Sonic Mania Review · 8:39am Aug 25th, 2017
Well, since Phazon was kind enough to point out that after blogging a crazy amount leading up to release, I haven't really come back to give my impressions of Sonic Mania; mainly because I've been playing Sonic Mania, along with doing another run of the StarCraft 2 trilogy... Along with getting increased hours plus a raise at my job after losing my weekend job.
So hear it is, my review of Sonic Mania.
Warning: If you've been holding out for the PC version, this review obviously contains spoilers.
If you're anywhere close to 30, chances are good that you grew up with the classic Sonic games; the Genesis / Mega Drive trilogy; Sonic 1, Sonic 2, and the holy grail, Sonic 3 & Knuckles. But after 1994, that 16-bit goodness seemed to vanish as Sonic followed his rival Mario into the 3D realm. But Sonic's transition was much rougher than that of Nintendo's resident plumber. Alongside a few gems and worthwhile experiences, Sonic has mainly stumbled for the past 23 years. Every time he seems to get his footing with a great game, something seems to happen; they make a cat fish and chase after a frog, one time they gave the emo a gun, then they gave Sonic a human princess to look after... The list is comedic and at times embarrassing. His 2D platforming had been limited to handheld devices and when it finally returned to consoles in the form of the episodic Sonic 4, it brought along largely unwelcome gimmicks from the modern age; homing attacks and tag-team moves.
Then, at E3 last year, on the heels of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, the worst selling game of the entire franchise, Sega and Sonic Team seemed to finally, at last, take the hint. They brought in a team of fan developers to bring us a fully 2D platformer again, straight out of the 16-bit era. Enter Sonic Mania.
First and foremost; this is a love letter to the Sonic of the past. A mix of re-imagined old classics with entirely new levels sprinkled in. Tails and Knuckles come along for the ride, and they have their unique abilities. Tails can fly and swim for approximately eight seconds, Knuckles can climb most walls and glide through the air. This time around, Sonic has his own unique move, the Drop Dash. Holding the jump button in mid air charges a spin attack, and upon landing the blue blur zooms on. It's a great move that takes a while to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it takes speedruns and time attacks to a whole other level.
The gameplay most closely emulates Sonic 3 & Knuckles; defeating the Act 1 boss results in a spinning sign post that you can bounce around for extra points, and then it seamlessly transitions into Act 2. Hitting a Star Post with 25 or more rings takes you to Blue Sphere, which aren't used for Chaos Emeralds this time around, but for unlockable extras; merely collecting all the blue spheres gets you a silver medal, and getting a Perfect gets you gold. A few of the Blue Sphere stages are ripped straight out of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and thus is the closest you will get to the game being EXACTLY the same as it's predecessors. But with all the posts I was hitting, I quickly grew tired of JUST Blue Sphere; Sonic 3 & Knuckles had three flavors of bonus stages to mix it up. I have yet to even see all 32 Blue Sphere stages.
For Chaos Emeralds, they are once again in Special Rings hidden quite well throughout the levels. And I do mean very well; I didn't find any Special Rings in the second half of the game, and I was halfheartedly exploring.
For the Special Stages themselves, Sonic CD and Sonic R are your flavors of nostalgia here. It's a Mode 7-esque course where you have to catch a UFO. Collecting Blue Spheres increases your speed to Mach 2 and then again to Mach 3. Collecting rings adds precious seconds to your decreasing timer. The tracks take around 30-40 seconds to lap, and blue spheres reappear while rings do not, making catching the UFO a task that must be done very quickly. After the first two emeralds, it largely becomes a somewhat frustrating string of trial-and-error. If the distant UFO left my sight, most of the time I never saw it again. In most cases, if I screwed up more than once, that was it. In my initial playthrough, I never made it past three emeralds, and was forced to complete the game and go back and spam the very first special ring in Green Hill Zone to largely memorize the course. The method I found most successful was getting to Mach 2 as quickly as possible, then collecting a mix of rings and spheres to get to Mach 3 while maintaining your timer. Emerald 5 was maddening, while I surprised myself and nabbed the seventh on my first try. Still, offering up a life for an immediate second try would have been a godsend, and probably would have resulted in a few Game Overs.
Longtime fans of course know what you get with all seven; a super form which can be activated at 50 rings, and a ticket to the game's true final boss if you're playing as Sonic. Thankfully, leaked reports have been proven false, and Tails and Knuckles have super forms again, for the first time in 23 years, though it is just invulnerability and speed; Tails' super form is sans flickies, and Knuckles can no longer glide-slam into walls and kill everything on screen. But it is more than acceptable; hedgehogs have been the only ones with super forms for far too long.
