Sonic Superstars and Sonic Frontiers Highlight a Worrying Trend with Recent Sonic Games

WARNING: This article contains spoilers about Sonic Superstars’ post-game content, and readers who don’t wish to be spoiled should use discretion going further. Now that Sonic Superstars is on store shelves so soon after Sonic Frontiers‘ post-launch support has ended, it feels like Sonic fans are constantly going on one adventure after the other. Even with Super Mario Bros. Wonder being a good competitor in terms of sales, it’s a great time to be a Sonic fan. Or at least, it is for those who have the patience to handle what Sonic Frontiers‘ DLC and the latest 2D Sonic game have thrown at them.

When it was revealed that Sonic Frontiers‘ DLC would feature a new story and playable characters as part of its third wave, many fans were rightfully excited. However, this update to the game would be revealed to be “Another Story,” an alternate path fans can choose once they get to Ouranos Island, the last island in Frontiers‘ plot. Completing Another Story’s challenges would reward fans with a brand-new ending to the game, which ends up being rather cathartic after what happened in the base game. Getting this new ending is no easy task due to a difficulty spike not seen often in other Sonic games, and Sonic Superstars continues the trend with its own technically “post-game” content to a worrying degree.

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Sonic Frontiers The Final Horizon’s Demanding Master King Koco Trial

In between the long-awaited segments of playing as Amy, Knuckles, and Tails, which players are able to take at their own pace, finishing their parts of the story in Sonic Frontiers‘ Another Story will eventually lead back to playing as Sonic. His job is to complete the trial towers in order to gain control of his cyber corruption and turn it into power. The last of these trials sees Sonic facing the titan boss battles in a boss rush with only 400 rings, his stats reset to level 1, and perfect parry being the only option to deflect attacks.

While Sonic Frontiers has always been known for having an adjustable difficulty curve, Master King Koco’s trial has made a name for itself among fans for being one of the hardest challenges ever in Sonic games. It has been criticized for having confusing perfect parry windows in a game that was never designed to have a timed parry attack. This, among other widely difficult things in the update, has made fans compare The Final Horizon DLC to Dark Souls, and some players have dropped Another Story in favor of waiting for a patch as even on Easy, it’s very demanding.

How Sonic Superstars Irritates the Problem Sonic Frontiers Started

Just as Sonic Frontiers‘ Another Story is extra additional content, players who beat Sonic Superstars‘ Story Mode are rewarded with a special story starring Trip the Sungazer, the new lizard character who has a golden dragon Super form. Trip’s Story essentially serves as Sonic Superstars‘ hard mode, adding additional enemies to the previous stages while asking fans to go through all eleven zones once again. While the game just feels like Knuckles’ campaign in Sonic 3 and Knuckles, it surprises fans with an exclusive final boss just for Trip against Fang the Hunter and his Eggman tech.

Unfortunately, also like Frontiers‘ The Final Horizon DLC, Fang’s boss fight against Trip has a massive difficulty spike that ignores players’ ring count in favor of instant death attacks and two phases with their own differing patterns. Fang the Hunter and his final boss fight takes patience to master and beat, but it’s vastly different from anything else in the game, and without Sonic Frontiers‘ difficulty adjusting, fans are stuck fighting Fang as he is. This is only made worse considering Story Mode’s final boss fight was also a difficulty spike on its own, leading fans who have played both titles to say that Fang is even harder than Master King Koco’s boss rush.

The issue here is these difficulty spikes aren’t communicated to the player and lock content and the true endings to the games behind them. Sonic Frontiers states its difficulty in a cutscene through Sage, but that can easily be overlooked as exposition and story rather than a proper heads-up. The fact that two games in a row have upped the ante so suddenly on challenges that aren’t entirely optional asks for there to be a proper discussion on difficulty in Sonic games going forward.

Sonic Superstars is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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