Board 8 > Sonic Frontiers: The Final Frontier Free DLC out today

(+) Yeah! (+)

Sounds like it might be fun if you liked the original game. Surprised by how expansive the move selection for Amy, Tails, and Knuckles are. They really seem distinct. They might have a final boss that isn't terrible too!

https://youtu.be/rftdA_pA8co?si=-OcoDE0j2rq4Bpyi

Edit: It's actually called the Final Horizon but I can't edit it. I'm sorry Mr. Hedgehog.

Heck yeah

Gonna play it when I get home after finishing up finding all the medals on the final island for the crown.

Wait did they add a crown for collecting all the medals or something? Because I went out of my way to do that on launch for no special reward. lol

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

Wait did they add a crown for collecting all the medals or something? Because I went out of my way to do that on launch for no special reward. lol

Apparently in one of the content patches they added super platform challenges and action chain trials along with collectible music. If you complete all of those plus everything else on the island (including nabbing every single world collectible on a given island) the island gets a crown mark for 100% completion. You get a cosmetic for getting a crown mark on all the islands.

S ranking all the Action Trials also unlocks spin dash (different from that wonky air one) which is fucking amazing

Yo I beat the final boss but it didn't save my progress for some reason. Lol so I have to beat this shitty moon again.

You can just switch the difficulty off hard and skip the moon phase

Well, I beat it again and made sure to save and got my little star next to my save file. Weird that it still tells me to get the last emerald still.

I don't think the DLC is available yet so I guess I'll do something else!

It's available, I'm downloading it now

Right after I relinquished control of the TV. Alas.

Started and jeez they really went all in on this, giving Amy and I presume the others their own entire skill trees >_>

it's so wild all this content was free

What the flying FUCK is this difficulty spike holy shit. The towers were brutal and this Master King trial is fucking absurd

This DLC is far more than I was ever expecting out of it. It seemed like they were seriously going to attempt a Sonic Adventure 3 style with the next game with how they had all the characters talking, and this feels like a major prototype for it. Overall, the ideas are all there to make a system like that work. An open world game where you have different objectives for different characters. I really dig it.

But oh my god the camera just has a fucking shit fit with Knuckles trying to climb up a lot of things. I tried to beat Ghost with him and it was just maddeningly difficult ONLY because the camera was just losing its mind and making my controls wonky while I tried to climb with him. So frustrating.

But I'm enjoying myself so far for the most part.

Advice for the last stretch of last trial and boss:

For last trial, after gaining the necessary meter, instant cyloop into stomp and loop kick spam is your best friend.
For final boss you need to smack his head once and then sidestep to be able to target the thing you actually need to hit because it doesn't tell you how / the targeting is super jank.

Pretty fun aside from the difficulty going into out of nowhere "fuck you" mode. Obviously there are a lot of things they need to work out, but you can tell this is partly them getting their feet wet again for an Adventure esque title if not Adventure 3.

Goddamn, this DLC is hard and not in a good way. Two towers down and most of it is just fighting the controls and camera. I really, really wish you could turn off Sonic doing aerial tricks, they are so annoying when you're trying to position yourself in the air above a platform...

Also, weird choice to let you play as Amy, Knuckles and Tails for, like 45 minutes each and then switch to Sonic with no way to switch back until, seemingly, you're done with these goddamn towers.

Hmm, consensus from Frontiers fans seems to be that this is pretty bad? Maybe it'll get fixed with patches.

Yeeeeah I'm waiting for the patch. lol

Like there's a ton to love here, and they added a lot more content than I think anyone expected. However, it feels like a bit more playtesting needed made, and it's kind of wild it got here in this state.

This absolutely feels like it was made as a prototype for the next game where you get to play as more than just Sonic. It's hard to be too upset at it though, because it's a free update that they never needed to give us. But it's a bit disappointing that it's content I want to love, but I don't know that I'm willing to go through it while it's in this state.

It's a weird thing. I got this distinct feeling playing the main game that there had been a lot of compromise to make the game not unfun - where they had made things one way, playtested it and found it was a chore to play, but couldn't rework it for whatever reason, so had to just tone it down until it at least wasn't unenjoyable. Stuff like the parry being infinite, having a dozen combat abilities despite most enemies being easy to fight and dying quickly, almost all of the open world challenges being super simple and having a much longer timer than necessary, the entire fishing minigame negating most of the item hunting, etc.

This DLC seems to have forgotten all of that and is probably a lot closer to what the main game was originally like: much more punishing platforming without any checkpoints and more difficult combat requiring skillful use of your abilities. The problem is, this game, like all 3D Sonic games, is still super janky, so that kinda stuff doesn't work properly and rather than challenging, is just frustrating.

