This update is interesting to me because it mostly just highlights the things about the game that don't work. People were willing to ignore shi because the main game trended easy, something not working right rarely stopped your progress and you could mostly mash through and enjoy the (bad) story.
Now? The goal of the DLC seems to try and milk the mechanics for all their worth, but Sonic Team didn't realize the proverbial cow was more like a donkey, so we come out a little underserved, to put it lightly. I've seen more people pointing out problems I noticed on release, so I guess it's a good thing overall? Maybe now some of these flaws will be on the table for being tackled next game.
The new enemy types just speeding up attack animations and health pools to comical degrees is amateur hour shit, like they just saw that platinum games do that on higher difficulties but didn't get why or what other changes they made, so you just get a mess of unreactable animations and waves of hitboxes. Easy enough to deal with when you remember hold parry and Sonic's invincible cinematic counters exist but even when you know the "strats" these new combat challenges aren't very fun or promote much mastery. Just cheese and spam. The closest I got to a dopamine rush was remembering that you can "parry" those disc attacks away while you're comboing an enemy and wrap things up pretty quickly.
Sonic Team in their childlike approach to feedback heard you guys making fun of them for the parry mechanic but didn't go back and fix any of the bad tells and animations on the boss fights, so you're sometimes challenged to land a fame perfect parry on a boss who's body you clipped through and thus the animation you can't actually see. I've always thought these fights looked like shit to the point where it affected how fun they actually are and the strictness of the challenge just amplifies that. The first rule of a good action game is clarity, and good tells combine with a good camera to facilitate that. Sonic Frontiers has never had either of these things in the best of times.
Which leads me to my polite suggestion for the next game. I get it, Frontiers is peak, it's an excellent foundation for the next game yadda yadda I lost that fight, whatever. But if you aren't going to hire a combat designer, just chop this shit out. I don't think anyone wants to go through another six games of you guys "finding yourselves" by slowly adding features action games figured out on the PS2. Double down on the cyloop but otherwise the rest of this shit is just unnecessary. Add some flashy finishing QTEs to regular Sonic boss fights and it'll go over just as well, I promise you.
As for the positives, how about I hit you with a genuinely unpopular opinion. I kind of like the tower climbs. I like that a Sonic game was willing to push it's movement mechanics this far again. This is the most satisfied I've felt after a boost section since Unleashed. Something like this would have never been good with the still-shittastic Cyberspace controls but the main game offers just enough precision to get away with a lot of this shit. Not all of it. The homing attack will still fail at critical moments and set you back entire minutes of progress, the physics are still unreliable to the point where setpieces will straight up fail sometimes, but as far as the inflated difficulty in this DLC goes this is it at it's most successful to me. It made me wish climbing tall structures was more central to the game's identity instead of bad combat and puzzles. These would be a lot better if the base controls weren't so flimsy, but I can at least say they have the right idea here.
In general, there are pockets of good level design here that makes me think the next game might be alright if they prioritize the right things. Like, Sonic Colors levels, which would be better than where we've landed here.
This heat doesn't transfer to the other characters though. Their sections are surprisingly short, most of them control like shit because of the bugged acceleration and even leveled up their kits aren't actually finished. They don't have the tools to hang with the suped up guardians so you end up having to avoid most enemies in a bit that I wouldn't call an intentional immersive choice. Again like with Sonic there are pockets of clever movement challenges here, but the movement is a lot worse than what Sonic has to work with so it comes across as frustrating sometimes. Thankfully despite how bad Tails and Knuckles's flight/glide feel their cheese potential is as good as ever so you don't have to engage with some of this stuff.
...Still, I'll admit that my grinch heart grew a few sizes when i fired up the DLC and was walking around as Amy Rose again for the first time in almost 20 years. It shrunk again when i realized I had to grind for any hammer moves at all, but it grew again like an hour later when I got the cyclone and realize it came with free flight. Little pockets of fanservice like that make me think this will be a bigger hit with Adventure fans than it was with me.
So how about that new ending?
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Well, of all the years I've spent reading and generally enjoying Ian Flynn's books I can count the times he stuck the landing on one hand, so coming out with an uneven mess twice in a row was a possibility that shouldn't have escaped me, and yet I'm shocked. The new ending is worse than the one they had in a lot of ways. The most I can give it is that they tied it back into the Super Sonic mechanics and the spectacle is slightly better.
Super Sonic but angrier was the one pitfall Sonic Team was smart to avoid over the years, so to see the acclaimed Ian Flynn walk them right into it over the base game's smart choice to give Sage the floor is disappointing even for them. Flashy action is cool, but the writing has to support it as a foundation. Sage helping deal the final blow to The End underlined her choice to fight for what she cares about despite the odds, a change Sonic helped facilitate, hence her assisting her with the final battle.
