Speedrunners Have Completely DESTROYED Sonic Frontiers

Sonic Frontiers has only been released for a few weeks and speedrunners have already found incredible sequence breaks and glitches that help them save massive amounts of time today we'll be looking at each of the skips and investigating a conspiracy that may be affecting Sonic Frontier speedrunning I hope you enjoy today's video one of the first discoveries was the magnet Dash and it would be the foundation of many physics-based glitches found in the game the trick requires that you have an enemy to lock onto and is quite forgiving as the time loss for not getting it on the first try is very minimal but players quickly began wondering since there's a way to get horizontal movement what about vertical and the answer led to one of the biggest skips in Sonic frontier's speedrunning to understand the gravity or anti-gravity for this Skip it's worth looking at what a glitchless run through Kronos Island looks like to progress normally you need to complete a series of objectives collecting 92 memory tokens all six of the chaos emeralds a number of Vault keys to access the emeralds and freeing Amy to get the final boss to spawn these are long and time-consuming tasks as some of these objectives require completing other quests to access their rewards but fortunately for speedrunners there was a way to skip the entire process all it required was leveling up the stomp attack is available when you reach level 18 and it allows you to stomp on enemies from above but helping you in fights isn't what this trick brings to the run it's actually the key to skipping the entire Kronos Island discovered by darkspine Sonic if you lock onto an enemy then do a Dodge roll you can stomp attack and then immediately cancel it with a boost and if your timing is correct you'll be launched into the stratosphere Runners call this trick by two different names the DSs Shuffle after the person who discovered it and the HSP or Hedgehog space program for how much height Sonic gets the obvious thing speedrunners tried was to use the HSP to get over the mountains around the arena with the final boss although there were problems and concerns first there's a giant invisible wall that stops you from entering the arena before you've unlocked it through normal progression and second you're required to have the chaos emeralds to fight the boss and if you manage to get into the fight early Runners weren't sure what would happen since those would be missing there was only one way to find out and that was getting over the wall and it turns out that the wall is really high but not high enough to stop an HSP from getting over it and when Runners arrived in the arena they found that the boss was absent while they were ecstatic that they got over the wall it appeared as though skipping the entire Island wasn't going to be possible as the boss was nowhere to be seen But vorgon the beta refused to give up hope and had something peculiar happen after exploring the arena the boss suddenly spawned in in a twist of fate that was almost too good to be true there is a trigger to spawn the boss on the same tile as where the cutscene spawned Sonic if you unlock the fight normally and vorgon had run over this while exploring which triggered the fight but things didn't end here remember the concern about not having the chaos emeralds the final Emerald is on top of the boss and if you grab it without having the others Sonic will still go super mode buy another Stroke of Luck the game developers never put a check to determine if you had bothered to collect the other emeralds thus letting Runners skip the entirety of Kronos Island it's estimated that this skip saves over 30 minutes and was instrumental in achieving the first sub-2-hour run but don't you think it's strange that there was a way to spawn the boss left in the game and to go super mode without having the emeralds the circumstances around this skip get even more bizarre if we look at the patch history between version 1.1 and version 1.101 the developers added another invisible wall to the Boss Arena except it was shaped like a donut which meant you could still get in through the top it was almost as if they were aware that speedrunners were using a specific method to skip the island and deliberately left it in we'll return to this point later in the video because we've just arrived at Aries Island where yet another major skip waits for us as you progress through the different levels in Sonic Frontiers the number of items you need to collect to unlock more of the game increases and Aries island is no exception requiring 240 memory tokens and all of the chaos emeralds if you want to face the area's final boss unlike the first major boss this one didn't have an arena for you to fight it in instead you summon it to a large Tower to initiate the fight which normally requires you to complete a puzzle that unlocks the door to the tower but a skip that bypasses the door was discovered and it's one of the most technically demanding in all of speedrunning you can just jump over it discovered by clave second this skip ran into the same problem as the first boss skip how do we spawn the boss once inside the encounter area which clove achieved by running around randomly upon further investigation it was revealed that Sonic needed to touch a specific spot which happened to be the location the cutscene places you add if you unlock the boss normally the coincidences for skips are starting to form a pattern this skip did have a couple of mandatory quests you need to complete for it to work first you need to save knuckles as this gets you a single Chaos Emerald which triggers the wyvern escape sequence once you complete the escape sequence the boss will spawn when you touch the correct patch of grass since you could climb over the puzzle doors Runners immediately tried using an HSP and it did work but all the time spent jumping and falling takes time and there was a quicker method discovered instead of going to the puzzle door and jumping over it they found a way to get to the boss trigger that involves using a spring from a Mini-Game sequence coincidentally the spring is close enough to the ground that you can lock onto it and use it without getting stuck in the 2D camera mode that happens when you start it normally this lets you get the Boost from the spring and exit the sequence early which puts you in an area you shouldn't have access to Once on This ledge it's possible to climb up two more walls with a couple boosted jumps and then make a beeline for the boss trigger so how much time does it save if you did Aries Island glitchless you would need to gather 240 memory tokens all the chaos emeralds The Vault keys to unlock the emeralds and watch all of the cutscenes but with Aries Island skip all of this is cut out saving almost an entire hour in the speed run and we're only on the second Island the next skip we're looking at has to do with the shield Escape in chaos Island and it showcases a couple of mechanics we haven't looked at yet it's a sequence