Brief recap on my feelings regarding the base game of Frontiers (www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/560239/). Despite its jank and extraneous systems like stats and a skill tree, I liked it and fondly think back on how distinct an experience it felt. I liked that we were getting a weightier plot in a Sonic game for the first time in a long time that feels aware of how much fans spent time with these characters over the decades, and an open world that gave players numerous directions and microchallenges to quickly jaunt between. Elements like combat and the Cyberspace stages weren’t very deep but they added variety as quick segways outside of the open world exploration to keep the experience fresh despite its repetitive core structure. They each had their moments; combat shining in the more Sonic Adventure-esque boss encounters and Cyberspace shined when you could properly plan movement across the stages but neither were pushed that hard over the run. The first two additional updates bringing legacy Sonic songs to find in the worlds, high score challenges and most importantly a spin dash elevated the exploration and focus on world movement to a satisfying degree; Cyberspace practically got a new layer with how fast you were. So, I was looking forward to how the last update would continue to play with the foundation.

With that being the case, oh boy is this update split in quality. There’s stuff that’s incredibly fun to play around with and exciting to imagine expansions for, and then there’s stuff I seriously question what was going on with putting Frontiers’s existing game systems up to the task, sometimes in the same place! It’s wild. Thinking more about what the update means for Sonic’s future instead just what’s here as a free expansion to an already released game, I’m more positive than most on here but it more than ever highlights the biggest strengths and weaknesses that exist in Frontiers’s current foundation.

One of the most attention-grabbing points I’ve seen going around is just how ludicrously difficult this update apparently is, like the game suddenly turned into Kaizo Frontiers or The Lost Levels or something like that due to its challenging tower climbs and trials attached to them. I’ll be honest though, while a few can be challenging the only tower that annoyed me with it was Tower 2 because part of it required nudging Sonic very slightly with the analog stick to balance on the narrow tops of platforms which is the opposite of speed. You had boxes on your first go to propel you up but they wouldn’t respawn upon a fall off, forcing players to inch their way forward if they fall below even once
(Update: This was fixed in a patch to make the pink blocks reappear if you cause them to despawn so you no longer have to incur a load screen, neat).
It’s also the only one that had a challenge involving thinking of enemy behavior in a specific way beyond being able to tank hits and spamming retaliation moves so while initially frustrating getting it down was fairly satisfying, not unlike a Devil May Cry secret mission.

There’s been quite a few comparisons made to KH3’s Re:MIND DLC. While weighed down by charging $30 compared to this being free, they’re both very conceptual addons that feed into stuff the fans wanted and pushed the game to its limits. The big difference though is that KH3’s main verb was its combat system and the fanbase was more than willing to get smacked in the face by superbosses even if game journalists weren’t. The reason Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix went on to be seen as the peak of the series for at least a decade was because of its superboss challenges. Fans adored Lingering Will and the Data Organization and hoped for something like that for years to fairly test their meddle after subsequent games dropped the ball there. KH3 had some clunk when it first launched, but the updates made a lot of Sora’s varied attacks feel smoother and more kinetic while the extra bosses genuinely topped what Kingdom Hearts II’s battles had to offer in terms of spectacle, music and even challenge while still being fair. The fanbase was prepared and even excited to be walloped.

Meanwhile, Sonic games have been incredibly easy for the past 14 years, so I can believe a lot of the fanbase was just lulled into thinking they never would test players meddle to this extent and got skill issued from most of the stuff here, especially with the option to switch to Easy Mode alleviating a lot of it (Extreme is a bad difficulty but that’s independent of this expansion). But the bigger issue in Frontiers specifically is that the combat worked best as a drive by occurrence to occasionally break up exploration and battle phases, not an actual system. The first, third and fourth challenges are all a cakewalk if you can just tank the hits and mash away with the canned animations. The fifth and final trial prior to the new final boss is to fight the first three bosses with only 400 Rings, Level 1 attack and a practically frame perfect parry on anything besides Easy Mode and to me this very thoroughly missed the point on one of the base game’s most beloved components.

