun and liberating — until you strike a small rock or a bump in the geometry, after which it becomes a crapshoot of whether he ignores it or is suddenly sent flying through the air for the game's trick system. The only ways out are air boosting or stomps, both of which can be dangerous if you're not careful, and these random bumps also have a bad habit of cancelling your Cyloops too. It gets worse with ledges, as Sonic randomly decides to either trick off of them, fall normally, plummet like a rock or even run down their side. It's so hard to predict that more complex terrain becomes incredibly dangerous.
  • Sonic's control options revert to their default settings while in the Cyber Space levels which can be a pain if you heavily altered Sonic's controls for the open world zones.
  • Cyber Space 3-5 gives us a level based on Savannah Citadel Day Act 2 from Sonic Unleashed and is the only level in the game to feature a unique "drift panel" to compensate for the lack of an inherent drifting mechanic. The problem is that drifting handles horrifically bad in this game, as attempting to turn Sonic feels like he's on ice, and unlike previous games with drifting you cannot manually stop on your own without killing all of your speed. Dash panels placed later in the level make it very easy to die by drifting off the course unless you simply choose to jump over the drift panels, which many players opt to do over dealing with the mangled drifting controls.
  • If you fail the QTEs during the Titan boss fights, Sonic dies. Many fans feel this makes the Titan bosses unfair as you are punished for failing by being forced to redo the entire fight all over again from the beginning, including the Colossus Climb portion as regular Sonic. Not helping matters is said QTEs typically come up completely out of nowhere, give absolutely no indication of what you're supposed to do, and only give one or two chances to pass them before abruptly killing Sonic. This is especially a problem with WYVERN, who's missile attack comes up with no warning near the end of an already long and difficult fight, only gives one chance of passing it with no indication of what the player needs to do to survive it, and its climbing phase is much longer and more drawn out than any other boss.
  • In "The Final Horizon", Amy, Knuckles, and Tails all start at Level 1 in all of their stats and many of their important skills (some of which are essential for completing the story) need to be unlocked first, on an island where the characters need to be maxed out to stand a chance. Additionally, Tails has no homing attack, Amy cannot climb walls (and neither can Tails, for that matter), and, when gliding, Knuckles controls like a drunk paper aeroplane.
    • However, Tails' sections generally would not need the homing attack or climbing, Amy also doesn't need climbing (and can more often than not use her insane vertical movement to climb scale most heights anyway), and Knuckles' gliding would be addressed in a later patch which removed the long start-up animation and correcting the issues with his turning.
  • Also introduced with "The Final Horizon" is Sonic's new mechanic of having to Perfect Parry. In the base game, you can hold a parry for upwards to 15 seconds without an issue and still deflect attacks, but the Perfect Parry is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: having to time it to actually get parries to work now. This wouldn't be so bad if the Master Koco challenge re-fights didn't show exactly why the default parry works as it does, as enemy attacks tend to be severely disjointed with a Hitbox Dissonance from their actual animations, making it hell to figure out when to time a parry. These fights in particular also speed up said attacks, and the game silently lowers your Perfect Parry window timing the higher the difficulty; with your normal parry completely disabled, it's not unheard of for most players to just stick the game to Easy for the mercy because Sonic's portion of this final campaign is a Difficulty Spike like nothing else in the series. Negative reactions to the Perfect Parry were addressed in a later patch where the timing was increased drastically on Easy mode, and slightly on the other difficulties.
• Shocking Moments: Pretty much everyone was pleasantly surprised by the incorporation of the Cyclone from Sonic Adventure 2 within Tails' moveset as part of the Final Horizon update.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Given how simple the game is, it is easy to waste time in the fishing minigame just sitting around and fishing with Big. It helps that fishing rewards you fish tokens after each catch, which can be used to redeem many of the in-game items in Big's shop, as well as Egg Memos — which add to the game's story — giving fishing a more practical purpose outside of being an addictive time waster.
