I am beginning to realize the severity
of the mistake I've made. You see, I thought I was making a video
assessing the unpredictable quality of animation in Sonic the Hedgehog games. But what I did not realize in that
fit of creative enthusiasm and (let's be honest) morbid curiosity, was that I had just stepped into the
Sonic YouTube equivalent of quicksand. Make no mistake, I am NOT
a Sonic the Hedgehog fan. Although, when I say that, people
seem to have a difficult time believing me and... yeah, ok. But whether or not I LIKE
Sonic is no longer relevant because now I have become
one of those people who TALKS about Sonic. And Sega is never gonna stop making
Sonic the Hedgehog games, so... ...I'm stuck here now. In releasing that video, I entered
the Hedgehog's gravitational pull and I do not have an exit strategy. Sonic DIED this year,
and yet, here I am! Nothing changed. What I'm trying to say is... welcome to New Frame Plus! Let's talk about the animation
in Sonic Frontiers. (adventurous orchestral music) As we covered last time, good Sonic game animation
boils down to four things: appeal, characterization,
game feel and polish But different games
have different animation needs, and Sonic Frontiers is a
rather different kind of Sonic game. So let's dig into this,
starting with... <i>[Locomotion & Traversal]</i> This is a very important category
of animation for any Sonic game because it's what you're gonna spend
the majority of your time doing: running and jumping. But Sonic Frontiers has you
running and jumping across a large, open 3D environment with (mostly) complete freedom
to explore in any direction you want. And, historically speaking,
high-speed free-form exploration is not something that Sonic games do well. 3D Sonic has usually worked best when
he's confined to a track, when the only direction
available is either "forward" or "generally to the right". Take those rails away,
and things tend to get very slippery very quickly. So with the constraint
of that track removed and the player now in full control
of both speed and direction, Sonic's handling has to be
far more carefully tuned, and his animation has to be
a lot more adaptable and do a lot more heavy lifting to provide players the clear
visual feedback they need to be able to feel in control during play. To be honest, when I first saw that Frontiers was going to be
an open world platformer, I was pretty confident predicting
this was going to be a mess. But, lo and behold, Sonic's
running and jumping in Frontiers is pretty darn solid actually! Now this is largely a
technical animation victory. If you look at each of
Sonic's animations individually, the jump, the run, the walk, a lot of them are very similar to
what we have seen in previous 3D entries. They all look fine, but I don't think
they are the reason this feels better. The difference is in the implementation. Sonic's animation here is
very responsive to player input, quickly conveying his
direction, current speed, and which traversal state he is in, whether that be running,
sprinting, jumping, bouncing, rail-grinding, whatever. And, crucially, his animation, when combined with the effects
and the camera and the audio, effectively sells the
exhilaration of speed without actually zipping you
through this world so quickly that you feel completely out of control. Of course achieving this
comes at a bit of aesthetic cost. Sonic's ability to change direction
almost instantaneously or quickly snap from the animation
of one locomotion state to another one with almost no blend
or transition between does mean sacrificing some
sense of physicality and realistic weight for the character, But in a game where the player may be counting on that clear visual feedback
to make split-second input decisions, that is a very worthwhile trade-off. Granted, the 3D Sonic jank is still here. I'm not saying it's not. Things tend to get real
buggy-looking at slow speeds. And Sonic transitions out of
some animations way, way too early, snapping from one state to another one well before the previous
animation was done. Also, they dropped the squetch
on his spinball jump, I assume just to spite me personally. Wait, correction: there IS a little
bit of squash and stretch on the jump specifically when you double-jump
out of a rail grind. Or also when you HAVE double-jumped
and you hold down A again so you can charge up a
little spin dash before you land? Then there's a little bit of squetch
on the Sonic ball too. I'm not sure why it's not
on any of the other jumps. I'm guessing it must be a bug?
I don't know. Whatever, I want the squetch
back on the jump is my point. It was good. Ultimately, we have seen more polish,
appeal, and even personality from Sonic's locomotion and traversal
in previous games, but even with those rough edges,
no other 3D Sonic has made this feel good before.
Not even close. And that is such a game feel
victory for this franchise that I'd still call this a win. But okay, that's just Locomotion,
what about... <i>[Combat]</i> I think it's important to understand: combat in most Sonic games
is not complicated. Enemies aren't put in these
levels so you can fight them. These aren't duels in the field of honor. These enemies are speed bumps. Half the time, you're only attacking them
for platforming purposes. Fighting generally just
isn't the point in a Sonic game. And, in the past, when a
Sonic game has tried to make combat be a more
robust aspect of what is still fundamentally a running
and jumping game experience? That has not gone well. Except for the boars.