In the base game of Frontiers, the first three Titan fights were the culmination of an entire island of exploration. Sage threatened you with the might of one at the start of each island, Sonic was on the back foot trying to get away from them, and the island progressed as Sonic collected Chaos Emeralds, helped reassure his friends, whilst the island music grew intense and bombastic, leading into the explosive action, cinematic moments with hard af metal vocals as payoff for the gradually building mundanity before. They were a surprisingly great example of setup and payoff communicated through all aspects of the game working in harmony.

In this, your incredibly tight timer means it’s harder to enjoy the spectacle and instead you must think about which interchangeable move deals damage the fastest while watching the same cinematic animations over and over for every new attempt. Getting up to Wyvern’s level once in the base game was epic. Doing it multiple times when retrying gets very tedious and stale very fast as you hear the same lyrics and see the same animations again and again. Before even battling Knight he jankily spins around and spawns a quick spike shield to knock you down. Not too bad in the base game since you’d likely increased your rings plenty for protection at that point but in this challenge it’s a death sentence since there’s no shot you’ll have enough rings left after taking a hit there. Thus, sending you to do the first two battles again just to get back there. It’s the one mandatory portion of the DLC I would call outright bad and seriously question how much playtesting it got.
(This ALSO got patched to make the challenge more fair and less tedious, tho not sure how it affects difficulty levels other than Easy Mode, your get out of jail free card is at least more easy to grab at the door).

The alternate ending in Frontiers is just that; an alternate ending. The plot of this scenario more thoroughly carries tension compared to the entirety of the final island in the base game, and if you didn’t like the original ending bc it didn’t feel epic enough compared to games like Sonic Adventure 2 or Unleashed, here you go. There’s some sick soul stuff going on here if you’re willing to deal with a camera constantly getting stuck on trees, a finnicky targeting reticle and adjusting to a much stricter parry (less strict post the December 6th patch), but it does fundamentally alter the mood of Frontiers’s final moments to something closer to most prior 3D Sonics. One worry I had going in was that this ending would effectively patch out the original ending invalidating anyone who liked that conclusion but no. It’s contextually presented as another choice Sage could have suggested before heading into the base game’s final battle. In that regard, this would’ve best fit as a dialogue option right after clearing Rhea, but I can also imagine it would be too much to ask players to create new saves just to get back there when most people interested in this have clear files.

The main passion and thought I see in this update in regard to the future went toward the three new characters and the Cyberspace stages, funny enough.

Amy’s pretty fun to run around with in this game and if there's anything I'll go back to beside the Cyberspace challenges it's playing as her. Some people wish she used her hammer more often than her Tarot cards, but looking at her kit from a functional perspective I appreciate what was done with her here. Giving her the highest basic jump of the cast is a great way to differentiate her from the rest and tie into her Adventure 1 and Rise of Lyric movesets, without a doubt the biggest influences here. Once you unlock them it’s fun to bounce around for insane height as she flips around in the air to do a short hover that feels pretty smooth. She also has a cute variation on the multihoming attack from Lost World which was neat to see from an animation/speed perspective, as well as a more seamless variant on her hammer spin move from Sonic Adventure 1. It helps too that Amy is the most similar to Sonic at her core among the three new characters so her moves largely feel seamless in Frontiers’s foundation with a specific focus on vertical height. Honestly, Peak 3D Amy.

Tails takes a bit to get used to. He’s the only one of the cast with no homing attack, instead having a projectile as a weapon and his flight working like an initial horizontal motion followed by a big jump. I like how in classic Tails fashion you can easily kiss the level design goodbye hopping in his Sonic Adventure 2 plane I was genuinely shocked they brought back here. The plane replacing his boost can be annoying at max rings if you just want to get more speed while grounded since there’s still no option to turn skills off but you can unlock a spin dash so it isn’t too bad if you get him to that point. Any moment where you need to jump on a spring is questionable given the lack of homing, but it is compensating for Tails being the only character to consistently hold air position if you want him to. I could see him working in the future if speed was handed to him more by the environment or using his laser cannons were faster but there’s a foundation to do so and challenges playing to his uniqueness.

