The game is easy when it's hard, except when it's hard, then it'd hard even when it's easy. The feedback for difficulty should be adjusted to "reasonable difficulty curves" and also "difficulty levels exist for a reason, Sonic Team"
I'm waiting as Tails by the last...thingy before what I assume is the climax. I'll play it when I wake up. I thought the new towers were gonna be WAY worse based on what you guys said, but honestly the egregious lack of any checkpoint pulleys is the worst thing I can say about them. They're easier than Rhea! The trials...well, what the hell were those lol. The first is a clusterfuck of enemies that I just kind of spammed the cyclone kick to beat? Not sure how reliable that is. Then we have the infamous snake trial...which I cheesed with @MD MH's strategy. I don't remember what the third one was? And then the last one was just...a slightly fast ninja? Weird. The super-hard open zone guardians are the pits, though. I have no idea how they expected you to tackle these things, not just because they're strong, but they're tanky. They have so much goddamn health! I only managed to beat one Master Ninja+ with Knuckles's defense-down parry thing. But ironically...they're almost always positioned next to a guaranteed gear drop. So it's kind of a signal that they're compeltely optional? I've certainly been treating them that way. Overall I'm more positive now than I was earlier tonight when 4-B was pounding my butthole, but yeah this thing is weird and whatever they're going for they should probably just patch it to balance things.
Digging the new Cyber Space levels. They're huge, offer a surprising number of opportunities for exploration, have tons of alternate paths, and the music fucks. The missions are also way more interesting than they were in the base game.
So... I've spend some considerable time with the DLC now... 1. The playstyles for Amy, Tails and Knuckles are a mixed bag, but ultimately aren't unplayable. Knuckles Glide and climbing physics are worse than Adventure 2 again for... really no reason, but in most cases you can compensate for it and I actually like his Island puzzles the most out of the 3. 2. To reiterate, changing the difficulty does indeed change the tower layouts. It becomes frustratingly obvious just how much they need automation to work as intended, which is unfortunate, but at least there's an easy way to get around it, and I'm glad that in this case there's at least an 'option' for a hard mode for people who want it, but it doesn't change my problems with the core design. The controls and physics are genuinely not well optimized for this level of platforming precision with max speed Sonic. It's far, far too easy to make a mistake even when you know all the correct tricks. There should have been one more tweak to the difficulty of hard mode's towers at a few 'very' specific pressure points. 3. If you lose in the trials enough times. (10+?) they lower the difficulty. The Snake trial is still hard to beat with the lower difficulty, but much more beatable if you use the recommended strategies. The "lower" difficulty should've been the default from the start, as it still takes quite a bit of skill and precision to beat, but not quite a superhuman level anymore. 4. However, I gave up with beating the 3 Titans for now. I love those fights, but this is the type of mission I'd do if I wanted to grind an extreme mode challenge. The tricks needed to beat them efficiently are not easy to master and rely too much on imprecise camera controls and luck. This should not be a mandatory requirement for story progression. I don't fault them for OFFERING a hard mode, but it stops being fun like this. And if I have to do the "10 times" thing to lower the difficulty? That's... that's just a massive waste of time. Maybe I'll pick this up again later. I don't want to hate this update, even with some problems... but... it's definitely worse than the core game and unpolished. Yes, it's a lot of content, but it's rushed and even feels broken at far too many points. And yes, flying in the tornado 2 as Tails is very fun. It may break the map, but I still enjoy it honestly. Not enough open world games embrace full flight mechanics, so I always welcome them.
the main tldr of problems to me are the new characters control mediocre to, in the case of knuckles, bad this is a difficulty jump to the level of optional extreme challenge modes (good) attached to mandatory content that's not optional if you want to know the story in this story-focused game (bad)
I went and watched the final portion of the new content. I'm sorry to say this...but I felt quite disappointed. Spoiler While it's better gameplay-wise, I didn't like how the events were handled out, especially The End (I preferred it in the original ending). I expected more epicness out of it, but got a half-assed final battle focused more on cool gameplay than balancing it with cool plotline.
My problem with the DLC is that most of my deaths come from the characters not moving how I want them to in parts that give little room for error or you have to do a huge chunk of content again. I'm glad Kishimoto wasn't afraid to make the game harder and that Ouranos feels distinct and fully realized now but the game still feels inherently janky. I mean at least it was free.
After all that…I think the final boss is bugged. Just keeps regenerating health and I can’t get any damage to stick. I’m playing on easy mode, for god’s sake.
It's not bugged, it's just that it, like the rest of the update, is bad at explaining what you have to do. Spoiler: Final Boss You have to attack and break the tube on its back. You do this by attacking the head, then dodging to the right. Sonic will switch targets. Break the tube and you can freely attack The End. Then, when it's down, you Quick Cyloop the hole in its back where the tube used to be, then Cyloop the sniper rifle.
I don't think Another Story is necessarily supposed to be a "true" ending - just an alternate one, where the continuity is left ambiguous. Spoiler Sonic quite literally goes through a portal into another world. We watch a cutscene of Sonic jumping into the portal and emerging in an alternate world. It's very diegetic in a way I didn't expected. I don't think this is necessarily "canon to the main story", just another direction they wanted to explore. And at the end of the day, the conclusions are the same - everyone goes home happy. SAGE eventually gets revived in the standard ending, so I'm counting that.
My god, this update is absolutely infuriating. Anybody know if there’s still stuff locked behind hard mode? It’s only now I’m hearing Vanadlize that I remember that the base release did that for whatever reason.
For the second trial, never ever cyloop unless you hate yourself. Go to their max range, wait for the boomerang attack, homing attack to them then parry the boomerang before it hits you then just cycle between attacking and parrying. I can do a recording much later tonight if people are still struggling for a visual example of how to do it.
I don’t think this is cheesing. That’s the same strategy I up landing on after seeing what approach could finish one of them under 30sec. I think it’s the only approach that’s possible.
I got pretty close with cylooping a few times, but I think doing it that way requires absolute perfection of execution and the parry strat is almost certainly the intended method. Made me feel like an idiot when I saw it given Frontiers never asked you to really experiment like this with combat moves before now. It does reveal the potential for depth a combat system has, but man if it doesn’t feel spiteful.
Since it seems like the character switching is tied to story progression, after beating this mode are you freely able to select characters in order to achieve 100% map completion? It doesn't seem like progress is tracked the same way as the rest of the game but I still would like to at least try
Once you’re at the point of no return, you’re given options to head into the final battle, continue exploring as Sonic or switch back to one of the other characters.
Here's a quick 'tater quality video of me finishing the challenge with the aforementioned parry-attack-parry method (I think?). I didn't intend to record it, but as I finally finished it (see, isn't it great?) I figured I'd better save the last minute of gameplay just in case. I'm not the best at pulling it off repeatedly (I got briefly hung up on the second one as well as the one in the video), so the fact I finished with 4 seconds to spare means there's some margin for error doing it this way.
