Sonic Frontiers Thread - PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC

Ares is too big and Chaos Island is a design nightmare. Ouranos has some good Cyberspace stages but most of the new enemies introduced there are pretty annoying.The combat system has potential but being locked into scripted battles with enemies like the wolf pack turns it into a chore long before the game is over.

And I mean the whole explore/combat/cyberspace loop.

 

Ares' is perfect. It is exactly how big the worlds should be. It got overwhelming in the beginning but minutes in, I'm actually exploring the world, planning to get to certain places instead of just running around. And you even get rewarded with things like the underground caves or the little valleys. It's exactly what the sequel should base itself on.

The other thing I disagree with its the scripted battles. The wolf pack boss especially is probably one of the best and most underused concepts. A regular looking enemy trapping you into a vortex where you have to time your attacks is a great idea. The only thing I didn't like is that you are required to parry; besides the parry needing no timing (I really hope that's fixed), I wished it allowed more freedom in how to fight the wolves.

Generally, the best bosses are the ones that trap Sonic and have him play by certain rules, like Squid, Sumo, and Spider. I want them to double down on that more than the combat system itself, though it should definitely have more moves with more unique properties. Have the bosses be little challenges that Sonic has to overcome before he's able to beat the shit out of them.

The rest I more or less agree with though. In terms of the gameplay loop, I hope the sequel merges the Open Zone and Cyber Space more. If everything was perfect, it would be seamless, but what I want to see the most is the linear stages being more a part of the world. Not just in aesthetic, but imagine if you can actually see the Open Zone from the Cyber Space stages.

 

Ares needed more set pieces. Size was fine but that’s the fun with deserts. Endless sand

 

The "only thing you didn't like" is the whole fight. You just get locked in, wait for them to jump out, parry and then combo them to death. It's a bad fight that doelsn't play to any of the game's strengths. Even if you want to praise the concept of an enemy that locks Sonic in there are guardians in the game that do better with that. I agree that ambush tactics are exactly what an open world sandbox like this needs to keep the player on their toes but if you use it just to lock the player into dull, one note fights you're just annoying them.

The best enemies are the earlier ones that allow more freedom to approach like the tower or the guardian Asura. Too many later enemies are like the wolf. They're isolated and just require you to repeat a certain action to beat them without doing anything to shake it up. There's the eagle, which arbitrarily can't be attacked through normal means and has to be parried before you get taken through a linear sequence. Hopper just requires you to stomp on him.

 

I think this critique misses the forest for the trees.

The whole context of that boss fight is:

• finding some unassuming wolf in the world, y'know, doesn't look threatening or dangerous.
  
• Then you get close and suddenly, you're trapped in a ring. You can leave and now the wolves are attacking you.
  
• you put up your dukes to defend yourself, but how do you fight them and get out?
• oh, you parry, so you have to time your parry (theoretically) to defeat them.
• if you fuck up you'll have to weather the storm, and if you take too long, they corner you and you die, tearing Sonic limb form limb (theoretically).

That's how I remember the boss and why I like it. The fact that you can't get away this time is what makes it appealing. Once you figure it out, they're as easy to avoid as the other guardians, and they're quick to beat.

The reason why I'm disappointed about the lack of alternative attacks working is because you can actually be fast enough to punch them and it just... doesn't work. Having alternatives isn't going to make the enemy more complicated, but it does reward you for experimentation.

You see it as "get locked in, parry, leave" which I guess isn't untrue but it's certainly not how I experienced it. On paper, it's one note, but it's a random enemy, not how all enemies are fought.

I see these bosses as the whole of their environment. The concept of seeing a huge geometric robot thing and then realizing it's a boss. The concept of an enemy trapping you in a ring to fuck you up. The concept of an enemy that flies around the whole map, so part of the challenge is simply trying to get to it.

These concepts are fun, makes the bosses more like set pieces in the world than simply enemies, and Frontiers does well with most of them that I want to see more.

Tower, yeah, definitely one of the better bosses. They did a lot with the concept of "tall thing that attacks" and it works.

Asura, though? Hell no, lmao. You play up the clunkiness of the Wolf fight but then give credit to the jankiest boss in the game?

Cylooping its legs for a reward is cool, but the Asura is literally "run up the leg, punch it to death." A boss I could do without. Or done better. If there's any improvement besides "make the fucking wall running work correctly," it's putting the boss in an area with more enviromental things to interact with, like a ramp or some rails.

