Thoughts on Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon DLC

This was originally posted to Thanks Ken Penders on Tumblr.

So I wrote a whole long thing about Amy’s tarot cards, but what about, you know… the rest of the Sonic Frontiers DLC? The new alternate story route, the hours of new gameplay, all that?

Having now played it, I’m not sure Sonic has ever had this specific combination of good ideas that make the future of the series look bright, and execution that I fucking hate.

(Full spoilers ahead.)

The good

There’s a lot to like here, conceptually.

First and foremost, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy are finally playable in a new mainline 3D Sonic game for the first time since 2006! Seventeen years! We’ve been begging for this for so very, very long. Nature is finally truly healing from the fallout of Sonic ‘06. Early on I hedged my bets and expected them to be locked to Cyber Space or something like that, assuming that there was no way they’d be fully playable in the Open Zone. But sure enough, while they’re a bit limited compared to Sonic, they’re still all full-blown characters with skill trees to unlock and lots of exploration to do.

We also got a more bombastic alternate final boss fight, after the first take on The End kind of underwhelmed. And it’s obvious that Sonic Team has listened to our pleas to focus on the 3D platforming over the forced 2D sections, and to reduce the amount of automation in the level design. This update is chock full of Actual Platforming. Wow! I can only pray this means we never get an area as agonizing to explore as Chaos Island again.

Sure, there’s still some jank - especially with Knuckles’ movement, which is kinda rough. But if this is the stuff they’re trying out so that they can refine it further for the next game, then I’m really excited.

On the other hand, good fucking lord is The Final Horizon tedious. And that tedium sapped most of the fun out of it for me.

The frustrating

The new scenario massively increases the difficulty over the base game, seemingly out of a desire to give the hardcore players who were posting speedrun videos and whatnot more of a challenge. It’s the Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels of Sonic. This difficulty comes in many forms throughout your playtime, some worse than others, and continues to ramp up over time.

Rather than giving you a tutorial level, the new scenario dumps you directly into a remixed version of the final island and makes you do some fairly precise platforming with Amy, Knuckles, and Tails - new characters with new movesets that you won’t have any experience with. You’ll also need to find character-specific Koco that give you free levels, because Sonic’s friends all start at level one and certain locked moves in their skill trees will be mandatory to progress. They don’t even have Cyloop unlocked at the start. And because they’re all low level, that means you’d better steer clear of the beefed-up bosses scattered around the map, which will absolutely annihilate Sonic’s friends. (I honestly just avoided them and never bothered beating any of them, not even with my high-level Sonic. I have no idea if they’re beatable with the others.)

None of this is explained to you particularly well. I spent my first few minutes with Amy wondering why the attack button did nothing, only to eventually think to check her skill tree and realize that I had to unlock her basic attack. If you don’t bother to take the time to read through the skill trees, you’ll very quickly find obstacles you have no way of getting past with no clues as to what exactly you’re supposed to do.

Adding to this confusion is the fact that objective markers often tell you to go half a kilometer into the sky, and you’ll have no idea how to get up there because all of the relevant platforms are out of your draw distance. Many objects seem to only pop in for me when I’m within about 60 meters of them, which isn’t a long distance for a high-speed open world platformer like this. I was having this problem running the game with high graphics on PC, so I can only imagine how obnoxious it is on Switch. I’d frequently find myself poking around nearby clusters of platforming objects and praying that they’d lead me to a spring, rail, or cannon that would eventually point me in the direction of the floating objective marker.

There were always complaints about the art direction in Frontiers and the way it relies on floating rails and prefab platforms that are visually disconnected from the natural scenery of the islands, but it’s even more dire here. The new platforming sections are dense and complex, but they seemingly didn’t have the budget to change the topography of Ouranos Island at all, so it all takes the form of these prefabs. It very strongly gives the vibe of a Forge creation in Halo 3, back when there were no blank canvas maps and people just had to make “new maps” by jamming a bunch of shipping containers and barricades together in the sky above one of the default arenas.

I was still more or less having fun, though, despite the jank. It’s a big creative swing, I told myself! They’re trying stuff out! They’re experimenting!

And then I hit the towers.

The towers are agonizing because they’re SO close to being great. The logical part of my brain understands why some people love them, but god, I just fucking hate them. The platforming there IS cool! These layouts are cool! The individual challenges along the way are a bit tough, but totally doable. You know what’s not cool? Making one mistake and slowly falling 800 meters all the way back down to the ground, forcing you to start over. Because none of these towers have checkpoints. For me, this one decision transforms what should have been a fun set of platforming challenges into a massive, unfun difficulty spike.

