Sonic Superstars: A New 2D Sonic Game (Fall 2023)

What? Evening Star was willing to to talk to Sega about making a Mania followup, at least up to a certain point. It's not like they immediately pivoted to developing PBB right after Mania Plus wrapped/Evening Star's foundation.

Anyway, I finally have the game for myself, gonna start playing it at some point over the weekend. So far I've actually been liking the level design that I've seen (arguably more than most), so the biggest test of this game for me is if it can reaffirm my thoughts (instead of making me reconsider). Bosses I've pretty mush resigned to expecting them as the absolute worst property of the game, no hope for those outside the first few. All of the footage and impressions honestly tell me I shouldn't even bother with Trip's Story / Last Story, but maybe the challenge seeker within me will take a stab at it regardless.

 

I'd highly recommend anyone who hasn't played this game stick to the main campaign and call it a day. The post game stuff is very disposable and badly executed, in my view.

 

Gotta say, the whole mood of this thread flipped on its head as soon as the sales came out huh.

 

Nah, this thread's been trending negative since the first leak happened. Which is a bit odd, my friends and I are still having a blast with it. Played through co-op the other day with a buddy who also understands how to play Sonic, and it was seriously some of the most fun I've had with a game all year. But maybe the people who like the game are too busy playing it to confront the complainers.

That's been my attitude, anyway. I'm not going to change anybody's mind, and I'm not gonna try. If you don't like it, that's fine. But I'm happy to speak up about what I like about it and what I feel it does well. It's honestly only grown on me since I first played it. I keep feeling like we must be playing a different game than a lot of other people or something. I know we're NOT, but it gives me that feeling.

 

I think the game is pretty good for what it is. Not a masterpiece or anything, but a solid classic title. It's probably the best of all the classic "successors" there have been, not counting Mania.

 

I mean I at least prefer it to Mania because there's far less for nostalgia-bait moments. It's not the most original game in the series, sure, but it's not any less so compared to Sonic 3 than Sonic 3 was to 2, IMO.

 

I'm not gonna lie, I find this to be a very strange stance to take on Superstars vs Mania. It places such a strong weight on the concept of simply revisiting previous locations that it ignores so much of the nuance therein, and everything else the games offer.

Mania came smack in the middle in of the series going OTT on its "hey remember the old days?" phase, which started with S4/Generations and has seemingly (hopefully) ended with Superstars. I don't think there's a single person out there who played Mania and didn't come away wishing that there was more original content. But of all the games that made it their mantra to be one big nostalgia trip, Mania is the one to do it best. The sheer quality on offer is second to none, and that puts it leagues beyond Superstars. Each of the second acts of the reused levels were littered with new visual design and new mechanics. Mania treated its reused levels like a challenge to overcome; how to make the old content feel new again.

Where Superstars gets many points for not outright reusing locations, it loses just as many for a variety of other reasons including the very execution. And I feel like "a new game should be new levels" is an absurdly low bar to set. The artstyle can at times be so basic that too many of the "new" level feel like ideas barely extend their basic tropes. To pick on just three levels from the first half...

• Bridge Island is sadly little more than a Green Hill palette swap
• Pinball Carnival 1 is your typical Sonic pinball and/or carnival level distilled to its most basic elements
• Lagoon City mechanically offers absolutely nothing not found in previous water levels, and there's almost no detail whatsoever to it's visual design. It's the definition of bland.

That's not to say that there's no creativity involved, because that would be an outright lie. I adore what they did with the visuals and mechanics of all 3 Golden Capital acts, Press Factory is a neat level with fun mechanics that are constantly active in both acts and Pinball Carnival 2 manages to at least some put a spooky theme on the immense blandness of act 1 (though it's petty barebones). How many levels in Superstars have a background that's mostly a vapid expanse that barely scrolls? The visuals are lacking, and with that they fail to set the scene properly.

