don't click here

Sonic Mania Plus SPOILER THREAD with UNMARKED spoilers!

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Harmony Friends, Apr 25, 2018.

  1. jubbalub

    jubbalub

    #1 Sonic Superstars defender Member
    996
    1,229
    93
    The leak also claims that Mother 3 is getting a remake on the 3DS for America, which isn't going to happen. I wouldn't get my hopes up.
     
  2. Axanery

    Axanery

    Member
    Yo, I've uploaded three of the four new tracks (everything but Angel Island). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs2R536ysdw (Back in Action) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j-sAavB-Mg (Trap Tower) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eWyKycmKTs (Double Take). All clean, no SFX.
     
  3. Aquova

    Aquova

    Professional nerd in training Member
    146
    1
    18
    USA
    Things mentioned in the leak:

    - Mother 3 remake
    - Kingdom Hearts 3 Switch port
    - Star Fox racing
    - Final Fantasy VII port

    Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's not true.
     
  4. Laughingcow

    Laughingcow

    Resident Edgelord PHD Member
    580
    3
    18
    No Xenoblade = fake

    We've datamined the next update so no announcement is enough for me to say fake.
     
  5. Gestalt

    Gestalt

    Sphinx in Chains Member
    This.

    Guys, I feel the need to say that we should be able to enjoy these games without caring that much. That's what Sonic Mania sadly doesn't stand for. Life is stupidly boring without Sonic games and the internet can be a really weird place. More like Mania would be welcomed not only because it was a financial success, but also because the developers did an impressive job at taking up the torch for example.
     
  6. foXcollr

    foXcollr

    Resident Dolphin Member
    738
    634
    93
    US
    Just noticed those music credits.
    So it's confirmed that the new tracks weren't composed by Tee? The production value does seem a little lower than the rest of the game's standard, especially Trap Tower.
    Definitely not complaining about the arrangement, just the production is a little wonky and there's something very offputting about that horn synth.
     
  7. CollectiveWater

    CollectiveWater

    Member
    134
    0
    0
    Whoa, I just assumed all the new "Plus" tracks were done by Tee since they're all so damn good. Hunty did a great job if he indeed was the composer. "Double Take" is one of the best songs I've heard so far this year. Check out more of Hunter's great music on his Soundcloud and Youtube channels.

    The full "Angel Island" is Tee, though, right? Perhaps he was too busy with sound work for "Adventures" and other projects to do more work than just that on "Plus." Whatever the case, totally happy with the end results.
     
  8. 360

    360

    Light Vision Overdrive Oldbie
    2,282
    1
    0
    United Kingdom
    Sonic Neon
    I appreciate the sentiment (what you said is really nice and positive - and quite the heart warming thought) but I think the reason for the endless speculation is derived from us all believing after SXSW that Sonic Mania 2 with potentially all-original levels was near definite and inevitable - and then Iizuka comes out and says the Sonic Mania project is finished and complete inferring that there wouldn't be another game any time soon. So all this speculation is more about determining the likelihood that Taxman/Stealth will get a second shot with hopefully the game we all want via the logic of the game's financial success providing the impetus and motivation for Sega to be forced to produce a sequel which will hopefully be an entirely original Mania 2. With also hopefully more creative control and power given to Taxman/Stealth given they just proved themselves with Mania 1 so massively. Honestly I think if Iizuka hadn't said what he said and placed that stormy rain cloud above everyone we'd all be automatically assuming a sequel is inevitable and would be happy to sit back and just enjoy the games without worrying whether there'll ever be another one - if that makes sense.

    I do remember posting in the thread about that interview. He didn't outright reject or deny a Mania 2 but he did infer the series may be done for a while after Plus. This is why I'm so determined to see the Sonic panel next week as it's possible (though perhaps a little unlikely) that Mania 2 or Sega's intent to eventually make it will be confirmed there. Or at least one would hope.
     
  9. TimmiT

    TimmiT

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Member
    There are separate staff credits for Mania Plus, and Tee isn't credited for composing music. It actually doesn't list anyone as composer for Plus at all.
     
  10. minichapman

    minichapman

    I'd like to think I'll be imparting words of wisdo Member
    681
    38
    28
    United Kingdom
    Staying sane.
    So, anyone that ordered Mania from Amazon U.K. should have a dispatched message. Mine strangely came up at 4am with an estimated delivery day of Tuesday but with a little luck I'm hoping it's one of those cases where it arrives a day early.
     
  11. Lapper

    Lapper

    Lappering Tech Member
    1,763
    951
    93
    England
    Sonic Studio, Sonic Physics Guide, Kyle & Lucy, Freedom Planet 2
    Think I ordered mine too late since my estimated is 18th and no such message yet.

    No matter as I'll be updating on Steam too.
     
  12. foXcollr

    foXcollr

    Resident Dolphin Member
    738
    634
    93
    US
    Oh, you'd be surprised though. Despite demonstrating the many reasons why Metal simply can't feasibly in the game, I still had to have a conversation with a Nintendo fanboy on that sub who continues to claim that he “could still be in the game” and continues to invent reason after asinine reason for how Metal Sonic could be playable and the leak could still be proven true.

    This is the kind of thing that makes me genuinely annoyed with the gaming community. This type of fanboyism and contrarianism has reached a whole new level of insanity. People are making up pipe dreams for why x new character is in their favorite game because they're THAT passionate about it, but it really does start to get difficult to talk to those people rationally. Especially when you can't really prove them 100% wrong because their claim is that “it COULD happen”, so they just sit on a pedestal and make everyone else feel stupid.

