Sonic Frontiers: Final Horizon - Finished

 Oh boyoboyoboy.

I was not terribly impressed with this DLC when I last posted about it. It was half arsed, to put it nicely... My main gripe was about the controls and shitty writing.  Well, they gave an update (yay) which fixed up most of the controls (yay) but not much they could do about the writing.  Seriously, the main story was so much better.

So with the controls fixed, I decided to get back into it and found things a little bit better. There is still much frustration though.

Sadly a lot of the issues stems from other  parts of the controls and the lack of checkpoints in platforming.

Let's have a look at an example:

In this picture, you can see some red balloons with blue triagnles on them.  They are there because I am playing on easy.  You can use the homing attack to bounce from one to the other.  When playing on normal, you have to use a combo of boosting, springs and homing attacks on enemies and springs to get up.  There are no mid climbing checkpoints so if you mess up, then you start from the bottom.

When playing on easy, all platforming is negated because you can homing attack your way up because the balloons are there.  It's gone from a very hard and frustrating experience to a press the button to win experience.

"But Tets, you're playing on easy, of course it's easy," I hear you rightfully say.  That would be a justified comment if not for the fact that the "normal" setting is set very high.  There is no mid ground.  I dread to see what the hard setting is like...

I felt this way about God Of War.  Normal had it's over powered guys in it (although I think I just went for them too soon),, but easy took all challenge away completely.  Sonic here does the same thing.  I think instead of giving you the cheaty balloon way.  Normal fshould have a few more checkpoints on the climb up the platforming sections, specifically those godd dam towers.

The wierd thing is, that many of the climbing challenges are good.  It's just the controls that are bad.  One section in particular really sucks though, the skills.  Ok, so there is one where when you get max rings, your characters get an extra ability.

• Tails can summon the Tornado and pretty much fly anywhere he needs to go.
• Amy makes a tarot card bicycle hammer thing.
• Knuckles  gets a high speed, very straight line glide.

Which are all very good and well, but many of the platforming needs a bit of a jump and boost combo.  If you have max rings, there is a delay with the start-up and it messes up the timing.  Especially for Amy.  Tails  is not such a problem as you just fly wherever you need to go.  Knuckles though... holy shit, you often have to use his glide, but when he's max-ringed, he gets super speed, it makes it so much harder to control and judge when to stop to get to your goal.  Most annoyingly there is no way to turn this off.  You have to get hit, which means finding some enemy somewhere and getting whacked.

Amy Max Rings

Then, even assuming you are at low rings, you pick them up as you do your stuff and all of a sudden, mid way through the climb, 

BAM

Super powered glide/weird tarot bike makes an unwelcome return.

Shit

The challenges just get all the more tricky.

Now while I love Sonic Frontiers, they made some dumb-arse decisions, such as the inability to turn off the max rings thing.  The next is this move each character has to activate special switches....

The swirly thing means my special punch is active!

Knuckles has a punch, Amy has a hammer whack and Tails has a gun thing.  Now, you need this to activate special signs.

That's a base of a special sign

Now, to do this, you need to charge a bar.  To charge the bar, you either attack enemies, or collect rings.  When the bar is charged, you can do about 4 special whacks before needing a recharge.  My question is, why does this move need an energy bar?  I don't think it's very good as an attack... so its just used for  solving puzzles, so why should it be limited?

Naturally, if you get to the point where you need to charge it up (through collecting rings and doing random cyloops), you'll end up at max rings again.  Can this move be used during combat? Yes it can, is it a bit powerful in those times? Maybe, as it often generates rings.  But outside of combat, this limiting of its power seems stupid.  You know what you could do Sonic Team?  You could not have this move generate rings, and then we don't have to charge it up, as it would then be less spammable in combat.

Speaking of combat, let's talk about that shall we?

