Final Horizon Update Thoughts

 I want to start off by saying that my initial experience with Sonic Frontiers was a good one. I didn’t really have much issue with the main game other than a few technical things here and there. I genuinely enjoyed myself and I’ve loved the updates. 

That said, the Final Horizon was – well, frustratingly awesome. 

I’ll break that down. 

It was frustrating because of the sudden difficulty spike. Now, I played the entire game on normal difficulty. IIRC I only changed it to easy once for the shoot-em-up on the bridge on chaos island but then I switched it back. 

I am a casual gamer. I don’t feel any shame about that since I play games for fun and not to rip my hair out. I was most interested in Sonic’s mechanics for this game (Which I love) and the story which was good despite the rushed ending in the original. 

The Final Horizon makes good on that initial problem I had with the base game. But it is frustrating to get there. I understand that it’s meant to be a high stakes thing and the end is supposed to be a bit difficult but it really made me feel like I had to work my ass off for it and in that regard after spending nearly 4 hours on the first tower trying to climb it – I switched the difficulty down to easy because good grief I just wanted to see the story. 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind grinding for things. I play Warframe and that game is nothing but grind for story but the difficulty and challenge is just right so that I don’t feel like I want to rip my hair out. 

This update was akin to a combination of Crash Bandicoot’s near perfect platforming with a mix of Dark Souls difficulty. Sonic is too floaty for that kind of precision and he doesn’t have all the combat for DS difficulty. Now, I will say this. I have never played a Dark Souls game, but watching my husband rage at Elden Ring – it’s definitely not something I would enjoy.

But I digress. The thing is even though there was a challenge, once I beat it I got that rush of relief that I could move onto the next part and the story did keep me engaged to want to get to the next challenge and tower in the game. Even on Easy mode it was difficult but it opened it up enough for me to succeed. 

Amy is the best of the three side characters you play as. I did state in my tiktok notes brief video that she had the smoothest operating of them. Her jumps are smooth and her card float doesn’t have that unnatural pause like both Knuckles and Tails do. Her combat may be weak, but she is fun to use. 

Knuckles is broken in a way that feels off. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his uses and his combat is the strongest of the three, but his pause before he glides and the awkward camera movement with tank controls make it difficult. But even so I still find him the second best of the three characters since he can stick to walls and latch onto surfaces like Sonic. I can forgive his tank steering and like him above Tails for the simple fact that he has the core function of the homing attack and his kit is a bit more precise. 

Tails will get praise from me because when you unlock his cyclone it makes moving across distances and heights less of a chore. And his cyclone attack is fun to use even though it’s ground based. I suppose that was done for balance. However, that’s where the praise kinda stops. Tails’ kit is the floatiest and loosest of the characters and his flight has that same pause that Knuckles does. 

What makes Tails my least favorite is the fact that he lacks a key component that the other two have and that’s a homing attack. Now, that may not seem like a big deal to some, but it is a fundamental feature. As I explained in my previous notes, I find that without that key feature it’s jarring and confusing, especially when it comes to the obstacle courses that you’d usually run with other characters that your reticle will target something to jump on and instead you throw a wrench and lose all the momentum you gained and the motions are not as fluid as if you’d just have a homing attack.

So, the flight pauses need to go and the wrench throw should be a toggle on the quick cyloop so that the homing attack button is free for that fundamental move. Don’t break what already works. Homing attacks help to reorient yourself and climb towers and/or obstacle courses better and more fluidly than trying to use the strange flight mechanics. Yes, the cyclone may be a way around that but it takes some of the fun out of it by having to judge where you want to go and sometimes it can be a little slow to gain altitude. 

Back to the challenge towers and Sonic. 

I think the biggest beef I had with the towers themselves is there was no checkpoints like on Rhea island. Those checkpoints made all the difference because you didn’t have to start completely at the bottom if you messed up or if the game doesn’t register your buttons. I had that happen as well. It can be partly a skill issue and the other part is the game not registering your button presses. There were several times where I heard the audio cue to do a homing attack and instead I did a basic attack and lost all of my progress on the tower. I could not get him to latch onto a target to save myself from a very long fall. The frustration mounted. 

