I'm pretty sure the hard mode (and possibly normal) version of the final boss has attacks it just doesn't use in easy mode. + - Those being it attacking Sage's shield and its cutscene death ball that temporarily depowers Sonic...which looks janky as hell. I think I prefer this over the base game's final boss, but, like everything else in this update, it's immensely rough and unpolished. I really hope Sonic Team reigns in their ambition with whatever's next. Frontiers ended up getting some pretty tight level design thanks to these updates (not the trial towers though, fuck 'em) and I'm glad they're willing to bring in other characters (even if they're bafflingly gimped compared to Sonic, given that they can't really do combat and can't activate several map mysteries for arbitrary reasons), so they've got something resembling a base, but they need to make it all fit together better and not have the game be held together by duct tape and dreams. Also, god, I am *sick* of the boring Starfall Islands environment design and all the floating video gamey platforms and rails. I would gladly welcome Green Hill back if it meant having more organic and focused environment design with loops and fun gimmicks and whatnot. Sure, they've never managed to make a full game of it, but fans have been designing better sandboxes for going on 15 years.
Being as vague as possible, there's another option at the screen where you get to swap characters, and I think that implies you're intended to get stuck at this point and then do 100% on the island before they straight up give you the answer to finish? I do kinda like that contextualization but that's a little weird lol.
Ok, I’m glad I’m not the only one who is having trouble with the perfect parry timing on hard. I’ve yet to clear + - Wyvern’s second phase on hard and ended up just going to bed last night. I think it would be fine if the game was designed to require the perfect parry in the beginning, as the timing window for attacks doesn’t seem as clear as other action games. I’m going to give it another try now. I genuinely like everything, but as I felt with the base game, this feels like a test for a future game more than a finished product. I think they’re onto something cool though. Knuckles’ glide is fucked though, as is Tails’ little hover before taking off. To steal a quote from someone, “What were they thinking?” Did it take more than 10 tries? Apparently the difficulty drops after that. I honestly think the difficulty drop people mentioned is the only way this could have happened as it was taking me at least 30 to defeat a single one with the cyloop method. Once I clear the rest, I’ll go back and see if I can get this to work.
I haven't got very far but I did play for the multiple playable characters. I know I'm very out of touch with the Sonic fandom on Frontiers. Everyone else really likes it and I think it is terrible. But as may seem hard to believe I do love the Adventure games.bi was excited to play as multiple playable characters in 3D. Somehow I'm disappointed and actually expected better. I'm not sure why I expected anything. Maybe it's because Sonic Team are actually trying this team. But I just think they aren't well suited to making Sonic games. Knuckles controls absolutely terribly. It is inexcusable how dreadful his gliding is. This is worse than a game that came out in 1998. Just unbelievable. But then I also think his movement fits with how terrible Sonic controls in Frontiers. I think Tails also fits into the Frontiers mould. Just completely broken beyond belief like the spin dash and options like jump deceleration. I admit he is fun to play. But he's not well designed at all. If they wanted to make someone with infinite flight they shouldn't give him platform challenges. Give him hidden collectables or something. Amy fares the best out of the three but I really dislike the way all her moves are tarot card based. I hate this change to card Amy. Wish she used her hammer more. I will play more of it to see if the difficulty becomes as bad as people say. On the positive side, the music is great as always. I also think Sonic Team are doing something really commendable by making the characters playable again. And they are finally making the right move by giving them the same base movesets as Sonic and gameplay goals. They should continue in this direction.
I dropped the difficulty down to easy in order to clear the third tower. In retrospect I presume the game expects you to do one of those automated cyloops around the weird, uh, plug things that the rails surround. If so, it might have been intuitive if I'd ever encountered those things before I tried that tower!
