I've reached the end of the first island in Sonic Frontiers, and surely things can only get better from here. I've enjoyed my time with the game enough so far, finally vibing with the modern, more open style of open world game, and finding the chaos of it all fascinating. It's not as polished as some other games this year, but it feels so much freer as a result. The dialogue is a little clunky, but it's hard to guess what obstacle I'm going to face next, and that's a welcome change from a lot of safe, sanitised triple-A efforts. Unfortunately, at the end of the first island, that obstacle was Giganto, the worst boss I have ever faced.
It's not that Giganto is hard. Once I figured out how to beat it (which took two or three turns), it then took me another two or three to get the best of it. Six turns and it was all over. I didn't waste days of my life on this guy. It's not an Elden Ring boss who has somehow wandered into Sonic Frontiers. But it's not Giganto’s difficulty that's the problem. It's how impossibly annoying every single stage of the battle is, and I have no idea why the battle works this way.
When I wrote about Sonic Frontiers introducing me to the vibes of modern open world adventures after Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring, I mentioned that open world games had once been my favourite. Prior to that, it was platformers, so I have my share of experiences with good bosses, bad bosses, and ugly bosses. Though some have earned a crystallised place in my nostalgia memory bank, the ones that have stuck the most are those that were difficult. There's a sense of challenge and accomplishment to defeating them, even if they felt unfairly difficult. But Giganto is just plain irritating.
To begin, you must climb up Giganto to activate the final Chaos Emerald and turn into Super Sonic. This seems easy enough, given Giganto's body is covered in boost pads. However, this isn't a guaranteed winner. You might go from the first set of boosters by its ankle to its thigh, then up its back to finally activate the switch at its neck. But you also might be thrown from that first booster to its arm, where you might grab ahold, or might sail through the air and land off in the distance, needing to return to start all over again. That's only the first part of irritation though.
Next, the battle starts in earnest. You punch and kick and punch and kick and punch and kick and then time runs out. You haven't even taken off half health. Something must be wrong. Hidden in the optional tips menu is the solution – you need to deflect Giganto's powerful attacks, not avoid them. This lets you counter and slice off huge amounts of health. For the first attack, this works. After that Giganto flails its arms at random. It might come near you (and can therefore be deflected), or might be over the other side of the screen, and you can't tell until it's too late. After a while, you figure out a sweet spot where you'll be hit most of the time, and can get Giganto down to its second and final stage in about 30 of your allotted 100 seconds. Here's where the real fun starts.
At this point, you need to button mash to block a laser that cannot be deflected, eating up precious seconds. You then need to navigate around other lasers, because parrying them is inconsistent. You then need to keep finding that sweet spot while dodging the lasers and having everything reset by the button mash attack. If you miss just one of these moments, you will run out of time before the battle ends and fail automatically. Oh, and speaking from personal experience, if you win with less than three seconds left on the clock, you'll also fail, as Sonic will un-Super himself during the unskippable defeat animation and it will boot you back to the start.
This isn't even mentioning that one glitch caused Giganto to disappear entirely until I shut the game down and rebooted it. Giganto is the worst boss because it's difficult to beat without being challenging, and therefore is a struggle with no reward. After Sonic Frontiers started with a world of fluid exploration and adventure, it's a strange decision to restrict you so much here and offer no recourse besides failing while doing everything right, hoping for some RNG with the attacks. When I eventually won, I had 20 seconds left on the clock, and I didn't think I had done any better than any of my previous efforts. The other bosses had better be an improvement – surely they can't be worse.
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