Sonic Frontiers – The Final Horizon

Posted on by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

The key art for Sonic Frontier's "The Final Horizon" update. It features Sage and Sonic centrally, with Dr. Eggman, Knuckles, Tails and Amy. In the background is the final Titan, Supreme.
Sonic Frontiers Official Site (Sonic Retro)

The third and final DLC update for Sonic Frontiers dropped. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. Thoughts (and thus spoilers) under the read more

Honestly, The Final Horizon establishes a much, much, much, better ending for Sonic Frontiers. The original ending well, it just ended a little flat. Though this isn’t to say the update’s alternate story doesn’t have flat moments (Amy placed a lot of value on the Koco but… that plotline didn’t really feel like it went anywhere? Like even Sage was like “the Koco…” but???? IDK maybe I missed something)

It was great seeing character interactions outside of Sonic, especially getting rare neutral interactions between Tails and Eggman, but also getting a LOT of rad lore that frankly they didn’t have to include.

A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers. Eggman in his Eggmobile is talking to Sonic while in some ruins. The subtitle below reads: "Did you see the dilapidated bridges and scaffolds around the periphery of Ares Island? The roads and tunnels have broken down over the years, but they were basically highways"A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers. Eggman in his Eggmobile is talking to Sonic while in some ruins. The subtitle below reads: "Moreover, the highways were full of energy brimming from the underground. The vehicles could replenish energy just by going through tunnels or passing over Dash Panels. There was no need for filling stations!" A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers. Eggman in his Eggmobile is talking to Sonic while in some ruins. The subtitle below reads: "Oh, but I suppose that doesn't concern someone like you, who can't do anything but roll around at the speed of sound."

In which Sonic and Eggman discuss Ancient traffic infrastructure

We didn’t need to know how the Ancients travelled around the Starfall Islands, but we did and I am MORE than happy about it.

We got new characters too! Amy, Tails and Knuckles. They take a while to warm up but once you’ve got skills with them they are extremely fun to play as! Amy has such fun air movement and Tails had a more unique style than just “orange Sonic” using tools and THE CYCLONE HELL YEAH

A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers, featuring Tails in the Cyclone flying in the air.A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers, featuring Tails in his Cyclone mech firing the Power Laser, now named Cyclone Laser.

Honestly cool cool! I love all the little touches with Amy and Tails. Amy using her fortune cards as weapons, Tails’ infinite wrenches…. Hell Amy’s down slam upgrade where she bounces off the floor she even does the air pirouette she did in Sonic Adventure!

A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers, featuring Amy laying out her fortune cards in mid air

All of it just made their sections of the game REALLY fun, even on the tougher platforming challenges for Amy it was still a pleasant challenge to do and overcome.

DO you’re not talking about Knuckles? What? Who? … … Okay… I’ll talk about Knuckles. LOOK PRETTY PICTURE 🙂

A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers, showing Knuckles obtaining the red Chaos Emerald

Okay okay. Knuckles is janky. His combat is honestly fine, it’s how he played in other games (he even has the fiery punches he did in SA2/Heroes), but his air movement? His wall climbing? It’s… so broken if you’ve ever played as Knuckles in a 3D platforming game!

For one his climbing speed is tied to his run speed, and you want to have ground movement up! It’s fun to run around quickly! But then as a result suddenly your climbing is stupendously fast, you tap to the side and he just careens off, and if you’ve got the camera pointed at certain angles his climbing inverts and I’ve no idea how you deal with THAT.

His gliding is really rough too. You wanna go in a straight line? No problem that’s fast and if you’ve got the max-rings upgrade he doesn’t even lose altitude! Nice! This is how I got around a chunk of his Koco Mapper puzzles, just got on top of a mountain and glided over to the waypoint. But if you want to turn? You don’t have that tight turning circle you had in SA1 or SA2, it’s a very, very, wide turning circle so you just miss what you’re trying to turn to or end up over-correcting turns and gliding wildly.

That said there is a mod for the PC version of Sonic Frontiers that focuses on rebalancing Knuckles. I’ve not tried it ‘cus I wanted to play the game vanilla but if for some reason I want to replay… well at least it exists.