I enjoy some masocore platformers, but those are typically games with quick deaths and restarts like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, or VVVVVV. Hell, the Mario games tend to get way more difficult than the average Sonic game, and those are obviously all great. Quite frankly, unlike those games, Sonic Frontiers is nowhere near tight or polished enough to make this difficulty feel fair. Bits of jank that I could ignore in the base game due to its lower difficulty are now matters of life or death. Missing a jump because I boosted off an incline in a way the game didn’t like for reasons I don’t understand is not fun. Falling off a tower because the camera was pointing in the wrong direction while I was in midair and I couldn’t see the next thing I was expected to homing attack is not fun.

And it’s such a jarring spike when moving from the base game to the DLC that it feels like the game is suddenly quizzing me on skills it never bothered to instill in me. Maybe if you’ve spent the last year labbing out the movement tech in this game this is all a no brainer, but for the average returning player it’s a kick in the dick.

I’m sure I could’ve beaten these towers normally if I gave them enough tries. They aren’t the hardest thing in the world. But I very quickly decided I had better things to do with my life and turned on easy mode, which adds tons of extra springs and homing attack balloons to make all of the platforming piss easy. I wish there was a middle option between Only Up: Sonic Edition and this extreme hand holding, but when given the choice between the two I gladly picked baby mode. I just wanted to see the story.

(The new Cyber Space levels are also long, challenging, and devoid of checkpoints, not unlike the towers. But I only ever found the entrances to two of them. So I only did two. They’re theoretically required, because they give you “Lookout Koco” that you need for… some reason? But in a rare act of mercy, Sonic Team put Cyloop treasure spots that give you free Lookout Koco all over the map.)

As I continued, so many little things started adding up to piss me off. Why do you only reveal like five tiny squares of the map at a time? I would’ve loved to find all the new 1-on-1 dialogue scenes, but not if I had to do dozens of hard mode versions of the stupid little puzzles and challenges to reveal the whole map. Why does every character need their own unique collectibles? What is this, Donkey Kong 64? Why can’t I just grab this EXP for Amy when I find it as Tails? Why can I only manually swap characters by talking to an out-of-the-way NPC unlocked right before the final boss? Why is fast travel disabled? Why are the new vocal themes you hear when playing as Amy, Knuckles, and Tails so monotonous, with a single verse repeating over lo-fi beats ad nauseum? Why is the jukebox feature completely disabled throughout the DLC, even after rolling the credits? Why can’t Tails homing attack? Why do I have to wrestle with the camera so much while also holding the jump button to fly as Knuckles and Tails? How many right thumbs do they think I have? Why is this animation for picking up animals in the Cyber Space levels so incredibly slow, and why can I still take damage while it’s playing? Why does the stupid starfall event have to make it so hard to see what I’m doing when climbing these towers? Why does this shitty combat trial have a popup that makes it seem like I should be using the Cyloop when the actual strategy revolves around repeated parries? And on and on and on…

The story

What about the new story? Well, there sadly isn’t much to chew on here. Most of the DLC has the cast running around and finding different macguffins for arbitrary reasons, as part of some sort of plan to divide up the work on the last island so that Sonic can go train with the spirits of the Ancients and harness the power of his cyber corruption. What the fuck is an Impact Form? I don’t know, but Knuckles needs something to do, so go find one.

It’s a thin excuse plot meant to make you do platforming challenges around Ouranos Island, with little room for Ian to add any real flavor of his own, even though he certainly tries. Having Sonic meet the spirits of the Ancients who controlled the Titans, who are revealed to directly parallel the personalities of him and his friends, is kinda neat, I guess? It’s something. The optional conversations seem to have some fun bits, including both conversations between the supporting cast and additional lore. But again, I only found a few of those because of how tedious filling out the map was.

The writing is also let down by the voice acting - or I guess the voice direction, because I know this cast can do better. Roger’s voice continues to be weirdly, distractingly deep as Sonic, which was clearly something that was requested of him just for this game. (For a recent example of him going back to his regular Sonic voice, see this LEGO trailer.) The performances of Sonic’s friends are also WILDLY mismatched. This is most clear when they start feeling the effects of the cyber corruption. Knuckles seems to be barely affected at all, Tails sounds like he’s moderately hurt and low on energy, and Amy starts completely overselling her pain out of nowhere. The extremely strained performance makes it sound like Cindy’s literally being tortured in the fucking booth. I have no idea what’s going on over there.

The final challenges

People have debated whether or not things like the towers and the new Cyber Space levels are fair challenges. What’s not up for debate is the fact that Master King Koco’s Trial is complete and utter bullshit, and I can’t believe they shipped this.

