New Sonic Frontiers overview trailer shows off the Chaos Emeralds, new combat gameplay

Sega has put up a new overview trailer giving us a dive into everything we know about Sonic Frontiers before it releases on November 8. Included in the information is our first look at a Chaos Emerald, combat, and a breakdown of how the story will begin.

The trailer explains that Sonic has been searching for the Chaos Emeralds alongside Tails and Amy. We don’t know exactly why they need them before the game begins, but they have been sucked into a dimensional portal. Sonic wakes up in Cyber Space and begins a journey to escape this dimension and find his two friends.

We know that when you first escape Cyber Space, the first Starfall Island you will start on is Kronos. There you will meet the friendly stone creatures that we were recently introduced to and likely will be saving along the journey.

While showing the general exploration gameplay, we get to see Sonic use some new moves he hasn’t used in the past. We see him punch a box and climb up a slanted wall to get to a boost pad that will let him run across it sideways. It is explained that there will be a combination of open world and linear gameplay, even while running through the Starfall Islands. We already knew that the Cyber Space levels are closer to the Sonic Boost era games in linearity, but now we know there will be moments where the camera turns to the side in the open world areas, like when climbing steep areas.

For the first time, this trailer mentions that you can complete the game in any order you wish, similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which obviously is one of the main inspirations for Sonic Frontiers. You’ll see plenty of enemies, puzzles, and side quests along the way that you will need to overcome. Solving puzzles will reward you with Red Seeds of Power and Blue Seeds of Defense, increasing your attack and defense stats. These were first mentioned as the Adventurer’s Treasure Box pre-order bonus.

Combat was also given a general look-over, showing one of the game’s bosses that will have you running on a track trying to catch up with them as you dodge projectiles coming toward you. You get a Portal Gear to unlock more Cyber Space levels when you defeat the bosses. Completing challenges in the Cyber Space levels will give you a Vault Key that can be used to earn a Chaos Emerald to progress the story.

Other combat details shown are that Sonic will have a skill tree that gives him new abilities like a spinning kick and some type of duplication-like move that turns his normal homing attack into multiple energy balls and sends them at an enemy. New basic combat moves for Sonic include parrying and countering. For anyone who doesn’t quite understand the combo system in combat, there will be an auto-combo setting you can turn on where you perform combos by just pressing a button.

Finally, we have a name for the trail we have seen Sonic leave behind in previous game trailers. This is the Cyloop Ability and works differently on enemies, items, and objectives. This trailer is giving a lot of information, which has us hoping that the Sonic team is still holding back some secrets for launch.