I declared that I will make September, my birthday month, a month playing important games on my backlog I've been dying to play. Video games I know I will rate highly and greatly enjoy. I was able to pull that off, to some extent, but what a shame this incredible month of mine had to end with a whimper. Sonic Frontiers was my game of the year for 2022. To say I am disappointed in this DLC is a massive understatement.

What the fuck happened at Sonic Team this past year that moved them to make this vile, frustrating content update that convinced me to think less of Sonic Frontiers as a whole. I appreciate the effort to make this last update a challenging experience for all players. I really do! I found most of the trial towers and cyberspace levels to be fun! The Cyberspace levels in particular has me excited for what's to come in Sonic Team's 3D level design. Branching paths and precise platforming to access shortcuts are what I expect a 3D Sonic level to feature. Rumors spread about a remake of Sonic Adventure, and I am confident that Sonic Team is able to pull that off. Sorta. Not really. Not at all actually. In fact, I am very, very worried!

The other 90% of the update fucking reeks. Bullshit trials given by the Kocos on top of Ubisoft towers where falling once just breaks the whole fucking climb where some mechanics restart to help you try again but some others straight up don't, requiring a full save reload so that you're not teetering on the edge of platforms where the slightest miss input can send Sonic flying down towards the ground. Remember that you can Drop Dash? No? Well, you fucking will when you accidentally hold the jump button for too long so when you carefully land on a platform, Sonic just boosts his dumbass straight off. Finally when you reach the top you're either greeted with the most frustrating challenge that'll make you tear the sticks off the controller or a braindead, easy parry trial that you wish appeared more often. Until the game takes away your normal parry and forces you to perfect parry through an entire boss rush with essentially a fucking timer. Perfect parries are garbage and I swear, do not work. Hit detection and animation problems already infested the base game, therefore introducing a perfect parry mechanic right at the end of a whole-ass game where parry timing didn't matter at all is insanity. Who even gives a shit about the other playable characters when you barely have any time with them at all? Hell, all three new characters are able to glide over puzzles making their whole gameplay a snooze-fest. Nothing much to say there. I wish they were playable more often in other Sonic games, that's all I guess. Final boss was pretty cool but still filled with awkward jank.

Highly do not recommend trying this out. Watch the cutscenes on YouTube instead. What a shitter. I'm going to bed.

I ain't finished it yet but Sonic Team can't cook. The open world additions are fine and dandy but the Koco Trials and new Cyberspace levels are horribly designed. They're not even hard, just abysmal and embarrassing.

I think the cherry on top of this steaming pile of shit is that they make you do the "run up" before every Titan boss. Meaning, instead of actually fighting the boss. You're wasting 5 minutes doing nothing but running in a straight line before you can actually fight it such as in the case of Wyvern. Oh and if you lose this bullshit boss rush? Have fun wasting 5 minutes all over again!!!

After finishing this, can safely say that final boss was not worth the entire slog of this update. The open world additions, new playable characters, and music are positives but everything else is 🚮

No Sonic Team, reusing Ouranos Island and slapping a bunch of blocks all over the place while making me play as the absolute worst versions of Amy, Knuckles and Tails does not count as a new DLC. I don't even care for the revamped final boss and "fixed" story, the fact that the new playable characters control as badly as they do on a game of this scale is downright insulting and i refuse to give this any more of my time. They figured how to make these guys fun to control all the way back in 1998 and they still find NEW and INNOVATIVE ways to fuck them up. THAT'S impressive.

Some good characters but my god is this game padded to a ridiculous extent. For a 40 hr game, it's about 20 hrs too long.

Side quests are filler with overly verbose dialogue in need of cutting and editing that adds very little to the experience. They are 90% of the time fetch quests that feel plucked out of an MMO.

The combat is fine, but it goes nowhere. There is no real progression and the few attacks you have are not enough to carry the repetitive combinations of enemies. What starts off fun quickly becomes a slog.

The story is fun initially and hooks you with its medieval political drama but sort of falls apart in the second and third acts as it becomes a standard JRPG 'let's all kill God' adventure and forgets pretty much everything about the world its been building for the last 20 hours.

Technically, the game is a mixed bag. It looks great (apart from the stiff character animations), but stutters a lot even in PS5 performance mode. There are no real game-breaking bugs though.

This is my first Final Fantasy game, so I have no real insight into the franchise, but I think I would probably prefer the turn-based games. The game is basically straddled between action and RPG and the RPG elements are so light they might as well not exist.