Yea, I absolutely love the new stages and they seem to take advantage of the new spindash physics too. I really love how cyberspace feels to control now that the spindash can be properly utilized. These levels truly feel like an actual evolution of 3D Sonic game design, and not some weird half step. Super cool.
I also appreciate that even the new ones that are still using an old level as a base, they have gone to much more effort to "remix" them compared to the base game. That remix of chemical plant from generations feels like a totally different stage, now. Spoiler: Spoilers for the end of the dlc Also, i just really like that they gave sonic fangs again for the new form. I've missed that design detail from SA1 for so long and thought it was just never gonna happen again
Just beat the DLC, I'd say it was pretty rad! I like how animalistic they made Supreme for the final boss, and it kinda unnerved me seeing it crawl around. I thought it looked like Supreme was in pain when The End possessed it, though I don't know if that was intentional. The whole ending is one big "what if" scenario, but I don't know which ending is canon now. I hate perfect parry.
The boss rush challenge would not be as much of an issue if it did not rely on perfect parries, because there's no other point in the game in which they actually matter, where they need to be performed. But then we've had a boss rush under those conditions since update 2. If they either refreshed your ring count between battles or had a bigger window for when to do the parries, that boss rush wouldn't be so bad.
Finally am playing this game now that all the DLC dropped. Beat the first island. Some thoughts: 1. Sonic feels magnetized to the ground. I like my Sonic games to have a little more air mobility than this 2. The aesthetics are very un-Sonic 3. The writing is pure fanservice. In hindsight the game where Sonic is the only protagonist with agency probably wasn't the best debut for Ian Flynn 4. Raising the Ring stat seems counter-productive 5. The Titan boss fight is a nice spectacle and I feel like these things will be the game's highlights So yeah, there's a lotta jank. But I waited to get it on sale, so I'm not disappointed
Unlock the spindash as soon as you get to the fourth island it fixes the issue with magnetization as it’s not affected by it, setting jump deceleration to 0 lets you fly across the map and makes the game considerably more dynamic to play.
Haha, I love it. I’ve yet to unlock it since I’ve been finishing up the map as Sonic before going back to the other characters. It’s grown on me slightly after realizing she’s riding the hammer, but I still think they could have designed something cooler than a wheel. What mechanic are you referring to?
I finally beat the update tonight. I feel like I could write an essay if I wanted to but I'll stick to bullet points: As someone who couldn't be bothered with the previously-added challenges, I appreciate the free Spin Dash unlock for the new content. Amy/Knuckles/Tails have some oddities, but I don't mind them overall. Amy and Knuckles having a homing attack but not Tails seemed a little odd. A lot of the update's platforming design feels like it simultaneously knows how overpowered Frontiers movement can be but doesn't understand how imprecise the controls usually are. And badly needs checkpoints. One Tails objective in particular was also ridiculous to find the path to due to the game's pop-in. The trial challenges suck. Some suck less. The last trial sucks incredibly hard. I don't hate the idea of this boss rush in theory, and I get wanting to introduce Perfect Parries before the new finale, but most of what it amounts to is learning what 2-3 moves to spam for the most damage and tearing your hair out trying to nail down Wyvern's parry timings. + - New Endboss: I want to like this more than I do. The things happening are very cool and we finally get another orchestral version of a vocal theme. But even ignoring the pain it takes to get that far, it relies on a poorly-conveyed trick to make beatable, and once you figure out (or look up) the trick, it's a bit of a pushover because the game just finished brutally beating optimal attack rotations into your skull and there's a fair chance you've gotten high stats in the year it's been since the game launched. I think if a version of this had been what we got a year ago, perhaps worked into both Islands 4 and 5, it would've been a satisfying conclusion. Or even this update as-is but without the new towers and trials. But the wall of a difficulty spike they decided to place between players and the new ending really overshadows everything else, at least to me. I'm also left a little more worried about SEGA's ability to refine and improve this gameplay style, if they really will try to stick with it. They've got the flash down, but the substance needs work.
