Sonic Frontiers is Extreme Now

slow motion why okay the first of three major Sonic Frontiers updates recently laid itself upon us re-sparking some interest in the game Post Release and it's not too shabby like the main game it has some caveats lacking the bulletproof AAA polish we want for this character I've made a new friend it seems but the good intentions are on full display as these additions are only positive nothing else broke on the way over here as far as I'm aware fingers crossed all right now that was just funny first up is photo mode at any point during standard gameplay so not cyberspace or cutscenes you can open up photo mode from the menu and move it around to get a nice shot this is going to make creating thumbnails a heck of a lot easier and it's fun trying to get that perfect angle although it is pretty Bare Bones the filters are nice but there are only seven and they don't even have names it's not a major complaint or anything I'm just curious why they stopped at that number like I'm sure it can't be that hard to program so if you're already going out of your way to create an entire mode centered around taking photos you might as well go all the way with it right maybe a saturation slider brightness exposure anything that a smartphone camera has had for the past 10 years moving it around is a bit cumbersome as well often getting stuck on the terrain and offering a zoom that doesn't go very far so if you want a high quality close-up you have to catch Sonic in a cool pose during gameplay and pause at the right time because there's only so much you can do afterwards it's a fine mode and I'm glad it's here you can certainly get the job done but I don't see many people getting lost in this nearly as much as if it had more extensive features you can't even save the pictures in game you have to take a screenshot if you want to keep it thankfully steam has that feature built in but I'm sorry how do you make a photo mode without the ability to take photos correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see anything here that tells me how to snap a pic and save it to an album next up is the Jukebox which should honestly be a Mainstay given how musically gifted this franchise is you can toggle it on and off of the options and press right on the d-pad to cycle through a starting list of 13 songs to listen to while you run around hold right on the d-pad and a larger menu will open for you to freely select the song of your choice you can have it play in order Shuffle or Loop your favorite tune if you want to let the speed mend it for all of time throughout every island are sound Memories the rainbow music notes from Generations that you can set a waypoint for on your map to easily locate each one gives you a new song for a grand total of 53 about the size of a full soundtrack although like the filters I have to ask why stop there it's a great selection don't get me wrong but given how much music there's been and how little space sound files take up nowadays I have to wonder if asking for more is reasonable and if Guardian fights could have their music replaced as well for consistency's sake I don't think I've ever experienced to more tonally jarring jump scare than When approaching tank either way I'm quite pleased with its incorporation this is going to be a lot of fun for people to try swapping out to different moods especially if they wanted something more upbeat in the vein of traditional Sonic the selection itself clearly had some thought put behind it Kingdom Valley on Kronos Misty Lake on Rio right by the waterfall a lot of these music notes are placed in areas that you could have easily skipped over in your playthrough like the top of this tower on Kronos that seemed too perfect to not have anything up there well now it does the far sides of aranos contain goodies and Ria Island a map that you had no prior reason to explore outside of curiosity is now home to a lot of essential songs some in quite creative locations like the underwater ruins this was always a standout section to me so I'm glad I finally have some incentive to head over and what do we get for it but the E3 version of his world the greatest song ever made [Music] there were a few quality of life changes as well like how you can toggle the power boost animation to not play every time you reach Max rings that was nice to see I'm never changing that apparently cyberspace control was changed a little bit too but had someone not told me I wouldn't have noticed because honestly I still don't you can also disable the Starfall slot machine from showing up but this is a weird change because it doesn't actually fix what was wrong with it the reason we were annoyed is that it blocked our view while we played so we just wanted a way to minimize or move it disabling it entirely means that we also don't get its benefits creating a new disadvantage and once it's on screen you can't even turn it off Midway you have to do it preemptively or else you're stuck with it unless you're able to trigger a cut scene hit a loading zone or quit out and change it in the menu before reloading your file of course now that I know how to manually stop the rotation I'll be standing still for most of it anyway so I can max out my purple coins and no more than three starfalls I'm serious it's a legitimate skill to try and get three in a row the timing is so specific get consistent to where you can pull it off with practice automatically making it a more fun mini game than the other Casino themed one once I have 999 coins I mean geez I just grind and cash out on aranos I went from Level 1 to fully maxed in an instant and that was a good feeling especially because the greatest Quality of Life Update is allowing the Elder Coco to upgrade as many levels as possible at one time and seeing that was catharsis typos are still here though gotta love it that's pretty cool and so you are hermit so you are indeed the meatiest parts of this update however are the new challenge modes cyberspace challenge is a simple level to level sequence where you're given a rank after each one and a final rank after completing them all this is entirely based on time so if you were able to easily get an S rank in standard gameplay then you'll probably nail this first try that's what happened with me and I even made quite a few mistakes here and there withholding any homing Dash usage as