• Signature Scene: The first Titan battle between Super Sonic and GIGANTO has become an iconic scene of Frontiers, with many fans citing it as one of the most hype moments of the Sonic franchise, with the presentation, Super Sonic's revamped over the top combat, and the killer rock track "Undefeatable" playing in the background. Fans note it as an incredible first impression of what Frontiers has to offer in terms of its boss fights and music.
• Signature Song: "Undefeatable", tying neatly with the above. While the other Titan themes are equally well-received in their own right, this one is by far the most well-known, and for good reason. Especially when you have a chorus like this:
  I'm hanging on to the other side
  I won't give up 'till the end of me
  I'm what you get when the stars collide
  Now face it you're just an enemy
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Even on 9th generation consoles and PC with the highest settings, this game has an obscene level of pop-in, with foliage, shadows and other graphical effects, and even large objects abruptly popping into view as soon as the camera gets close to them. While this kind of thing is inevitable in Wide-Open Sandbox games, most other games will mitigate it by having assets gradually adjust from lower-to-higher levels of detail or smoothly fade in as the player approaches them.
  • When it rains, look directly at Sonic when he's not running around. The rain falling on his body looks startlingly low quality, coming across as white pixels dancing on his form instead of water falling upon him. It's most obvious if you just have him stand around in the rain and bring the camera closer.
  • WYVERN has no collision during its boss fight aside from the one segment that can be targeted for attacks. Failing the parry timing on its claw swipe is essentially guaranteed to have Sonic pass straight through it as he moves back into position for the missile phase. Even while attacking it, he's all but guaranteed to clip through its jaw by using a stomp attack, as the tangible segment is positioned too close to the jaw.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While the game isn't flawless, many fans and critics are in agreement that the game is a massive step in the right direction for the hedgehog after the deeply polarizing reception to Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces, largely due to its improved writing, better controls, expansive level design, and more in-depth gameplay.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The game shifting away from the stage-to-stage progression of previous games in favor of a Wide-Open Sandbox has resulted in some of this from the fandom, especially those who feel Sonic's speed would not translate well to a wide-open sandbox and would rather have something akin to Super Mario Odyssey or a modern take on the Sonic Adventure gameplay. Many also see it as another case of Sega trying to capitalize on current trends (in this case, the open world craze of the mid-2010s-to-early 2020s) at the expense of settling on a consistent and stable formula for Sonic.
  • Many fans who were initially excited by the game quickly became wary once it was revealed that Morio Kishimoto (who has gained a poor reputation amongst the community due to being the director of the more recent and divisive games in the franchise, such as Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces) would be returning as the director for this game.
  • While not universal, the announcement that Ian Flynn would be writing the story has left some fans worried, due to the Broken Base regarding his work on Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW), such as his handling of Sonic, Eggman, Shadow and the Metal Virus storyline.
  • The IGN First gameplay trailer has made many fans concerned about the game's quality. Points of criticism include the largely empty hub world, a seeming over-reliance on automation and puzzles, Sonic's low speed when not boosting, noticeable graphical pop-in and performance issues. The problems showcased in the trailer has caused much of the initial hype for these fans to get hampered (if not kill it off entirely), leading them to demand that Sega delay the game past its holiday 2022 date, believing that six months (if that) will not be enough time to fix these issues. This did die down slightly after IGN later clarified in their hands-on preview that the footage was from an early build of the game and footage of a later build featured the game in a much better state (as well as the reveal that the final game will allow you to customize Sonic's controls to your liking, alleviating fans' concerns that Sonic controlled too rigidly in the trailers), though many noted that Sega seemingly decided to advertise the game with heavily outdated footage for no real reason.
  • The reveal that Green Hill, Chemical Plant and Sky Sanctuary would be returning as Cyber Space stages has immediately received flak from the fandom, given that the former two have previously appeared in Sonic Generations, Sonic Mania, and Sonic Forces with the latter also appearing in Generations, as well as several spin-offs. Many fans have accused Sega of being lazy and once again trying to pander to nostalgic fans with returning zones, even though the game is touted as being a new experience.