For the most part, Superstars just lacks all of the intrigue that Mania has. It doesn't have any of the finesse in game design, coming across as a valiant but ultimately amateurish effort. They got the physics mostly right, and yet still messed up some of the physical mechanics so the game doesn't play the way that it ideally should. Between Superstars and Frontiers' Final Horizon, poor Knuckles just can't catch a break. His gliding has been neutered and broken in both games by developers who don't fully understand what made it enjoyable before. Lots of the gimmicks and obstacles are scripted in such a way that they override physics, such as the wind in Sky Temple and "floating pipe tracks" seen throughout the game. Arzest just aren't very good at what they do. I find it so unusual for a Sonic game to show such promising direction and intent, but stumbling at the execution like this. That's compared to Sonic Team's efforts with games like Frontiers, where half of it feels cobbled together out of necessity because they don't really have a very strong direction nor have much confidence in their own product but need to pad it out anyway (see Cyberspace).

If Mania is the prime steak of nostalgia bait, then Superstars is a microwave burger with a 62% beef patty and a sachet of "secret sauce" that will probably go straight into the bin. Sure, if I've truly got my heart set on a simple burger for dinner, then I know what I'm going to pick. But I'd be hard pressed to argue that it had anything over the prime steak where it really counted.

This all comes from the perspective of someone who greatly enjoys Superstars and has interrupted a playthrough of it to write this. Superstars is decent. But it's a whole different league to Mania. It doesn't go far enough to truly address the complaints regarding Mania's originality, and on no other metric does it come close to matching Mania's quality either. Gameplay, music, visuals, depth, story, presentation... Mania comes out so far above Superstars in all of those areas (and more) that a slight edge on originality in level locations can't begin to offset the competition in Superstars favour even a little bit. There really is no competition.

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I've nowhere else to put this, so I'll just slap it on to the end. My personal biggest complaint about the gameplay of Mania was the fact that most bosses are unfun. There were more bosses than were needed, and I would routinely damage-boost or Super Spam through them because the fights tedious borefests. But If I was up make a list of the 10 worst boss fights in the series' history, it would be no less than 50% Superstars bosses and Mania may not even rank once. You can't even employ the same cheese strats in Superstars to make a bad time more bearable. The boss fights end up taking up so much playtime with all the waiting for animations to play out, lengthy attack pattern cycles and downtime when you're doing almost nothing. Then there's the issue of difficulty balancing on top of that, with several bosses having cheap ways of killing you instantly and no checkpoints between very long phases. They're horrible and manage to drag the entire game down. Some of them don't seem so bad on an initial run, but play the game a second or third time you'll almost certainly be reaching for the "exit to world map" button at the end of each act.

 

Very much this. Being down on the post game hasn't soured the main experience for me. SuperStars is pretty good. It's sitting solidly in my "good" tier, and it's definitely the best non-Evening Star attempt at a Sonic game since Sonic 3.

 

I completely disagree with everything I've quoted here. Mania is definitely presented better, but game design-wise Superstars blows it out of the water. Mania's level design is bad and heavily automated, and its bosses are easily the worst part of the game.

Superstars has fantastic level design that guides you towards the end but doesn't automatically put you there, lots of hidden items to reward the large amount of exploration you can do, and has a nice difficulty curve while rarely feeling unfair. The only thing it's lacking is character-specific routes, being replaced with character-specific acts instead (but then, Mania didn't exactly excel there either).

I find the bosses genuinely enjoyable and meaningful throughout, for the most part. Nearly every boss can be attacked in every pattern they have, and outside of the final bosses they can all be taken down in under a minute or so. There are a couple of bosses with phases where they don't have weak spots and these are generally the worse ones, but at the same time they're never as unfair or cheap as Mania's Flying Battery or Stardust Speedway bosses. As for cheese strats, you literally have a "do two hits of damage on the boss" button in the form of the Avatar ability.

I do agree with the fact that Superstars is visually bland, inconsistent musically, and has poorly mixed sound generally. But when playing through, the only time I really wanted to stop playing was during the final boss. On the other hand, Mania is a very marketing-friendly game - all the zones you love in a pretty and nice-sounding package. But I haven't bothered to play through it in its entirety since 2017 because I dread having to deal with the dodgy Metal Sonic boss or waiting through the awful Mirage Saloon; I tend to just pick a couple of the good levels to play so I don't spend half my time holding down and watching the game play itself.

I dunno, maybe my opinion on Superstars will change when I get it myself and replay it. But I had a ton of fun and would rather replay it than Mania.