In contrast, what exactly has changed about Sonic over the course of this journey to to justify a new form? I don't care for this game's writing on the whole but at least Tails, Knuckles and Amy had to do some soul searching. Even Eggman had to admit he cared about some shit. Sonic? Nothing. not even this DLC that's ostensibly about challenging him. The ancients give him a little grief for breaking their shit but he manages to charm them like always.
And that's the ending's biggest sin: They snub the game's most interesting character and rob her of her moment to give the least interesting ones a victory lap. They don't even let her keep the sacrifice at the end which I don't really get. We knew she was fine. It was just a way for her to show the extent of her devotion to Eggman. Now that's gone, and this is better because Hype? I don't buy it. If Sonic wants to be Demon Slayer he needs to go back and study that shit. Explosive action is cool but without character writing underpinning it it can turn into noise very quickly unless it's executed well.
Maybe I could take all this on the chin if the spectacle was worth it but the cutscene direction is still pretty lackluster. I know nobody waited all this time just to fight a suped up version of Supreme in the exact same area. The cannon setpiece was cool but I was hoping that The End would actually get like, a design?
Even the voice direction took a hit from the main game. Everyone sounds like they're literally just 40somethings talking into a mic which doesn't fit the youthful energy these characters are supposed to give off at all. I don't even get what they were going for with Amy's delivery most of the time. It's like there's ZERO direction on some of her lines. Mike Pollock continues to phone it in on Eggman's big game as well, failing to sell an important character turn for him.
All in all, I've felt that this game's tone is playing against the franchise for a while now and this update does nothing to shake that feeling off. The subdued performances this story demands doesn't play to the strengh of the characters or the actors involved, making it awkward at the best of times.
In conclusion there are some bright spots but yeah this was a dull, bloated waste of time when smaller update might have been able to cut to the heart of things better. Maybe one new character instead of three, chop out the obligation for it to be three or four hours long and thus a lot of the filler, and take a scalpel to the ending instead of a chainsaw.
As usual with these types of Sonic games the bright spots are being drowned by feature creep, making something that's a lot more fun to think about than it is to play. What if they had nailed all this shit? That would have been cool, right? It's a nice thought, but charging 60 dollars for a thought exercise stopped being cool 17 years ago. A massive update to one of these games is a chance to deliver on that promise some, but them over-committing and under-designing the damn update the same way they do the games just proves to me they don't have it in them no matter how many chances you give them.
Now? The goal of the DLC seems to try and milk the mechanics for all their worth, but Sonic Team didn't realize the proverbial cow was more like a donkey, so we come out a little underserved, to put it lightly. I've seen more people pointing out problems I noticed on release, so I guess it's a good thing overall? Maybe now some of these flaws will be on the table for being tackled next game.
The new enemy types just speeding up attack animations and health pools to comical degrees is amateur hour shit, like they just saw that platinum games do that on higher difficulties but didn't get why or what other changes they made, so you just get a mess of unreactable animations and waves of hitboxes. Easy enough to deal with when you remember hold parry and Sonic's invincible cinematic counters exist but even when you know the "strats" these new combat challenges aren't very fun or promote much mastery. Just cheese and spam. The closest I got to a dopamine rush was remembering that you can "parry" those disc attacks away while you're comboing an enemy and wrap things up pretty quickly.
Sonic Team in their childlike approach to feedback heard you guys making fun of them for the parry mechanic but didn't go back and fix any of the bad tells and animations on the boss fights, so you're sometimes challenged to land a fame perfect parry on a boss who's body you clipped through and thus the animation you can't actually see. I've always thought these fights looked like shit to the point where it affected how fun they actually are and the strictness of the challenge just amplifies that. The first rule of a good action game is clarity, and good tells combine with a good camera to facilitate that. Sonic Frontiers has never had either of these things in the best of times.
Which leads me to my polite suggestion for the next game. I get it, Frontiers is peak, it's an excellent foundation for the next game yadda yadda I lost that fight, whatever. But if you aren't going to hire a combat designer, just chop this shit out. I don't think anyone wants to go through another six games of you guys "finding yourselves" by slowly adding features action games figured out on the PS2. Double down on the cyloop but otherwise the rest of this shit is just unnecessary. Add some flashy finishing QTEs to regular Sonic boss fights and it'll go over just as well, I promise you.
