Yeah, it’s pretty much a straight shot from the downhill rail. Though you do have to pull slightly right when dashing off the top of the wall so you’re not drawn towards the helicopter.
Speaking of useless things, I hate how you're obligated to see the tutorial messages in every single playthrough, INCLUDING Extreme, you know, the mode you only unlock after doing what the game considers a great performance in a bonus mode you only unlock after already beating the game anyway? It should already be toggled by default, but it feels incredibly silly to choose what should be the ultimate challenge and begin with the game still trying to teach me basic stuff like turning the camera or what Kocos and Seeds do (even if you can't use them here)
Ya extreme mode could definitely stand for further refinement. No seeds, no kocos or the hermit or elder, no tutorial messages. They’re smart enough to just remove that level section from the bottom left hud at least.
Aw, man. That's a bit discouraging. I think I'll still continue my run, but it's a bummer you don't get anything for it.
While I couldn't give less of a shit about these new modes, the music notes made me want to play the game again. I booted up my save from just before the final boss and have been going through all the islands again collecting the songs. I like a lot of the tracks they picked. The art direction on Islands 1, 4, and 5 reminded me a lot of Kingdom Valley anyway, so the fact that I can play that through the game itself while running around is killer. That and Mystic Ruins are my favorites for those islands. Arid Sands and Savannah Citadel are my favorites to play while running around Island 2. I've also been gathering up all the memory tokens I missed the first time around (gotta have some reason to run around and listen to these songs). During my initial playthrough I didn't really bother doing the big rail momentum jumps, but some of these memory tokens have incentivized me to make extremely liberal use of them. This is not the intended way of acquiring these, making it all the more satisfying to do so. It's not quite spindash-jumping off of inclines to take massive shortcuts in Sonic Adventure, but it's the closest to that I've gotten from a 3D Sonic game since Sega's been a third party developer, and I love it. Island 3 is still far and away the least fun Open Zone for me, but I learned that I can Drop Dash up the icy parts of the mountain that the game doesn't let me run on, which is pretty cool. My one complaint about this update is that the music pauses when you open up the map. Since I'm collecting all the memory tokens I missed while jamming to these tunes, I'd have preferred to not have the music cut out each time I go to mark the next one on my map.
yeah I had gone and gotten the memory tokens (all of them) as part of my initial playthrough and the relative freedom of the ways you could go get them is one of the things I like about the game. Even some of the Chaos Island ones can be cheesed without having the game forcing you into a 2D mode.
I actually really like the music notes, and I honestly wish that there were way more of them. Maybe have you unlock the normal game OST in the jukebox alongside the new tracks. The thing is, Frontiers is a game based around exploration, but once you have all the stuff with a gameplay benefit, there's little reason to seek out those extra memory tokens or seeds. This is part of the reason I view it as a massive missed opportunity to not scatter the ol' Forces cosmetics around the island and cyber levels and let Sonic wear them. There are so many little pockets of rings or extra tokens that just go in the garbage once they're collected (especially since rings respawn pretty quickly) that it feels like a massive waste of space, especially with how many little nooks and crannies the cyber levels have that give you little to no reason to explore them. I hope the next game either does this or scales back the open-zone areas enough to make them more focused.
I dont think i saw anyone post this, so I figured I would share it here, but it seems like the new update also has a new "spin dash" animation that isn't used, at least not yet. https://twitter.com/davisito1411/status/1638960444801949699?t=tekrlPXi4TBnflkM5G20wg&s=19
The Drop Dash uses animations that were originally intended for a spin dash, according to the filename. However, this animation is entirely new. Very interesting to see what they're cooking and what it'll amount to. For some reason I find it hard to believe they'd give Sonic an entirely new base move, but weirder things have happened to Sonic. I don't remember if this was posted here, but this update also added rfl files (parameter files) for Amy, Knuckles, and Tails as playable characters. They're mostly identical to Sonic's, but the fact that they're there at all is exciting to me.
Drop Dash is, first and foremost, very badly implemented and the reason why I won't tackle Cyberspace Challenge and Arcade Mode any time soon. I perfected my runs during my initial playthrough, and can replicate most of the tricks no problem. But 1-6? Nope. It's GHZ, it's 2D, and pretty straightforward all together, I WANT TO USE THE DROP DASH. But it just won't work consistently. It's either to slow or stops abruptly. This is easily the worst Cyberspace level for me exactly for that reason. Maybe next time.
Does the game request S ranks in all segments for the bonuses or S Ranks overall? That's not very clear to me.
Yeah, no idea what prompted me to because I hadn't previously, but when I played 1-6 during the Cyberspace Challenge recently I tried to use the Drop Dash near the end, and he just stopped cold, 2 or 3 times in a row. It's ridiculous. There's a lot of passion and effort put into Frontiers for sure, but it's like they ticked off the Drop Dash checkbox as soon as it was implemented in some capacity and then never looked back.
Overall, for both the cyber space challenges and the battle rush, as long as overall rank is S you get the rewards
Wait, what!? Wow, I really didn't need to reset nearly as many times as I did just because I screwed up in a very specific segment of these challenges :p
At least I'll be able to say I did that for all the Battles on the islands. No way in hell am I doing that in the Cyberspace challenges though, I was wondering how anyone was supposed to do 1-2 in pretty much the exact same time they couldn't before now.
The good thing about cyberspace challenge is the rank is based off cumulative time. If you shave off enough time in other levels you can afford to lose time elsewhere and still get an S (like in the challenge, 1-2’s S rank is its own plus 1-1’s S rank, so if you get a second under 1-1 you have that extra second to spare in 1-2, and so on. You can really royally screw up in all islands mode because of this and still be fine)
I think labeling the cheaters with an asterisk has way too much of a chance at backfiring. I just accidentally triggered it without trying while trying to move normally in 2-3. Twice. So now my S rank time on the Ares Island cyber space challenge has an asterisk even though I did it legitimately with no real benefit from triggering it the once.
lol, I have never once used the Drop Dash in this game, until suddenly I accidentally activated it during Battle Rush and it threw off my time. Was very frustrating!