Knuckles. . . really needs more work. Gliding and attacking isn’t close to as seamless as it was back in Sonic Adventure 2 twenty-two years ago, with a second delay every time you start a glide and stopping in the air before doing a slower divebomb, compared to SA2’s quick and instantaneous drop. Even gliding itself is initially stiff to get used to, not nearly as bad as 06 Knuckles since the downward arc is more natural and you can reliably jump off the walls, but something you need to get used to.
(Update: A recent patch made Knuckles’s glide turning a lot less stiff than it once was on top of removing the second delay when pressing the jump button which is well appreciated. But you still can’t swap characters without going to one spot on the map over and over, somehow).

He’s saved by the actual challenges themselves, testing the player to glide carefully and think about wall climb travel. His skill tree has some fitting quirks but nothing to fit the enemies on the island at all with their overtuned speed and crazy beefy health bars. The fact that even HIS moveset, for the guy known for being the muscle of the group, barely attempts to make combat interesting or exciting makes me wonder if Sonic Team even wants the combat experiment to continue.
(Update: Strength parameters have been adjusted so leveling actually means more, but giving the characters stats at all was still a bad idea, even thought this about Sonic in the base game).

Still, I hope not; the fun of base Frontiers and even this expansion was using the various character abilities to seamlessly explore, not stopping for combat over a long period nudged by mostly vestigial stats.

But the Cyberspace stages, surprisingly, are a real highlight and the biggest straight up BUFF over the base game. In the base game, Cyberspace levels could often be fully 2D, not being particularly fast. The levels were very short and even with multiple objectives including a ring count check, time and Red Ring collecting a lot of them were one and dones. There were only two stages that changed up the gameplay and one of them (drifting) worked terribly without evolving on a base mechanic. Now, introducing Sonic’s sprawliest 3D only level design since Sonic 06, objectives that require exploring the stages, gimmicks that complement speed in interesting ways and game design built around speed tech like your insane spindash and magnet dashing. I really hope we see more level designs along these lines in the future because I liked every single one I attempted. The biggest issue here is that by the very nature of exploring you’re never incentivized to go to any of them. If you’ve been Cylooping the various glowing ground spots as the characters, you’ll get more than enough Lookout Koco to never even think about trying these. And sure, you COULD get vault keys in the original game from Big the Cat, but that was a choice to avoid exploration and use currency in a specific way, not a consequence of being curious. But I’m glad the team realized the inherent potential these could have as a side order to the main game and I hope this is where they expand on particularly, perhaps even incorporating aspects of this design into the maps themselves.

Overall, this update was perfectly acceptable and carried by its fun character movement, new level/world designs, and general fact that it is free, but I feel like certain aspects, such as the high difficulty outside of Easy Mode, or the incredibly poorly thought out fifth trial are VERY wrongly seen by some as being a transfer into the next game. Sonic Frontiers being in the position that it is would only be this hard when it’s feeding into the existing audience playing the game months after launch, not the general gaming public buying it for the first time after seeing reviews from major publications. I hope the focus on more sprawling sequence breaky level design remains alongside the varied methods for traversal and alternate characters in dense worlds more in Sonic’s typical vibrant art style for the next game’s tone and I’ll look forward to what modders can accomplish with the new toys they were given to play with in the meantime.

As is often the case, the music hit pretty hard. The new Final Boss theme is much more bombastic than the version in the base game and is pretty in line with the hyper anime energy Sonic used to have, the chapter themes for each of the main characters can get repetitive but are pretty atmospheric, the Cyberspace remixes are really rad and more intense to fit with the crazier stage layouts, and the particular theme that plays when you first switch back to Sonic, excellent stuff right there. With that in mind. . .

For the love of god Sonic Team, P L E A S E, PLEASE fix the pop-in for the next game! It’s more jarring here than in the base game because the new characters have some form of flight. Switch 2 is on the horizon so make the mandatory Nintendo representation only be on that platform. We don’t need the PS5 game held back by its Switch limitations any further when this style of game could look exciting to explore when so many platforms and objects aren’t appearing right in your face the moment you approach them.