That's what's fun about them. Figuring them out and exploiting that weakness. It only gets annoying with the Tank boss, for example, because it's a long sequence before you fight them.

But the Wolf, Sumo, etc. bosses follow this formula and they're fun. They shake it up through simple escalation; this can be fixed by giving the bosses more attacks, which is really what Frontiers is lacking.

 

I think I'm talking about the forest(the mechanics and what the game is actually asking you to do), and you're talking about the trees(aesthetics). Even that doesn't come across great because the animations on this enemy are so undercooked. I didn't exactly feel tension or heightened stakes. I was just kind of baffled I wasn't free to move and form my own strategy like I could for the other group ambushes earlier in the game.

If you have the super boost you can use nearby hills to attack Asura. I agree that they should have placed them in more interesting environments so that Sonic could have more vantage points to fight from, but one of my biggest critiques in general is that the game won't let its peas and potatoes mix. Level design and combat are rarely mixed together. As it stands now though Asura is one of the few enemies that allows for this kind of flexibility at all.

Most of the other ones lock Sonic in scripted encounters and become busywork once that encounter is "solved". There's no evolution to any of it, they rarely throw in harder attack patterns to raise the stakes, they don't even mix and match enemies to create more tense situations. There's a lot things missing here that could make combat more exciting.

 

Games aren't just the mechanics, they're how the mechanics work and how the player interacts with them. The enemy designed to be a seemingly innocent encounter that becomes incredibly dangerous. It's designed around that idea.

And even if it is "aesthetics", aesthetics matter. That's why it's a wolf. The idea of being circled and cornered by a pack of wolves. The idea of running into a more or less harmless creature and being jumped on. How the enemy is designed works with how it plays.

Sure, it's timing your parry while you can't leave. But that's fine. It's different from how enemies usually work. It's fun. More mechanics could be swell, but more stuff =/= better. It's a simple idea executed almost perfectly.

The encounter, and the game, is more than the concept of the mechanics.

I agree, though I feel like saying even Asura is an exception is stretching a bit. Hopefully designing the Open Zone around the platforming to begin with will solve this issue in the sequel.

That busywork is just... playing the game. Almost all of the bosses use the mechanics in some way. Strider uses rails, Spider uses the Cyloop and Skydiving, etc. And if you're regularly leveling Sonic up, fighting the boss when you solve them goes pretty quickly. Never had to do more than two cycles for a Guardian.

This is less an issue of how the bosses are designed and more that Sonic Team literally didn't have the time to implement additional attacks and moves they wanted.

Datamine the game and you'll find a lot of unused variations for enemies and Guardians. The Spider has six I think, including one where it's walking on strings of light. This is all chalked up to the rushed development, which is a shame, because those variations look very interesting to fight.

 

Oh absolutely. The lack of attack variations is definitely a problem. My point is more about how well the enemies are implemented as is, in which most of them work well, even if they're largely carried by their concept.

(Except the Shark.)

I just don't have a problem with a boss that traps you and forces you to get defensive or figure it out.

 

I understand all that, I'm saying that because the underlying mechanics are a failure, the encounter fails even if the aesthetic makes their intent clear. If I was actually "getting torn apart by a pack of wolves" they'd probably work together to overwhelm me with attacks instead of lining up to get parried. The simplicity also takes the edge off as I'm certainly not going to be scared the next time I get corned by this wolf pack. I'm not gonna be on guard in the future, wondering how this enemy can get an advantage in such and such environment or when paired with this other enemy. This is why it's important to focus on what the game is actually asking you to do holistically. and not just what the art team put together.

That's the thing, though. If your primary gameplay loop is focused on combat encounter after combat encounter, I should be excited to get to the next fight, not thinking 'been there, done that' the next time I see an enemy. This is why escalation in action games are important but all the mechanics are too simplistic and segmented for that.

That would...still make it an issue with how the bosses are designed. Even if they knew exactly what the problem was and had solutions in mind before the game shipped, it's how the game shipped that matters. I'll be willing to go back and give them credit if they fix some of these encounters via updates but I doubt its a priority for them.

It's a 60 dollar game with one of the longest development cycles in the series. There is, imo, zero excuse for it not being done. I don't care what the reasoning is or who's fault it technically is. It needed to be done when before they made their first sale.

 

I genuinely do not think the actual game or its combat is designed with that in mind at all, considering the ring system, how Sonic fights, etc. Neat idea, though.