If you've played the classics religiously, you'll notice small nuances which can prove irking to purists; like the way Sonic jumps off of the handlebars in Flying Battery, or the jump height in Blue Sphere. The game's wavering difficulty actually brought me some more nostalgia as well. When I say that, I mean I threw myself at the Oil Ocean 2 boss eight times before I finally beat it. It was like I was nine again.
True to the 90's, glitches within the game can be both hilarious and FML-worthy. I've seen clips of Knuckles glitching through walls, of Sonic getting thrown to the bottom of the level to his death by the floating egg chamber (you know, that thing you hit to free the animals after the Act 2 boss). While I never experienced any soft-locks myself (where the game doesn't freeze but something has occurred that makes progress impossible), all it takes is a brief search on YouTube or the Sonic subreddit to see all the misfortunes that have befallen players. What you think of these glitches is largely dependent on how you view 90's gaming bugs; you'll either chuckle at them and shrug your shoulders, or throw your controller as you're forced to perform a hard reset.
When it comes to the purposeful game design, Christian Whitehead and his team have largely nailed it, but there are a few areas that I have to point at and ask "What were you thinking?" Oil Ocean 2 brings back an almost-universally hated gimmick from Sandopolis 2, while at the same time, seeing what happens if you can manage to keep a fire shield made my jaw drop. There is far, far more water in Hydrocity than there ever was in the original. The first time I faced Metal Sonic, I had to actually pause the game and google what the hell I was supposed to do with the endless stream of 8-bit Silver Sonic bots that spawned. The Zone-to-Zone transitions inexplicably stop for the second half of the game. And last but not least, it's time to give Green Hill Zone a rest. If it makes another appearance after Forces, it'll officially be a running gag.
What Mania absolutely, flawlessly accomplishes is its music. Composer Tee Lopes has made incredible mixes of all the familiar tunes, and catchy melodies for all the new locales, even if some of the new levels themselves don't quite go over as well.
By and large, Sonic Mania's driving force is the unrelenting nostalgia for those of us fans who are old enough to have been waiting over two decades for this game. I really, truly hope Sonic Forces continues this trend; otherwise, the Sonic fandom will immortalize 2017 as the year when fan hackers were hired and made a better game than Sonic Team.
+ Flawless music. Nearly every piece is a potential ear worm.
+ Faithful 16-bit era platforming.
+ Nostalgia by the truckload. No hand-holding.
+ Each character gets their just reward for collecting all chaos emeralds.
+ Time Attack with Leaderboard functionality.
- Unlockable abilities and modes are limited to the No Save mode.
- Only one type of Star Post bonus stage.
- Special Stages can be incredibly unforgiving to the uninitiated.
Overall Score: 85%
As much as I enjoyed the game myself, I was kind of perturbed that only 4 of Mania's zones are original; the rest are remakes of 2, 3&K, and CD levels (and Green Hill, because Green Hill). Also, why isn't there an Ice Cap Zone? Ice Cap was my favorite zone in 3&K, and neither Mania nor either version of Generations did Ice Cap. But at least Press Garden Act 2 made for a decent ice level.
As far as Blue Sphere goes, I think I perfected 29 of them and cleared another 2 by the end of my first run, because by the end of Titanic Monarch, I was getting the same stage over and over again. I also only got 3 Emeralds by the end of my first run, out of 10 attempts (including one in Titanic Monarch, of all fucking places). Pretty sure I found an Emerald in Oil Ocean though; that zone's aesthetic design is not very conducive to hiding giant gold rings, at least not until Act 2...
Speaking of Act 2, I found the smoke gimmick somehow better and worse than the ghosts in Sandopolis 2. The ghosts always gave me more shit if I let it get too dark, but the smoke in Oil Ocean 2 makes it much harder to see.
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Just beat the game as Knuckles, four emeralds, and his first special ring in Green Hill is the fastest and easiest to get to.
I rage quit an hour ago due to the fifth special stage.
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I prefer to do a little more exploring to find as many rings as I can, so I started back at Green Hill as Sonic & Tails after beating Titanic Monarch. I even found two Special Stage rings at the beginning of Press Garden Act 2, within 30 seconds of each other! Shame it's not Press Garden Act 1, or that intel might be valuable to you.
You rage quit on the fifth Special Stage? Damn, I just got to it after taking nine tries on the fourth one. I mean, I've already lost twice to stage 5, and the layout looks a little too trap-heavy, but it feels like something I can beat with a little more level memorization.