How to complete the Pinball Minigame in Sonic Frontiers

Sonic games have had pinball sections for going on 30 years now, but the one in the newest game is one of the most frustrating yet. If you’re wondering how to get past the pinball minigame in Sonic Frontiers, you’re not alone, as the sequence can take a fair amount of patience and it’s sort of hard to tell what you’re even supposed to do during the final section. Let’s take a look at what you need to do to get past it to cause the volcano to erupt and finally take the third Titan out of the picture.

For starters, you’re not playing as Sonic directly as you may have expected. Instead, you’re only in control of the two pinball flippers. Your initial goal is to get five million points. The counter in the top right-hand corner tells you how many more you have to go. You only get three balls. Lose them all and you’ll need to restart the section. Be careful not to press the button that causes you to quit out, as it won’t ask you if you’re sure if you hit it by mistake. You don’t want to have to start this repeatedly.

Screenshot by PC Invasion

Beat the pinball minigame in Sonic Frontiers

If getting five million points sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. You’ll no doubt immediately notice that getting points for hitting bumpers and grabbing rings is just a tiny drop in the bucket. The key here is to get score multipliers. Do your best to keep the ball from falling. Hitting both flippers at once is a good way to keep it from falling into the middle if you’re not sure where it’ll be going. The main thing to keep an eye out for are red rings, as grabbing one will double your multiplier.

At first, you’ll get a multiplier of four. This is followed by eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 with each additional red ring. You can also get a multiplier randomly, I believe, although this might just be from hitting a score threshold. If you lose a ball while building the multiplier, it gets erased entirely. If this happens, you may just want to restart the minigame. Once you hit a multiplier of 256, it’s only a matter of time until you get the five million you need. But then the trickiest part of the level starts.

In the below picture, you’ll notice a blue space at the top of the screen. If you’re not sure what that’s supposed to be, it has an opening in the center to knock your ball into once you’ve accrued enough points. Actually getting the ball in there is the hard part. You’re going to want to knock the ball upward in such a way that it lands on the middle bumper directly under the opening and bounces into it. Alternatively, you might have better luck finding an angle that’ll let you knock it in without doing this, but this is easier said than done. Once you do this, you’ll have completed the pinball minigame in Sonic Frontiers.

Screenshot by PC Invasion