well since I had a feeling that these times wouldn't be designed with that in mind in fact the game now acknowledges when you use the Homing Dash by putting an asterisk on your time it's still a valid run but it's the game's way of reminding you that you had some assistance you rotten filthy cheater there's a separate category for each island and then in all levels mode where you play all 30 back to back egg shuttle style kinda repetitive when you do it in one sitting but it makes sense I was just a little disappointed that there was no extra stipulation like a ring bonus a red star ring count it wasn't so much of a challenge as much as the game just asking me to play through cyberspace two more times like I already have been albeit in one and go which is inherently more difficult not to mention most people haven't replayed these nearly as much as I have and so they get to keep their sanity alas I'm glad that the mode exists in any capacity and achieving all s ranks will grant a special reward you get a medal of accomplishment on the title screen and unlock the power boost for cyberspace now this isn't the speed fix we would have hoped for it's still pretty slow in those long stretches of running only shaving off a few seconds at most but the air boost is more effective and rail launching is significantly enhanced feeling more like how it is in the open Zone at least in 3D the 2D sections are still numbingly tepid I don't even think it makes you faster in fact the only thing it does make me is upset still I think having it enabled does improve cyberspace enough to justify its unlockable status for 3D anyway the other challenge mode is Battle Rush a series of fights against all the enemy Types on each island than like before all Islands back to back in one massive Gauntlet it's not quite the Titan refight Mode people wanted but it's pretty close and a Boss Rush really should be included in any game that has bosses so this is only a good addition gives you a chance to re-experience that ghoulish camera wow that is oh please stop please Sonic please please once again though you're ranked purely on time so all that matters is how quickly you can dispatch everything in front of you that's all well and good but this means that the combat issues from the main game carry over it's not about getting creative with your move set it's picking the strongest attack with the shortest animation and spamming that on everything only changing if the enemy type requires a different approach like a side Loop and there is some satisfaction in a Mega Man Boss weakness sort of way where you find the trick like how recovery smash is a Tower's living nightmare just run up get hit press a and or how it's more efficient to dodge around instead of parrying because it's faster side looping a group of Shield enemies to disable them then Dodge canceling the end of your attack animation to save time running up to squid and making him implode Mother of God there is depth when you look for it a little more than what I gave credit to in my review but it doesn't fix the fundamental issues present nor does it go nearly as deep as other games in the genre further convoluting this are the RPG elements When selecting battle Rush your stats are carried over from whichever save file you choose meaning there is a spectrum of combinations for what level Sonic can be fully maxed out maybe somewhere in the middle level one full defense no attack all speed no rings there's a lot to consider here assuming you have the file to support it but let's be real who's not going to play this fully maxed out on their first try this is Battle Rush after all a test of your skills you want to stand the best chance you can right you spent all that time leveling up for a reason of course you're going to go all in as far as you know that's how the mode was meant to be played but doing that will guarantee the S rank in a way that further reduces the need for all that clever Innovation I cleared everything first try without giving it much thought spamming the same combos trivializing the early game content especially look at ninja on level one versus 99. oh now come on this puts us in a weird situation where we have to limit ourselves to make the mode better instead of being well balanced by default or having an Adaptive ranking system that corresponds to your stats we have to fiddle around with settings and values to uncover what's most fulfilling for us on one hand it gives you options the luxury of choice but on the other there's a strong lack of clarity and decisiveness on the game's end to give me a well thought out experience to make the S ranks more meaningful I have to self-impose restrictions but how far do I go you try doing it on level 1 attack and it seems impossible for later Islands apparently it's not people have done it but how many Hoops am I going to have to jump through to figure that out and will it be fun those are risks I don't know if I have the time or desire to take and that is the price of putting too much freedom in the player's hands without proper conveyance so far my results have been moderately positive some encounters being greatly enriched by this limitation like red pillar finally someone who can tell me the truth the recovery smash does so little damage at level one that it actually becomes more optimal to run up and Dodge the spinning wheel to get to its head faster then I swapped to a ranged attack when it gets too close and I repeat very satisfying s-rank to achieve but very little of it felt intentional and with that you can have some Jank those quirks in the combat like accidental moves homing reticles not showing up input delays domesticating wolf It all becomes exacerbated under this strict criteria there's a lot of trial and error to figure out what works and I have no problem with that philosophy so long as my mistakes are evident but that's not always the case overall I think battle Rush is a fine mode that deserves to be included but is no more polished than the content it isolates if nothing else it's still a convenient way to fight all the enemies one by one to test your efficiency at varying degrees and in that regard it does its job well just keep in mind that the ranking is lopsided if I may suggest a superficial Quality of Life Update let us choose what time of day we fight in some of these bosses look really good at night and