 

I’m actually replaying Mania at the moment and the difference between it and this is night and day. Levels have so much more flow to them (even those taken from CD), despite being absolutely enormous and sprawling (seriously, just take a look at SPZ1’s map on the wiki). I fairly often found myself finishing acts in the 6-7 minute range, not because they’re overly long, but because the simple act of poking around is just so much more fun in Mania with all of its attention to detail and brilliantly crafted level design. Not once did I feel like any level overstayed their welcome, a phenomenon that only gets more common in Superstars beginning with Sky Temple (which I think is only the second zone? This game is already sliding off my brain). Further, Mania doesn’t punish you for going fast, which Superstars seems to hate with a burning passion. Some people might say the game plays itself as a result, which can be true to an extent but, while holding right and letting the level take you can be good if you just want to switch off for a bit, it’ll never be the best way to do things and Mania perfectly fits alongside the classics in this regard, versus Superstars which just demands you stop or get hit far too damn often.

Several of the bosses are guilty of playing the waiting game, sure, but to a far lesser extent than in Superstars. While a lot of them can hang out of reach, if you can get around that and hit them anyway, it counts. Even in the scenarios where you can’t (Hydrocity Act 2 is a good example), there’s not nearly as much dead air where the boss is just going through animations while invincible.

In terms of narrative, Mania’s ought to be thinner than Superstars, but it’s presented so much better. Even in this paper thin plot that’s Sonic and friends chasing the Phantom Ruby through familiar locations, you can see Eggman scheming in the background, or you get character moments like in Chemical Plant or Knuckles vs Heavy King. Meanwhile, it feels like there’s a narrative Superstars ought to be telling with Trip and who she is but just…doesn’t.

I’ve played quite a few mediocre Sonic games and I still get hankerings to go back to them. Even the desire to replay Chronicles washes over me now and then, but I don’t myself ever revisiting Superstars for its own sake - it just can’t offer anything that hasn’t already been done better elsewhere in the series.

 

Although I have serious issues with some levels' structure, flow etc etc. I have to agree that Superstars does have good level design principles (before Golden Capital) that Mania doesn't have. Bridge Island Act 1 is probably the most interesting opening act we've had in Sonic since, what? Angel Island? And I'd contend I like Bridge Island Act 1 more than Angel Island Act 1. It feels mostly free-form, it favors verticality an getting creative with motion play to get where you want, it has a super neat set piece at the end that makes the level feel super satisfying.

Mania feels automated where it shouldn't, and bloated where it also shouldn't. Sure, it has the more inventive ideas (like elemental shields changing the way you go around a level), but then it also has Studiopolis Act 2. And, in fact, many other instances where the game will taunt you with items you could get if you weren't going so fast, but it's basically impossible not to go fast -- and it doesn't matter either way because why would you go after them? Superstars is much smarter: generally, and again up until Press Factory, it's you who has to figure out a way to get what you want and use the level (or Bullet) for that.

Also, my hot take is that the bosses' designs are very neat except for the wait times, and if you could hit them multiple times they'd be among the best in the series, just like -- say -- Rush Adventure. I'm a huge fan of Pinball Carnival Act 1 with Sonic, and the way you have to get really good at bouncing to be able to hit the boss. It reflects on the stage's gimmicks, and if you coul hit the boss at any time, that'd be even more so.

EDIT: Also I'll say it again: Speed Jungle Act Sonic is the hottest shit. Trip's version is pretty cool, too! The fact that it's the only level that is like that makes it even better. If the game had more levels like it, it'd ruin the fun.

 

I would replay Superstars sooner than I would Mania, and I also think Mania is a better-made game. In fact, I did replay Mania, and my feelings remain the same.

The best way to put it is that both games have a point in my replay where I'm less inclined to finish it. For Mania, it's Flying Battery. For Superstars, it's Golden Capital.

Original level designs go a long way, and Mania is hurt from going from a super-creative stage like Studiopolis to Flying Battery, which is also one of the levels that are the most like the original (the worst in this regard is Lava Reef). In Golden Capital's case, ironically despite being one of the more inventive themes, it takes me out because it's genuinely mid. Good levels go a long way too, haha.

