I had a bit of trepidation about this DLC when I first heard my friends’ reactions to it being extremely janky and a little overtuned, but I had fun with it for the most part! Honestly the thing that kinda bummed me out about not being able to finish it because I’m a baby who’s bad at video games was that I actually genuinely enjoyed messing around with the non-Sonic characters’ weird movement options, and I was kind of excited to maybe mess around with them in the endgame to fill out their skill trees and whatnot. Tails is my favorite to play as, as usual, but I had a surprisingly fun time with Amy (surprising considering her movement options usually aren’t quite as fun for me) and I still enjoyed Knuckles. They did each have their own janky edges to them that made some of their sections a little frustrating, but there’s something about getting to skip some sort of meticulously crafted platforming challenge because you happened to glide right over where you could drop down to it.
There’s definitely a weird edge to the difficulty, though. The minibosses are ridiculously overtuned to the point where I barely saw health bars going down even with Sonic at max power, but fortunately none of them were mandatory. “If it sucks, hit the bricks” is the name of the game, honestly, and I kind of appreciate that you can just go full Da Share Zone when it comes to the content you do or don’t want to do… for the most part.
I appreciated that you didn’t have to do seriously crappy minigames like the Koko herding that was the bane of my main game experience, but uhhh. Instead you had to do combat challenges, which were a little… dubiously balanced? They gave you nine minutes to fight a ninja miniboss that goes down in like thirty seconds but the snake trial with the shield enemies was so down to the wire. I wasn’t really good at the parry method so I did manage to do it with the cyloop method, but I can’t say it was good or fun… and then the final trial is just bizarrely hard. Like I’m sure it’s probably easy for some people who are really good at the combat but a boss rush where you play as Super Sonic and your ring amount counts down from 400 and the amount carries over between the boss fights is uh. Uhhh. Hmmm. I only played one cyberspace stage but I hear they’re kind of buckwild and the one I did play was nuts.
Anyway because the boss rush defeated me I watched the ending on youtube and it was fucking sick. I’m not ashamed to say I think it’s cool as hell. Cringe is dead, Sonic is the hypest anime of all time, I love this shit.
Honestly I guess you could say that this DLC encapsulated the things I liked most and least about Frontiers itself and just kind of amped it up in both directions? I loved exploring the island and just… playing, looking for secrets, using my movement options, Going Fast, etc., and I loved the character writing. I wish I’d gotten to see more of the conversations but again, that… kind of… requires beating the fifth trial, apparently, and ho boy I do not want to deal with that! And… yeah, the combat’s worse, and it even makes me kind of dislike the Super Sonic boss fights that I actually liked in the main game by making you do a boss rush with a bunch of unfun restrictions. Again, I’m sure it’s fun for some people, but it sure ain’t fun for me! I hate that something I was having a good time with had to end on such a sour note, but I’d rather move on to greener pastures instead of banging my head off of something I’m ultimately just going to find really frustrating.
Oh yeah I dipped my toes into the Sonic’s Birthday DLC alongside this and it’s cute. The alternate HUD is a little much on the eyes but I think the party hats and the reskin of the islands are funny as hell. I did not get many of the Big Kokos or S-Rank many of the action chain challenges. I appreciate that they’re there for the people who want it but it’s not for me. I did enjoy spin dash immensely in Final Horizon, it went so so so fast and therefore was fun as fuck.
There’s definitely a weird edge to the difficulty, though. The minibosses are ridiculously overtuned to the point where I barely saw health bars going down even with Sonic at max power, but fortunately none of them were mandatory. “If it sucks, hit the bricks” is the name of the game, honestly, and I kind of appreciate that you can just go full Da Share Zone when it comes to the content you do or don’t want to do… for the most part.
I appreciated that you didn’t have to do seriously crappy minigames like the Koko herding that was the bane of my main game experience, but uhhh. Instead you had to do combat challenges, which were a little… dubiously balanced? They gave you nine minutes to fight a ninja miniboss that goes down in like thirty seconds but the snake trial with the shield enemies was so down to the wire. I wasn’t really good at the parry method so I did manage to do it with the cyloop method, but I can’t say it was good or fun… and then the final trial is just bizarrely hard. Like I’m sure it’s probably easy for some people who are really good at the combat but a boss rush where you play as Super Sonic and your ring amount counts down from 400 and the amount carries over between the boss fights is uh. Uhhh. Hmmm. I only played one cyberspace stage but I hear they’re kind of buckwild and the one I did play was nuts.
Anyway because the boss rush defeated me I watched the ending on youtube and it was fucking sick. I’m not ashamed to say I think it’s cool as hell. Cringe is dead, Sonic is the hypest anime of all time, I love this shit.
Honestly I guess you could say that this DLC encapsulated the things I liked most and least about Frontiers itself and just kind of amped it up in both directions? I loved exploring the island and just… playing, looking for secrets, using my movement options, Going Fast, etc., and I loved the character writing. I wish I’d gotten to see more of the conversations but again, that… kind of… requires beating the fifth trial, apparently, and ho boy I do not want to deal with that! And… yeah, the combat’s worse, and it even makes me kind of dislike the Super Sonic boss fights that I actually liked in the main game by making you do a boss rush with a bunch of unfun restrictions. Again, I’m sure it’s fun for some people, but it sure ain’t fun for me! I hate that something I was having a good time with had to end on such a sour note, but I’d rather move on to greener pastures instead of banging my head off of something I’m ultimately just going to find really frustrating.
Oh yeah I dipped my toes into the Sonic’s Birthday DLC alongside this and it’s cute. The alternate HUD is a little much on the eyes but I think the party hats and the reskin of the islands are funny as hell. I did not get many of the Big Kokos or S-Rank many of the action chain challenges. I appreciate that they’re there for the people who want it but it’s not for me. I did enjoy spin dash immensely in Final Horizon, it went so so so fast and therefore was fun as fuck.