Just found the worst retroactive continuity brought on by Another Story: + - Big the Cat is not real.
I sold my physical PS5 copy and got a cheap steam code and reloaded a fully powered up save file at the start of island 5. Controls were a bit more precise in the PC version, it seemed, so I finally beat the whole thing with some light mod tweaks. Honestly? I liked the original ending better. The final boss was an absolute mess and actually didn't really fit the story they were going for. If this was the original ending and only ending, The End would make even less sense. Plus, I just enjoyed the concept of the epic space battle better even if the Schmup battle itself was... silly. At least The End's exposition during it fit the concept of the character a bit more. Truthfully, my ideal end would be a mix of the 2. Let the trio help Sonic. Battle Supreme in Space, then have Sage take it over after that and finish The End off, and keep her sacrifice as it was. Keep the new super form too, but get rid of the trials and only keep the cutscenes and exposition from them. Instead, neither ending feels fully complete. Oh well.
I'm not sure I'll ever boot up Frontiers to try this update out to be honest. I had the most fun in the desert zone, but grew pretty tired of the level design (aka throw grind Grails, boxes, balloons, pulleys, and dash pads everywhere). What I've read about the level design and character controls in this update is not encouraging. The only way a Sonic Frontiers 2 can really live up to it's potential is to 1. have functional momentum and 2. hire new level designers who don't suck
Alternatively if you’re playing on PC and have Hedge Mod Manager, you can download the community cheat codes for the game and unlock it for the entire game from there. Some people would probably argue against that on the grounds of balance, but the option’s there if you want it.
I got both of those attacks in easy mode. I think all easy mode does for the last boss is change the parry timing window. EDIT: might as well say my thoughts since I beat the whole thing now. Overall I like the ideas they had and I don’t think “the whole game is ruined now” like what some people are suggesting that people who liked the base game should think, I just think they need to tone the trials’ difficulty down and then fix some jank with Knuckles and remove Tails’ “charge up” before flying. I had fun climbing up the towers on Hard and don’t think they need to be changed but if they get patched to be easier and everyone’s happy then that’s fine with me. If they fix just those things then I’ll be fully satisfied with it & looking forward to what’s next.
All of the praises (and critiques, ironically) of the new level design is specifically that it utilizes momentum and thoughtful level design. Automation is toned significantly and the game actively makes use of the Spin Dash and how Sonic flings off of terrain. And while the new characters have problems, their own challenges are also pretty good. Knuckles has one climbing section that would be amazing with better camera and climbing controls. If you don't cheese everything with the Cyclone Boost, Tails has interesting challenges revolved around his flight. Amy is not particularly innovative in controls or level design but they basically exist as a more platforming-focused Sonic. The Cyber Space stages especially basically perfect these mechanics. The difficulty of these levels, besides jank, is almost entirely because of how much freedom it gives and how it expects way more from you than almost anything from the base game.
