After finishing Sonic Frontiers, I was ready to back up over it, peel out, and leave it in the rear-view. I was done, I was out, I had no obligation to play its insipid DLC much less touch the case, except to move it out of the way for RoboCop: Rogue City, a proper damn video game.

But The Final Horizon, Sonic Frontiers' free story DLC, is a strange thing. Complaints about its difficulty and lackluster implementation of Sonic's friends, who hasn't been playable since Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), are common despite its current 3.0 average. Video guides often depict gameplay set to easy mode, and the first walkthrough I pulled up for the Master Koco Trial - an apparently common point of frustration - leads by calling it "unfairly difficult". I know what you're thinking, Sonic Team fumbling the ball? How could that be!

All this has left me with a nagging curiosity, a growing itch on my back that can only be satisfied by reinstalling Sonic Frontiers and experiencing The Final Horizon first hand. I'm a weak man, a cowardly little creature, and so I found myself sitting in front of Sonic Frontiers' title screen, basking in its stupid weepy music yet again.

Before getting into The Final Horizon, let's briefly talk about the state of Sonic Frontiers a year out from release. Loading up the game hits you with a barrage of notifications about what's changed, including adjustable sliders for speed (as always, sliders go to the right), other little tweaks, and the inclusion of birthday bonuses. I'm not a fan of how obtrusive the birthday UI is, but I do like that you can run around and collect tracks from past Sonic games to put into a playlist. Being able to listen to Palmtree Panic instead of the forgettable noise that comprises Frontiers' soundtrack is a marked improvement, and it's nice that I can put on the theme to the Mystic Ruins considering this game still has the pop-in of a Dreamcast title.

Poor draw distancing was already a major problem in the base game, severely impacting the readability of the open zones and often requiring the player to slowly trace geometry as it draws in. The problem only becomes worse in The Final Horizon as Tails, Amy, and Knuckles are all built around verticality, resulting in objective markers being placed far higher or further outside the island's bounds. This clip of me staring at an objective hovering over the middle of the fucking ocean is a perfect distillation of the Frontiers experience, a riddle solved only by remembering what game you're playing.

I don't care much for Donkey Kong 64's roundabout level design and segmentation of collectables and have been told this might pre-dispose me against collectathons. Well maybe there's a nugget of truth there, because The Final Horizon veers into DK64 territory, segmenting its collectables between Sonic's friends, resulting in the player frequently running by color-coded Koco that cannot be interacted with unless you're playing as the corresponding character, who until the end game is likely locked for story reasons. If anything, I think The Final Horizon should've gone whole hog here, litter the environment with color-coded rings, I might respect it more. Not enough non-euclidian design here, if you ask me!

Sonic's friends just aren't fun to play as, either. Tails' flight, Knuckles' glide, and Amy's Tarot Card Goobercycle all have an initiation delay that makes them feel lousy to jump into, and I don't even know what Amy's cycle is meant to offer considering her faster spindash makes it redundant. Knuckles' climbing feels like maneuvering a tank as 'forward' inputs only seem to register in the direction the camera is facing, resulting in him feeling about as awkward to control as he was in Sonic 2006; his glide is incredibly stiff to the point of near uselessness, too. I am not kidding when I say all of these characters played better in Sonic Adventure, though you can make use of some of their abilities to bypass platforming sections to great effect. I'd usually claw my way up to a collectable and then find that I was high enough to simply fly, glide, or hover-jump over to one or two more without needing to actually platform my way through another obstacle course, and frankly I see that as a positive.

In fact, Final Horizon does address a pretty big complaint I had about the base game automating too many of its platforming sequences. The training wheels have been completely blown off the bike - along with my legs - and this is kind of a double-edged sword. You have to actually engage with the game now, and I think that's where a lot of the perceived difficulty is coming from, especially with the trial towers. Sonic fans being asked to actually play their game instead of drinking in the spectacle as it's played for them, you love to see it happen.

Not that my snide, cynical take should rob anyone of their criticisms about Final Horizon's difficulty, but I think the root of the problem is that Sonic just doesn't control well and is unsuited to platforming in an environment that isn't open or which requires precision. There's a reason Sonic Team chose to affix the player and guide them through platforming challenges, and I believe Final Horizon lays bare why.

I didn't have any trouble with the combat trials and in fact found them to be absurdly easy even on hard mode, but the Master Koco Trial is one of the worst boss rushes I've ever played. I didn't get into it much in my review of the base game, but I think Super Sonic fights are usually the weakest part of any Sonic title, and the fact that all of Frontiers' major bosses are modeled as such made me despise them. So needing to go through them back-to-back, platforming sequences, unskippable cutscenes and all, was just tiresome. You need to perfect parry each boss and trap them in a stunlock using your cyloop which kinda feels like not the way you're supposed to defeat them, but it's certainly the most efficient method. Shoutouts to Knight killing me during the final quick time event because a tiny part of my thumb barely touched the X button enough to register an input, and that's an auto-fail for the entire boss rush. Very cool!

It was about at this point I started to wish Sonic was a Konami franchise, because at least they would've demoted Iizuka to parking attendant years ago.

All of this culminates in a bare-knuckle battle against Sonic's longest, greatest, most deadly adversary: an uncooperative 3D camera. I love to spend the majority of a boss fight requiring perfect parries stuck behind Super Mario 64 trees. At least you get a new Super Sonic form, despite Iizuka refusing to so much as utter the words "Hyper Sonic" in fear that he'd somehow introduce "power creep" to the series, which you might note is literally an insane thing to believe. Mr. Egg Person does finally get a happy ending as he's reunited with his precious daughter, a note that is entirely too sentimental and undeserved for his character. This is a man whose previous years long diabolical plan was to build an amusement park. But, you know, like an evil amusement park, which is bad. I think if Ian Flynn writes hoaky tripe like this regularly then he's just as poor at what he does as Ken Penders, albeit less interestingly so.

I remember people saying that Sonic Frontiers may have issues but it laid out a promising groundwork for things to come. I also remember questioning the wisdom in that and guess what, they followed it up with this.