Last week, the third and final update of Sonic Frontiers, The Final Horizon, was finally released by SEGA and Sonic Team. This was set to be the DLC that would be entirely story-based and allow fans to at long last play as the other characters in the series with Tails, Knuckles, and Amy Rose, something which the main series of games hasn’t done for quite some time. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that a Sonic game has offered DLC that acted as either a continuation or extension of the main campaign along with brand new cutscenes. And it’s also free, too!
The main hook of The Final Horizon that it features an alternate climax to the story of the original game. While not officially stated, this was likely done to address some of the main complaints that Sonic fans had when it came to Sonic Frontiers has a whole. Despite Frontiers receiving a mostly positive response from the fanbase, they were not scared to voice their issues with the game. Criticism such as being unable to play as other characters, the major subplot of Sonic being cured from his cyberspace sickness being resolved in a heartbeat, the final boss/ending being underwhelming, and the big one, the game was just too easy. In some respects, you can basically say this is the equivalent of Re Mind DLC from Kingdom Hearts III.
The Final Horizon DLC takes place shortly after Sonic arrives on Ouranos Island, the final area of the game. Once Sonic is able to find and go through the big golden ring, that takes him through an alternate timeline where things will end up playing differently than it did during the main campaign. After Sonic’s friends sacrifice themselves to suppress his cyber corruption, the hedgehog accepts an alternative proposal from Sage to defeat The End by converting his corruption into greater power. As a result, Sage restores the holographic forms of Tails, Knuckles, and Amy, allowing the pair to aid Sonic in his quest to destroy the last remains of the Titans. The three now must complete their duties to finding the chaos emeralds once again while Sonic himself must undergo a series of trials at the five Towers of the Masters, helmed by Master King himself, the leader of the Ancients and overseer of Cyber Sonic, so he can combine the power the king possess with his own to destroy Supreme and The End once and for all.
The first thing that needs to be stated right off the bat is how hard The Final Horizon is. And I mean it is hard as BALLS no matter what difficulty you are playing on! If anything, this perhaps might be the hardest bit of Sonic gameplay that I have ever played. It does not hold your hand in the slightest! This makes Eggmanland from Unleashed look like a cakewalk! It’s like Sonic Team took the complaints of Sonic Frontiers being “too easy” to heart and made the desire to make it as challenging and rage inducing as possible just to to complainers up. Well for those that complained about that, I highly doubt they will ever criticize a Sonic game for being “too easy” ever again!
Having a game be hard isn’t necessarily bad in it’s own right. It’s find for your game to difficult and challenging just as long as it’s rewarding by the end of it and feels like it’s hard by design and not strictly because of insanely flawed game mechanics. Is The Final Horizon the fun kind of hard or cheap kind of hard? It’s…..complicated.
To be sure, the DLC as a whole is designed to be a challenge! There’s the sections where Sonic is supposed to climb up the towers that inserts the design of gameplay that requires the player to do more than just mindless boosting, jumping, and homing attacking. There’s the trials with the king where you have to beat a certain number of enemies that takes many hits to kill with very limited time in order to advance. And of course, there’s the boss rush mode near the end where you are required to beat three of the main bosses of the game back-to-back-to-back with no extra rings or checkpoints in between. However, there are other elements where it feels like it’s only hard because of how awkward the characters control and the cheap mechanics that are thrown in.
The moments where Sonic is climbing up the tower feels needlessly cruel because it inserts gameplay styles that the main game never provided and is designed in a way where it feels like you are suppose to be it in a way that the game never intended. Like, who is really thinking that the only way you are able to get up to some of the towers is by slowly walking through some very easy to slip and fall off platformers. Or how there’s a certain section where you can only advance by Sonic using the spin dash on something that ALWAYS flies you right off the tower and back down to the ground. That doesn’t’ feel right.
There are multiple other sections like that in the DLC. Like how the only way to get from one section to the other with other characters is by flying ridiculously high in the air and skipping past all of the required platforming sections. Or how being unable to perform an attack on an enemy to get to the top of the tower or beat a boss because the camera decided to betray you, make you lose sight of your character, and force you to start over. That’s not challenging, that’s just cheap.
And that’s not even going through some of the insane difficulty spikes for some of the main trails. There is one challenge that will take you forever to beat because it requires you to defeat certain amount of enemies that take forever to kill in a very short amount of time. However, there are other challenges where you are literally given all the time in the world to beat and you are able to do so in just a minute or two. Heck, I was even expecting that those challenges would have like ten more enemies to beat because of all the extra time I was given. There is no way this had to been done by accident, this is Sonic Team literally trolling it’s fanbase.