Another difference is that if I can fight that drive, for Mania, I would get the same feeling at Oil Ocean or Titanic Monarch, while I can pretty much complete Superstars if I can get past Golden Capital.

As someone who not only doesn't get frustrated with Superstars and the Final Horizon's difficulty as others, but actually enjoys the notion of a Sonic game that actually tests you, I wonder how much ire for Superstars is about that frustration of its difficulty over its actual quality.

Don't get me wrong, Superstars (and the Final Horizon) have actual nonsense and some bad design tied to that difficulty, but largely, I believe it is fair and it's also very much easier and more rewarding to overcome that. Some bosses will force you to wait no matter what, but there are some you can shave down the time with.

But it's funny to hear someone here use "it punishes you for going fast" for a Classic Sonic game, but only a specific one, when that critique is used for Classic Sonic games as a whole. I can't say that Mania is necessarily different than Superstars in this regard at all, let alone that it is better for doing so.

 

Superstars is to Classic Sonic what a Mimic is to a treasure chest.

 

*sigh*

Mania has problems, but those problems are far less severe than the problems superstars has, and are far more inline with the way all of the core games were designed, while it also expands their scope and does some fresh things too (I think people forget just how much of a staple the drop dash has become to Sonic's gameplay now).

I'd argue Mania doesn't do enough to evolve the formula, but it 'does' evolve it and the "automation" people complain about is nothing that's not also done in s3&K to a decent degree. Launch Base Zone has a lot of highly automated areas 'if' you follow those set paths and don't deviate. Mania is fairly similar in that aspect.

The key difference with Mania's automation vs the automation of other titles in, say, the adventure era (which was what caused the entire debate about automation to begin 25 years ago now), is that you can easily break from Mania's automation and discover either entirely different routes, or secrets, not to mention breaking from the scripted automation is usually very easy in all but a few setpieces (which only last a few seconds). Something which, like it or not, has often been a staple of the series. If you try to break from automation in the Adventure titles, heroes, unleashed, or generations, it often kills you or leaves you with nowhere else to go. Mania at least doesn't result in instant death, and offers full player control in all but a few instances. You don't have to like it, but it's nothing compared to the problems of automation the players have seen in the rest of the series, and those sections are usually only a fraction of the entire game's levels.

Sonic Superstars does indeed line somewhere between Sonic 3K and Sonic CD in stage design. This is not a bad thing, and has been pointed out, it at times does so brilliantly. But it goes back to ideas seen in Dimps games where cheap and harder to predict deaths are relied on, and meaningful speed in any stage after speed jungle is only really possible for highly skilled speedrunners. Again, that's not the worst sin by itself, but when the game goes back to tons of death pits, spike placements, and cheap deaths, when it takes away my ability to gain the rush from using a super form in many stages, I just can't enjoy that as much. It's not an unforgivable sin, but as has been stated, it gets much worse with Trip's campaign, which is mandatory for proper game completion.

It stops being fun. It's not the kind of difficulty the classic titles relied on, and it kills the one thing that kept the classics around for years; replayability. I can replay Mania with the 5 characters and gain satisfaction from exploring or speedrunning the stages. Superstars is not designed with that kind of appeal. Blue rings force you go to to the special stage and can't be disabled. You have to learn to avoid them eventually, which is counterintuitive. There's just plain too much RNG in certain bosses or stage mechanics, particularly the late phase of the Fang Superboss and Last Story boss, and when it's not RNG, certain attack windows are narrower than they should be. Mastering a title like this stops becoming fun and simply starts becoming frustrating.

 

The argument that Mania has heavily automated level design has never sat right with me. It has several set pieces that change how you interact with the game, but it rarely removes your control outright. Sonic has been doing this from the start with things like loops and Labyrinth's water slides, and they all enhance the experience. Superstars doesn't have as many set pieces like these, which can lead to a degree of homogeneity in the level design. And when it does have set pieces, they too often either bring the game to a crawl or remove control whilst you watch the game go by for a little while. Mania doesn't play itself with automation, but it does constantly want you to move forward and I think it does an expert job at this without discouraging you from exploring different paths. Every moment in Mania has something going on, regularly including obstacles and mechanics that aren't the standard running and jumping, including various things that try to speed you up. If that's what people are recognising as "automation", I can see it but disagree vehemently.