So, the DLC here has the same enemies(called Guardians) as the main game, only they are extremely overpowered.  Or so I thought.  Since you only need to do the towers to progress the game story (yes, even cyberspace levels [classic Sonic boost style sections] can be ignored), you don't need any gear things to access the Cyberspace setions.  So it's entirely plausible to skip every single Guardian.  

Which I did.

Ok, I'll admit I tried a couple to see what it was like, but that was at the start of the game and since the haracters are generally low levelled, you end getting a bit of an ass kicking, and everything hits hard and moves super fast.  Learning their move set was not a fun time.

So anywy, at the end of the game, I noticed that I had levelled up the characters to level 99 and so I thought I would go try a Guardian.  And it was ridiculously easy.  So skill doesn't account for much, levelling does.

Tails vs the Spider

Using Tails as a prime example.  In the picture above, I had managed to unlock a lot of Tails' moves and thought that this big ass laser would be the way to kill the Spider Guardian.  Turns out this is not the case.  At the level I was at, the laser did minimal damage, despite its powerful looks.

When I eventually got Tails up to level 99, using the exact same tactic, the laser finished it off in no time.  Whaddaya know.  As another aside of the odd decisions they make in this game, the laser is the only way to destroy certain blocks for Tails' platforming challenges, and for whatever reason, instead of having the block be immediately destroyed by the laser, the block will withstand the attack for approximately 70% of the laser's duration.  The laser lasts for a good 4 or 5 seconds...

Anyhoo, back to the combat... The same kind of thing happened with other characters as well.  SO it was rather pointless.  Unless you wanted that extreme combat, which I'll admit is nice if them to have that option, but EVRYTHING was extremely hard at the start of the game, and skipping them all means that, yes, less-skilled players can progress through the story, but they are getting less game play as well.  

It's the same kind of thing as the homing balloons for the easy difficulties tower climbing.  Yes, you can get through the challenge, but I wouldn't exactly call it gameplay as such, it ends up just being a timed button pressing exercise. 

One thing I thought amusing in the main game was the guardian intros.  They are still here and kind of jarring in a way, especially since I and trying to not fight any of them.  Running around as Knuckles and this butt-weed keeps BLAaaAAAArrr!-ing at me.

I've often wondered if this is a Beatles reference.

And now having recently levelled Knuckles' up, I thought I should give a try and see if I can do it, but this ass-hat will fly around his arena at the speed of irritation.

As it turns out, now that I'm levelled up makes the fight pretty easy.   However, the incredible speed with which old Maxwell (as I like to call him) makes fighting him very difficult.  Another big problem is the arenas have to be reasonably large right, but that makes it very hard to keep the target lock-on, er, locked on.  So while fighting this guy, I kept losing sight of him.

Much awkward camera control later...

One part that was kind of cleaned up, but still a bit whack in the update is the starfall thing.  After 3/4 day/night cycles, these stars things fall from the sky and any defeated enemies will respawn.  Luckily though now they have removed the incredibly annoying slot machine they had before.  It was so bad, I don't see how it got approved... and it was replaced with this rather pretty, but slightly irritating rainbow thing going on now.

OK, it looks kinda cool yeah?  However, what it does do is mess up your map markers.  I've put a marker on the map, which I would like to get to.  The marker is represented by a nice clear line that goes vertically through the whole map and can be seen from wherever you are.  Handy right?  

Except when the starfall is falling.  

Can you see the marker? (Does it brighten up your day?).  It's there, on the right, the thin orange line (3rd from the right).  See how it looks very close to the other ones?  Yup.  It's confusing as hell.    Usually when this happens, I just leave and go make a cup of tea while waiting for it to pass.  What a nutty decision.

And finally, my final comment.  So the end of the main game has you fighting the imagintively named "THE END" in a vertical shooter kind of fashion.  RIght.  Kind of out there, and it goes on for way too long, and since THE END is juts a big moon, you're blasting a moon for about 15 minutes in what is essentially a timed sequence.  It's crazy, why is it even there?  I don't get it you know, SOnic is meant to be a fast, speedy game, yet a few Final Boss fights (i.e Super Sonic time) are incredibly dragged out... You end up racing against the countdown of the ring count, more than the boss itself. (I'm looking at YOU Sonic Generations in particular!)