Don’t even get me started on that final boss rush mode I mentioned earlier. If you played the game on hard mode up to that point, that will be the moment where you will chicken out and go straight to easy mode. And even then, it’s not really easy. Having no extra rings or checkpoints, being requiring to perform pitch perfect parry attacks in order to block attacks from enemies, and knowing all the quickest tricks imaginable to beat every boss is asking a LOT from the player. Even if that was by design, I still couldn’t help but feel like I got screwed over multiple times by the game. If it wasn’t the game failing to respond to a button input at the exact time I pressed it that was killing me, then it was the game being stuck in it’s own loading screen for an eternity which forced me to restart the game. If there is one part of the game that basically shows The Final Horizon‘s thin red line between hard by design and hard by pure bs, it’s this section.
Now, the main selling point of this DLC is being able to play as the other characters that include Tails, Knuckles, and Amy Rose. This is the first time that these characters have been made playable in a main series 3D game since Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), literally 17 (!) years ago. This is the main element I was anticipating as I said in my piece of things I want for future Sonic games after Frontiers was being able to play as other characters. When it comes to the way they play however? Once again, it’s……..complicated.
At the very start, they all control rather awkwardly. This is mostly due to not being as skilled up as you will likely have with Sonic during the main game and certain skills that are taken away at the start while only being accessible through gaining enough XP points to unlock them. It gives the notion that these characters were not design for this kind of gameplay and Sonic Team still has work to do with making them feel comfortable to play in a modern 3D environment. However, once you are able to unlock certain skills and move sets that you were able to as Sonic along with getting the hang of their own unique tricks, there is some fun to be had with them.
Amy is able to have her own hammer attack and ways to launch herself in the air in ways that Sonic could, Knuckles is able to glide all over the place in ways that feel broken in the best and worst ways, and Tails even gets to use his mech to fly around in. Not gonna lie, that last part was just pure AWESOME to see again and basically makes these characters being playable again worth it. While it’s great to be able to have these characters be playable again, there’s still more work to be done with them to make their gameplay stand out better the next time around, if Sonic Team plan to bring more playable characters.
There are certainly improvements that are made here over the main game. The first one being the Cyberspace levels. There’s much more unlockables and challenges this time around that help increase the replay value along with level designs that feels much wider and open without it being ripped straight from any of the other boost games. These unlockables mostly include the ones that was when prior games though like Lost World and Forces which involves collecting the number coins in the correct order, the five moon tokens, and even rescuing a pair of flickies. The challenges come from the ones that was used in Colors: Ultimate where you are racing against an A.I. that basically cosplays as a hologram version of Tails. The physics still feel off and Sonic feels way too loose when in the air but there definitely was more effort put into Cyberspace levels this time around that I hope carries over in future games.
The main saving grace in all of this is how strongly the DLC concludes with the new and improved final boss. Without going too deep into spoilers, for those that were underwhelmed with how the final boss in the original game turned with inserting the kind of gameplay style that didn’t feel appropriate, you will likely feel the exact opposite this time around. Not only is the final boss here better than the original game in every way, this might be the very best final boss in any Sonic game period.
I was on literal cloud NINE during the majority of this final boss! It’s frustrating at first when you don’t know how to take way The End’s health charger but once you figure out the move to get rid of that, the rest of it is just an amazing triumph. It’s able to feel like a challenge without being unreasonably fair, the spectacle of the fight is incredible, the remix of I’m Here is absolute EARGASM, and my god, Super Sonic has never been more badass than he has been here.
It also does a good job of having Sonic’s cyberspace corruption still feel like a part of him during the final battle and not completely glossed over unlike in the main game. The story itself concludes in a better was as well, with an ending that feels more happy and earnest but still bittersweet. Aside from missing that chilling “I AM INEVITABLE!” monologue from The End, this is the exact kind of final boss that I wanted the first time around which helps make The Final Horizon end on a high note. Also, there’s a pretty cool node to Sonic X that you will know when you see it.
Just like the main game itself, The Final Horizon is….complicated. There are definitely some notable improvements from the main game such as the cyberspace levels and final boss along with getting to play as the other characters in a 3D game once again. However, there are plenty of other sections that feel way more frustrating than it is fun. The difficulty spikes is incredibly inconsistent, the controls to certain characters are awkward as hell, there’s parts where I can’t tell if it’s actually beatable by design or by basically cheating, and those trials with the king and the final boss rush mode is beyond ridiculous.
I still say it’s worth trying out for yourself to see if you are up to the challenge as it is free after all but The Final Horizon is definitely something that will kick your ass in all the best and worst ways possible. Like the original game, there are plenty of seeds planting throughout that show great potential once they are allowed to grow into a fully form plant. We can only hope that Sonic Team can learn the right lessons next time around and able to expand upon it’s promising foundation in the hopes of even greater experiences in the future. Time will tell but there is at least a reason to be hopeful for Sonic again. If anything, that is more than enough as of right now.
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