Oh sure. I'm grateful for you outlining everyone so clearly. From my point of view, I'd rather not distinguish the best of a bad bunch, because they're all bad. So when people say the Ouranos cyberspace levels are the best, I'm just thinking "but they still suck, so it really doesn't matter".
The Cyberspace levels are like any other 3D stage in the Boost games. To say they’re worse or even better than previous games is hyperbole. The only difference is they’re shorter. I personally really enjoyed them as I have previous games. The control is perfectly fine in both the open zone and Cyberspace. I thought it was stiff at first but it’s actually not. I went back and S Ranked (on my first attempt at S) one of the Sky Sanctuary stages that I kept dying on my first time. I went through it with ease once I stopped overthinking it. The 2D ones feel slower imo. It wants you to boost to get across gaps and such. Maybe they did this to help keep Sonic from slipping. It’s not a problem just a difference. To me anyway.
Ouranos definitely has the best Cyberspace levels. I think they are the best designed part of the game, albeit they are still very shallow. But they actually play and flow well in design. It's just the controls completely destroy them and make the whole experience horrible.
Sorry but no Cyber Space controls like ass lol. As soon as I installed Tracker's mod which enabled open zone physics in cyberspace I instantly had a better time. Forces controls better than cyberspace. That's honestly really sad. I did get used to the controls after enough time and had my fun with the levels, but the stain of control was still there.
I can't even tell if I'm boosting in the Cyberspace levels There are Scratch games with more effort put into them
Literally everything in the cyberspace levels slows you down and its so frustrating, doesn't help that... as you said, there's no sense of speed even when you're boosting so its hard to tell how fast you're really going even when you are at max speed. It is so counter intuitive that the game basically requires you to just skip half of the gimmicks and barely play the game as intended to get anywhere near the S Rank (1-2 is the worst offender of this.) Overworld stuff is enjoyable but the more I sit on the Cyberspace stuff the worse it gets.
^ I feel like only 3 levels have tough S ranks and weirdly 2 of those 3 are the 1st 2 levels in the game. Really puts your expectations in a weird place. The other one is like 30 seconds long. I don’t think that’s fair, they clearly put effort into the game just cyberspace doesn’t feel great. Doesn’t help they had to come up with a balancing act for the physics because the stages from games that have nothing to do with each other (SA2, Unleashed, Generations Classic and Modern, and then some original stages) Doesn’t mean it was a good design choice but effort was put into this game.
Ya the actual boosting does not feel as fast as the previous games where you seemingly blaze through (I usually keep hitting boost that triggers the initial blur effect, I think it make you go slightly faster) but the control is not any worse imo. A lot of the S ranks are lenient. I died once and still got an S rank. 1-2 is one of the strictest but it’s fun because you know you can do it. It also helps the stages are pretty short if you’re struggling. You just need to make minor adjustments.
There isn't a single stage where this is true. Not even in 1-2. You absolutely can get an S rank by just optimizing your route in 1-2.
Can I ask why they thought it necessary to leave in the boost music filter? It already sounded bad and muffled the music, but now it doesn't even make sense in the context of the game since the boost serves a completely different purpose now. It's pointless and annoying lol.
This is actually an illusion, but I don't blame you for falling for it. The issue at play here is the camera. Remember how in Unleashed and Generations, upon a boost the camera zooms way out and stays zoomed out until you stopped boosting? That is what was vital to providing the sense that the boost is fast and stays fast, but Frontiers fucks this up somehow, as the camera only zooms out for a second upon the initial boost and then zooms back in. Because of the way our brains work, you'll automatically interpret the period the camera zooms out as 'faster', due to the scenery at the edges of your screen zooming past quicker, even though Sonic's movespeed isn't any faster during this period. I hope that made sense.
Yeah, I’ve timed it out while time attacking the stages and mashing doesn’t make a difference. Does anyone know the deal with spamming the quickstep is though? I have some really great times judging by the Speedrun.com IRs, but I don’t bother with the community outside glancing at 1st place times. Most tricks I’ve been able to discover by playing and understand how it functions except for the quickstep stuff. I don’t know the specific reasoning why stepping back and forth speeds you up (though it definitely appears to in my experience).
Fair enough, I personally could only get an S Rank on 1-2 but skipping a lot of the opening section by just boosting and skipping most of the handle pulleys (I forget the exact name) but i can see how with a bit more effort I could've done that properly. The other stages, yeah I was wrong.. they're pretty easy to S Rank even with using the gimmicks. Not that you need to use them but I was mostly thinking about the springs in the cyberspace levels, where they (at least) feel obnoxiously slow using them. Even at full speed, It just halts your momentum completely. My bigger issue with the stage gimmicks in Cyberspace in general is; I wish that your speed that you accumulated on the ground carried on to the gimmicks and not overlapped by them. Making it feel like you are more in control of how fast you make it through a pulley section or a spring section instead of each having a set speed. While it does make it consistent so you know how long it'll take you to do a gimmick however, it feels so much less dynamic. Grind Rails are a good example of almost hitting the mark, where knowing when to switch is a lot of fun to keep your rail speed, but there is no way to really go much faster than the default rail boost speed. But that is more an issue I have personally with the boost gameplay in general and not so much the actual design of what they were going for. Not that pre-boost games had this aspect all the time, but the illusion you had control of how fast you went through a gimmick was better. Basically, the stage gimmicks here feel so binary. Saying that, I never had this issue with the Overworld platforming sections, although I'm sure that has more to do with it being vastly more open and so much easier to exploit.
SegaSammy's third quarter results have been published, and they put Frontiers at 2.9 million copies sold worldwide at the end of December last year. Not quite the bullseye hit for my guess, but it's definitely in the ballpark. Reckon that a confirmation of over three million copies sold will eventually come later this year. Maybe when Sega posts their results for the end of the fiscal year.
That’s definitely quite the accomplishment for a Sonic game in 2023. Things have been on a pretty steady decline with little blips here and there from Mania and PC sales of old games. And don’t tell me Forces sold well. It didn’t. The only actual numbers Sega published were, “Over 1 million combined between Mania and Forces.” The PS Plus numbers were morbid curiosity from those too smart to buy it lol (and me, who bought it on Steam but didn’t want to buy it again). Frontiers sold 5x the amount of Forces in Japan alone at launch. I think Tomoya Ohtani and the sound team deserves a lot of credit for the numbers considering his tracks and Vandalize were better marketing for the game than any of the early reveal trailers Sega did (the CG ones and the Knuckles animation were pretty tight though). It’s definitely brought a lot more eyes to the game.
To piggyback off that last sentence, I never really had ohtani ingrained in my head but after seeing the raw talent on display in this entry I genuinely believe he will be considered one of the greatest composers for video games, or at the very least he now is in my book.
Don't even need to wait this long, Kishimoto just confirmed it on twitter: https://twitter.com/moq_46/status/1623870331579682822?s=20 Google Translation: .
Yeah, I think Forces and Frontiers gave him a better chance to express his unique direction towards the soundtracks. In Unleashed, he sort of had to work around the whole different continent theming. For Lost World, the OST had to reflect the very “gamey” direction of the game (though I don’t think I’ve listened to any tracks outside of the game with the exception of that aquatic grinding level’s). I mean I always loved the Knuckles raps (Space Trip Steps is up there with QQ Good Future as my favorite song from the series period), his stuff from 06, etc., but he just seemed overshadowed by Jun Senoue in discussions about the OSTs. That has definitely changed with Frontiers. Considering just the vocal tracks, I think only Live and Learn and Open Your Heart can compete with the boss themes from this game. Though Jun has countless instrumental stage tracks from the series that I still think are top tier.
