How do you feel about the series' pretty sudden shift in difficulty level lately?

[Ryannumber1gamer]

I think it's fair to say that over the last few months, the franchise has been getting a fairly big serving of content since Frontiers released, between the three major content upgrades, and the rather surprising reveal of Superstars just back in Summer. But to me, it seems that ever since Frontiers dropped back in November last year, and there's been a lot of response to feedback and such from Kishimoto in particular, and one thing in particular is there's been a fairly significant scale up with the franchise's difficulty level.

I'd say this shift could be traced as early as Frontiers' first content upgrade, where the boss rush and speed run challenges were introduced retrospectively, presenting the challenging feat of finishing every enemy/boss in the game, and every level within a overall time-limit to get a S-Rank, with even a pretty difficult one hit kill mode in the same vain as Devil May Cry's Heaven or Hell mode as the reward for S-Ranking the boss rush. 

From there, Update 2 introduced the open zone challenges and the special Kucos, in which the former required some pretty swift abuse of the game's combat scoring system in most scenarios, while the latter arguably really pushed the platforming challenges that went beyond what the main game had, with some pretty punishing segments in particular that would require restarts for simple slip-ups. 

Now, what made these fairly understandable was they seemed pretty intended on simply being additional challenging content for those who want more to squeeze out of the game, the first update primarily being about those who mastered the combat and platforming, while the second was about expanding the open world challenges and giving out a fun reward with the spindash, a broken mechanic, sure, but it was a worthy completion reward for finishing up the new batch of content.

But Update 3 is where I feel most would agree the problems really start to arise. With guardians that are absurdly spongey, and highly damaging, with little to no vulnerability states, cyberspace stages that outright required abusing the Spindash's brokenness to finish stage requirements, platforming towers that could take minutes at a time to scale and would immediately punish you for falling back to the start, with precise platforming that clashes with the game's control and physics. 

More importantly, there's also the mandatory trials, that drain you back to Level 1 stats and give tight time limits, and most infamously of all - the Titan boss rush that gives you a level 1 Sonic and practically exposes the shortcomings of the combat system by having the only real viable means of winning to be spamming stomps. Worse than that, the game also abruptly requires you to now have a perfect parry that outright punishes you for even a fraction of a second mistimings, in a game where the Parry window was unlimited beforehand. Not to mention the game's poor tutorials with new mechanics in the final boss.

It's not really much of a secret that generally, a lot of people find that this difficult massively shot the game in the foot, being ill-suited for the game's otherwise very forgiving design for the main game. Worse than this, this is more or less the true ending of the game, which means Update 3 is not as easily forgiven as Update 1 and 2, which could be given a break for being optional stuff. Here, this is three playable characters, a whole island of content, and story that's straight up locked behind this absurd and abrupt difficulty spike.

I think for most however, they could be willing to overlook Frontiers' difficulty issues. A one-off failed experiment where the team took just about the worst kind of feedback they could take for Update 3, and poorly implemented it. 

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Then Superstars drops this month, and it becomes a concerning pattern.

Superstars more or less plays well up through the first seven or so zones, your typically standard Sonic affair, albeit with some annoying boss design, as bosses seem to have been designed for co-op, and have long vulnerability states, something that seems more or less bizarre for a Classic Sonic title, where even fights like Silver Sonic and the Death Egg Robot could be damaged at most points, if you knew how to do so safely. 

But starting from Press Factory, there's a massive downward spiral into a difficulty spike, where insta-kills become incredibly common, possibly even more than a Rush title, and the bosses not only take longer and longer and longer, but they also start to implement instant kill moves into their arsenals.

The most concerning of which being when this all kicks off with Nack's boss fight in Golden Capital - a 4-5 minute auto-scrolling set-piece fight where the game not only forces you to replay a sizeable chunk of the fight every single time you die, but is where the scriptedness of the fights begin to severely rear their heads. 

