What was your most frustrating/difficult experience with a Sonic game?

[MGA_Gamer]

Pretty much the entirety of Sonic Lost World. It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but the level design was just brutal!. I lost count of how many times I got a Game Over by midway though Silent Forest.

[StreetSonic2022]

There were a couple of moments that was so unnecessary and would often frustrates me when playing the Sonic games back in the day. Some I can remember as a child during the Classic era were: the trap placements on Marble Zone, especially with the crushers, Chemical Plant's acid near the end of Act 2, and the infamous barrel in Carnival Night Zone. Also, you may hate me for this, but as much I love the music for Red Volcano Zone in Sonic Blast, Act 3's weird things (which years later found out they were the platforms to use Spin Dash to go up!), pissed me off so much to shut off the game. Adventure/Dreamcast era was Crazy Gadget (the last part)! Holy moly, I couldn't figure out how to get Sonic to the other side to the Goal post until I bought the strategy guide! Initially, I thought Egg Viper boss for Sonic's story in Adventure 1 frustrated me until I finally defeat the boss but Crazy Gadget's gravity blocks puzzle took the cake.

[babsiwuff]

RRRGH.  I can't get past Zavok in Sonic Forces and I've given up trying.  >.<

[Iko]

-Sonic 2, the Special Stages (especially with Tails AI) are all about memorization and the controls are weird, they are bad and rage-inducing. Still Sonic 2, the Death Egg Robot with 0 rings.

-Sonic 3, the barrel.

-Sonic Blast, getting lost in Blue Marine Act 2, the worst level in the whole series.

-Sonic Adventure, some missions such as getting that jump on the snowboard level by perfectly timing a jump on the ramp.

-Sonic Adventure 2, I loved the game, but I also completed it with all ranks A with the PAL double input glitch, try to imagine.

-Sonic 4 episode II, the Sky Chase level and its bullshit design; Also the heart-shaped final boss, and other do-or-die moments in the game.

-Sonic Generations... all the missions that require you to memorize the level in order to get a rank S, the delayed and unprecise input (especially when Sonic boosts/spindashes in the opposite direction), the unpredictable collisions, the trial and error level design that punishes errors by throwing you into a 3 times longer route (AKA need to restart the level for rank S) or by activating a 5-seconds long animation when you get hurt, the glitches that made me restart missions multiple times, Planet Wisp, the Egg Dragoon and its wonky gameplay, the super boring "homing shot" bossfight that needs to be done twice (hard mode lol it's still the same borefest), etc. Getting all the red star rings in Sky Sanctuary classic.

-Sonic Forces' gameplay, especially the avatar.

-Mania: Chaos Island like level design, you touch an invisible spring and the game throws you into a chain of springs and gimmicks for 15 seconds while you have absolutely no control over the character, and to humiliate you more, it also lets you see some secret rooms (such as a giant ring, or a room with many ring monitors and an electric shield, or something) but makes it impossible to backtrack to them once the automated sequence ends; Mania has troll level design that's absolutely not fun. The super annoying bossfights, especially Metal Sonic Kai that's like the worst bossfight in the entire series. When you are at your 10th lap in a special stage but the emerald still won't get close because you're going through the wrong route; the special stages when you fall and there's no way to restart it, and even if you exit, the game makes sure that the giant ring will be unobtainable until you reach and defeat the final boss.

-Sonic Forces Speed Battle. Don't play that game, it's just frustration and shady practices to exploit the players' FOMO, nothing of it is fun nor good in any way. Don't let the fanservice trick you.

I didn't play Unleashed and 06

[Maple Syrup]

3 words. Chemical. Plant. Zone.I can't get past those moving stairs in water!

[Gruffin]

I haven't played many of the games yet, so this is likely to change as I work my way through the library, buuut...Final Rush and Route 280 in SA2 (Steam version, unmodded).

For Final Rush, I was constantly falling off the rails after either aiming badly or struggling to gain enough momentum because I hadn't figured out to crouch and not touch the control stick. The vertical rails also gave me a lot of trouble.

For 280, the kart racing parts of the game are already frustrating because of the way the karts control, but the time limit made it even worse to get through.

[King of Fanta]

The Sonic 3 barrel. It's funny how nowadays this wouldn't even be a thing, you'd just go online and find out what you were supposed to do and you wouldn't give it a second thought. Back then I had no idea. I had to get my brother to keep jumping on it as Tails just so I could spindash under it as Sonic. I have no idea why I didn't think that there must be a more straight forward solution than this.

EggmanLand in Sonic Unleashed is far too long, but not too difficult. Its easy to farm lives before, and the game gives you extra lives during difficult parts of the stage itself so you can keep retrying (which makes those parts seem so pointless, but I digress).