  • While the Gamescom public demo was met with a largely positive reception, one point of concern arose from footage of the Cyber Space stages appearing not only to use returning zones from previous games, but also more or less copying level structures. For example, the first stage you enter based on Green Hill being structured almost exactly like Windmill Isle Act 1. This caused some to worry that all Cyber Space stages would be no more than just recycled zones and level structures with no new experiences outside of the open-zone parts, once again accusing Sega of laziness.
• That One Attack: The wolf enemies on Ouranos Island have a rather cumbersome and annoying method to beating them. Once spotted all six of them teleport to Sonic and rapidly spin around him to form an impenetrable ring barrier. The only way to escape is to successfully parry each of the six wolves one at at a time without getting hit once. If you get hit at any point during this attack, the wolves who got stunned will instantly recover and you will have to redo the entire sequence over again. Worse yet, if you're unable to parry all six wolves fast enough the ring barrier will close in on Sonic and instantly kill you. Naturally, the third Trial in The Final Horizon requires you to defeat a pack of them.
• That One Boss:
  • THE END on Hard Mode is this for many players, due to the Unexpected Gameplay Change to a full-blown Bullet Hell shmup, the exact same one used for the hacking minigames with almost no changes. Unless one is familiar with the polarity-swapping mechanics of Ikaruga, the boss will likely do you in a lot while you struggle to whittle down its massive health bar. The sudden shift in gameplay to a bullet hell shoot 'em up can easily throw players off, and the screen can become absolutely covered top to bottom in bullets, on top of tricky-to-dodge lasers that can't be countered. What's more, you can only take three hits before having to redo the entire fight from the top, which can feel like hours due to its spongey health bar, so God help you if you're not too familiar with this gameplay style.
  • "The Final Horizon" adds another insane boss challenge, though it'd probably be more accurate to say that it's Those Three Bosses. Master King Koco's trial for Sonic, consists of a Boss Rush against GIGANTO, WYVERN, and KNIGHT. There are three fundamental issues with this trial that make it an absolute pain in the ass, though. First off, you're limited to 400 rings at maximum for the entire trial (not each individual fight, the whole trial), and because it also includes the Colossus Climb sections, you can actually end up with less than that. Secondly, your parry is replaced with one that requires perfect timing to pull off instead of the unlimited time window that made it a Game-Breaker for most of the game, so it's likely that your muscle memory for parrying the Titans' attacks will be thrown off entirely. Finally, your stats are severely limited for the duration of the trial, nerfed to level 1. So in short, you have a collective 400 seconds at max to beat all three Titans with an underpowered Super Sonic, while also having to deal with a new parry mechanic for the first time in what is quite literally a forced speedrun. Oh, and if you die at any point in the trial, you have to start right back at the GIGANTO climb. To put things into perspective, playing this on easy mode has been compared to being just as, if not even worse than the infamous Eggmanland. It's that hard.
    • Out of the three titans, the most frustrating of them in this trial is WYVERN. GIGANTO and KNIGHT can at least be defeated fairly quickly without needing to parry too many times, although KNIGHT can cause problems due to the shield riding section being a massive time waster if you get stuck on it. WYVERN, on the other hand, has to be parried in order to damage it at all, otherwise you get stuck in a never ending cycle of attacks that waste all of your rings. Not helping matters is that WYVERN's attacks are incredibly difficult to parry due to the parry windows being unclear (for example, the claw swipe has to be parried before it actually hits Super Sonic) and needing to do it multiple times in a row as the fight goes on. Above everything else, this fight goes to show how poorly implemented Perfect Parrying is.
    • A later patch released in December would alleviate some issues with this boss rush, including making the fight on Easy mode properly easier (Perfect Parry lasts FAR longer and Sonic starts with more rings), as well as just buffing the Perfect Parrying timing in general. That being said, most of the issues with WYVERN still apply, as the boss fight's biggest boon to difficulty is just how much visual clutter there is on the screen, making it difficult to time the (still tight, but less so) Perfect Parries.
