When Sonic Frontiers was revealed it immediately attracted comparisons between the game and the Nintendo-exclusive Breath of The Wild. What with the scenes of Sonic running through the idyllic open world filled with greenery, Sonic Frontiers looked quite reminiscent of Nintendo’s stab at the open-world genre.
Now it looks like the Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka is trying to distance the game from this sentiment. In a recent interview with Shacknews Iizuka stated that Sonic Frontiers “isn’t similar at all” to Breath of the Wild. He feels rather, that Sonic Frontiers is more action based and that despite the open-world design, Sonic is still very much so a linear game as it does not give as much freedom to the player as it does in Breath of the Wild.
“From the development [team’s] perspective, they’re going out and making an action game. They see Breath of the Wild as a role-playing game, it’s not similar at all to the action game that they’re making,” says Iizuka (9:40 mark).
“You know, there’s the same element of freedom that has been applied to Breath of the Wild as a role-playing game, but they’re taking the linear high-speed action Sonic game and implementing freedom into there,” he continues. “But when we think about, ‘is it an open world game? Is it similar to Breath of the Wild?’… A lot of people on the team love the Zelda series, they love Breath of the Wild, but to them, they don’t see a similarity between the games.”
Later on in the interview Iizuka states that he doesn’t think that there is another game that compares to Sonic really and he’s very eager for fans to see Frontiers as something new and fresh.
“It’s a high speed platform action linear game taken to this open environment and turned into something new. We really feel we’re out there making something new and interesting.”
But with the current trend of games being open-world it would make sense that it would invite such comparisons from the public. In anycase, the game’s release is just under a week away, so we will have to see for ourselves. Sonic Frontiers launches November 8, and will be available on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
In other SEGA news, the company recently released it’s latest integrated report. Here the company revealed the integral nature that Sonic is to SEGA, touching on the success of the latest Sonic film in the US all while announcing that 1.5 billion units sold in Sales and Downloads. Sonic Frontiers is a sure-fire way to increase that statistics even more. Certainly we will see more sonic films and games in the future.
