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

Reading through this thread makes me feel I should probably do the DLC on Easy right from the start

 

Yes, but this has been out for a week they’ve barely had a chance to act yet.

 

https://gamebanana.com/mods/415617 - Tracker's Physics brands itself as fairly minor but it does adjust rolling physics to be more in line with the Adventure games.

https://gamebanana.com/mods/451277
https://gamebanana.com/mods/464502 - Mach Speed Physics and its add-on, Next Generation, aren't update 3 compatible yet, but offer a more extensive overhaul that changes how the game is played much more than Tracker's Physics.

 

This DLC honestly made me like the game less. I dont feel much was a improvement over base game. The platforming is still the asset reused jank with ROBLOX tier level design, combat is still bland button mashing but now I have to fight the same enemies just artificially powered, the puzzles of course are still gonna exist and not be essential to sonic gameplay.

Felt like busy work so I just stopped playing. Didnt enjoy the other characters movement either so there was no point for me to continue...

 

My problem is that I don't think they're going to patch it. Maybe they'll fix the deceleration slider but I for some reason have zero confidence that they'll add checkpoints to the cyber levels or towers, nerf the guardians and trials, or fix the air control and cyberspace turning (this one in particular should've happened with the DLC itself). It's a shame...because I can fix all those things for myself already. I just hate that everyone can't get that experience when it's so easy.

Edit: oh yeah, enable the jukebox too.

 

Just in case, I gotta make sure to set time aside so I can honestly wear the "I Beat Frontiers Update 3 Before The Nerf Patch" t-shirt

 

It's really not that difficult. As long as you figure out how to beat Trial 2, the only really hard part is the boss gauntlet.

 

People tend to highlight the tower climbs as another source of frustration. Aside from a couple of segments - the platform with two boost pads and a Cyloop sign immediately comes to mind - I think they're far more tedious than difficult (and playing on Easy alleviates even that). It certainly is frustrating to have to redo the climb because you fell and couldn't land on a lower platform or something, but to me it's more out of annoyance at wasting time than outright anger.

 

I think the tower climbs were pretty good, but yeah, the concept inherently lends itself to frustration. I thought it was quite exhilarating to spindash launch off angled platforms and make your own way up though. It gave a sense of vertigo and apprehension that Yasuhara speaks about trying to imbue his games with. Not many 3D Sonic games have really captured that.

 

I'd also like to point out that, at least when I played the update, buying upgrades - which the friends' platforming sections are built around - forced me into their respective tutorials. And coming out of said tutorials would respawn me back on land if I was in the middle of a prop platforming sequence.

 

Yeah, the game counts running the tutorials as putting the characters in a "new" location, and the game spawns you on the last terrain you touched, and none of the platforms count as "terrain". It's extremely dumb, but if you keep pressing the start button when you get a new skill, you can skip the tutorial entirely.

 

It’s slightly ridiculous that the “difficult” update that’s designed for fans has tutorials for the cyloop, stomping, etc.

Even disregarding how it takes you off platforms, which can take you far as hell away when you are making the most of the new movement options, it’s very tedious and annoying.

 

I can throw mud at this update til the cows come home but godDAMN if I’m not listening to Blood Flow at least once a day

 

Was staying with some relatives so I didn't get to sink my teeth into this update until now, and it's...kinda hard, I guess?

Not trying to throw shade at anyone here, but I honestly didn't see the kaizo/bloodborne level of difficulty some people here complained about for pages on end.
I read the posts over the last few days and was dreading the tower climb and trials, but like someone mentioned the towers in Rhea are honestly way more difficult, so...
And as for the trials...well, I guess the enemies are kinda agressive? But the battle system can still be cheesed just as easily, so again, didn't really struggle at all here. The "infamous snake trial" can just be completed by using cyloop kinda fast, and the other ones just ask you to beat the enemies, which you can do pretty easily.

Playing as other characters after so long was sooo fun, and I loved the way they control, weird deceleration issues aside. I'm not exactly sure what's the point of even giving them skill trees and attacks tho, when they're obviously not meant to engage with any of the gardians present on the map. Are you supposed the fight regular enemies at any point with them?

Not the biggest fan of the music, to be honest. That's weird, I loved the music in the vanilla game but nothing here really does it for me.

The Cyperspace stages are open ended and have tons of alternate paths, this is how you do a 3D Sonic stage. We've reached critical levels of "Colours-tier floating blocky boxes in the sky" tho, so it's something they reaaaally should get to fix in the next game, it's so immersion breaking lol

Now, I haven't played the boss rush and true final final boss yet, but I honestly doubt this is gonna make me hate the whole thing :p. Again, I know "git gud" is a toxic mentality to have, but...are you sure you guys tried your best? This isn't nearly as bad as anyone makes it out to be, even in hard mode.

