I've been having a lot of fun grinding cyberspace level times in Sonic Frontiers. This is my latest one:
It's a little messy, there are definitely some optimizations to be made, but it's still less than half the par time. It makes heavy use of magnet jumping, which is a technique I picked up from watching some other people's level videos in which you start a targeted dash (towards an enemy, bounce pad, etc) and then cancel that into an air dash, which preserves the extremely high targeted-dash momentum but changes its direction. This lets me fly long distances very quickly and skip big chunks of time-consuming gameplay.
For some levels, a solid magnet dash strategy makes the whole thing nearly trivial. 3-6 is not one of those levels. It took me most of an evening just to come up with a route where my magnet jumps don't just send me rocketing off into oblivion or straight into an enemy, and then another few hours of practice to get this (still imperfect) run. It requires eight separate magnet dashes, each one of which requires its own kind of finesse, whether that means transferring to another targeted dash, dropping at the exact right time to hit a boost, or even going straight into a light dash through a line of rings.
Magnet dashing has, in one singular high-end mechanic, substantially increased my appreciation of this game. While I still think the cyberspace level designs are a bit janky in places, the fact that routing is no longer just about trying to stay on the fastest intended path is exciting. Instead, it's about trying to find the best way to break out of the intended path and exploit the level geometry to my own ends. At the same time, the power of the magnet dash is just limited enough that it never makes a level too easy and rarely makes it require truly pinpoint accuracy to go fast.