As for the positives, how about I hit you with a genuinely unpopular opinion. I kind of like the tower climbs. I like that a Sonic game was willing to push it's movement mechanics this far again. This is the most satisfied I've felt after a boost section since Unleashed. Something like this would have never been good with the still-shittastic Cyberspace controls but the main game offers just enough precision to get away with a lot of this shit. Not all of it. The homing attack will still fail at critical moments and set you back entire minutes of progress, the physics are still unreliable to the point where setpieces will straight up fail sometimes, but as far as the inflated difficulty in this DLC goes this is it at it's most successful to me. It made me wish climbing tall structures was more central to the game's identity instead of bad combat and puzzles. These would be a lot better if the base controls weren't so flimsy, but I can at least say they have the right idea here.
In general, there are pockets of good level design here that makes me think the next game might be alright if they prioritize the right things. Like, Sonic Colors levels, which would be better than where we've landed here.
This heat doesn't transfer to the other characters though. Their sections are surprisingly short, most of them control like shit because of the bugged acceleration and even leveled up their kits aren't actually finished. They don't have the tools to hang with the suped up guardians so you end up having to avoid most enemies in a bit that I wouldn't call an intentional immersive choice. Again like with Sonic there are pockets of clever movement challenges here, but the movement is a lot worse than what Sonic has to work with so it comes across as frustrating sometimes. Thankfully despite how bad Tails and Knuckles's flight/glide feel their cheese potential is as good as ever so you don't have to engage with some of this stuff.
...Still, I'll admit that my grinch heart grew a few sizes when i fired up the DLC and was walking around as Amy Rose again for the first time in almost 20 years. It shrunk again when i realized I had to grind for any hammer moves at all, but it grew again like an hour later when I got the cyclone and realize it came with free flight. Little pockets of fanservice like that make me think this will be a bigger hit with Adventure fans than it was with me.
So how about that new ending?
Hide contents
Well, of all the years I've spent reading and generally enjoying Ian Flynn's books I can count the times he stuck the landing on one hand, so coming out with an uneven mess twice in a row was a possibility that shouldn't have escaped me, and yet I'm shocked. The new ending is worse than the one they had in a lot of ways. The most I can give it is that they tied it back into the Super Sonic mechanics and the spectacle is slightly better.
Super Sonic but angrier was the one pitfall Sonic Team was smart to avoid over the years, so to see the acclaimed Ian Flynn walk them right into it over the base game's smart choice to give Sage the floor is disappointing even for them. Flashy action is cool, but the writing has to support it as a foundation. Sage helping deal the final blow to The End underlined her choice to fight for what she cares about despite the odds, a change Sonic helped facilitate, hence her assisting her with the final battle.
In contrast, what exactly has changed about Sonic over the course of this journey to to justify a new form? I don't care for this game's writing on the whole but at least Tails, Knuckles and Amy had to do some soul searching. Even Eggman had to admit he cared about some shit. Sonic? Nothing. not even this DLC that's ostensibly about challenging him. The ancients give him a little grief for breaking their shit but he manages to charm them like always.
And that's the ending's biggest sin: They snub the game's most interesting character and rob her of her moment to give the least interesting ones a victory lap. They don't even let her keep the sacrifice at the end which I don't really get. We knew she was fine. It was just a way for her to show the extent of her devotion to Eggman. Now that's gone, and this is better because Hype? I don't buy it. If Sonic wants to be Demon Slayer he needs to go back and study that shit. Explosive action is cool but without character writing underpinning it it can turn into noise very quickly unless it's executed well.
Maybe I could take all this on the chin if the spectacle was worth it but the cutscene direction is still pretty lackluster. I know nobody waited all this time just to fight a suped up version of Supreme in the exact same area. The cannon setpiece was cool but I was hoping that The End would actually get like, a design?
Even the voice direction took a hit from the main game. Everyone sounds like they're literally just 40somethings talking into a mic which doesn't fit the youthful energy these characters are supposed to give off at all. I don't even get what they were going for with Amy's delivery most of the time. It's like there's ZERO direction on some of her lines. Mike Pollock continues to phone it in on Eggman's big game as well, failing to sell an important character turn for him.
All in all, I've felt that this game's tone is playing against the franchise for a while now and this update does nothing to shake that feeling off. The subdued performances this story demands doesn't play to the strengh of the characters or the actors involved, making it awkward at the best of times.
In conclusion there are some bright spots but yeah this was a dull, bloated waste of time when smaller update might have been able to cut to the heart of things better. Maybe one new character instead of three, chop out the obligation for it to be three or four hours long and thus a lot of the filler, and take a scalpel to the ending instead of a chainsaw.
As usual with these types of Sonic games the bright spots are being drowned by feature creep, making something that's a lot more fun to think about than it is to play. What if they had nailed all this shit? That would have been cool, right? It's a nice thought, but charging 60 dollars for a thought exercise stopped being cool 17 years ago. A massive update to one of these games is a chance to deliver on that promise some, but them over-committing and under-designing the damn update the same way they do the games just proves to me they don't have it in them no matter how many chances you give them.