  • After the Master Koco Trial in "The Final Horizon", Super Sonic battles SUPREME and defeats it in the same way as the main story... until THE END links itself with the Titan, taking complete control over it. This new final boss is more difficult than the original final boss, with three phases (four if you count the original final battle that precedes this one as the first phase) where its main attack is an orb that chases Sonic and depletes thirty Rings (or less if you're playing below hard mode), needing to be countered with a Perfect Parry (that, unlike the main parry, requires exact timing to be successful). When its health bar is depleted to a certain amount in this phase, it becomes a Puzzle Boss, with it always regenerating its energy and its health will not go down past a certain point no matter how powerful Sonic's attacks are. The solutions to this puzzle is for Super Sonic to first cut the link with THE END's moon form and the SUPREME Titan's neck (which isn't conveyed outside of a hint by the Master Koco, and hitting it can be a challenge if targeted incorrectly) and then perform a Cyloop on the boss' back, which again, isn't conveyed properly. The most likely way a player might find out is if they dodge while targeting the boss' face, causing it to switch targets and discover the opening that can be targeted. From there, Super Sonic has to Cyloop the disarmed Titan's weapon, which will trigger the next phase of the battle. During this phase, if Super Sonic is hit by the energy balls the boss fires at him, it will trigger a cinematic the first time this happens, which, while is a really awesome set piece, also serves as a straight up ring check. If you don't have enough rings when THE END fires its giant orb attack that depowers Super Sonic, it will be an instant kill. If you do have enough rings to survive it, you will be reduced to 100 rings, requiring you to finish the fight quickly. What is supposed to be a challenge that seemingly acts as a Final-Exam Boss^note eg. elements of the encounters with the NINJA Guardian and KNIGHT Titan can feel like a challenging chore due to its conveyance issues.
• That One Level:
  • Portal 3-4, due a bevy of tricky-to-avoid lasers and spikes, especially annoying when attempting complete the missions.
  • Portal 3-6 is easily one of the more difficult Cyber Space stages, as it is designed around using various gimmicks such as accelerator guns and rainbow rings, and is filled with iron balls and bottomless pits, where one wrong move can send you plummeting.
  • Chaos Island, for its confusing layout- there are several areas you can't get to until solving certain mysteries to make rails appear, but the game doesn't guide you to which one. Getting to some of the chaos emeralds can take several minutes of navigating the various up and downs of the map. There's also an overabundance of forced 2D sections that can kick in while you're trying to do something else, and halfway through the level is a large river of lava that can be tricky to get past.
    • The mission to lower the bridge later in the main story missions for the island is an aggravating spike in difficulty for what should be a simple mission. The mission has Sonic skydiving and having to reach the ground within a time limit while avoiding springs and other obstacles that will slow you down. The problem is that the time limit is pretty short leaving very little room for error, forcing you to be at full skydiving speed for practically the whole mission which makes your steering really stiff and harder to dodge the springs that send you back upwards. In addition, Sonic has a very bad habit of targeting enemies with the homing attack that you're not aiming for (causing him to waste precious seconds with realigning himself with the correct enemies you need to take out) and the gold rings you pass through which are supposed to carry you to the next section of the fall tend to take way too long with their animation thanks to the unnecessary loops they do, which can actually be long enough to rob you of victory at the very end of the mission when you're about to reach the ground. To make matters worse you have to rewatch the mission's startup cutscene every time you restart, which only serves to delay you from your next attempt.
    • The pinball segment at the end of Chaos Island is also aggravating, mainly for the fact that, in order to complete it, you need to get an insanely high score of 5,000,000 points, then fling the ball through the opened door at the top. The ball's physics are finicky, and it's common to watch it get bounced down into the sides and down into the empty pit at the bottom while you're struggling to get enough points. It doesn't help that getting a whopping 5 million points can take a very long time, even with the Rings and Red Rings to increase your point multiplier (which goes away when you get a Ball Out). It's also a common sight to watch it refuse to get through the damn door until it finally bounces off a bumper and actually goes upward. On top of this, you only get three tries before having to start all over with no way of getting another attempt. And if you managed to get enough points, but run out of attempts, you'll have to do the entire thing over again. At least the music's nice.