Otherwise yeah, an amazing update for an amazing game. Nostalgia will probably still put Adventure 2 as my favourite 3D entry, but this is a close second. It's kind of amazing how they literally brought back everything I loved about the series back in one go for that game, I honestly CANNOT wait to see what's next for the series. Haven't been this excited being a Sonic fan in ages, haha

 

It's not that it's literally impossible, just that it's a stark contrast to everything else and clearly unbalanced with the way you've been conditioned to respond to the entire rest of the game.

Anyway, I've been responding to this kinda piecemeal so I think I'll sum up everything as a final thoughts:

Characters: B

Knuckles, Amy and Tails are, from a conceptual standpoint, everything they should be in relation to Sonic. They're all fast, can all spindash and boost, mostly feel the same as Sonic to play, have unique movement abilities, and their own flavor of attacking and moving, without straying too far from the formula. However, even once the deceleration bug gets (probably) fixed, I still mourn the lack of air control. Hedgemodmanager has had a "improve turning radius" code that makes it close to a perfect rotation for months now, and I really with ST had seen how good that could be. It's amazing that Tails can cyloop while using the cyclone, because...you're not completing a fucking loop in that thing. Knuckles's gliding is too broad as well, and only functions because his sections are designed around it. Also, the strange delay he and Tails have for their air actions and stomps is weird. Not a deal breaker, but weird. Also, the climbing still sucks. I'm convinced this shouldn't be a part of any Sonic game. Sonic should be able to run up a wall when he has the speed and there's a curve for it, and we should figure out after that if a manual wall-run is even necessary. Amy is probably the most rounded of these characters, with her high jumps and hover being really fun to take advantage of.

New Ouranos: B+

Yeah yeah there's boxes everywhere and it's ugly. I get it. That doesn't change that this is some of the most technical platforming the series has ever seen, and with no 2D sections to boot. The level of freedom you get from the new character abilities lets you break a lot of them in half, but they're still fun to tackle on their own, and feel the most balanced as endgame content out of anything in this update. The island puzzles, what few there are, are also suitably difficult, although that final ball-and-hoop puzzle can go die in a fucking hole. I hesitate to rate this any higher however, because figuring out exactly how to get to some places with this draw distance and the pitiful speed of uncovering the map is tedious. The other reason is the towers. Now, I don't think these are too hard at all, even on hard mode. I found them fun! More fun than Rhea, as previously mentioned. I think it's just fucking bonkers that they don't have any checkpoint pulleys. They clearly know that those are necessary, they even give you one to skip the last one when you want to switch characters or fight the final boss, so what gives???

Combat: D

Ugh. As I said, it's not that it's too hard, it's that it's a completely jarring shift, and whether it's doable doesn't change that it feels completely unbalanced. The guardians are completely tanky and do absurd amounts of damage at extreme speeds. You can get into a pattern with abusing these guys' AI just like anything else in this game, but the amount of time you have to spend doing it consistently sucks all the fun out of everything. The only solace is itself a different problem, that being that you have absolutely no reason to even bother touching these things. You get showered with portal gears from doing random normal stuff anyway. The combat is even worse in the Koco trials. The first and third ones are okay, just slightly-jank enemy gauntlets. The second, the snake trial, is easy if you get into the pattern of parry-strike, but feels totally at-odds with the "only use cyloop" instructions, and still isn't what I'd call "fun". And the fourth...ugh. The titans didn't need a second pass from gameplay. They were spectacle, and worked fine as spectacle. Making me repeat them with base stats, a worse parry and no way of replenishing my rings is just rock-stupid. I have no shame, I just turned on the "no ring loss" command. The best thing this dumb endeavor taught me is that you can spin the analog stick during the button-mash sequences and it's way easier.

Cyberspace: C

I finally 100% completed all of these tonight, and I have intensely mixed feelings about them. On the one hand...this is exactly the level design I want to see from 3D Sonic. There are tons of routes to take with different skills being tested, alcoves with little extras or the new collectibles in them, experiments in structure and format, and a love for spindash-jumping that I truly feel at-home with. On the other hand...WHY can I still not fucking TURN? Why is my air control still so BAD? What is this game's fucking beef with CHECKPOINTS? These new stages are a lot longer (especially if you're going for all the stuff), and you can die easily if you're trying to make them shorter (by going faster). Having to restart from the beginning each time is completely needless. Did they fire the guy who looked at anything they made and said "put a checkpoint here"? This compounds with the fact that the Silver Moon Rings, Number Rings and Tiny Animals can be pretty hard to find, and now even if you do, it's all out the window if you die.

Music: C

Yeah, surprising. I love Frontiers's normal OST, but these were just...okay. The Cyberspace remixes are a mixed bag. I feel that tracks I already didn't like were benefited, but the ones I did were either neutral or worse. Escape the Loop being the obvious one, where I loved the original but the remix is just kind of gross. The new mixes of I'm Here and I'm With You are alright, but I'm With You shouldn't be that soft when the original song didn't even have lyrics. I suppose I'll wait for a good mashup? The character themes are good, but they get annoying once you've been running with them playing for several hours, and you can't access the fuggin' jukebox here! Why not???