Maybe this DLC being free is Sonic Team testing the waters to see how much fans like this level of difficulty, so they can calibrate the next one better?

By the way, the Perfect Parry they added to the game is actually a 0.12 second window. Which is absolutely insane and I don't know how they let that happen. And it's necessary to beat the master challenges. But people learned you can cheese it by parrying, pausing the game, then unpausing and parrying it again and repeat.

Like that thing I don't understand how you let that get past testing. It's a game for children. Lol

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

But people learned you can cheese it by parrying, pausing the game, then unpausing and parrying it again and repeat.

Sounds familiar.

Oh and those challenges with the blue squares can go fuck themselves.

Alright, Towers 3 and 5 were super easy, Tower 4 sucked about as much as the first one, but it's all rails, so that's expected.

As for combat trials, 3 and 4 were super, super easy compared to 1 and 2 and then fuckin' Master King Koco shows up. Managed to get Giganto down to sub-50 rings on Hard, but I just can't get the parry timing right consistently enough on Wyvern's stage two attacks. Ugh, I really don't want to have to turn down the difficulty after coming this far...

JackMan posted...

Alright, Towers 3 and 5 were super easy, Tower 4 sucked about as much as the first one, but it's all rails, so that's expected.

As for combat trials, 3 and 4 were super, super easy compared to 1 and 2 and then fuckin' Master King Koco shows up. Managed to get Giganto down to sub-50 rings on Hard, but I just can't get the parry timing right consistently enough on Wyvern's stage two attacks. Ugh, I really don't want to have to turn down the difficulty after coming this far...

Trust me you are better off just setting Master King trial to easy where the perfect parries are still tough but sensible. Normal-Hard mode perfect parries are just broken and it becomes especially nonsensical with Wyvern missile hell when you still got Knight left to go.

Yeah I watched a video on the DLC today and about 7 minutes of it was spent ranting about the Wyvern fight

The missiles are fine, I can parry those easy, it's the claw attacks I'm struggling with. I can get the first one maybe 1/4 of the time, but then haven't succeeded getting the second one yet. Annoying, because I just need to get that and I think I can blitz its second form.

It honestly wouldn't be so bad if it was just the combat part of the boss and the cutscenes were all skippable, but the fact you have to do the run up each time too is just terrible game design.

The problem with the missiles especially in phase 2 is that sometimes it will come at you from off screen right on top of you and there is basically nothing you can do about it even on easy.

Yeah, that is annoying. I've found not moving at all helps a little, but yeah, no helping the jank.

I'll probably try for a few more hours tomorrow and then might just have to bite the bullet and drop it down just for the trial. Frustrating either way, honestly.

Welp, I tried for another two hours and, although I was getting better at the parry timing, I just lost the will to continue and did it in easy. It's is ridiculous how much easier it is. This whole DLC is just one extreme to the other with no middle ground.

Which leads to the final boss. Bumped it back up to Hard, but it didn't feel like it. Only bit I struggled on was figuring out how to actually target the damn cable on the back of its head. Definitely a cooler final boss to look at, at least, despite how many asspulls there were. Disappointed the post-credits scene was the same, but at least we didn't have sad Eggman this time.

Overall, I think this whole DLC was a cool idea really poorly executed. I would have put the focus on the friends and only had Sonic playable right at the end. Weird also that you could just completely ignore all the new cyberspace levels.

JackMan posted...

Welp, I tried for another two hours and, although I was getting better at the parry timing, I just lost the will to continue and did it in easy. It's is ridiculous how much easier it is. This whole DLC is just one extreme to the other with no middle ground.

Which leads to the final boss. Bumped it back up to Hard, but it didn't feel like it. Only bit I struggled on was figuring out how to actually target the damn cable on the back of its head. Definitely a cooler final boss to look at, at least, despite how many asspulls there were. Disappointed the post-credits scene was the same, but at least we didn't have sad Eggman this time.

Overall, I think this whole DLC was a cool idea really poorly executed. I would have put the focus on the friends and only had Sonic playable right at the end. Weird also that you could just completely ignore all the new cyberspace levels.

I mean you could ignore the cyberspace levels in the base game too. It was probably them trying their hand on better/tougher levels after the reception for the base game cyberspace levels which were generally considered the weakest part of the game.

You could, but doing them was how you were supposed to get keys. Sure you could get them other ways, but at least they were an option. And I'd rather do cyberspace levels than tower climbing any day.

Also, fuck whoever it was on Sonic Team who decided to put all those trees around the final boss.