Another Story/Final Horizon appreciation thread

[AortaPlatinum]

Another Story has gotten a lot of hate, and while I do think it's mostly warranted, what the expanded Ouranos does well it does REALLY well. So I wanna talk about the really cool ♥♥♥♥ here!

-The new experimental Cyber Space stage gimmicks are really interesting. I especially love the gear mechanic in that one with the Eternal Highway theme that reskins another Cyber Space stage from the base game. The boost has needed an improvement to make it deeper for a while now IMO, and the gear system is REALLY cool, you're trying to stay on the ground and not hit anything to maintain your maximum gear, but at the cost of control. The more open-ended ones with the animal rescuing are also neat, if confusing due to the copy & pasted platforms.
-New character themes are FIRE. They do get repetitive after a while, but that's not an issue unless you're going for 100%
-Amy's crazy high jumping is really fun to play around with. Cheesing some of the platforming segments or just boost jumping into a glide to just float across half the map is really satisfying, and the game just lets you do it, it's rad
-Tails' Tornado is also really fun, especially with infinite boost makes it so you almost don't need fast travel [not like you'll unlock it anyways with that one ball and hoop map challenge oh God]
-We now know the names of the Titan pilots [or I guess they're called Masters instead of pilots]! Masters Dragon [Giganto], Snake [Wyvern], Tiger [Knight], and Crane [Supreme], along with another Ancient we haven't seen before, Master King.
-Koco translates to 'spirit' in the Ancients' language. Either Tiger or Snake ends a sentence with 'spirit' in the subtitles and 'Koco' in the audio, so assuming their language is structured the same way as English, Koco means spirit or soul.
-We now know what the "ZAP" symbol means. Speaking to Sage as Amy in front of the entrance to the pyramid temple where the white Emerald was stored reveals that it's the symbol for a god the Ancients worshiped. Seeing as how this god never appears in the story but the symbol does countless times and was left ambiguous in the base game, it's pretty safe to say that if Ian Flynn keeps coming back to write for the games, this could be an overarching plot thread alongside The End. Maybe The End IS this god, but either the Ancients didn't know what it really was, or it betrayed them for some reason. They did know The End was coming, seeing as how they were able to evacuate their home planet and set up defenses on Earth...
-The End Supreme is really creepy with it's animations, I especially love it's transformation scene and the QTE's where it's like crawling around super fast
-Super Sonic+ is crazy, Cyber Sonic is even more nuts! Master King warning Sonic not to "go all-out" and then him having to do so anyways makes me wonder what kind of consequences it will have in the future, either effecting Sonic negatively or The End advantageously.
-Sage lives! Eggman gets to be a dad! I'm With You Vocal Mix is late 90s as hell and beautiful to listen to!

What else do you guys like about Another Story?

[AortaPlatinum]

Oh more cool lore in a Sage conversation I missed as Sonic!
There were five races or tribes of Ancients back on their home planet. Each tribe had their own unique attribute- four legs, a tail instead of legs, that sort of thing, and the 5th tribe was super intelligent. All five tribes worked together to fight The End, but four of them were killed off, leaving only the smart Ancients, who were the ones who evacuated on their ships. When they landed on Earth on the Starfall islands, they then built Titans based on the attributes of each of their lost tribes, which is why they're all designed different, so that they could attack in different ways and also as a tribute to the lost tribes.
It's also possible the Starfall islands could each be named after the tribe who's Titan was stationed on it, as there are "five" islands [technically. I'm still salty about the Kronos/Rhea situation]

[Nick K. Paddywhack]

Having not unlocked the Spin Dash before this, it's really fun to play with!
Tails' flight and homing attack stuff is pretty fun to work with, I think this is the longest flight energy Tails has had in any game since Sky Patrol.
A lot of the new dialogue is pretty insightful in terms of lore, and gives us a chance for characters other than Sonic to interact with each other.
With Knuckles, I can keep gliding into a wall to ascend it, I just love that bit of jank.
The Slot Machine's replacement is a lot more direct and functional.
There's a LOT of stuff to do in general. Getting through this free DLC alone probably takes longer than some Sonic games especially if you're 100%ing it. It's the meatiest of all the DLCs for this game.

[AortaPlatinum]

Originally posted by Nick K. Paddywhack:

There's a LOT of stuff to do in general. Getting through this free DLC alone probably takes longer than some Sonic games especially if you're 100%ing it. It's the meatiest of all the DLCs for this game.

YESS. It's definitely quantity over quality, but the quality isn't BAD. Just, not as great as it could be. Which, Sonic usually is, so I'm okay with it.

-The new Ghost fights are SUPER fun, especially since you can play them as any character and all four characters chase them along a different path

[Atom]

Really enjoyed my time with it. It's so close to being excellent but I worry that certain spots are really gonna turn away a lot of players.

- Cyberspace is the closest in feeling to SA1 levels of openness they've done in the modern era. I can't overstate how excellent these stages are. Comparing them with the spindash to Forces you wouldn't believe the same developers made both games.
- Amy fully upgraded is like Sonic with crazy vertical stuff and feels super unique. Knuckles and Tails I think need a bit more work but it's impressive that the characters are as good as they are given they've not really done other playable characters in like, 2 decades almost. Their dedicated platforming challenges are pretty darn fun.
- The towers that remove automation are really good, puzzle platforming. You need to have a good understanding of sonic's movement abilities and take things slow at points. They reward planning things out. It's relieving to finally see Sonic Team trust players to overcome challenges.
- The actual DLC itself is massive and free. It's like a whole nother third of the game with a ton of new story scenes and clips.
- Ghost is great, as are some of the other enemies. Just only as sonic.

My suggestions, Sonic Team, in the off chance you're reading this:
- Don't make players unlock cyloop, parry, and the unique quick cyloop thing for each character. Give them a quick tutorial text on how the new mechanics work and how to get skill points. Make it clear what lookout coco do as well.
- Have normal mode for the towers add targets and automation for the hardest parts of the tower. Hard and Easy can stay as is, but perhaps add a midway checkpoint on the towers, even if only on lower difficulties. Players often don't mind doing difficult stuff, they don't like doing a lot of difficult things in a row to fail at the end and have to repeat it all over.
- Nerf the first two trials on lower difficulties and buff the second two a bit. Fewer enemies in trial 1, more time in trial 2.
- For the boss rush master trial: cut the run-ups to the bosses, at the very least Wyvern's. Do 600, 500, 400 rings for easy, normal hard. And swap the parry window to 2 seconds, 1 second, half a second or something instead of the current 1 second, 0.2s, 0.15s or whatever it is.
- Give the player hints for the final boss on subsequent failures instead of requiring them to grind out the map.

I know you might have officially ended support for frontiers, but these small changes (honestly, the trial nerfs and a tower checkpoint are the highest impact ones) would probably leave players with a much better impression. Regardless, looking forward to whatever comes next -- though I don't think anyone would complain if the super hard stuff was kept to optional challenges.

[Omabroodje]

I have loved it, played it on Hard.
The only thing that pissed me off was the final boss for the 2 obscure things you have to do to progress.

[Nick K. Paddywhack]

Originally posted by AortaPlatinum:

-The new Ghost fights are SUPER fun, especially since you can play them as any character and all four characters chase them along a different path

Didn't realize this, this is already giving the game some replay value; love having some unique fights for the characters!