Before you can fight the new final boss, the game forces you to do a boss rush of the first three Titans - INCLUDING the pre-Super Sonic climbing sections - with a hard limit of 400 rings. For all three lengthy, heavily scripted fights. Back to back. You can’t even cheese it with the leveling system, because you’re forced to do this at level 1. This all but forces you to look up speedrun strats for the Super Sonic fights so that you don’t run out of rings and fail the trial.

And the real kicker? They changed the parry just for this trial! Originally, you could just hold down the bumpers endlessly and Sonic would ready himself to parry the next attack, whenever that may hit. Now it requires you to do a “Perfect Parry” with specific timing. And you HAVE to hit those parries if you wanna clear this trial and get to the new ending. Miss a few and you’re probably fucked. You just have to reset. Time to go through all those fights, all those climbing sequences, all those QTEs, and all those unskippable mid-fight cutscenes all over again. This is by far the most egregious example of the DLC deciding to quiz you on new skills that the base game never required of you, and it’s one of the most absurdly unfair things I have ever seen in a Sonic game.

Easy mode does make this trial easier by making the timing window for Perfect Parries much more generous, but that’s all the help you get. It’s still easy to lose time failing to parry Wyvern’s hard-to-read animations, or to lose rings by getting hit on the climb sections, or for things to just fuck up because these fights were always kinda jank. I gave it a few shots. I looked up guide videos. I tried the Quick Cyloop and stomp combo strat that seems all but mandatory. But I quickly decided that, again, this wasn’t a worthwhile use of my time. It just sucks. And I really, REALLY didn’t want to overwrite all my fond memories of these Titan fights, some of my favorite setpiece moments in any Sonic game, with memories of this shit ass boss rush.

So I cheated! And if you’re on PC, you should too.

With the worst hurdle out of the way, I turned cheats back off and moved on to the new final boss. It was pretty cool. It’s much flashier than the original fight against The End, that’s for sure. It’s still kinda annoying, and it requires you to do very specific shit without properly telegraphing it, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the preceding challenges. I was hoping for one last new metalcore song to go with the new fight, which we sadly didn’t get, but at least the new version of I’m Here is good.

The ending is… mostly the same, with a couple altered scenes that don’t really change anything in the long run. But overall the new finale was pretty good. I just wish it hadn’t been such a slog to get there.

Closing thoughts

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon wants to be three things:

1. A patch that adds a new alternate ending that was probably supposed to be in the base game in the first place.
2. An experimental take on making Tails, Knuckles, and Amy playable again, presumably testing things for the next game. And…
3. An official Kaizo Sonic Frontiers mod for the sickos.

The thing is, the people showing up for #1 and #2, the main things that Sega hyped up about the update, are not necessarily going to be down for #3. If they had announced some uber-hard new Cyber Space levels for the arcade mode or whatever, I’d be like, neat! And then not play them. I would never touch Master King Koco’s Trial if it was an optional challenge. I would leave that for the sickos. But instead, they made the hardest content mandatory for anyone who wants to see the new Good Ending where the final boss gets an actual budget.

I’m mostly left in a state of shock that it shipped like this. I cannot believe they playtested this and decided this was the state The Final Horizon should be released in. That this should be the note Frontiers ends on. That this should be how we remember those Titan fights. That this should be the lingering taste in our mouths as we wait however many years for the next 3D game.

Armchair devs always love to say that things would be “easy to fix,” but like… there really would be easy fixes for the insane difficulty and general tedium here! Add a few more tutorial popups explaining what the game expects of you with Sonic’s friends. Give the Cyber Space stages and the towers a couple checkpoints. Give the combat trials more generous time limits, especially on the lower difficulties. Remove half of the map puzzles, and make the ones that remain uncover twice as many squares. Skip the startup animation for Knuckles’ glide. Let me turn on the goddamn jukebox. Since so much of this update was designed around fan feedback, I can only pray that Sonic Team is still listening, and that they tweak at least a few of these things with a balance patch.

But still, after those many, many paragraphs of complaining… this still somehow makes the future of 3D Sonic seem pretty promising?

Sonic’s friends are FINALLY playable again, and the focus is back to proper 3D platforming, rather than railroading players into awkward forced 2D sections in what’s otherwise an open world. These are the things that they hopefully want to carry over to the next game. The difficulty? Well, that’s just because it’s the postgame DLC that’s supposed to be the toughest challenge in the game. It’s just an unreasonably cruel one of those - an example of how designing and balancing for a vocal minority of your fanbase can really hurt your game. But Sonic Team is onto something here, and I hope that they can learn the right lessons from this expansion and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.