    • Also, the mission where Tails requires you to pick up 600 machine parts is an absolute pain to complete. For starters, the time is extremely strict leaving no room for error. However, the main problem with this mission is the fact that in order to collect the parts, Sonic must bust open the many metal boxes that contain them. Some can be taken down with one attack, but others require more effort and combos to break open. There are two other major issues on top of it that makes this mission so tedious: One, breaking the boxes with combos could often lead Sonic into locking on a further away box causing him to lose out on precious machine parts. And two, the machine parts don't automatically get collected once you break them open. You have to manually collect them yourself. Sounds annoying right? Well, how about the fact that if you take too long on a platform, it actually will sink into the lava causing Sonic to bounce off in pain and lose a life making this easy to lose all three should he fall from a higher platform. Like with the bridge lowering mission, this one leaves no room for error and will most likely take numerous amount of tries in order to complete. It's definitely safe to say that Chaos Island is easily the most difficult of all of the islands.
  • For a given definition of "level", some of the towers you have to climb on Rhea Island are daunting. They include (among other things) moving walls, frequent placements of spikes, pathways that require precise timing, and an enemy type that hasn't been seen up to now (and can kill Sonic if you don't know how to defeat it). Also, due to the nature of these towers, falling off them means climbing back up from the beginning. Thankfully, the towers makes shortcuts as you climb, making it easier to get back up.
    • The Towers in the "Final Horizon" update, however? Very much That One Level, due to the incredibly difficult and precise platforming where a minor mistake could send you plummeting back to the bottom. And with no checkpoints or pulleys, falling to the bottom means you'll have to climb all the way back up again. That said, a lot of the precise platforming is in play if the game is set to Hard difficulty. Adjusting it to Normal or Easy will add more objects for the player to be able to homing attack, skipping over most of the preciseness required to scale the Towers.
  • The Snake Trial from the The Final Horizon DLC has already become notorious for getting players stuck, since Sonic is locked in at Level 1 on all of his stats and his only useable skill is the Cyloop, and the trial involves defeating several shielded enemies within a strict time limit. The easiest way to beat it is to have the enemies throw their shields as far as possible, attack them while you still have the chance, parry the shield, rinse and repeat until the enemy is defeated, then move on to the next one and repeat the process until they're all down. This is STILL far easier said than done. ^note The description essentially tricks players by saying the only available ability is the Cyloop, causing players to think they'll have to use the Cyloop to damage the enemies, which grants a very brief opening to damage them. It's doable, but way harder than the parrying method.
  • Portal 4-H. The others may be hard to do the missions and get S-ranks on, but this one is hard to minimally complete due to making you balance on a lot of tricky small platforms, and it is very easy to under-or-overshoot your jump and fall to your doom.
• That One Puzzle: The puzzles in the game are pretty rudimentary and quick, but one puzzle, "A Grave Mystery," is noted to be incredibly difficult for what is the gate to the first major boss of the game, being a Light and Mirrors Puzzle where you need to align four lights with linked rotation into the right mirrors in order to recreate the pattern on the ground. Figuring out which ones are moved by each and how they'll rotate has caused plenty of frustration for players. There's another issue, too - it's one thing to figure out the solution to the puzzle, but figuring out what the objective is is its own issue. You're told to use the marks on the ground as hints and the central grave lights up if a beam hits it, but you're given no further context on what the win state is for the puzzle. Half or more of the time spent solving the puzzle can end up being the process of even figuring out what you're supposed to do. It can actually be fairly stimulating to puzzle out given some time thinking about it, but it stands in stark contrast with the rest of the 'action platformer racer' gameplay, being something you'd find in a '90s adventure game.