Story: C-

I wasn't really expecting much knowing this was just a revamp of the last act, but somehow all the dialogue this time around felt really lacking. In vanilla Frontiers, every island feels like it's in-part about the character you free. They each have their little arcs to go through, from Amy to Knuckles to Tails to Sage. New Ouranos feels like it's about...nothing? There are so many new conversations that feel like they showcase neither an interesting topic nor the personality of the characters. Eggman in particular is docile to the point of feeling not very much like himself. I guess the theme is probably covering the Ancients and Starfall lore they didn't get around to the first time (the plethora of "remember this from X previous island???" convos certainly displays that), but it means you could swap one or more of the characters in every conversation for another and it wouldn't change much. The voice direction is also...even worse than before. I genuinely like the voicework on Ares and Chaos, but we're back to the weirdness from Kronos here. I hope they get a different director.

Ending: C+

I think this was the kind of ending that a lot more fans wanted, but I'm honestly not sure if it's better than the original. "Supreme The End" or whatever we're calling it is thankfully more merciful than the Titan Gauntlet beforehand, in that I can take in my actual fucking stats. But it's hard to get a read on what you're actually supposed to do in the fight. I'm lucky I saw people talking about switching the target lock or else I wouldn't have known that you could unplug The End. I feel like the better design choice would be to just...not let you attack the head during that part? It's not like it does anything. I'm also interested to see if you can quick-loop the rifle before your second takedown, because I wasn't fast enough on my own. The perfect parry...is still dumb. It fits a lot better here than in the Titan Gauntlet, but if you really wanted to use that to prepare us for this, you should have let us keep our stats and just had the new parry (or better yet, don't do it at all). Overall, I really wish we'd gotten to see the version of this game where both endings were one big thing, but I'm glad we didn't lose the original here. Also, I like Cyber Sonic's crazy eyes.

Overall: B-? C+?

This thing was a lot of fun to travel through, and I'm glad we got it. It adds a lot of playtime to the game and implements new characters in a serviceable manner. The thing that gets to me is just how bizarre a lot of these decisions are, or more accurately, how easy it would be for them to not even be an issue. You can just ADD checkpoints to stuff. In a level editor, or even with a HedgeMod code that lets you just CREATE checkpoints. There are spots all over the towers where you can just put a pulley down to the previous level. The Guardian health is just a number, and their aggression would make for an actual fun game of risk-and-reward if they weren't total damage sponges. The perfect parry can just be a hard/extreme mode exclusive. You can just increase the time limit on the trials depending on the difficulty. None of this would be a big deal and they somehow decided to make it fucking crazy. People are overall having intensely mixed reactions to this Update, and I guaran-fucking-tee that it would be overall a "mostly positive" one if they'd just balanced it better. Yeah sure that's Reddit Sonic fans' opinions I'm talking about but Frontiers was basically MADE for them so you might as well. I have no idea why they decided to make it like this. The platforming is good. The final boss, when it's not confusing, is good. The content contained within this update does not need to be an emotional rollercoaster and I pray to whatever approximation of God is out there that they recognize this and patch the game.

I'm left very uncertain about Sonic's future right now, if this update has anything to say about it. It was easy to point at Frontiers and say "just do that but better". Because it was clear that "better" meant original stage layouts and themes, a more traditional Sonic artstyle, and just more polish overall. Now, I have no idea where they want to go with this. Multiple playable characters being among the less-offensive things in this update might be a good sign, but the implementation is strange. I'm still a little bummed they haven't yet caught onto the idea of these being options instead of necessary sequences, and that makes the skill trees and leveling even weirder. They've got good level design now, but it came at the cost of the aesthetics, and they still never implemented any meaningful attempt at changing the controls, even though every PC player has been able to do better for MONTHS.

 

Currently fighting the last trial :')

I found out from reddit that there is a 3 second parry window which quite helped me to get further in progress! So the Wyvern part goes speedier now that I know i can hold parry down around 3 sec (Easy) and the small zigzag between boss and Sonic helps to know when attack happens.

Was so close to win it

edit: Did it!

 

For posterity the Perfect Parry timings are as follows: Easy is 1.2s, Normal is 0.2, Hard is 0.13s, and Extreme is 0.06s. Quite the jump there.

 

WTF...There's something called "Battle Guidance" from the Master Koco that unlocks when you've 100%'d everything else in the update. It just tells you how to beat The End...

Did anyone mention this yet? This is hilariously stupid.

Edit:

Do you mean 0.06s for Extreme? Yikes. That is genuinely really tight.

 

Not related to the current discussion but I'm watching a compilation of all the lore dump conversations in the update and I gotta be honest none of these are as good as just hearing one of the ancients say a word sounding like "koco" that's translated as "soul". Makes a few of the conversations feel hella redundant and drawn-out.

 

They are a bit redundant, especially the ones involving Sonic. But I can excuse that since we had a whole game previous of Sonic and each of this friends having conversations. But when it's, like, Knuckles and Amy having the same kind of conversation, that's disappointing.

The highlights are as always Sage and Eggman with any of the characters.