People agree that Sonic Frontiers is superior to Elden Ring.

The open-world Sonic game that was only launched last week has a user rating of 8.5 on Metacritic, but Elden Ring, which is a lock to win the majority of GOTY awards, has a rating of 6.9 among users. I’m concerned that this indicates that Sonic Frontiers is superior to Elden Ring in terms of quality.

There is more than just this one piece of evidence to suggest that the blue blur is simply superior to the grizzled old wretches that inhabit the Lands Between. A site that players of personal computers would believe to be more reliable than At the time of this writing, user reviewers on both Metacritic and Steam have given Sonic Frontiers an “Overwhelmingly Positive” user review average rating. The average for Elden Ring can only be described as “Very Positive.” Another victory goes to Sonic Frontiers. Better game! Even more crushing!

Even though Elden Ring has 413,604 Steam reviews and Sonic Frontiers only has around 6,000 right now, a calculator on Survey Monkey tells me that in order to have 95% confidence in our survey results, we only need a sample size of 385 respondents. This is based on the assumption that there are approximately 1.75 billion total PC gamers. Therefore: Blue man is better.

Okay, okay, so maybe the sample size only means something if we survey a random sampling of PC gamers about both games, and compare what a few thousand Sonic fans think about the new Sonic game to what a few hundred thousand gamers think about Elden Ring is not actually helpful at all, but responsible polling methodology does not help sow discord in comment sections. Okay, okay, so maybe the sample size only means something if we survey a random sampling of PC gamers about both games.

If I were responsible, I would suggest that taking aggregate review numbers of any type too seriously is a certain way to lead people looking for enjoyable pleasure in the wrong direction.

Even if the movie Possessor has a user review average of 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, you shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to see it. (Don’t you want to see what David Cronenberg’s son is doing with the family business?) [Don’t you want to see what he’s doing with the family business?]

However, if we shouldn’t let low score aggregates discourage us from consuming media, then high ones certainly shouldn’t either. Perhaps it is time for us to pay notice. I had a chance to try out Sonic Frontiers today, and I have to admit that I really loved the faster-paced gameplay. The fact that a game about speed has a maximum frame rate of only 60 fps is ironic, as is the fact that the Windows mouse cursor kept appearing in the exact center of the screen.

It is not outstanding from a technical perspective, and I’m sure that some fans of Sonic Frontier would embrace a beehive if you painted it blue and said it was loyal to its friends, but surely the entirety of the Sonic fandom is not just pretending that this game is fun when they play it.

At this moment, the aggregate rating given by professional critics on Metacritic is 78, which is somewhat lower than the 8.5 rating given by people. Even if our hands-on preview in September was not encouraging, our review of Sonic Frontiers is still in the process of being completed.

Surprisingly, the scores are higher for the PC port, which appears to be of lower quality than the console versions; for example, the PS5 version has a score of 72 and an 8.4 rating. It’s possible that Sonic fans with the most lenient attitudes also have the best taste in platforms.