The boars were perfect. (comical boar squeals) So here again, Sonic Frontiers is
taking on a pretty scary challenge for this franchise by attempting to
make prolonged battles one of the load-bearing pillars of
the play experience. This world is littered with
enemies who can take a lot of hits, who each represent a kind of
combat puzzle for the player to solve. And this greater emphasis
on combat necessitates a considerably wider range of
combat moves for Sonic. So now Sonic's homing attack,
which has basically been 3D Sonic's main way of attacking enemies
since Sonic Adventure, has now been turned into
just the distance-closing opener for a brand new attack combo. And this combo feels quite good! Each individual attack might
be a bit hard to make out in the flurry of motion and hit effects, but thanks in part to the camera swinging
out to the side to give us a better angle The way Sonic quickly snaps to and holds
on each heavily-exaggerated pose adds just enough clarity for your brain to
connect the dots between each move. And as you progress further into the game, you will unlock more and more
increasingly flashy combat moves. A lot of effort and attention has clearly
gone into making these feel cool. And while I do think
having a lot of your moves essentially be micro cutscenes you
have to watch every time you use them can get old after 20 or 30 times, the presentation on these is
executed with so much more meticulous care than anything
the previous games have delivered. Sonic's new suite of
combat animations is at least in terms of
visual appeal and relative polish, one of this game's
animation strengths, I'd say. But if we're gonna talk combat spectacle,
we also need to talk about... <i>[Bosses]</i> Sonic Frontiers aims for spectacle
with its boss encounters in a way that no other Sonic game
has ever really pulled off. And while that spectacle may not
always result in fantastic play (I honestly found like
half of these really irritating), if we're talking strictly in terms
of visual presentation, for Sonic Team,
this is a noticeable step up. Sonic Frontiers, broadly speaking,
is aiming for a grander sense of scale than you get in
most Sonic experiences. and these fights are where
those efforts are felt most clearly. And the biggest contributor
to that difference, the real animation MVP
in Sonic Frontiers is the camera. The way an action is staged, the choice of camera angle
and framing, the cinematography can single-handedly make or break
the impression that action leaves. I mean, just look at
the difference between what this Street Fighter attack
feels like WITH its custom camera... ...and then without it. And, across the board, I see
so much more intent and care given to the staging of
Sonic Frontiers' action. To the dance happening between the
boss's motion and the camera framing them, and all the little ways
the camera works to make so many of these boss attacks and moments
feel so much bigger and cooler. Of course, the execution on
the animated spectacle in these fights is not consistent across the board. This gameplay camera,
for all of its aesthetic improvements, is not always your ally. And a lot of these battles have trouble
finding the appropriate balance between spectacle and clarity. I mean... this is just noise. Also it's pretty clear that this game
just cannot technically deliver on all of the big moments
this team's aiming for, no matter how powerful
the hardware you're playing on. And honestly, even with
all of this cool looking stuff, there is still so much
room for improvement. so much more refinement that could
happen with some extra polish time. Even so, this kind of
shลnen anime action is a real good fit for Sonic.
This feels so right. Like, this character's been going
Super Saiyan since Day One. If any retro platformer mascot should be
doing cool anime fights, this is your guy. But that brings me toโฆ <i>[Narrative & Cinematics]</i> As we have already discussed AT LENGTH, Sonic games do not have a stellar
history when it comes to cinematics and narrative animation in general. The high point for Sonic cutscene
animation was Sonic Boom, a game that was otherwise
kind of a train wreck. And the low points have been TRULY dire. Uncanny motion capture making everyone
look like humans wearing mascot suits. Giant faces that barely animate. Giant faces that animate
entirely too much! But really, we haven't seen
a true cinematics disaster from Sonic since 2006.
No, in recent years, the narrative animation in Sonic games
has just been... serviceable. A lot of kinda bland performances that are further constrained by
these awkward body proportions, and these face designs
that simply lack expressive range. And Sonic Frontiers pretty much
continues this trend. A lot of these scenes
(most of them, really) are very flat. Half of them are constructed of
little more than these looping idle poses and some
auto-generated mouth flaps with the vocal performances
doing all of the heavy lifting when it comes to conveying emotion. And, to their credit, even when the
animation's not doing anything to help, these voice actors are
carrying these scenes. On the one hand, you could argue
that this game's more melancholy tone does lend itself to a more muted,
understated style of character performance. On the other hand, there is a
difference between "subtle performance" and "no performance". That said, a few of these scenes
along the game's golden path have clearly been given
more attention. They have more specific expressions
and acting choices, characters clearly making eye contact
and listening to each other. And in those moments, this game's
cutscene animation is as good and sometimes even a little better
than what we've seen in other recent efforts like
Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces. I've talked before about how
the eyes and the hands are the most expressive
parts of our body, right? And how this incarnation of the Sonic crew having such large eyes and hands that
aren't being animated is so detrimental? Well, in some of the better-animated
scenes here, you can really see the difference that decent
hand and eye animation can make. When these characters
are expressing with their face and connecting with each other, when they are actually acting
and the animators have time to give them appealing expressions
and hand poses, it makes such a huge difference in
how good these characters look on screen. This still represents an
incremental gain at best, and doesn't hold a candle
to the personality or appeal on display in Sonic Boom's performances,
but in its better moments, Frontiers does at least help to point to
where the biggest gains are to be made. This little dance though?