A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers featuring Sonic and Sage looking at the distance of a faint tower behind rain and clouds. Sage's dialogue reads: "You need to ascend the four Towers of the Masters. They are memorials to the pilots who gave their lives to save the world."

These. Fucking. Towers. I only enjoyed ascending two of them, and spoilers (even though it’s obvious from the map) there’s five towers, you do the first four, get more emeralds then do the fifth. IIRC it’s the 3rd and 5th I enjoyed scaling, one where you climb up with the glowy sticky walls and the fifth tower that was just pure platforming to the top without gimmicks.

They’re all platforming challenges with no checkpoints. You fall off? Well bad luck bucko gotta start again. I would genuinely suggest just setting your difficulty to easy. The towers still need platforming skill but it’s actually enjoyable.

And then as a fun kicker, at the top you have to do combat trials! Where your skills are set to minimum (or even some locked off). OH BOY. The 3rd and 4th one are easy, once you remember that Sonic’s standard parry is a counter stance for the 3rd and the 4th one is a slightly upgraded version of the first guardian you encounter. Easy! The 2nd one is tedious and the 1st is just rough. The REAL issue is the 5th tower that took me two and a half hours, on easy, to complete.

Why? It’s the first three titan battles again and you’re capped to 400 rings. Seems fine! Until I realised wasting over 200 rings on Giganto that the rings persist, the game wasn’t kidding when it said “you won’t gain rings otherwise”. The final kicker is that your parry is disabled, which if you remember Wyvern you’ll remember you need that. Well don’t worry you have the perfect parry instead. Yes that’s right, you need to perfect parry through.

It was when all this dawned on me fuck it, we’re setting this to easy. I don’t claim to be a good player, but given I beat the main game on Normal (and then the final boss on Hard ‘cus of the extra cutscene) I wouldn’t say I’m bad.

The entire thing really does feel like the devs got wind that people were claiming Frontiers was easy and went “you know what? Fuck you”. At least Undefeatable is a bop no matter how many times you hear it…

All that fun I built up with Amy and Tails, and even Knuckles to a degree was lost. It was decidedly extremely UnFunâ„¢. It all really spoiled the update for me and the final boss didn’t help when it replied on target swapping which I just never did the entire game but I guess that’s on me. Likewise I guess it’s on me for forgetting about Cyloop to grab the gun.

I just sat there in the post boss cutscenes and credits kind of frustrated and annoyed, which REALLY FUCKING SUCKS YOU KNOW? I fucking adored the base game, I didn’t even expect to! But it just builds this constant tension-release-tension-release-etc. loop that keeps the player driving forward, exploring, seeing character reactions and getting four Super Sonic battles in a series that typically only has one “true” final boss that requires Super Sonic in a game (Perfect Chaos, Biolizard/Final Hazard, Dark Gaia, etc.) and that was fucking RAD.

Hell, Super Sonic’s animations in the True Final Boss are fucking FANTASTIC

A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers featuring Super Sonic menacingly pointing at the screen. His face obscured mostly by his hand.A screenshot of Sonic Frontiers featuring Super Sonic menacingly pointing at the screen. His face now visible with an intense glare at the viewer with his right first raised.

A lot of the pose work in the animated attacks is clearly inspired by works like Street Fighter, Dragon Ball (ignoring that Super Sonic is just a reference to Super Saiyans) and hell I’d even say JoJo’s Bizzare Adventure. The animaters here did this with intense stylistic flare that if I wasn’t so grumpy because of the trials and slightly confusing mechanics (that are technically my fault I accept this) in the final fight I’d have been so overjoyed seeing it all.

Instead it kind of just mustered a “yaaaaaaaaaaaaay” out of me and it’s only in retropect on reflection I’m like “no wait that was fucking amazing”.

It’s a really weird capstone to put to what was a good game. Like was it perfect? No. Was it fun? Yeah until The Final Horizon update… Like it’s not spoiled my opinions of the base game but MAN what a rough final piece to leave the game with.

BLEH. At least I finally got the last achievements.

A screenshot of Steam showing DarkOverord earning three achievements: Hypersonic Hedgehog - Raised Speed Level to MAX. Hearty Hedgehog - Raised Ring Level to MAX. Combo Crackerjack - Performed Phantom Rush 50 times, outside of the training simulator.