But from there, this just...spirals further and further. To the point where minibosses start to become auto-scrollers with weird physics that can instantly kill Sonic and set progress back significantly. 

Then, it all culminates with the Egg Samurai fight, the final boss of Superstars' main campaign, in which you fight two heavily scripted fights back to back, filled with instant kill moves that punishes you by sending you back to the immediate start every single time, and where it's main game plan seems to be cheaply surprising you with a new trick each time. Nothing like getting close to the end of the fight, only to get hit with a rotating spinner move that's practically impossible to avoid if you don't save a duplication power for it. 

But that's not where it ends - the spiral only continues as the brand new character - Trip's story begins - the apparent 'hard' mode of the game where you play as Trip, who acts more or less like a jack of all trades, master of none character. From here however, rather than create a good redesigned mode, the general idea for Trip's story seems to just be that they jack up the number of instant kill pits, spikes, and crushers so that you will get repeatedly killed and sent back. If bosses were bad in Sonic's campaign, they're worse here, typically given extra hit points solely for things to get drawn out further and further.

Then you get to Trip's final boss, who ALSO manages to be a far more extreme version of Egg Samurai, who was he himself - already a extreme version of previous final bosses. Nack's mech is not only two phases, but the first phase alone will be guaranteed to take up at least 4 minutes, each and every single time, all because of how scripted the fight is. Worse than that, almost all of Nack's attacks have some insta-kill quality to it, meaning that it is very easy to make one mistake and get killed.

Then you get to Phase 2 where Nack's mech is not only still heavily scripted and can take about eight hits before it will finally go down, but it has no less than three additional one hit kill moves, including one that is shoved out at the very last second as one final 'gotcha!' to the player if they get that far. It's a endurance fight, one that will almost be guaranteed to take ten minutes per successful attempt, and even to get to Phase 2, takes at least five minutes, and filled to the brim with instant-kill attacks that will massively punish you for simple mistakes.

Even the Super Sonic fight doesn't escape this, being a seven minute long endurance battle every time, with at least one instant kill attack with the black hole barrage, and a poorly communicated new technique that's required to finish the boss, and every time you fail, which is highly likely due to again - how scripted the final set piece of the fight is - you start from the very beginning time and time again.

While Superstars does not have a life system, marginally making up for this, it still doesn't change the fact that from Zone 8 on, it's a constant spike of difficulty that already reaches extreme lengths by the time of Egg Samurai, and gets downright ludicrous by the time you reach the Nack fight in Trip's story. 

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Which I suppose brings us to the apex of this topic's conversation - what are your thoughts in this sudden shift in design philosophy? Is it purely coincidental? Is it seemingly a effort following Frontiers' initial release and claims of it being too easy? Is it overblown and it's not that bad? Do you despise it? Do you think there's merit in the ideas, but the execution is just terrible?

It'll be interesting to see where things go from here, but I do think Final Horizon and Superstars releasing so closely together and having the same kind of ridiculous difficulty (IMO at least) got really draining. It's not a matter of not being able to do them for me personally, as I finished both everything in Frontiers and Superstars 100%, but if I'm not having fun due to the absurd difficulty, I think it's just not worth it at that point.

[Diogenes]

I haven't played either game, but the sense I get is that the difficulty comes from sloppy design more than anything. Sometimes it's intended to be difficult, sometimes not so much, but it doesn't seem like well-crafted challenge. Frontiers' dlc seems to be intentionally aiming for "hardcore" difficulty at points, but it swings so wildly in Final Horizon that I'm not sure they understood what they were actually making. Or at least, I don't think they had the time to do any real testing and rebalancing and had to rush it out as soon as it was functional. Superstars seems like it intends to have a more sensible difficulty curve, but it seems to fall more and more into lazy "retro" platformer design, wearing you down with cheap hits and instant death, making you feel more frustrated than engaged.

I don't think the difficulty spikes in these games are a sign that they are, overall, trying to shift the series towards a more hardcore audience; I think it's just another manifestation of subpar developers putting out rushed products.