• That One Sidequest: Portal 1-2, despite only being the second Cyber Space level in the game (out of 30) and being straightforward in general, has proven to be notoriously difficult to get an S-rank on, with even the speediest playthroughs only achieving the rank by a few seconds. The main problem here is that the timer immediately starts upon beginning the stage, where Sonic is running automatically for a few precious seconds before the game lets you have control. This ends up wasting some time for no good reason. To note, 1-2 is the only Cyber Space level in the entire game to not have its S-Rank time requirement be lowered in Extreme Difficulty.
  • SEGA actually officially acknowledged how difficult this level's S-Rank time is to achieve through the Cyber Space Speed Strats video, having seen the annoyance of it through livestreams.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Amy is a bit of a Base-Breaking Character, as she is portrayed quite differently than in recent games. Some fans complain that Amy's primary method of attack was changed from her hammer to her tarot cards, as with the exception of Sonic Chronicles, Amy was never once shown using her tarot cards for combat. As for her writing, there are fans who feel that her more level-headed behavior in this game makes her boring, lacking her bombastic Genki Girl and Smitten Teenage Girl style that defined her character for years.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The true Big Bad, THE END. Despite being responsible for a lot of past events in the overarching story of the games, we don’t really get to learn much about it, apart from being an Eldritch Abomination Omnicidal Maniac Hidden Agenda Villain. Where did it come from? Why does it want to destroy everything? Why did it target the Ancients in the first place? We don’t really get to learn much about it, with fans hoping that it survived so more can be learned about it. Previous statements on the BumbleKast made by him as well as the fanbase's interest in the character for its eldritch nature implies that The End, while physically destroyed, might get another chance to return in the future.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Cyber Space stages borrowing themes and layouts from previous games made some people Tainted by the Preview, but a number of players do find the actual layouts taken from certain games like Adventure 2 to be fun to play through. The problem? Only the Cyber Space themes revealed before the game's release were there, meaning Green Hill, Chemical Plant, Sky Sanctuary and one original highway-themed aesthetic; rather than a real visual variety, every single stage is in these same four themes with different times of day or some altered backgrounds, really putting a damper on the whole grabbag of levels idea. Not to mention, more variety in stages could have been used to punctuate how Sonic's memories were being transferred into Cyber Space.
  • After all of the build-up of cyber-corruption from Sonic saving his friends, the Rhea Island segment really hammers it down that Sonic is being pushed to the brink, before he's finally overwhelmed and has his mind trapped between realities. Except this happens for a grand total of two or three minutes before his friends re-seal themselves back in virtual reality and restore him with little fanfare, undoing the entire plot point and making some feel like nothing truly serious can ever happen to Sonic himself without it being whisked away. To be fair though, the stakes here were still pretty high, considering that he had to risk losing his friends forever, basically reversing his efforts in saving them in the first place, in order to save the whole damn universe.
    • In an interesting case of the good plot not being normally accessible, there are several bits of dialogue on Rhea Island that show the dangerous extent of the cyber corruption infecting Sonic and setting the tense tone of the island. However, in order to access these dialogues, the player has to effectively idle in order to hear them, meaning that on a first playthrough, players may not even hear these bits of dialogue.
  • After an intense finale of Sage performing a Heroic Sacrifice in the base game, and the implications of a planet-eating Eldritch Abomination being such a massive threat that indirectly caused the entire franchise, the only character that actually reacts to it is Eggman being sad over the former, which is shown after the rest of the characters celebrate for saving the day and act like none of that really happened. In a series where Sonic mourned Shadow's seeming demise and tried to honor his memories of Chip, and in a game filled with Character Development for everyone else, he somehow doesn't even react to Sage's sacrifice.
  • The father/daughter relationship between Eggman and Sage, while a heartwarming idea on paper, has been criticized by fans for being underdeveloped in the game, as the story doesn't give much focus on it for most of the game until near the end. While the Egg Memos help in fleshing out the relationship more, they are easy to miss, given they can only be obtained in the fishing minigame and are optional. Fans feel the contents in them should've just been proper cutscenes instead of being relegated to optional logs, especially since the Egg Memos contain important plot-related info and give better context to Eggman seeing her as a daughter by the game's climax by showing his increasing fondness for Sage.