Superstars' different paths all feel the same (which is partially down a lack of variety visual design within levels). Even though it offers intrinsic rewards with medals, those rewards kind of suck in practice as reward for exploration because they only affect battle mode. I prefer that Mania can give you a bunch of different shields and more frequent Special Stage rings. Superstars does get something right that Mania doesn't in this regard though. Once you get the Emeralds in Mania, you can't return to the Special Stages. Superstars does let you re-enter them, in addition to having my preferred bonus stages with the rotating mazes. Seriously, those mazes aren't fun in S1 and are totally awful in S4, but in Superstars they've finally been realised to great effect. I probably choose to go into about half of the rotating mazes in Superstars for the pure fun of it, whilst in Mania I'll only go into the bonus stages in Encore mode to get an extra character if I have to. Even Blue Sphere wore thin because of the time investment vs meagre reward was a poor balance.

But this is wrong. The bosses in Superstars have long periods of untelegraphed invincibility, both between regular hits and when they decide to draw out battle further with multiple phases. GHZ2 and BIZ2 are a straightforward comparison: GHZ2 be can be attacked entirely at will, plus has one attack that leaves him extra vulnerable). BIZ2 will shake off direct hits because it's not the right time for you to attack it and it lengthens the battle time with a mid-fight transformation that takes entirely too long. Even though Avatar can score your two or three free hits on most bosses, it really highlights just how excessive those i-frames are. Superstars only lets you hit bosses when it says so.

Mania's FBZ2 and SSZ2 bosses both have some really cheap mechanics that can OHKO, and the former even has the untelegraphed i-frames issue too. But I think those isolated incidents and less egregious than a game that makes even fight last longer than necessary regardless of what you do. Most of the bosses in Superstars, not just a couple as you say, dictate the pace the of the encounter. Cheese strats are a saving grace in Mania because they let you get the bad part over with quickly. That just isn't the same for Superstars.

Wait, what? Are you saying that you've only played Superstars' as a co-op experience and don't have a copy of it yourself? If so, I think there's a lot that sets in a lot after your initial playthrough that may not be immediately noticeable on your first run, especially when it comes to bosses. I honestly thought nothing of the absolute gauntlet that is the boss of Golden Capital 2 on my initial run and wondered by everyone seemed to dislike it so much. Turns out I just got kinda lucky on my first attempt and cleared it without dying. On all subsequent runs, it's an awful way to end the level, worsened if you're going through Trip's campaign which is likely to be how many people get their second experiences tbh.

 

I feel like if they liked the game in coop they'll definitely like it in single player.

 

I really can't get with the idea of Superstars supposedly having cheap design, at least outside the extra campaign. The stage design is strong from beginning to end. Maybe I'm not as fast as would qualify for "punished for going fast", but I have not felt that an inability to perform speedrun tricks has hampered my ability to go fast in the game. Press Factory's gimmicks can slow me down, but that's because I'm not that familiar with the level design yet, and you can definitely cut cycles on those stages when you know where you're actually going. I guess maybe a character act here or there, like Knuckles's Golden Capital, isn't great? But when I think about cheap design, I think about stuff like the do-or-die moments from some of the Advance and Rush games, and I'm literally not even sure what the complaints about spikes and pits are, I can only remember a couple of death pits in the whole game (if it's the Frozen Base boss, yeah I get that one), and none of the spike placement strikes me the way something like Advance 3 does.

 

I need to play more to form a strong opinion but the level design is actually good. I think I may have underestimated this game. Still hate the bosses though.

 

https://nintendoeverything.com/famitsu-sales-10-16-23-10-22-23/
1 [NSW] Super Mario Bros. Wonder – 638,634 / NEW
9 [NSW] Sonic Superstars – 4,128 / NEW

No surprise that Sonic gets beat by Mario in Japan, but 150x more? Good lord. Granted, this doesn't include all of the Superstars SKUs, but Switch is far and away the most popular.