I would agree with the idea that fighting them again would be more tedious when you already know what to do and they don't change, but you'll never be "scared" again even if there's variation if it's supposed to be the same enemy. That's never something a game is going to keep up.

It's not about "the art team". If you're talking about what the game is asking you to do holistcally, it's not just about parrying it. What the encounter is includes the experience of fighting it, which includes finding it and being underprepared, surprised, and needing to figure out what to do.

Are you thinking of mechanics as just "what buttons to press and what they do"? Because I'm thinking it's more "the interaction of the various different elements in the world".

I brought up how I'm disappointed that other attacks don't work on the Wolf, but that's because when I played, I tried to punch it, timed it right, and simply didn't work because they intentionally did not make the encounter like that. I feel like you're saying that the problem is the low number of mechanics, as if the speciic number of attacks will inherently make the encounter a certain quality. I'm saying that the encounter wouldn't actually change, but it would feel better if those were added.

They could have also made it clearer that it's evident that normal attacks won't work, which is something they can do with the aesthetics, like making the wolves streaks of light or something. I have no problem if the lack of interactions are made clear and built into the encounter. I had no illusions about trying to escape the Sumo's cage, for example. Once I'm in I knew I had to fight.

Okay, but Frontiers isn't designed around combat encounter after combat encounter. Combat and fighting enemies is treated the same as finding a puzzle or finding a neat secret in the overworld. Something you can find, engage with, and can ignore. And even the fact that some bosses lock you in when you get near, well, you still need to get near!

You can play the entire game and never encounter this enemy depending on how you play. That is explicitly how the game is designed, down to the fact that fishing can in theory negate every other gameplay element. By nature, you can't get excited for the next boss because you don't know what it is until you encounter it! That's just simply how the game is designed! An emphasis on mystery and exploration!

This design philosophy comes with problems that Frontiers do not entirely avoid, but the concept of enemy counters that are self-contained, designed around what you are and are not capable of when you get in there and where it's placed in the world, is one of its better executed ideas, including the Wolf.

There's billions of excuses. The developers clearly did not get to choose when they were actually finished. A majority of the development time was spent trying to make sure the core idea is even worth pursuing. If things went awry, the game we have wouldn't exist at all.

Then when they were tasked with fully making the game, they pretty much had the same amount of development time as any other game.

Sure, it should have been fully done. It wasn't fully done, and you can feel it. But what it did done, it did pretty well more often than not. We're talking about how the developers designed the game, but this critique is better pointed at the publishers who choose when the game is meant to release.

There's no clear evidence of what the Wolf boss is missing. More variation of it would be great, but there's no indication that it isn't exactly what they wanted it to be. If it is, I think they did a good job.

I'm disappointed that we didn't get the variations of the Spider boss, but what I think they did put in works well.

Supreme is an example of a boss that is seriously impacted by what they couldn't include, as a negative example.

 

Just gonna chime in that the dog fight is absolute dog shit and absolutely is the worst fight in the game.

 

Besides me liking that fight, how are you just gonna sit here and snub the Shark like that?

 

The wolves scared me the first time around and it really did work for its purpose, I spent quite a bit of time fumbling about trying to defeat them. Definitely nailed the feeling of dread that I think they were going for.

After that they lost their luster, though. Now I just get mildly annoyed when I run into them because they just take time, not skill, when you know what to do.

 

I couldn’t figure out how to beat the wolves until several tries later, so I avoided them. Not that fun in my opinion due to the insta-death. I’ll take this concept over SQUID (Starlight Carnival paths strike again!) though. I like the concept of that “ghost” one in Ouranos that has you moving through the environment, but that one also had some weird instakill thing.

 

I agree that It's hard to have any kind of difficulty when even a single ring can prevent death. The only difficult enemies are ones that, insta-kill you, stop you from cylooping or collecting dropped rings, or can attack you while your recovering from another attack. My fix for this is to make rings work like hit-points. Getting hit would lose a consistent amount of rings, 100 would be reasonable in Frontiers. Rings that are dropped from getting hit wouldn't be collectable at all, which should stop rings from being able to invalidate almost any attack. Being able to use cyloop to get rings in the middle of combat would still make it easy to recover from attacks, so maybe the cyloop would only give rings when used outside of combat. This would also make upgrading max rings useful outside of the Titan fights.

 

Other games use #/# for their health systems though, Luigi’s mansion, Metroid. Not exactly the same but idk it’s I don’t think it’s too convoluted, plus it reflects the kinda “lore” so to speak, as long as Sonic has 1 ring, he’s fine.