Sonic Frontiers does exactly what I’d initially hoped Sonic Adventure 2 would have. It wasn’t objectively bad by any means, but it wasn’t what I had enjoyed about Sonic Adventure. Those huge hub areas were lost in exchange for one compact, focused level after another. While Sonic Adventure 2 was in many ways technically superior, it cut out the part that I viewed as the adventure.

It gave Sonic what was for the time, a large area to run around it that supported his speed. Running around those open “adventure fields” of Station Square and the Mystic Ruins as Sonic felt incredibly free. Don’t get me wrong, on a technical level Sonic Adventure is a borderline broken game and entire segments of its multipart campaign ultimately fall short of their ambition, but it was that ambition and scale that kept me coming back. When I got my Dreamcast on Christmas day 1999 along with a copy of Sonic Adventure, I was entranced. But if you’re like me, Sonic Frontiers may just be an admittedly imperfect look into exactly what 3D Sonic should be.

It doesn’t mean that every 3D Sonic fan will like it, it's arguably at its worst when it is being what 3D Sonic has largely been for the last 20 years. That doesn’t mean that Sonic Frontiers is some perfect game that will reinvent the series, in fact it is crawling with flaws. Sonic Frontiers is the sequel that 7-year-old me wanted to Sonic Adventure.