  • Tails at one point mentions encountering an illusion of himself while trapped in Cyber Space, who calls him out for his general weakness and cowardice. This encounter, despite having a lot of potential for introspection on Tails' character, is entirely offscreen, and neither Amy, Knuckles nor Eggman are mentioned to have gone through a similar experience, even though it would have been no less interesting.
    • In the "Final Horizon" update, there are Cyber Space levels where Sonic will sometimes need to race against a black-and-white version of Tails, which might have been the illusion that Tails mentioned in the base game. There are however no cutscenes that show Sonic or Tails interacting with this illusion, nor does Tails even have any Cyber Space levels to begin with to meet him. This makes the illusory Tails stand out as unused potential.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • For the first time since Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic can go underwater in 3D. Unfortunately, outside of a few pockets of water in Kronos and Ares, this mechanic isn't taken advantage of with any dedicated underwater platforming segments.
  • The Drift is back for the first time since Sonic Generations after being an automated sequence in Sonic Forces, but it's only used in one Cyberspace level, and one of the later ones at that. Depending on the player's choices by the time they finish Chaos Island, they might not even have known it was in the game. The Spin Dash can also double as a drift, albeit one unlockable by end game and as an unintentional bonus of its abilities.
  • Pinball returns for only one late game puzzle and never again after that.
  • "The Final Horizon" adds new Cyber Space stages, each with their unique gimmicks. The most unique of all is 4-G, which introduces the "Rev Boost", a mechanic where instead of Sonic boosting at the cost of Boost energy, he gains energy while boosting, shifting gears at a certain threshold much like the gears of a car. However, it is only used in this stage.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Many fans were surprised when an article by Game Informer confirmed the return of Big the Cat, of all characters (with a fishing minigame to boot). Sonic himself lampshades how Big is even in Starfall Islands in the first place:
    Sonic: What are you doing here?! How did you get here?!
  • While they do not appear in the flesh, nobody was expecting Tangle the Lemur and Sticks the Badger to be casually referenced and confirmed as part of the mainstream game canon.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: This is the first Sonic game in a long time to be considerably Darker and Edgier than its modern predecessors, and it shows.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • While Sonic Frontiers hasn't been a complete home run the same way Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations, and Sonic Mania have been prior, most fans and critics are in agreement that the game is a solid step forward in the right direction after the lukewarm and polarizing reception to Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces, with the game winning back many fans due to its more in-depth gameplay and engaging story, and causing them to be hopeful for the franchise's future after it had been stuck in mediocrity for most of The New '10s after Generations (Mania notwithstanding).
  • Cyber Space in its launch incarnation was widely panned by most players, but the "Sonic's Birthday Bash" update helped get more people back on board with it via the Jump Deceleration slider, which addresses the complaints about Cyber Space lacking a good sense of momentum and killing all of your speed when in midair. This, combined with the overpowered Spin Dash to break stages, has caused some fans to reconsider Cyber Space to being much more fun now that it feels much more flexible in its approach.
  • The Final Horizon DLC manages to do it to the final boss: while the boss battles against SUPREME and THE END were considered below GIGANTO, WYVERN and KNIGHT's battles, Sonic Team uses the DLC to merge these two bosses into a single Final Boss that was acclaimed by the fans, with some of them considering it one of the greatest Final Bosses in entire series.
  • Despite the feeling of overcompensation with some of the balancing, the 1.41 update to the Final Horizon DLC is a much needed welcome, easing up on the extreme difficulty of the mode while still keeping it challenging, and addressing several core issues like Knuckles' gliding and his, Amy, and Tails' damage output.
• The Woobie: Sage. She may be cold and emotionless, but deep down, she wants a real, genuine family, which is shown in a cutscene that has her break down when seeing Sonic and Tails' brotherly bond, lamenting that she herself doesn't have that kind of relationship with Eggman—one of love and not genetics. You just wanna give her a hug...

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