Back in May of 2018, I remember briefly asking Junichi Masuda, then of Pokémon developer Game Freak (and now chief creative officer at the Pokémon Company), whether Pokémon might one day follow the likes of Zelda and Mario into some kind of open-world format. At the time he called it a “possibility,” if, and only if, the studio could find the right way to balance the traditional Pokémon staples with the open-world formula that was proving so successful elsewhere. It wasn’t until this January, a good four years later (a lifetime in Pokémon development terms), that we saw what that possibility really was in Pokémon Legends Arceus – an open-ish world game that was really more of a series of open areas, linked together but gated according to your progress, and that progress achieved by doing very traditional, classically Pokémon things.
Pokémon is of course barely relevant here, but that means of going sort-of-open-world might sound familiar to those with a close eye on Sonic Frontiers. It’s another knot in the thread, which we can now rather neatly tie from Breath of the Wild’s leap into the fully open world to Sonic, this coming November, doing the same in its own way.
People do like to cut that thread, mind – or go further and suggest it doesn’t really exist. A common point made is that, while these games like to market themselves in the same way, finishing a trailer with a series mascot channelling a bit of Caspar David Friedrich by looking out imperiously over a green and mountainous world of adventure, that doesn’t mean the games are the same, or that one was inspired in an any meaningful way by the other. These games all have fundamentally different systems and different goals, after all, and so Breath of the Wild isn’t an influential game; it just had really influential box art.
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