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

The super Emeralds' only real issue is that we already have an implementation of them implying that they are directly related to the Chaos Emeralds, otherwise you could make up any new excuse and it would stick for how it's always been. You could treat them like the Black Star Dragon Balls from Dragon Ball GT, where once they're used, they're spread across the universe, and that's the reason we haven't actually seen them since, so to bring them back would mean actually finding them for one reason or another, and an excuse to actually go to space this time.
Idk. I don't think it would matter much more than it does now in terms of power scaling. It's just something that would be neat to see reinterpreted (Personally, I like the idea of having multicolored lightnting glowing and reflecting off silver colored fur) even if it was just once again.

Idk why Flynn would mention that. I'd rather he never say never.

 

The only way I can see Hyper Sonic being relevant again is by having a plot that makes the Master Emerald relevant again. Frontiers hints at it since it predates basically any of this stuff coming planetside and is the primary cause FOR everything ending up here, but that's a sequel hook mystery for another time.

If the game wasn't involving the Master Emerald besides implying the Ancients were trying to figure out how to control or harness it for their own ends, then yeah, I can see them vetoing Hyper. Given its circumstances, I think they're saving that card up their sleeve, albeit I'm not optimistic in that sense.

 

I would actually rather they bring back super knuckles over hyper sonic. Hyper sonic works best as a one and done thing, the only way I see them bringing it back would be in some anniversary game with really high stakes. Id rather give knuckles some relevancy again.

 

Hyper Sonic isn't just without value, it actively provides negative value. I have absolutely no qualm with saying that people only want it out of nostalgia and fanservice for an idiom of Sonic that no longer exists and probably shouldn't exist. Super Sonic was never that great a reward in the classic games, and "Super Sonic but more" just makes things even worse. From a context standpoint, Super Sonic is the reward Sonic gets (and by proxy players get) for their hard work across the game, and the point is to raise the stakes of a climactic encounter. Even if most of them suck, every Sonic final boss does this well in terms of the size and scale of a given battle. What is supposed to change about this with Hyper? Sonic goes from throwing Wyvern into a mountain to...throwing a bigger Wyvern into a bigger mountain?

The people who say "Yeah The End wasn't that strong otherwise it should've needed Hyper Sonic" make me feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because the only thing Hyper Sonic has actually been shown to do is be a little faster and stronger than Super Sonic. The Dragon Ball Z argument fits this to a T. The only actual difference between Super Saiyan and Super Saiyan 2 is that one of them loses to Cell and the other doesn't. Sonic doesn't get an emotional character arc moment to push him beyond Super Sonic (and arguably, neither does Gohan) because Sonic is not a Dragon Ball protagonist. The series is not Sonic's journey of self-improvement and growth, and if we're saying that Super Sonic is worn out now, we're only going to be saying the same thing about Hyper Sonic after it's been used for however many games. It's a bad way of thinking about story and game design, full-stop.

Other characters having Super forms is much more workable, since that's horizontal progression. You can make a lot of different judgements about Sonic's ability to win based on who he has fighting alongside him, and other characters do grow and change over the course of the series where Sonic doesn't. That's kind of what Frontiers is about. That said, I think that if characters are going to be getting powered-up forms and transformations, they shouldn't be just other chaos emerald super forms, but something unique to each character that can't necessarily be passed on to others.

 

I had the Xbox version and I remember it playing decently... But yeah, can't say the same about the PS2 version tho'.

 

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Nazo Unleashed. I discovered that when I was like...7(?) and I feel like it's a contributing factor in Hyper still having cultural cache because goddamn did that animation make it look awesome. Otherwise, I agree with the sentiment that keeping it buried and non-canon is for the best to avoid power creep and diminishing the gravitas of Super Sonic (even in the IDW comic, the super state has only shown up once in its 5 year run!).

 

I saw on twitter that apparently they axed Hyper Sonic because they didn't want it to turn into DBZ levels of escalation with super forms, and yeah, I get that. Even though I think Hyper Sonic's rainbow colors, star pattern, and game-breaking double-jump make it so cool...

Also, yeah, I have (and have beaten 100%) Sonic Heroes on GCN and it plays like shit. lmao

 

I can safely say I've never played Sonic Heroes. Yay me. I've also never played 99% of 3D Sonic games. I played a tiny bit of one of the Adventure games once on a kiosk in a store (the one with the level in which you're on a board of some sort and going down the street on a hill) and I hated it. I never touched another 3D Sonic till Frontiers.

 

I played Sonic Heroes last year on GameCube, it was fun up until Casino Park. Casino Park, Bingo Highway, Rail Canyon and Bullet Station are my four most disliked levels of the game, and they all in a row. They are the levels that suffer the most from the slippery controls and awful rail switching. After that though the rest is just good fun.

 

There was a time back when I was around 11-14 years old where if you asked me, I would have told you that Shadow The Hedgehog was a better game than Heroes. Big yikes right?

I think it’s mostly because I found Heroes really dull with all the repetition of basically having to play the same game 4x just to get to the finale. I knew Shadow had a shitty story, the guns were nonsense, and the mission structure was frustrating, but I guess I didn’t care because I was devoted and appreciated the variety.

I guess it’s the same reason why I tolerate all those mini games that pad out the story in Frontiers. Yeah, most of them are not good, but I appreciate that they were actually trying to mix things up a little.