The second challenge tower was the hardest one to figure out of the four main challenges just because I was trying furiously to beat the clock but after that challenge passed it was smooth sailing until the fifth one. 

Which Oh My God was the fifth trial a huge kick to the face. Like I was on easy and I managed to complete it with 6 damn rings left. It took me two days and several tries before I was able to finally manage it. I thought Eggmanland gave me a run for my money, oh no – with no checkpoints and no ring refills (ON EASY) this challenge really did make me want to rip my hair out. 

And honestly it wasn’t Wyvern that gave me so much trouble believe it or not. It was Giganto and Knight. Giganto for the simple reason that there’s no way to really defeat him any faster because he has those animations that take up time where he basically spits a laser out of his mouth at you and there’s no way to speed up that process. He’s constantly attacking you in phase 2 and the perfect parry can be finicky at the best of times. 

With him done it’s just a matter of Wyvern’s missiles and making sure to time the parries with his attacks. It can be annoying but you can cheese him to second phase really easily by binding him down with the quick cyloop and just chunking his health down. Then it’s a matter of rinse and repeat and he’s the quickest to beat. 

Knight gave me the most trouble in the fact that I didn’t find out until much later that you can switch targets by sidestepping after you attack. Now, the game never tells you that you can do this so it’s not really a function I was aware of until the final boss. The point is, the shield ride is what drained most of my rings for that battle and if I hadn’t of been able to get lucky with the phase 2 shield slashes then I would’ve had to start all over again and by that point I was so frustrated with the whole mess that if I would’ve had to start over, I probably would’ve threw my controller. 

I don’t like getting mad at my games and I don’t like getting frustrated while I’m playing games. It’s why I don’t play rage games. Well, at least certain ones (crash not withstanding, that was for a twitter poll) but that challenge was rough and I’d never felt anything like that pain in Sonic since Sonic ‘06 and the ball puzzle. It was just a massive sense of relief once I was able to move on from it. 

The final battle with Supreme was pretty much the same as the base game and I had no particular issues with it other than the same issue as before where it’s hard to trigger the last animation to end the battle. If you do it wrong it’ll just stun clap you and shoot a laser. To get the gun it’s a little tricky to trigger that. 

But The End is where it really got good. The second phase, the whole moon powering the avatar prison. I liked the entire mood of it and Cyber Sonic was a fantastic upgrade. It was just fantastic in the cinematic goods. 

The downside was the trees in the way of the battle if you got pushed back too far. Probably needed to take the battle into an open area for that and, two, as I mentioned before the fact I didn’t know about the secondary targeting since I’d never really had to use that feature up until this point. So the entire time you’re targeting the head without knowing how to target the tube on the neck area.  And the other part being it was hard to get a lock on the gun in the back to make it exit. 

Besides those points, the final battle was a beautifully done cinematic masterpiece and it completely makes up for the base game’s rushed ending. I liked the character interactions and I enjoyed Sage being acknowledged by Eggman and the emotions that went into those interactions. 

The one performance I questioned overall was Knuckles in the fact that he sounded like he had a permanent head-cold. As in his nose was stuffed up worse than Chuckie Finster from the Rugrats. Not sure why they decided to go with that direction but – (shrug). 

Overall, I did enjoy the experience with Final Horizon it just needs a few tweaks for those of us who don’t want to break our hands and lose our sanity while doing so. If I wanted a challenge I’d switch it to hard and play it. Fact of the matter is, I didn’t find Frontiers too easy on my first play through.  I found it quite enjoyable and I don’t really know why the sudden difficulty spike was even necessary.  If they wanted to do that they could’ve just put that spike on Hard where it belongs. 

The towers needed the checkpoints and the King’s challenge definitely needed ring refills. At least 50 rings as a buffer on easy. 

Frontiers is something I find myself revisiting often because I find the atmosphere pleasant and it’s nice to just run around the maps with soothing music and forget the stress for a while. 

So I’ll say that it was a lot of work for a pretty satisfying end to the tale.