This new boss for Frontiers unfortunately manages to fall into this category.

We have amore visually exciting boss that has been "rectified" *ahem* this.... With "SUPREME/THE END."

Delightfully huge, you can see that Super Sonic is tiny.  Cool hey?  By this time in the game I had maximum ring count, a glorious 999 to take the tie pressure off me.  As Super Sonic, he can't actually die, until you run out of rings and will revert to Sonic.

Throughout this whole fight, I spent most of my time trying to work out the patterns, which have to be countered with Sonic's new powers, which will then allow a chance to attack.  Anyway, the whole thing is pretty much a quick time event.  You must counter at the right time, then attack, then sidestep to attack this umbilical chord thing, then cycloop the thing to get the gun out, then cyloop the gun.  If you mess up the timing, a semi cut scene plays and you start from scratch.

It's kind of amazing how staged the whole battle is.  It doesn't provide prompts like Dragon's Lair or Time Gal does, yet at its core them gameplay is the same concept.

So while it looks and sounds epic, and should be great fun, most of the time while I played it, I felt no need to worry about failing, only frutsration as I tried to work out the sequence of attacks.  If you wait too long, THE END regains all their health, so I went in all guns blazing, took down half it's bar and while continuing to attack, I noticed that it's energy wasn't decreasing, so I stopped, thinking it would cut scene into a new phase, so I held off and yes, a cut scene did occur, but it just regained all its life.  

Start sequence again.

Eventually I worked out the buttons, and the timing and finished.  Did I feel accomplished? Not really?  On top of that, it was at times visually confusing.  THE END is a big dude, and you're fighting him in a clearing between trees, and for some annoying reason, the camera would pull back and any incoming attacks were obscured by trees...

Sonic and four flying balls are actually in this screen-shot somewhere.

Damn amateur shenanigans going on here ladies and gents.

Oddly enough, there are cut scenes mid-fight which indicate special moves as well and they just seem to come out of nowhere.  It's actually hard to see how Sonic pulls off the attack.  At times, he'll just snap his fingers and something will happen.  It's such a mess. 

What I am going to do is link up a youtube video.  This guy seems to be playing on hard, so there is an extra stage to the fight that I didn't experience, where THE END attacks the shield that Sonic's pals set up.  But I think you can get the general feel for it.

It seems pretty epic, mainly because the music is really cranking and there are lots of flashing lights and shit, but it's all a bit superfluous.  Watch the video and you should get a feel for it 'it has handy dandy chapters marked).  For example, at about 7:40, Sonic gets forced out of Super Sonic form, but during the cut scene manages to regain it and even power up the blue eyed form which is a power level up.  What exactly is the point of this?  It fills in time, makes you feel like THE END may be a threat, but since Sonic powers up again without any player input whatsoever.

 You could cut it completely out and no one would know.  So that means the whole scene is pointless. 

It's weird think in my Sonic Frontiers posts, all I've done is whinge and complain about its shittiness, but I actually rather like the game.  There is a lot going for it and so very much potential here.  I just don't think they have capitalised on it at all.

And that is the rub.  I see the start of brilliance here and something good for the future of Sonic games, yet I have a feeling that SEGA will bin this style for the next game and start from scratch as they rarely manage to build on the good points of the games they have worked on (especially recently).

So any potential in Sonic Frontiers will probably fade into something else.

Prove me wrong SEGA, prove me wrong.

*******

I'm actually secretly hoping that the Sonic Generations Shadow version (Sonic X Shadow Generations) is just an easy filler title while they develop a proper new Sonic Frontiers (with level graphics that actually look like Sonic levels throughout the whole game.  SEGA are well known for rushing games out under-developed and I think the evidence of that happening with Sonic Frontiers is obvious.

Fingers crossed for a good Frontiers sequel.