[Palas]

One should be cautious about using a default explanation of "they just suck" for everything people perceive about the games. There is thought and care put into both games, and we should engage with what they are proposing, even if we think it's flawed in principle or execution.

And I can't talk abut Frontiers Update 3, but you will, in fact, notice that at least Superstars is very interested in making you see every challenge. I don't think this had been done before, especially in classic Sonic. You could say the bosses having vulnerability windows makes up for co-op, and that they'd just be too easy otherwise, but the fact is that they chose to preserve and ensure the integrity of the challenge at every single turn. This isn't trivial or obvious, and execution doesn't really matter here.

I may be far off, but besides being less forgiving, I think there's a subtle change in what the game is asking of you (relative to the classics): rapid reflexes in a moment becomes more important than feeling and mimicking a certain rhythm in the level. You know how there are a lot of times in the 16-bit games in which the game seems to have gained a consciousness of its own, even though it could never be the case? You know when either everything you do will suddenly go surprisingly right (you'll bounce off a badnik that you didn't know was there, or land a second hit on Eggman that you think you weren't supposed to) or terribly wrong (you'll be hit two times in a row for no reason by badniks that are just doing their thing, or you fumble a jump between two moving platforms and suddenly no jump ever goes right again)? This doesn't happen in Superstars at all. Didn't happen to me at least, because it looked like the game was more actively reacting to my presence, and this kind of timing happened mostlyup until Press Factory and then in Frozen Base Act Tails.

Notice how some badniks that were brought back had their attacks improved (buzz bomber) or started reacting to your presence (like Mecha-bu). Even Sand Sanctuary felt different from Sandopolis Act 1 even where they looked exactly alike: while, in Sandopolis, a Skorp would eventually hit me no matter what if I landed the wrong platform, at the wrong time and on the wrong foot, Sand Sanctuary's Skorps consistently felt a lot more like a reflex challenge because I could see them coming. This doesn't make the game harder, necessarily, but it does make the nature of the difficulty different. That was my impression, at least. As a side note, I loved both acts of Press Factory because they retain that sense of rhythm, and it really is stages 8 through 11 that mostly let go of that in favor of more controlled or self-contained series of challenges.

So when you take away the player's wider margin of error, Sonic feels weird to play. When succeeding at one jump doesn't make the next jump easier, that feels weird, and we basically never relax. That's why we tend not to like crushing deaths: we're used to feeling like dying was the result of a series of mistakes, of us being out of sync with the stage's or boss' internal beat. This is what I felt from Golden Capital on, even with rehashed elements. In Metropolis, Slicers feel like elements of rhythm due to their placement after corkscrews or in tight tunnels that demand you to not hesitate. Them being on open spaces in Golden Capital made them a lot more like a one-on-one combat.

That'd be my point: the difficulty in Superstars, beyond being higher or lower, often feels different in its later stages, more reminiscent of a traditional platformer at heart. The precision of one move is more important than a sense of timing across various moves. And they wouldn't have it so that you cheese it all, so they made sure you'll go through all challenges. Each individual challenge Superstars proposes in a vacuum may not be harder than your average Sonic game, but the way they're stringed together, resulting in constant endurance battles (especially in the bosses) is unusual. It's not like Sonic 1, 2, CD or 3&K never did what Superstars does. It's just that Superstars seems committed to it.

(There's also importance in the references it took. Someone in the team really likes shmups, and a certain kind of shmup at that. That must mean something).

Edited October 26, 2023 by Palas

[Salamander]

My impression whilst I was playing Superstars, and especially the final bosses and Trip's Story, was that the game was being aimed at a nostalgic hardcore audience who played the classics back in the 90s and are back for some of that retro challenge.  If so, it's a gargantuan misstep.  Superstars could and should have been a gateway game to a new generation of 2D Sonic fans, but at its worst it's too much of a meat grinder to be fun, too focussed on long endurance matches or blindside after blindside.  Granted my impressions of the game have been badly tainted by the Trip's Story versions of the zones, but if it's possible for that to happen then that too is an error.