I think players would appreciate the option also careful When selecting chaos Island because you know who shows up right off the bat nearly punched a hole in my desk like the cyberspace challenge you're given a reward for getting all s ranks here however this is no mere menu toggle we're granted an entirely new mode in extreme difficulty this can only be selected when starting a new game and can't be changed Midway like the others enemies are allegedly harder although I didn't notice a difference Sonic is unable to level up his stats outside of the skill tree so you're stuck at level 1 and taking a single hit will result in death trying to grab this vault key that for some reason won't let you touch it get clapped idiot naturally the stakes for every combat encounter are much higher now since any small error can be fatal fixing the core issue with rings and how you only needed one to survive and could continually pick the same ones back up or Sile Loop the ground for easy access none of that is applicable anymore and it's one of the two things that extreme mode greatly improves upon about the base game unfortunately it also throws the game's balancing way out of whack even more than it already was in regards to combat yes it's an instant kill now but you still have a busted Perry that can be held well in advance or how parrying after a hit can suspend you in midair negating your damage animation sparing your life don't like jump rope go get a snack these two features alone break so much of the intended challenge to where the majority of my deaths were just plain stupid instead of locking onto the enemy right in front of me it chooses the one off screen that happens to be surrounded by spikes I want my lawyer extreme really is a good name for this mode because it doesn't necessarily make everything harder it accentuates the polarizing extremities in the Frontiers balancing act like how certain enemy telegraphs or lack thereof are really problematic now fighting konoichi like always and then you know what laser there's another laser on caterpillar that just feels engineered to cut you off right when you switch rails unable to course correct Sonic squiggly Spider Sense is nearly impossible to see or hear when you're right up in a Titan's face wailing away with your own particle and sound effects made extra confusing by the one attack that doesn't kill you because it plays into a cutscene some Guardians behave like this too Towers Spinning Wheel doesn't hurt but everything else does how about dying in the open Zone did that ever happen to you in standard play look I don't mind getting killed instantly if the fault is clearly my own but the occurrence is so random and sporadic there's no Rhyme or Reason it'll show up for two seconds and then you might not see anything like it for hours I never died to an open Zone challenge I never took damage until chaos Island and it was one part A Part I usually quite enjoy but the lasers have no Telegraph there's a brief sound cue but no visual Wind-up to warn of its activation or positioning and they don't exactly stand out against a dark background of identical lights the worst part though is that dying to those resets me to my last save point at the cyberspace portal beforehand so I have to redo all that stuff again it's only roughly a minute but if you fail multiple times that Stacks up and look if you're familiar with my videos then you know that I'm no stranger to redoing content from a fatal mistake if it's part of the challenge in fact I've often encouraged it but this this isn't a challenge it's a series of scripted Thrills that are meant to feel good and look cool making me repeat any of that will diminish its appeal almost instantly thankfully there is a checkpoint right in the middle of this section if you can walk forward a couple feet it's just too bad they respawn you directly on one of the laser holes what are you kidding me it's not even a consistent firing rate sometimes you have a second to get out others it's immediate fine Tails yeah I'm trying checkpoint placement was an issue in my first playthrough but the review is already so long I decided to shelf it it's time to break the silence the way this game Auto saves is an anomaly after a major event or Mission makes sense but grinding memory tokens for the Absurd final aranos cost only to trip over some spikes which on Extreme will kill you and B reset six whole tokens is deflating maybe the manual save fixes this but I'm not going to preemptively do that after every step I take nor should I have to if you want to reset my spawn point go for it but let me keep the items I've collected at least it's especially entertaining when it can't make up its mind on where to put you I left a cyberspace portal ran up the mountain died to some spikes and respawned back at the portal makes sense it's not very far away but then I went the same way getting launched by the terrain classic chaos Island moment I went too far fell in the pit and it respawned me on the Mountainside I thought oh that's convenient puts me a little closer so I get launched again entering a 2d section in 3D and other chaos Island trademark get hit by spikes and I'm back at the portal again what this is not a major inconvenience but what happened on a side note I've actually come around on chaos Island quite a bit since my first exposure I still have the same issues with it but I've learned my way around and came to enjoy a lot of its platforming maybe I don't need to purchase that firearm after all but all window shop so yeah the combat still isn't where it needs to be aspects of it are definitely improved but some pretty game breaking exploits are retained and now we have these random moments in the open Zone affected by the extreme difficulty even though virtually nothing about the open zone is meant to be difficult climb all the way up this tower on Ria but got hit by those spikes at the very end because you boost faster than your rail switching animation can keep up do it again another aspect that gets pretty shut down on extreme mode is the assortment of collectible items while you can still obtain them Cocos and seeds of power and defense have no purpose since your stats are locked at level one the HUD is even disabled now this has its advantages late game enemies won't get steamrolled by a maxed out Sonic but now all of those open Zone puzzles