It’s no secret that Sonic Frontiers has been compared to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and in many ways this makes sense. Both games feature massively popular mascot franchises being brought into new, open worlds, with branding that heavily features said mascots looking out over vast green landscapes. Plus, Breath of the Wild was a pretty popular game, and it garners a lot of comparisons.
However, in a recent interview by Shack News, Sonic Frontiers producer Takashi Iizuka pushed back on the narrative that the upcoming game would be the Sonic franchise’s take on Breath of the Wild. In response to a question about any inspiration the Sonic team may have taken from Breath of the Wild, Iizuka stated that, while many members of the team, “love the Zelda series,” they also believe that Breath of the Wild is a fundamentally different game from Frontiers. The main distinction he points out is in the difference between Zelda’s status as a role-playing game and Sonic’s as an action game. There is, he notes, at least some overlap in the sense that Frontiers does contain, “the same element of freedom that has been applied to Breath of the Wild,” but that at the end of the day the developers, “don’t really see a similarity between the games.”
Also in the wide-ranging interview, Iizuka confirmed that Shadow would not, in fact, make an appearance in Frontiers, much to many fans’ chagrin. He did, however, mention that he likes Shadow a lot and that while he didn’t make the cut in the current cast, he still, “would like to bring him into more content in the future.” Hopefully, longtime fans can instead find solace in the many other series staples that will make an appearance in Frontiers, from Big the Cat to a host of returning zones.