 

I have no real nostalgia for Hyper Sonic. I didn't beat Sonic 3 & Knuckles until last year on the Nintendo Switch. I found out about Hyper's existence through wikis and YouTube videos. Yet I think it's an incredibly interesting part of the nature of Chaos Control that never got to be fully explored because it was introduced before Chaos Control was a thing. I am not someone with much attachment to Sonic 3 but I think it could create interesting plot lines for the future of the Sonic series.

 

The thing about The End is that it's ACTUALLY undefeatable - I think people missed that part? Yes, we "defeat" it at the end of the game, but as it says, it will just come back anyways. It's like hitting reschedule on Windows Update. IDK what scale they're thinking on if they don't think Super Sonic beating a single battle with it was a 1 in a million chance.

But I also don't think that's any reason not to bring back Hyper Sonic and the Super Emeralds and make them actually work for any other reason. Even as one-off transformations, Darkspine and Excalibur fulfilled roles, and even though there's no reason they should ever come back now (beyond just remaking the games they were in), they make the moments they existed memorable. It can work for reasons beyond "Well it's more powerful".

I'd say what Hyper Sonic has now (officially) is more like what Dark Sonic is in Sonic X . It's the suggestion that more could be done with not much more payoff than the suggestion itself. Dark Sonic existed for litterally 27 seconds (being generous) and came into existence because of Sonic's emotions at the time and even being fueled by fake emeralds. You can't really just ignore something like that, so you want it to happen again for a better payoff.

in this spirit, the sacrifice of the previous "canon" appearance of the Super Emeralds would fulfill a greater purpose and give closure when effectively repurposed. But right now they're just saying "No, we can't use it because we're only thinking about power scaling and not creative enough to give reasons it can't be used". + - even though they never needed a reason not to use the Chaos Emeralds.   Which to me just means "Try again" because with the right pitch the answer is *so obviously* "Yes", even from current naysayers.

 

Exacliber Sonic and Darkspine were designed to fit specific situations in those games. If you think Hyper Sonic could be redesigned to fit Frontiers's situation with a rewrite, then fine, but then the question becomes "Why Hyper Sonic specifically?" when the two examples you brought up were custom fit for their game. They didn't feel the need to bring up Hyper Sonic then, or any time before now. Why this time? If you need a new form, why arbitrarily tie yourself to an old concept? I need a better case then "It seemed epic when I was 5."


To me, the fact that Ian would even think of suggesting that just made me roll my eyes. Dude's got one eye in the past when he needs to be looking forward. It's fair to think the final battle needs some sort of escalation after a game of Super sonic fights but to skip past everything Frontiers introduces and bring up Hyper Sonic instead is probably the laziest angle possible.

 

Honestly everyone just keeps looking at the power scaling factor, but the fact is there is no "power scaling". Sonic is as strong, or often times as weak and slow, as the plot needs him to be. We can come up with dozens of Fridge Brilliance articles on TVTropes for why this or that works, lord knows I did a fair few bits on the Frontiers pages myself, but the most we know is literally that Iizuka / Sonic Team don't want to use Hyper Sonic, and they know it exists, they just prefer to keep trucking on like it doesn't. Acting like Hyper Sonic appearing is gonna break some sort of invisible scale is a bit much.

Plus, Hyper Sonic was proposed very early as he says, likely before most of the game's plot details and other elements were even fully established yet. It's likely he was on the same boat of "We use Super a lot in this concept, why not have the finale step it up?" So the entire game wasn't written with Hyper Sonic in mind, it was just an early idea quickly discarded and moved past. Hell, before release friends of mine were insistent that this game was gonna have a Cyber Sonic transformation, so a lot of people were expecting something more than just Super.

 

I wanna be clear, I do not give a shit about power scaling in any series for any reason. "As strong as the plot needs them to be" is how strong every single character in every piece of media ever created is.

My point about Hyper Sonic is not that it will break power scaling, but that the power scale itself is bad, and Hyper Sonic would make it more relevant and prominent. We already have Super Sonic, and while I think Super is flawed, it does serve a very specific role. Hyper Sonic would not only be redundant, it would produce severe diminishing returns as eventually they'd be motivated to one-up that transformation. None of this breaks a hypothetical power scale, it just destroys the tension of the scenes preceding it.

And if your argument is "well they could just change Hyper Sonic to make it different and more unique"...then what makes it Hyper Sonic?

 

A new Hyper Sonic would be fit directly to a new game's situation because they'd be exploring what makes the Super Emeralds so Super. Sky's the limit on what you could do with them, you'd just be *doing something with them*.

Meaning in the same way Super Sonic has been redefined since Sonic 2. Screen nuke and rainbow colors aside, Hyper Sonic doesn't have any other notable traits. "Hyper Sonic" as a concept is an extension of the Super Emeralds, so, changing what those are or what they do while keeping them as usable for a transformation, that transformation is probably going to change at least a little. People just wanna see the things used to its fullest potential.

 

Hyper Sonic and the Super Emeralds have already been used to their fullest potential. They didn't have much, that's why we left them in 1994 where they belong. What is Hyper supposed to provide that Super didn't? If you're saying "just make up new stuff", then you're admitting Hyper doesn't have potential, because you just had to invent some.

 

This issue of 'potential' is a big problem in the Sonic fandom. Talking about how everything has potential without clarifying what it is or justifying why it should be made.

A remake of Sonic Labryinth has potential. Doesn't therefore mean it should be made.

 

I'm not exactly against the idea of Hyper Sonic returning, but bringing Hyper Sonic back in Sonic Frontiers is the same equivalent of putting Super Sonic in the first Sonic Movie. Too soon. I think we should let SEGA work with Super Sonic more (and focusing on the Chaos Emeralds lore) before bringing Hyper Sonic back.