A better ending but with plenty of faults accompanying it
source: www.youtube.com/@BeardBear
The final update for Sonic Frontiers just came out a few days ago. This update brings a whole new ending section to explore another way the story could have gone. This alternate path can be played as soon as you get to Ouranos island but it is recommended you play it after beating the normal ending. I have now completed this updates main contents, so I am now able to give my full opinion on it.
~ Positives ~
Let's start by talking about the positives. Firstly, something you see very early is an improvement to the narrative. No more do Sonic's friends sacrifice their digital beings and magically revive sonic. Now you actually have to play as them and help sonic break his corruption another way. This gave me a sense of urgency the main game lacked. It felt more like a final area with quite a bit at steak, especially with the looming presence of the end. I also liked the sweeter ending too, despite loosing the end's dialogue. Being able to play as the other characters and them having their own skill trees and such was quite cool. Each also had their own platforming challenges to do, with provided a decent amount of content. Cyberspace saw some good improvements. Each stage kind of had it's own gimmick, which allowed them to stand out more. The stages were also more challenging in general. Many of the sub bosses from Ouranos got new versions which is not something I expected, they were much more challenging than before. This was a nice bit of variation. The puzzles were pretty alright in this update, some of them actually required thought. Would have been nice if they all did but still an improvement for sure. The ending fight was so much better than the shoot em up we got in the normal version. It had so many hype moments and it provided a decent challenge. Sonic finally went beyond super Sonic, which I feel was what should have happened, with the steaks being higher Sonic should need to go even further beyond.
~ Negatives ~
Now let's talk about the negatives. Let's start off by talking about the new playable characters gameplay. Tails, when upgraded, could fly past every platforming challenging making them all redundant. Knuckles has a really stiff glide with a big start up time that made it not much fun to play him. Amy has a triple jump that was quite hard to get used to and lead to many overjumps. So, none of them really ending up being well designed, though tails was still fun at least. Next, the tower segments were really poorly designed. The platforming required a lot of preciseness and if you fell off then you would need to most likely restart the whole thing. On top of this, some of the elements that you would need to get to the top would not respawn meaning you would need to save and reload or jump off the side of the map. The difficulty in general was all over the place. One of the trails gave you way too much time, while others required extremely close calls. Another thing I will say is that the perfect parry is really unfair. On hard people have said that it is only around 15 frames, now I see why play testers requested the parry to be so easy. The bosses attacks can come out really fast and somewhat require weird timing. This just made it really frustrating more than difficult. However, putting the game on normal or easy gives you a few more frames which I think is much fairer and how the parry should have functioned in general. During this update I experienced an infinite load bug. I have watched other people play this update and it has happened at the same spot for them. This bug wouldn't be so bad if it didn't mean we had to redo a whole section. Lastly, the final boss as cool as it was had two issues. The first one being the camera. You fought the camera as much as you fought the boss, trees would completely block your view making it nearly impossible to block incoming projectiles. The other issue was the fact that you had to do something specific to damage it. This was having to dodge to the side so you could hit it's actual weak point. I am not sure how people are really supposed to find that out naturally.
~ Conclusion ~
To conclude, this update provided a better ending in general than before. Though it not only had the normal issues with the game still present, but brought even more along with it. I rated Sonic Frontiers a 7.5/10 in my review and I think I would keep it that way, though it could possibly be nearer to an 8 now.
That's it for this blog, stay connected!
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