 

Yeah, I don't really get this either. Mania certainly did more nostalgia baiting, but Superstars still did an egregious amount of it (especially compared to how little of it the initial previews led one to believe there would be). People point out Zones of similar tropes being effective stand-ins for older Zones of the same trope (Splash Hill or Bridge Island for Green Hill, as an example), but Sand Sanctuary might as well just be called Sandopolis with the gimmicks and badniks it uses. Just like the whole point of switching from pixel graphics to 2.5D models renders the faux Genesis music really questionable, the conceit of "it's only new Zones this time, baybee" renders stuff like the Slicers showing up in Press Factory, for example, questionable.

I'm fine with being "tested" in a Sonic game, but I'd personally prefer it to be more in the form of a platforming challenge (like Sonic 1's Labyrinth Zone, my favorite boss "fight" in the series), and less in the form of "boss fight where you avoid hits 95% of the time, attack 5% of the time" with the main challenge arguably being to keep one's greed in check. Those are different kinds of difficulties, and for me they shine more in different kinds of games. While Sonic and Dark Souls are both Rolling Simulators™, they're otherwise very different. One is focused on platforming, and the other is focused on combat.

The difficulty of the bosses aren't the problem (for me, at least), it's the amount of waiting that surrounds what difficulty is there. If I'm skilled enough at the Labyrinth Zone boss "fight", I can get to the top without the water ever reaching me. In Marble Zone people often hate the amount of block riding sections that force the player to wait, but most of them don't actually force you to wait, you can skip some if you go the right route, and speed others up by using the space you have to build speed and carefully platform. In both of these cases, being better at platforming makes it go faster.

For Superstars, you can somewhat dictate the pace of the boss fights by using Avatar and Super, and I have definitely used those to my advantage and these boss fights would have been so much worse for me without them, but they only work so much. Avatar can have its hits blocked, and sometimes the boss just goes offscreen and you have to wait before you can use it. I haven't used Super to cheese bosses in the main campaign, because I've been slowly slogging through Trip's, which adds an additional layer of annoyance to the Super strat: good luck having your rings by the time you get to the boss. And good luck retaining your Super form long enough to finish the boss out, because you might need to just use it as soon as you get 50 rings in the stage so you don't lose them; and with all the waiting the bosses make you do, there's a good chance you'll run out during the fight.

If you remove the bosses, the more difficult platforming challenges in Trip's campaign would probably be thrilling for me. Instead, I'm spending my time in them trying to hoard rings, so I can make the bosses at the end of the levels go by more quickly. Because having to replay the multiple phases of the fight if I fuck up or get screwed by the game in a later phase just gets exhausting after a while; fatigue sets in and I start screwing up more in parts that I already know I can clear (this sort of thing is exactly why the main campaign's final boss took me so long). But since there are hazards everywhere, I'm losing those rings, and getting annoyed the whole time playing the levels. There's certainly a sense in which being better at platforming in the level will net me more rings which will allow me to make the boss go faster. That's similar, in spirit, I guess, to "being better at Labyrinth Zone boss platforming section", but not really the same in a way that does it for me, because it's not as if being better at the platforming in the boss fight itself will make it go any faster.

Since I'm playing through Trip's pseudo-optional campaign, my feelings on the game are muddled; I enjoyed the main campaign a lot more, and once I clear Trip's, I'm planning to do things like Time Attack and chew more on the parts I liked. After that I'll have a better sense of how I feel about the game as a whole. But right now, the way the difficulty is handled and executed is significantly lowering the quality of my experience playing the game. That is partly on me (nobody's forcing me to do this instead of Time Attack, for instance), but it's also partly on the game (I want to clear the main game before doing the side content, and the true ending is part of the main game).

I do get the appeal of trying to solve the problem of players being able to simply use the invincibility after taking damage to cheese boss fights. I don't think "forcing the player to wait for a small window to attack" is my preferred solution. I'd instead rather give the player some incentive to clear the boss fight with a lot of rings on hand, to disincentivize getting hit at all. The coins/medallions would have almost worked as a solution, if they had any use in the main campaigns (ie: take your custom robot out to play through the actual game instead of the battle mode that nobody seems to care about, myself included). I also don't mind if some bosses force the player to wait for the occasional window to attack, but I'd rather those bosses be in the minority within any given game, and I'd rather the waiting windows be relatively small (Sonic 1's Spring Yard and Scrap Brain bosses, for instance, don't make you wait very long between opportunities to hit).