I just finished, kinda only wanna say some stuff about Sonic. I agree with what most people are saying about the other characters, although I still had fun with them! Spoilering this whole thing: Spoiler The Final Battle feels pretty lacking in presentation. For one, there is no point in the game where you are ever required or led to think that sidestepping will change the part of the boss you're locked into. I guess if you mess around with the controller for a while you'll eventually accidentally hit the tube, but it's so unintuitive and jank. The energy ball attack also comes with the single strangest design choice I've ever seen: if you have below an undisclosed amount of rings, you inexplicably die. I died to this several times and was genuinely confused each time because I had maybe a little under 50 rings left but Sonic would just die in the middle of a cutscene. But the ring counter was hidden, and every time a cutscene plays in the base game and the ring counter is hidden, you know your rings are not depleting. On top of that, the cutscene doesn't take 50 seconds before it kills you, so I knew my rings weren't running out, the cutscene just like does a check on your ring count and either kills you or Sonic loses the emeralds and then goes super again. There is no explanation of why you died, so for a while I thought I either had to avoid the energy ball attack, maybe dodge it, maybe I had to defeat The End BEFORE the energy ball attack, or something like that. Imo this is just... a wacky decision, considering the boss is already on a time limit based on how many rings you have. I ended up theorizing it was my ring count and coming back with 400 and that worked out. There are some other weird choices too, like why make the player do Wyvern's quick step section in a boss rush? The Master Koco Trial was really whack, but I have to say I did enjoy being genuinely challenged in a Sonic game for once. The issue imo is it's not all intuitive challenge, or even consistent challenge. Even now that I can perfect parry Wyvern's missiles with nearly 100% accuracy, sometimes they'll come from off screen or sometimes they'll be hidden behind Sonic's model. Something I didn't even know was possible until today? I'm pretty sure the "closest" missile that you're supposed to parry can sometimes miss you when you're standing completely still, which is bewildering when you're just staying in one place trying to parry. Cylooping or double cylooping Wyvern also felt extremely inconsistent, sometimes after a quick cyloop you can attack immediately but other times Sonic gets stuck off-camera and you have to wait for him to drift back down before you can attack. This meant sometimes I would parry Wyvern and then IMMEDIATELY cyloop and I'd still lose a lot of time waiting for Sonic to get back within Wyvern's targetable range. I'm sure there's some way to do some of this stuff more consistently, but if there is then it's NOT intuitive at all. As for the extra cyberspace levels, Sonic's trials, the new towers, etc... that stuff I actually had good fun doing. Some of it's kinda janky, and the "difficulty" isn't always intuitive difficulty, just an esoteric cheap strategy that you're supposed to figure out like infinitely parrying sawblades back and forth... but it was fun! Despite the cheap parts, some of it felt genuinely challenging and fun. The new towers have some of the most interesting platforming I've seen from a 3D Sonic game in a long time. And despite my criticisms, the new The End and new Super Sonic form are really cool and there was a lot of hype packed into that. Idk how much the ending even changes tbh? Like it's still mostly the same, but the events of the battle are different. Unless I missed something. All in all, I feel like they went above and beyond with this. It's got a lot of problems, but I didn't expect this much content to begin with. I think a lot of people expected them to put all the effort into fixing some deeper seeded issues with the game itself rather than adding a bunch of stuff to do, but for people who liked the base game... they got a lot more of it. So that's nice, and as suck-uppy as it sounds I'm glad they did this at all. They made the ending actually serviceable, that's like the most requested thing
Squishing the complex dynamics of Sonic's physics down to "momentum" is part of the issue here. Every main Sonic game has "momentum" to some degree except 06, but that doesn't mean they all have functioning 360 degree rotation in a 3D space with accurate buildup and falloff of speed up and down slopes. Updates 2 and 3 understood that people liked spindash jumping and built level design around flinging off of ramps. And that's good! But it's not the same as having anything approximating the physics they just replicated for Superstars, for instance. And that doesn't even get into bigger complaints like turning radius and air control, which are both terribad in cyberspace and have never had their complaints addressed. Near-perfect 360° air turning has been built into Hedgemodmanager as a default code for months now, and there is not a single thing in the game that is worse for wear. People figured out slopes barely a week or two after release, as well as allowing Sonic to fully turn while boosting in cyberspace. The problems caused by these things are incredibly minimal (as in, you can absolutely still 100% the game using Tracker's physics, you just might die once or twice when your turning or speed catches you off guard) and it's fair to criticize the updates for not even seemingly considering even touching them. I like the new level design. These new cyber stages, despite being visually ugly, are some of the most dense and layered we've gotten since the mid-2000s, and the amount of versatility you have to float between pathways and find the added collectibles is inspiring (again, what's with No Checkpoints being a theme of this update though?). But like with 06, that design doesn't mean shit when it feels jerky to try and make Sonic go where you want. The fact that these are all independent challenges with no continuity or meaningful powerups/secrets to find also hurts them. You can explore, but there's not a great reason to do so. These are all things that can be addressed, but it's fair to complain about them here and now.
