"Canonically" as in, you can actually see it attached to Kronos in-game. When you head to the "trailer" tower on Kronos and look down at that lake with the ruins in it, that is Rhea.
I mean there’s no reason they couldn’t be brought in too, and that was speculating from the standpoint that they may be recording new lines for the additional story content anyway.
See, but Rhea is so clearly unfinished that I think it might be reductive to even treat its appearance as anything definitive. You could just as easily say that the map reuse means that Kronos and Rhea are two identical islands as them being the same island.
No real reason to go by that. The game lore of the Egg Memos says 3 islands, and we know Ouranos was awkwardly cut from Kronos super late in dev which is why it breaks the written and voice-acted lore they placed down. By all accounts, we could pretend that Ouranos is still meant to be tethered to Kronos canonically to make sense of it, and no one in the game or outside of it is claiming there's some secret 4th island or anything either. Rhea is a compromise, and I can't see it as anything but more Kronos. They chopped off what would become Ouranos because playtesters didn't like such a big island (and, knowing Sonic Team barely managed to get everything to come together at the last minute, it was probably woefully alpha phase designed in objective/collectible layout too) and then they cropped up what was left of the Kronos land mass to make a tutorial area and then Rhea. Just because the game calls them all islands doesn't mean much when everyone could tell what happened to things behind the scenes even before Kishimoto officially confirmed any of it. Maybe Update 3 can change that. It would be nice to have a large reworking of the late game entirely to just.. make it cohesive instead of feeling like Sonic's suddenly teleporting off-camera to the next plot point and then dicking around collecting the Emeralds again after losing them this one time for seemingly no reason whatsoever before a boss that appears damn near-literally out of thin air.
I mean... they're changing/adding more story, and brought Ian Flynn back in. Either they bring in the voice actors and do more lines or... everything's subtitles. I kinda doubt they'd do the latter.
Y'know, how the Boost and the Spin Dash work together in Frontiers is the closest it has been to how I think both moves can work in a game. Make the Spin Dash less naturally powerful and make it more dependent on terrain (namely losing speed when going up hill) and it can be a great counterpart to the Boost as something you can master; meanwhile the boost can be an easy and reliable option for speed but more binary and not as powerful. Your boost speed carries over even when you stop boosting but you lose that speed when you come to some opposition or terrain. I also love the idea of using boost energy to maintain the Spin Dash, but that would work best in a game where boost management is more strict and demanding. I also think it would be good to tie special attack moves to the boost meter so they have some actual cost. Then you can have the Phantom Rush be a state that rewards you for clever use by going ham and giving you infinite attacks. EDIT: I guess I'm just asking for a stamina meter, lol. But the idea of a meter where you can make Sonic faster for almost any move sounds like a very interesting idea to me. Giving it depth not necessarily by changing how it works, but changing what it works on.
I think the boost still overpowers the Spindash. Also it hurts me that they gotta make it weaker but I think a good way of going about the boost is instead of having it mapped to a button. You can have Sonic flow into it. IE:gaining enough speed to go into the boost state. I think could be very fun as it then would become seeing how long you can stay in the boost state and keep your momentum.
In my testing cyberspace spindash seems to be as fast as power boost if not faster, going off the open zone speedometer the spindash exceeds the markers on it and can stay at that speed when going down sloped terrain or spamming it SA1 style, power boost falls a bit short of hitting the last marker. In open zone you can set acceleration and initial boost speed to 0 so the boost builds speeds over time and tapping the spindash when you want to quickly accelerate to top speed, this effectively replaces the boost with a more traditional setup and I find it pretty satisfying to use.