that involves Sonic being chased by a shield through a 2d section with you having to restart the stage if you're Touched By The Shield Chasing You YouTuber d-pad gamer discovered a quirky slope next to the start of this sequence that will launch you with enough height to skip the 2D trigger if you boost off of it at the right angle if you are wondering why they don't use an HSP it's because there aren't any enemies around so there's nothing to lock onto which is a problem because with the trigger avoided you still need a way to skip the sequence itself but luckily there's another piece of tech called the trick launch that will help us out a trick launch may be something you've encountered yourself in the game as it's relatively easy to perform so here's an MS paint Recreation if you're running at Max Speed and hit a small incline you'll be sent flying with the amount of extra speed you receive depending on your angle at the time of hitting the incline once you've passed the 2D trigger the game locks progression since it thinks you're inside of a special sequence but d-pad gamer theorized that if he ran to where the 2D section ends and hit the trigger to end the segment he would be able to progress and he was correct using a trick launch he escapes the 2D segment and then runs to where it ends and sure enough the game behaved as if he had played it normally and let him continue making narrative progress the skip hasn't been used in runs yet for a few reasons first if you fail the setup on your first try the shield will likely touch you and cause a reset which costs a lot of time second the angles you need for the jumps are very precise so it's not easy by any means and third the skip only saves a marginal amount of time so it's not worth using until the run is more optimized trick Launches on the other hand are used throughout the run to skip various segments and get around faster and they can be achieved when boosting off of a flat platform or the the Platforms in the 2D sections if you can access them without triggering the special camera there's one in the current route used right after the shield escape to skip another 2D section and the future of the run will likely be finding and routing in different trick launches as they have huge time saving potential I know I just laid out reasons on why this wouldn't be used in a run but in a shocking turn of events onaku decided to YOLO the skip in his recent world record and managed to pull it off second try saving 40 seconds by using a different trick launch spot and getting the first sub 120 time quite insane but not the last thing we're looking at there's one segment of the game that Runners absolutely hate and that's pinball if everything goes perfect you can get through pinball in a minute and a half but the majority of time you'll be spending minutes on this section because it's full of RNG the goal is to get 5 million points with score multipliers spawning in random locations as you play with some being easy to grab and others being incredibly difficult due to the physics involved more than a few Runners have lost potential PBS and World Records to this section due to it being a time-loss black hole and since it was a mini game required for story progression it was thought that a skip would be impossible to find but Runner cabley discovered something that no one saw coming when you enter pinball an auto save is triggered and if you reload this auto save the game starts the first cutscene leading into the mini game again except there's one big discrepancy you have full control of Sonic for a few brief seconds while you're in the pinball game and loading into it the game keeps Sonic hidden off screen during the reload the goal is to get Sonic close to a crater and then jump into the void so that he will hit the death plane and die after the game has initiated pinball you do get a brief glimpse of where Sonic is during this process and if you manage to time the death properly the game will load you back to the cliff you just jumped off of except the story flag in the top right will be missing the story flag lets the player know what their current objective is and it's not understood why it gets wiped when doing this skip the best explanation I can offer is the classic the game gets confused while the game is in this state if you die again by jumping into the crater you'll be reloaded on the cliff except now the story flag gets updated to the objective after pinball which just so happens to be entering the crater to trigger the next boss there is something very strange about this skip however players would randomly lose runs when doing the inputs while Sonic is off-screen for whatever reason the angle that Sonic started in when you got control of him could vary which meant that even if you perform the exact inputs as someone that found the crater you could fail the trick and get something known as glitched pinball all was not lost however for some reason that's probably related to Mario entering parallel universes if you destroy this box before going to pinball your angle will be set to a fixed position when you do the skip there is one caveat however after breaking the box if you hit a trick launch or engage with a 2d section your angle will get changed and this actually cost Emerald a run when he accidentally hit a trick launch and failed the skip oh it did up oh that's so bad I don't know what to do now um you're likely wondering if there are other cutscenes or segments that can be skipped with this method and unfortunately there haven't been any found that would be helpful to the any percent run the 100 category may be a different story but it hasn't been routed yet so we'll have to wait and see but there's one thing left to look at the Sonic speedrunning conspiracy it's clear that the developers are aware of some of the skips that Runners have found as they intentionally patched in a second wall in the gigantos fight that appears to make it harder for casual players to enter the arena but has a giant hole in the top that allows speedrunners to perform the trick on top of that it almost seems too good to be true that ways to trigger the boss fights were left in the game when skipping all progression requirements and some Runners speculate that these were intentionally left in in the event that they found progression skips so is this a grand conspiracy or just a series of very lucky accidents it's hard to say but the head of the Sonic team at Sega did mention he was aware of speed Runners ahead of the game's release in an interview with Game Informer so who knows if these are happy accidents or breadcrumbs left by the developers let me know what you think down below thanks for watching and I hope to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Abyssoft

Views: 407,964

Keywords: sonic frontiers, sonic the hedgehog, ares island, kronos island, chaos island, frontiers, abyssoft, speedrun, world record, pb, speedrunning, skip, glitch, trick, sonic, sega

Id: Ybpu5NhGbtg

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022