Image: Sega
When Sonic Frontiers debuted the first little bits of gameplay, fans immediately drew comparisons to Breath of the Wild. It wasn’t hard to do. We were shown Sonic racing through realistic, natural-looking environments, exploring great stone artifacts that dotted the landscape. There was no timer, no counter ticking up the number of rings acquired, just Sonic and a seemingly open world.
And while Sonic Frontiers’ creative officer Takashi Iizuka understood why, to some fans, the game looks like Sega’s late-hour attempt to replicate BOTW’s success, it’s actually nothing like that. “We’re starting a design perspective that is totally different from what other open-world games are,” Iizuka said to me through a translator at Summer Game Fest…