...Also, for what it's worth, I think I managed to cut the first phase of final boss Fang down to about two minutes if you hit it in every single window.  But that's not easy and does come with the risk of being instakilled, so I can't blame anyone for only taking the safe hits.  The Eggman final boss has similar issues; I suspect it can be attacked at more points than is obvious, but when it takes so long to get there each time, who's going to risk the experiment?  They really wouldn't be seen as nearly such difficult bosses if there was only a checkpoint between phases.

[Shiny Gems]

Well, first off, I made this not too long ago.

Secondly, I think the difficulty spike, while unexpected, is rather nice in both the Sonic Frontiers' last update and Sonic Superstars. Granted, I thought the difficulty and trial and error in Sonic Superstars was dull, but only in some points of the game. I think the difficulty spike was highly tolerable to me, and is not as bad as some people here, at least, make it out to be. Know that trial and error, and high difficulty are not necessarily what makes a game bad. Sure, both Sonic Frontiers could have been easier in some parts for some people, and high difficulty and trial and error would be bad if the level design, enemy placement, obstacle placement and such were bad as well. Fortunately for me, the level design and the other things that contributed to difficulty in both games were not so bad in my eyes.

I think that some fans, not just some here, are not used to trial and error and high difficulty in Sonic games. That said, there were games for the classic NES from Nintendo that had such difficulty and trial and error, and some of those games, like the second Super Mario Bros., titled The Lost Levels, never made it to at least the USA due to its hard difficulty. That does not mean either the NES games or even just The Lost Levels Mario game were necessarily bad. I am not trying to compare them to the new Sonic games, if directly, for I am just saying video games can have hard difficulty as well as trial and error, and that is all nothing new. Plus, the last Sonic game with high difficulty and trial and error was Sonic Unleashed PS360, and that was a long time ago. With that one game, released long before Sonic Superstars and Sonic Frontiers' last update; the latter two being close in release; and no other game with a difficulty spike, I do not think many Sonic fans like some here are used to such difficulty as I said.

I understand there is a difference between challenging and frustrating, but to me, trial and error games and high difficulty games can improve the skill of those who try it. It is not meant to be a thing that is necessarily done well the first try. Video games are games, after all, and they are supposed to be challenging and sometimes, in this case, hard. Compared to having one's hand held, or levels being done for the player, or something else like the game being a breeze or easy that there is not much to learn from, trial and error and high difficulty are something that can be part of games like video games, and the player can benefit them more easily than if they were easy. Memorization is a key thing in such difficulty, and I am starting to think that some Sonic fans, like the ones here, don't appreciate trial and error or hard difficulty enough or don't have the will to try it out when it can be beneficial. Sure, Sonic Superstars and The Final Horizon of Sonic Frontiers had some flaws, but I have seen some people go as far as to hate the difficulty spike in those games and attribute it to them being bad. To me, difficulty itself is not what makes a game bad. It is how it is done and accommodated with level design and other things that can make it bad, and I do not think The Final Horizon or Sonic Superstars necessarily had bad level design, nor were any other things that added to the difficulty bad to me.

There have been people outside the fanbase telling those complaining to "get good". I do think you can't fully blame the game if you have a hard time getting through it or can't get through it, but I do not think "getting good" by itself is the problem here. I think that some people just don't want to get good or develop skills, at all. Quite a shame. I know Sonic games are about going fast and other similar concepts as well as platforming, but that does not mean people have to rush through the levels of Sonic games all the time.

[Ratchet25tx]

Pretty random, if you ask me. While I like harder things, it shouldn't be a cake walk then all the sudden walk through some hot rocks with your shoes off-type hard. Again, make it hard every time you progress on stages/ challenges(looking at you, Frontiers).