Sonic '06 isn't too bad unless you're going for every achievement. Then it becomes a descent into madness. The amount of times either 1: Sonic clipped "absolutely nothing" in a high speed stage and died, 2: Shadow's stupid hovercraft exploded for no reason, or 3: Silver's Psychokinesis didn't work how it was supposed too, resulting in death or a restart due to losing out on a good time bonus. Putting myself through this living hell might be why other Sonic game's difficulties don't seem too bad.

I don't mind Sonic Superstars difficulty too much, although Trip's story isn't much fun. Far too many cheap hits. I'll defend the Nack fight at the end as a boss fight you just need to learn, however the headbutt attack that comes out of nowhere is bad game design.

 

[kiro]

The  most frustrating thing for me in a sonic game is going fast and suddenly getting stopped by a wall and getting dirt in my face or going really fast then jumping high in the air just to land on some god damn spikes is so nerve racking it pisses me off some times.

[Blacklightning]

Not many things top Rouge's chapter in Sonic Battle for me.

The fact that Rouge is already one of the worse characters in the game certainly doesn't help things, but it comes to a head when you fight Amy - who while isn't the most infamously gamebreaking of the cast, still has a noticable advantage over you. In her second round, Sonic joins in and the fight becomes a 2v2 with Emerl on your side. This single moment is probably the sharpest difficulty spike in the entire game, not just because they turned the AI difficulty of Amy's team way up, but they turned Emerl's AI down, making him a constant liability throughout the fight. And it would be bad enough if Emerl contributed nothing to a team battle and then fucking died, but this game is played for score, not lives - which means not only do they contribute almost nothing to the fight no matter what you configured their moves to beforehand, they actively feed points to the enemy team by running right to them and then doing almost nothing to fight back, meaning you have to constantly babysit this useless bastard to make sure Amy doesn't take the lead through absolutely no fault of your own.

Insult to injury, of course, is added by the fact that in terms of the storyline, the Sonic on Amy's team isn't even real. I feel that bears repeating because I cannot stress this enough: you are getting the shit kicked out of you by a literal figment of Amy's imagination. The game never explains how or why this is possible, whether it even happened from Rouge's perspective, and doesn't so much as fucking acknowledge the second round at all after you finally beat it. What's worse than an infuriating difficulty spike? An infuriating difficulty spike accompanied by atrocious writing that throws the entire existence of the event into doubt! It's saying a lot that practically the very next fight is a 3v1 with Rouge being the outnumbered party, and somehow that while still difficult, still manages to be the less offensive fight by a very large margin. Fuck Rouge's chapter, man.

[LegoNess]

I still haven't beat Master King Koco's trial, even on easy. It's mostly due to how time-consuming the battle against Knight is. Seriously, it takes so long before it can be attacked.

[Miles Storzillo]

On 11/25/2023 at 8:57 AM, LegoNess said:

I still haven't beat Master King Koco's trial, even on easy. It's mostly due to how time-consuming the battle against Knight is. Seriously, it takes so long before it can be attacked.

I think you mean Wyvern.  Also, yeah, this would have to be my pick as well.  I never thought I'd ever encounter anything in this series more infuriating than Eggmanland.  And I refused to do this on anything but Easy.  I have no idea how I managed to beat it on my 1st try on my 2nd playthrough.  (I wanted to fight Supreme End with a lv 1 Sonic.  Thankfully in the base game I made a save before the Knight fight so I could battle him as many times as I wanted and I didn't have any upgrades besides for speed (which does nothing for combat))

[Ravenfreak]

Oh man that lame barrel of doom from Sonic 3 haunted me as a kid. I couldn't beat the game as Sonic or Tails for the longest time and first beat the full game with Knuckles. I made it past the barrel thanks to my friend. I had him play as Tails and jump on the barrel, and there was a gap small enough for Sonic to make it through and I finally was able to beat the level. I never figured out that you needed to just press up and down until I joined the Sonic Community in 2008. :V

[Shiny Gems]

I have one word, or two words in one...EGGMAN-LAND. From Sonic Unleashed, of course.

That and some of the things in Sonic Frontiers, as much as I loved that game. Those things, while I can't remember precisely which ones, I'm not counting the DLC story mode, The Final Horizon and the towers in it here.

[AlexHidanBR]

The most frustating experience, you ask?

Let me show you an image as my answer:



This is not my photo, it's someone's else. But if you check my Xbox profile (AlexHidanBR) and check my xbox 360's achievements, it'll show that I 100% years ago.

[Ghelatlishol]

34 minutes ago, AlexHidanBR said:

The most frustating experience, you ask?

Let me show you an image as my answer:



This is not my photo, it's someone's else. But if you check my Xbox profile (AlexHidanBR) and check my xbox 360's achievements, it'll show that I 100% years ago.

Dear God. Is this an accomplishment or is it self-inflicted punishment?

[sonic_the_cuber]

The hardest level for me was Sonic Forces, stage 28. I was 11 years old and spent 3 days trying to beat that level... haha