Aight, finally got a chance to play with the Spin Dash. Count me on team "this fucks". I know everybody plays Sonic games for different reasons, but there are two reasons I play Sonic games: to be a ball rolling fast down a hill, and to be a ball shooting off of a hill into space. While Frontiers is still lacking for me in the former department, it's delivering in the latter department in ways that haven't hit my doorstep since Sonic Adventure 1. "Slope jumping" off of rails was an acceptable facsimile of what I was after, to the point I already loved abusing that to collect all of the memory tokens. But this is more what I was after. It doesn't function or interact with the terrain in the exact same way it does in Sonic Adventure, or fangames like Green Hill Paradise, Sonic Utopia, or Sonic Islands, but damn if the results ain't close enough. It breaking the game and trivializing level design isn't an issue for me, because that's what I'm after in the first place. I guess I can see how you'd want something so overpowered to be locked behind some sort of challenge, but I don't think these were it. I've had the difficulty set to hard since I beat the game the first time around and just kept it there when I ran through collecting the music notes after the first update. Turns out the challenges are frustrating when the difficulty is set to hard, so I turned it down to easy. But then they became trivial to complete. Maybe putting the difficulty to normal would have made it more satisfying, but I was more interested in getting the Spin Dash already so I could collect the additional music notes and fat kocos with it. Would have been cool if I had the Spin Dash at my disposal already while doing the challenges. It definitely doesn't render the boost pointless, because the boost still acts as an air dash. That weird roll they added sucks though; you're able to roll up hills with it, you don't gain that much speed rolling down hills with it, and when you roll down hills with it the speed isn't really retained after you reach flatter terrain. Also, can you damage enemies with it? I don't know, I should test that. And the Drop Dash is pretty much pointless; I think you gain more speed going down hills than you do with the Spin Dash? It's honestly hard to tell. Regardless, the Spin Dash can still be charged in the air. A sequel should definitely condense the roll, drop dash, and spindash into something more straightforward: just keep the Spin Dash as is (and build the open zone around its power), but with the Drop Dash's slope physics (if those are indeed different).
I'd be okay with the spinboost returning if they could just tone it down. Launching into the air is great, but I do think it moves so fast that it leaves me wondering why I'd ever boost (besides for an air-dash), and the fact that it drains at the same rate gives me even less reason to alternate. So nerf it in those ways, and make it where it can only be done either from the spin dash charge or while boosting. LT while running should let me roll normally. With those changes, I can see the spin and boost together in the next game easily.
It still have it's uses, on Chaos Island, on the top of the mountain where it's all covered in ice, i still can's spin dash my way through it, or boost, but drop dash works perfectly there
The base game's Drop Dash picks up speed down slopes (up to max speed) and can also climb inclines easier than any other form of movement. It also can dash across slick or unrunnable surfaces that the game would otherwise force you to slide down or cling onto. It's got more utility than most people would think, but that largely goes unnoticed because they force you to uncurl from it if you go under running speed, and they made turning too stiff. Pretty lame, because it's otherwise a pretty good attempt at 3D rolling physics. Fellow Sonic Retro member TrackerTD made his own physics mod that shows how it'd work with a lower speedcap / smoother turning, and it's really fun. I recommend PC players giving it a shot.
Ok I started doing the Action Chain Challenges and they were not as hard as I thought until Ouranos Island so I just changed the difficultly to Easy. I don’t usually do anything on easy modes but I just really wanted to try the Spindash and didn’t feel like doing them anymore. I could barely do 2 Ouranos challenges on Normal. It’s fun. It’s not a game breaking super power the way some make it out to be. I’m still not convinced it needed to be locked in these challenges. It should have been 5 per island not 10. You still have to basically beat the game without if you’ve never played it before.
Yeah definitely agree with all that. Oddly enough, I found the challenges on Kronos Island to be the hardest. I had a much better time with them on the following islands so far (still finishing up the last one). Maybe I just got better at them after sitting and grinding them for so long. I will say, as frustrated as I was was with the action chain challenges at first, they've become a huge reason I get excited about playing the game now. They really make you carve out your own custom Sonic level out of all the open world stuff and the dopamine hit I get when I pull it off is the same to me as doing a tricky time travel route in Sonic CD.
Been picking Frontiers back up, these large kocos are in spots that are a real pain to find a route to. Just some random really high platform you need to circle until you find the spring to take you to the challenge to get there.
The worst ones involve having to navigate those sticky green walls. Movement on those is extremely fucked up sometimes, probably because of the fixed camera. On the first island there's one with a bunch of moving green walls and rotating spiked balls. Controls were very unintuitive. Up on the stick will move Sonic up, right on the stick will move Sonic right, down on the stick will move Sonic down, and left on the stick will move Sonic......down? But left is exactly where I need to go, and quickly! Yeah I could run, but that's very unwieldy; Sonic runs too fast and the walls are too small, so it takes less than a second for him to simply reach the end of the wall and stand on top of it. Shit sucks hard.
Just beat the Chaos Island Titan last night. This game is far better than you can tell from the demo! I didn’t expect to enjoy it this much.
This one i skipped the route to it entirely -by accident- and just ended up on the koko platform, seeing the green wall leading to it, and said "oh well"