Wanted to hone in on this because, while I largely agree with you on this update's content (and I do think Frontiers is probably more divisive now the honeymoon phase is over), I think it's more a question of execution. These characters fit poorly into Frontiers not on a conceptual level, but because their implementation largely just blows chunks. Universally, these guys just aren't designed for combat. Sonic has his combo attack and then all his other wacky special moves. The others have to unlock their combos and they don't get any other combat-specific special moves the same way Sonic does. They can't match his DPS, they don't have tools like Wild Rush or the cutscene attacks that can cheese a lot of fights - there's just no reason to waste time and energy trying to fight anything other than basic enemies with these guys. Knuckles' and Tails' traversal is pretty jank, the former moreso than the latter, but there was no reason it had to be like this. Frontiers would be a strictly better experience if everything else was the same except Tails got rid of that weird startup on his flight and Knuckles' gliding got rid of the startup, had tighter controls and carried momentum. These are choices made during the development for reasons that I will probably never understand, but I don't think they're intrinsic constraints of a modern formula. I also agree with you regarding Amy. She's the best to control but I do dislike how she's so tarot-centric now and that her aerial manoeuvre is just a better version of the glide. Not only has the Piko Piko Hammer been shifted out of focus, but it feels like Amy's crush on Sonic is also barely a thing nowadays. I realise the latter element in particular was portrayed pretty problematically in most of her appearances in the past, but it feels like Amy's identity has been largely stripped away in the games and replaced with something safe and boring. I'm glad to see them bring back the tarot aspect of her, but it's definitely overtaken what she was before to a large extent. Thankfully the comics are still able to deftly balance all of these elements and continue to give us the best version of the character.
Lol okay I've got to the first tower. The game's controls are just far too bad for this kind of difficulty design. A lot of the automated challenges don't work as intended if you boost too much or too little. The ramps are particularly awful. So it turns into a trial and error memorisation test of how long to press the button down. It wouldn't be as awful as it is if they provided checkpoints. But they don't.
Okay, I dropped it down to easy for the gauntlet but put it back to hard for the final battle. Not bad. I think the game should have communicated what you had to do on the final boss a bit better in terms of using the cyloop to progress to the final phase. It's not as bad as needing to get hit towards a specific area by Supreme's base version in order to trigger his gun attack, but it's still a little annoying. Still need to play every Cyberspace stage but this first one now. What's the deal with the orangey boost that we saw in the trailer btw? Also, wtf are the lookout Kocos for?
The lookout Kocos unlock the towers, you just don't need very many of them. I had enough for all five just from picking them up in the overworld, I never needed to enter a single cyber stage. ...Yeah I think a bunch of the complaints here (from people who didn't already dislike Frontiers) would disappear if they just balanced this differently.
For the boss rush do you also need to beat Knight? If so I just look up the final boss and ending. There's no way I'll be able to beat that.
I’ve been stuck on the boss rush trial pretty much all day, though I’ve slowly improved and found out a way to cheese the first two titans (use cyloop then spam L2). As someone who liked the base game (aside from the incompleteness of the last island & ending), I really wanted to like this update and while there’s definitely some really good ideas, I have to agree with everyone that the execution is pretty bad, and the difficulty spike is ridiculous. My main gripes are: * The difficulty curve is ridiculous, easy mode is harder than the base game’s hard mode. * Who in the world thought forcing “perfect parry” was a good idea? Did they play test this? * Why does Knuckles do a weird “charge up” before he glides? * Knuckles can‘t climb most walls, only the red block ones, and the climbing physics feels identical to the slippery “walk up the green walls” physics. Huge let down. * Turning while gliding as Knuckles is too sluggish. Amy and Tails are fine for the most part, in fact Tails once you get all power ups is freaking awesome. Amy suddenly being portrayed as this magic card lady feels like a retcon even though I’m aware it was mentioned in her bio as far back as Sonic CD, it’s just that we’ve never seen her use her tarot cards in any of the games before so it’s kind of jarring for this to suddenly be her major character trait as if it’s always been like that all along. I really hope there’s another patch to fix the difficulty, and maybe adjust Knuckles’ controls. In it’s current state there’s no way casual players are ever going to beat this, even on easy mode.
You do, but Knight is actually the easiest titan to beat quickly, when you learn how to skip the whole shield riding section. Actually, how you do that is important for beating the new final boss too.
Oh… I guess I was never short on them. I was curious what happened to the tower “keys” that were mentioned as I was able to just progress from one to the other.
That's part of what makes it so weird. The game similarly showers you with portal gears, meaning you can easily skip both combat and cyberspace for this entire update (and a hefty amount of platforming, though I wouldn't call what is there hard), until the trials pound you into the fucking ground. If you had alternative easy ways of doing those like you do with the cyber levels and guardians, it would at least feel intentional, if still really weird. Instead it's just confusing. This needs a patch. A patch can easily fix most of this. The problem is that they clearly did it on purpose.
