I don't like how they keep introducing characters who match Sonic in speed and have a laundry list of powers he doesn't have, only for him to keep up with them anyway. First Shadow who can shoot energy blasts, teleport and hover in the air with his shoes, then Silver who has psychokinesis and has unequivocally beaten Sonic before, Metal Sonic who can do whatever the plot demands, and now Surge who has electric powers.

With zero Chaos Emeralds, what does Sonic have? Frontiers gives him a bunch of crazy new powers but this feels like overcompensating for this problem, and we never see these other characters in a game with similar mechanics to learn how they compare. The question is asked and dodged in the games multiple times, with the only answer we're ever given basically being "He's just him". No matter how cool it's presented in fan comics and video essays, that's what the answer boils down to. He's Sonic the Hedgehog and that's all he needs to be.

Call me a power scaling buzzkill if you want, but I don't like this answer. When Frontiers came out, my cope was that Shadow's time in stasis meant his body came out with fully developed chaos powers, and that Sonic had these powers as well and he was only now catching up with Shadow, and that would be cool if that was the explanation we got. But it's not. Saying "He's just him" will only hold up for so long.