This is good. Just look at him go. (peppy victory music) Honestly, I know I've said that
this iteration of these characters is constrained by their proportions,
and I still think that's true, but if you want to see just how
much more could be squeezed even out of these designs, go look at what they're doing with
the latest Sonic TV series, Sonic Prime. Now, obviously Sonic Prime is
going for a slightly different tone and a bouncier energy, but the
broader expressive range here... the subtleties in expression
and the fidelity of performance... Sonic games COULD have this. Like, I know that TV animation
is its own world with very different production
challenges and constraints, so it's not a one-to-one
situation. My point is: even with this iteration of Sonic,
with this limiting design, greater expressive potential DOES exist. And for all of its failings,
the Sonic Boom game did manage to replicate the animated appeal of
the TV show it was modeled after, so it can be done. So... how do we rank this? Compared to previous 3D Sonic titles, I would say the animation
in Sonic Frontiers averages out to a genuine improvement! It may not quite match the level of gameplay animation polish
that we see in Sonic Lost World, and it may still be a far cry from
the animated appeal in Sonic Boom, but the gains they make
in game feel during moment-to-moment play
are pretty substantial, and all of the new combat additions
are bringing some great visual flair. And the clear efforts made to
push the action spectacle in this game further has paid off! The added attention to camera work
and choreography turns some of these boss fights into genuinely
cool set piece moments. Overall, if I had to pick my Top 5 Sonic Games with
the Best Animation again, I could see Frontiers
swiping one of those spots. But then... if we were to zoom out a bit, expand our focus beyond Sonic games
for just a moment and compare Frontiers to the output from some
other comparable studios... other mascot platformers, other 3D games with
stylized animal-adjacent casts... that shift in perspective
is not flattering. It kinda reveals the vast amount of
room for animation improvement that still exists here,
how wide the gap between Sonic and his competition
has grown over the last 26 years. Like, yeah, this fight looks
really cool compared to past Sonic boss battles, for sure, but... Imagine what some of Sega's competition
could do with a fight like this. Can you imagine how good the
Insomniac crew could make this fight look? But then again,
Sonic Team is not Insomniac. And that's not their fault.
MOST studios aren't Insomniac. They have like 80 animators
over there, it's stupid. But that's not my point.
This is my point: Something that has become
increasingly clear to me studying all of the
games in this series - and it's not like a bombshell
revelation or anything, it's just something that's easy
to forget sometimes - is that Sonic titles
are mid-budget productions. These games are not made with giant teams. It is not going to take you 40 minutes to watch the credits
at the end of a Sonic game. These games are not given
long production cycles, and I would wager they
are rarely given extensions. Like, if the deadline to ship
a Sonic game is looming, but the game's not ready yet and it needs
more time and money to be ready, history suggests it's probably
not gonna get it. Right? Sega is gonna put that
game on shelves as planned. I would wager this is probably
one of the biggest reasons the quality of Sonic games is
all over the place like it is. And yeah, that kinda sucks sometimes. But then, the more I think about it... maybe that strategy is also
the reason we still have Sonic games
coming out at all. Think about it, they have
a dedicated base of fans who will probably buy most
of the games they make. If you keep the budgets to
these games relatively low, then you minimize the financial harm any
given game could do by flopping. No one Sonic game is given
the chance to lose enough money that it could risk
the franchise's future. And I don't have inside information
here, this is me speculating, but if I'm even half correct,
maybe the best favor Sonic Team could do themselves in the future is to try
scaling their ambitions down a bit. Try building smaller,
tighter Sonic experiences that they can consistently deliver
in a complete, highly-polished state. But that's not really
the Sonic Team way, is it? And I do have to admit: I kind of
sincerely love that about them. I mean, love these games or hate them,
but Sonic Team GOES for it, man. They are rebooting and rebuilding the
foundations of Sonic gameplay constantly! What if Sonic played
more like Mario Galaxy? What if we do both 2D Sonic and
Modern Sonic gameplay in the same game? Hey, that Breath of the Wild vibe is cool. Let's put our guy in a big old
apocalyptic open world with sad flashbacks and sad piano and map towers to climb and
little round goobers to collect. Will somebody PLEASE get
that grouchy hedgehog a gun. And, honestly, considering the
amount of ambition on display here, Sonic Frontiers is really solid. Like, this crew not only ventured
into some unfamiliar design space, but they also took on a bunch
of old animation and design challenges that past 3D Sonic games
have fumbled SO badly and, despite all that, they still
managed to deliver results as good or better than past efforts. And good for them, I say! Sincere applause. Anyway, I'm gonna go try to
think about something other than Sonic the Hedgehog
for a while. While I can. So... Thanks for watching, byeeeee (upbeat music)
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It's good to see Sonic getting more functional 3D animation, but it's a real shame they don't let the cast's personalities shine via animation in like, any of the games. Sonic's characters are beloved (for some reason) and I feel like they deserve better.
The creator of this video, Dan Floyd, also has a Let's Play channel called Playframe I'd highly recommend checking out. Dude used to do those Extra Credits videos back in the day, and he's got a lot of insights into game animation to offer, along with being generally funny and wholesome.