and minigames that granted a seed for your trouble have greatly reduced value they still create fast travel rails and uncover parts of the map to help locate Guardians and portals but you can definitely feel that a portion of the game's currency has been gutted I don't even bother maxing out the skill tree since the three story moves you get are all you really need once I got the quicksiloop wild Russian Cyclone kick I never looked back and you know what my combat experience was actually a lot more seamless now that I wasn't accidentally doing the Homing shot all the time God bless although it did mean that I was fighting those common enemies even less than before since they weren't going to drop anything I could use outside of the rare memory token or portal gear which is a shame because I'm much less bothered by the shields now than when I first played getting good can be a very real prescription except when the terrain is comprised of failure running over these Stones can disrupt a side loop at any time it feels like it all right try it again nope okay come on dude enough with the freaking cactus just draw the circle okay close it close it this is pain ironically even though rings have zero meaning on Extreme dying in one hit meant that I always respawned at 400 so I never had to spend time side looping the ground to get the power boost back and that alone was kind of worth it despite half of the Collectibles losing their meaning though the other half is made a lot more necessary and that's because Big's prices have been modified by Mr Krabs himself They just added a zero to everything 150 tokens for a single vault key not even big the cat's alternate Dimension fishing hole is safe from inflation honestly I think they should have disabled the shop entirely that would have been the most hardcore thing to do since players can still technically grind the soothing fishing game as long as they want but jacking the prices up is equally funny and deterring in its own right needless to say I didn't bother with any of it I already fished everything out once I don't need to do it again hammerhead shark aside and because I wasn't cheating with our purple feline friend I had no choice but to pay attention where all the Guardians were and fight them without taking damage so I could get enough portal gears to unlock cyberspace and speaking of which this is the other thing that extreme difficulty nailed in fact it's my favorite part of the entire mode Sonic team went back in and lowered every time requirement for the S rank except 1-2 because of course now I've played these levels so much to an unhealthy degree if I'm being honest that I was still able to get most s ranks on my first try but not by much with a few exceptions I was mere seconds away from needing to try again and that's with me taking the optimal routes and not taking any damage two seven and three three in particular were the standouts that had me replaying a few times only to barely skate by I should also mention that I disabled the power boost and didn't use any homing dashes to keep it fair so you could still use either for an advantage with all that information though I firmly believe that this is how the time requirements should have been normally you can still get three Vault Keys per level by doing the easy missions you'll just have to find more portals whereas the skilled players who can achieve those tough s ranks will not only get a fourth key but an extra three for clearing every Mission so at most they'll only have to play three maybe four cyber stages per Island to unlock every Vault a sizable incentive for going that extra mile the worse you play the less you earn the better you play the more you earn this is basic balancing and extreme mode shockingly understands that better than the others at least when it comes to the guardian vault key relationship everything else is still either are the same or worse like they changed all the s ranks but not any of the mini games in the open Zone except for the Chaos Emerald missions where you had three HP now you only have one to keep in line with the one hit KO philosophy although not for the hacking minigame I guess they forgot about that one same with pinball but that's probably for the best I was terrified that I was gonna look in that top right corner and see like 10 million points or something absurd to troll us but thankfully they showed mercy no change to the final boss either that was kind of weird seemed like a good opportunity overall I'm rather mixed on extreme mode I like the attempts it makes it a higher difficulty more threatening boss encounters I actually had to fight Supreme Big's fishing isn't nearly as broken and cyberspace is the best it's been we really need a way to select extreme in the arcade or challenge mode however the imbalances in the combat are on full display more so now that you're dying a lot to the point where even the open Zone has its share of snags and with half the currencies rendered useless a chunk of the explorative charm is taken from us as well I would say this is more of a side grade if anything some things are are better some are worse but most of it is the same game worth playing for the novelty I'm definitely glad it's here I don't regret what I played but it falls very short of what a hardcore mode can be instead of going in and carefully retooling enemy patterns platforming challenges and item locations they just changed a bunch of numbers around take away Sonic's Health his upgrades lower S rank times and raise fishing prices done cut print please let me go home to my family I wouldn't be opposed to more elaborate modifications being made in the future or some kind of reward for beating the game on the highest difficulty we don't even get a medal on the title screen for it as a complete package though I thought this update was pretty good the game is in an objectively better condition now with more content that's entirely optional and free even if still flawed it's a very good start that makes me excited for the coming updates until then thank you guys so much for watching and as always don't forget to check out the next episode whenever I post it which will probably be soon alright see ya

Channel: bickuribox12

Views: 202,506

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Id: 0sI7G2259io

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 24 2023