I'll also add here that, on all of these bosses, quick cyloop is your friend. My strat was to cycle through the basic combo, spin cycle and stomp, using the quick cyloop at the right time (i.e. not before the health threshold for a new phase) and, particularly on Giganto, abusing parry to grand slam for big damage with little ring loss. These fights are absolutely bullshit under the specified conditions and basically ask you to optimise the fun out of combat and Knight is definitely the worst of them with its luck-based crapshoot shield surfing segment.
I'm only going to post this one time then leave it since I know a lot of people love this game. But in my opinion this update is trash and it fits this trash game. It's not that the new content is far worse than the base game. The new characters control terribly just like Sonic does. The difficulty is only as unbearable as it is because the game is not refined enough to support it. This update just lays bare how badly made this game is. The difficulty is badly designed. The towers are infuriating but inconsistent in difficulty (tower one is harder than tower three). The trials are the same (the fourth trial is by far the easiest). It says a lot about how poorly designed the combat is that the only way they could make meaningful challenge is using time limits. Because the combat is very easy because of the invincible parry. The other playable characters are very badly designed and control terribly for the reasons I have previously said. Compounded with the dreadful pop in which really is a problem here with characters like Knuckles and Tails if you aren't just abusing the Tornado. The run button also doesn't suit these abilities. Playing finger twister with R2 and X. I also think the story is terribly written again too. I'll avoid spoilers but I feel like it again had lots of words being said but nothing of value. Exposition overload with only snippets of poorly executed characterisation. I know Flynn has a lot of fans and I really hope it isn't just because he writes dark stories and puts focus on other characters than Sonic. I've never read his other work so I can't really pass judgement on him. But if he stays on he needs to do a lot better than this. Its even below Pontac and Graff, who often wrote terrible jokes but at least made dialogue largely tied to actual personalities and characterisation. I like flying around with Tails and breaking the game. But it's not well designed. Like I enjoy flying around with no clip. The music is great. That's the only straight compliment I can give the update. Again fits the rest of the game. I am glad though that, from what I've seen from various commentators, the update is making people question the fundamental controls of the game. The combat goes without saying but i mean his base conttol. The tower climb proves that Sonic actually controls terribly in this game which I've said from the very beginning. His jumping correction has always been this bad. His boosting has always been very difficult to control and especially when using it for jumoing challenges. The grind rail automation has always been broken. Sonic often glitches out instead of doing inputs. Sonic moves well when going forwards but that's about it. It really bugged me when people were saying this is the best Sonic has controlled when it so clearly isn't. Frontiers is definitely less worshipped now compared to when it came out which is a good thing. I hope in a few years most people who do like this game can like how it caters to their tastes while also acknowledging the game is very badly made in most ways. If Sonic Team do a sequel in this style they need to drastically improve everything about it.
This update is so weird man. Even as someone who hasn't been as down on Frontiers as most people, a lot of these design choices are just so baffling and weird. Like I wish I could just turn my brain off and enjoy it, but I keep running into things that just make ask "but why though"?
It was never "worshipped" at all. Even people who said the game is their favorite had no problem criticizing it. It was never an untouchable game and nothing about its reception really changed with this update. People who don't like the game continue to not like it, people who like the game like what the update does but are as critical of it as they were the main game. No one is "realizing the game was actually always terrible". I feel like we've specifically had this conversation before (or I had it with someone else). But if you feel like your opinion was being "stifled" or whatever, it's less because you didn't like the game, and more that you frame yourself as the "only one" who "realizes" or "admits" or whatever that the game is terrible, which are going to get people defensive for many reasons including they simply disagree the game is terrible at all. I flatly disagree with some of your critiques individually (especially on writing and basic controls), but I do agree that the update's experimental designs magnify the game's existing issues. But in spite of the game being stressed to its limit (sometimes very literally), I still think it largely succeeds. My opinion is the same as when the game came out: it's a good game, with a good foundation, with obvious, sometimes unnecessary, flaws, and a sequel that builds on it (and the update especially makes me believe that Sonic Team can and want to build on it) would definitively be one of the best Sonic games ever. You can skip that segment entirely, though.
The new controls control kind of like ass, especially Knuckles. The difficulty is an absurd leap from the original game too. But the cyberspace stages so far are a gigantic improvement from the original game. This update really has that signature lack of polish and uneven game design that Sonic Team is known for. We're so back yall.
