Sonic Frontiers sees the titular hedgehog race across various islands, complete speed-based challenges, and zoom through Cyber Space levels, so just like any entry in the franchise, it's all about speed. In terms of Sonic Frontiers' gameplay, this translates to a speed stat that players can find throughout the game.

Sonic Frontiers has four major stats that are the equivalent to Attack, Defense, Speed, and Rune Capacity levels. The good news is that leveling these up have a palpable impact, with Max attack and defense states making Sonic hit much, much harder and take far less damage from attacks, while the difference in speed is quite noticeable too. The bad news is that leveling up speed in Sonic Frontiers is painstakingly slow.

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Sonic Frontiers: Gotta Go Slow to Go Fast

To level up attack and defense stats in Sonic Frontiers, players take certain collectibles to Hermit Koco, who collects them all and can jump Sonic in level as a result. Depending on how many players have, it's easy to jump 20, 30, or more levels this way. Unfortunately, the same doesn't apply to Speed and Ring Capacity. They both work off the same "collectible," which is taking Kocos to the Elder Koco. These aren't as noticeable on the map as the others, given that they are the equivalent of small rocks and don't really have specific tasks associated with them. That's not the bad part, though. The bad part is that, once players do have enough of these, Elder Koco gives them a choice between Speed and Ring Capacity for. every. single. level.

The dialogue then goes on repeat until players have leveled up everything they can, or they cannot take another second of the slow dialogue, animation, and whatnot associated with leveling this up. Why Sonic Frontiers doesn't treat this the same as Attack and Defense, tie Ring Capacity to Speed, or at least offer a slider can be bewildering. After all, given that the max level for every Sonic Frontiers stat is 99, players will end up just slowly mashing A for quite some time until done, especially if going all the way.

After all, there are achievements in Sonic Frontiers tied to maxing out the stats. PC players notably have mods that can bypass this issue already, but anyone on console has a real tedious grind to embrace the Sonic mantra of 'Gotta Go Fast.'

Sonic Frontiers is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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