I did everything in the game I could 100% and S rank from a completely fresh game prior to this update dropping and almost nothing comes even close to the difficulty spike. They needed a better curve in general. I could muscle my way through it but writing off complaints as old people suck or skill issue is really bad faith. Sonic team fucked up the difficulty and it should be better balanced next time.
I also disagree about the difficulty spike being an issue. Moreso, they should've set our expectations properly that we'd have to fight to see the new ending/Super Sonic form. Back in the 90s we had to fight all the time to see the true endings. I still can't beat all of Sonic CD's special stages and I was able to beat the Final Horizon update.
Y'know, Giganto and Knight aren't that bad to figure out how to blitz through, I'll admit that. But Wyvern's encounter design is flat-out unfun to master. Each swipe you fail to parry as you learn the timing (which changes in phase 2) means getting flung back and waiting for the next missile to parry (which visual clutter can make tricky), and every time the ring counter hits 0 you have another round of Giganto and uglier Starlight Carnival between you and more practice. That's not a fun challenge, that's wasting my time until I can get that perfect run and earn admission to the new final boss, and I don't think a smoother difficulty curve or clearer expectations would make the trial less flawed.
And I suck at Super Mario Kart. No biggie. Come to think of it, that trial could have been just the perfect parries, 10 per each titan, and it would have been gold.
I've literally memorized every single blue spheres stage in S3nK and can perfect all of them in a single run because the objective never changes or how you come across it in every subsequent run. This isn't the same at all especially because the enemies will seemingly move more sporadically the closer you get to running out of time.
If they've done it right, you can parry to the rhythm of the music. I have yet to check this, though.
Yeah, you can’t parry to the beat of the music. I can do perfect parries in nearly every game that’s designed for them, but Frontiers’ bosses clearly were not. Things like time slowing down in order to prompt you to hold the buttons (like on Giganto’s hand crush attack) make it harder to perfect parry than if it didn’t slow down. The rest of the update was only marginally harder than the base game IMO. Titan gauntlet was the only thing I had difficulty with and I ended up just dropping difficulties because I hated redoing Giganto plus the chase leading up to Wyvern. One day I’ll give it a go on Extreme, but I’m pretty happy with not getting the timings down consistently on those tail swipes.
Tails has to be the most fun of all the new characters. All the air mobility stuff is super fun to master, especially with being able to hop in and out of using the Cyclone in tandem with his actual flight stuff. Hoping the next game fully fleshes out this one's ideas. It comes so close to being great, but really misses the landing and even becomes egregious in how terrible it is at times. I've been playing Mario Odyssey in tandem with this, and that game can teach Sonic Team one small lesson alone: More level biomes, period. Fuck the bland ass art style, just give me more variety, please. Off the top of my head Mario Odyssey has you exploring a prehistoric jungle, a mechanical woods, a snowy tundra, a polygonal kitchen, a Dark Souls esque medieval locale, and there's still more where that came from. Frontiers has a generic grassland, desert, and cliffside. Literally that's it. Give us more, but denser environments next time, please. And just imagine if they make a game where Sonic and co. don't stick out like a sore thumb!
Oh I really like frontiers but I agree more actual Sonic biomes next time, and more organic environments. And fix the pop in because it looked particularly bad with the new challenges and cyberspace stages being littered with objects. Thankfully this is likely the last 3D Sonic title for the Switch. That and prob the last 3D Sonic for the PS4 and Xbox One, so hopefully the technical issues can be fixed at least by ditching the last generation. Anyways currently on trial 5. Oooohhh boy ya this is mean I tried for like 20 min last night and I just got anxiety. So I dialed it back down to easy for this challenge only, and I’ll bump it up to hard for the final boss. This 3rd dlc definitely has some balance issues (overall I like the challenge, but trial 2 and 5 stand out as unfair, especially when trial 3 is a joke with it’s time limit. The new platforming can look stupid but it’s actually really fun imo more of these types of challenges and cyberspace stages in the future please). Can safely say I don’t see myself beating this on extreme ever. New game plus? Maybe. I do see myself playing the main game as the other characters though because I thought they were fun. With a bit of tweaking they’re pretty much there imo.
Wait… is this possible? I assumed they were locked to Ouranos. You can’t even switch islands after activating the new story.
Almost done with the third island. I think my main issue with the game is that it doesn't really test your control over Sonic per se, but rather your reflexes. Getting to out of the way places for me, has been less a question of "how do I build up enough speed to get there", but more "alright, where's the obstacle course that leads to that place" I hear the Spin Dash makes it better, but considering that it appears to be effectively endgame only without mods, I'd rather my first run to be vanilla. Maybe all this has been rehashed and I've been late to the party