    I agree with most here that this whole leak is prefty BS, especially “Mother 3D”, Metal Sonic, no Xenoblade, etc.
    But I guess toxic fanboys will believe what they wanna believe regardless. I think in this case it's probably best to just not engage with those types of people, it never gets anywhere.

    Anyway, as far as Mania 2 is concerned, I'm absolutely down.
    However, is there really any plausibility to this? I believe I remember someone on the team saying that Plus was going to be a challenge to develop in time, and considering that a lot of the dev team has said they're looking for work on Twitter it seems like work on a sequel couldn't have started.
    Knowing Sega in the past, would they really announce something that isn't even in development yet?

    It's a pipe dream for sure, but if they did do something like that it would be bananas. If I were them, I would be confident enough in Mania's success to greenlight a few more sequels right off the bat.
     
  13. CollectiveWater

    CollectiveWater

    Member
    134
    0
    0
    Hanging Waters, a good rule of thumb is just to never put any stock into any rumors. Especially ones that have nothing to them. If Nintendo announces a Direct for the 22nd today or next week, then there's a little more there, but even then the claims in the rumor you're talking about are so outlandish (and have multiple outlandish things listed, not just one) that you still should not believe it or bother talking about it online.

    Just wait until these announcements are actually made. Even when stuff from rumors come true, they rarely are what everyone expected them to be. Like if that "Star Fox" racing game by Retro Studios ends up being real, it's not going to look 100% like what any of us have dreamed up in our heads.

    All of us discussing the possibility of a "Mania" sequel in this and other threads aren't doing so in a rumor-esque way; obviously we all know nothing has been confirmed. It's more just us expressing that we really want to see it happen, in the off chance someone involved with the project sees us hoping for it and decides to put anything into action. (Remember when they announced the physical version of "Plus" how they preceded showing it with a slide filled with a ton of comments from across the internet of people asking/saying they wanted one? Turns out sometimes these companies do actually listen to feedback, if there's enough of it out there and they also think it sounds like a good enough idea.) That's where I'm coming from it at, anyway.
     
  14. Sid Starkiller

    Sid Starkiller

    Member
    1,457
    358
    63
    Virginia, USA
    Paying off student loans
    The way I see it, even if they've already started development on a Mania 2 (which, frankly, I'd rather they give the team a break so they don't get burnt out), why would they take attention away from Mania Plus by telling us now?
     
  15. ICEknight

    ICEknight

    Researcher Researcher
    Just gonna say that there's not much "Classic Sonic" going on in "Trap Tower" and "Double Take"... =|


    Starting to fear that IGN had a point with the lower score and that Plus just won't feel as polished as the main game.
     
  16. Lapper

    Lapper

    Lappering Tech Member
    1,763
    951
    93
    England
    Sonic Studio, Sonic Physics Guide, Kyle & Lucy, Freedom Planet 2
    I don't think the Mania menu music sounds too classic anyway. Not genesis anyways. Makes me think of a menu of a modern Mario Kart game or something.
    I also don't think some different composition for a new menu (etc) says much about the talents of everyone involved in the update.


    On another note, I guess we have a character for every single 'Mania colour scheme' colour now. If you give the dark blue to Mighty... ok it doesn't quite line up but I originally thought it was for this purpose and thought the 2 blues were going to be classic and modern Sonic (since classic is now light blue) :o
     
  17. ICEknight

    ICEknight

    Researcher Researcher
  18. Naean

    Naean

    Naean H.F. (Nez Man) Member
    821
    190
    43
    United Kingdom
    2D. Sonic Fan Game
    I didn't really think of Mario when I saw this initially, but now that you mention it, yeah there are some Mario-esque sound effects going on there, haha.

    On the topic of sound effects, a detail that I'm slightly disappointed by is the flipper sound effects. I would have preferred if they used the same sound effect as flippers in Sonic 2/Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Oh well, it still looks great overall! :)
     
  19. CollectiveWater

    CollectiveWater

    Member
    134
    0
    0
    I think the whole point was for "Double Take" to sound really different--it's signifying that Encore is a purposefully weird thing separate from the main game. I love it. Definitely like it even more than the Mania mode menu music. "Trap Tower" sounds like a remix of the original combined with a casino theme, which makes sense since pinball is heavily associated with casinos in the world of Sonic. I think it's a great remix. The full "Angel Island" sounds like what you'd expect, and "Back In Action" is just a basic, short mash-up of the two songs from "SegaSonic" it's based on.

    "Double Take," "Trap Tower," and "Angel Island" are the standouts ("Back In Action" is too short to be very meaningful), and honestly I like "Double Take" and "Trap Tower" even more than the full "Angel Island" (which is also great). Which is pretty amazing if those two tracks were indeed composed by Hunty and not Tee. I love Tee's work, and would definitely be upset if the tracks not done by him sounded bad/noticeably worse than his work. Amazingly Hunty pulled off the near-impossible; I wouldn't have even known they weren't composed by Tee unless told otherwise.

    And yeah IGN's 7.0 score for the DLC by itself is absolutely about the right score. DLC nearly always for any and every game gets scores in the 7-8 range, since it's always just minor additional material meant for people who have already wrung everything out of the main game that just want a little more. DLC rarely ever matches the quality of the main game itself, which makes sense since it's always a much smaller, scaled back work often made by much less people than worked on the main game. "Plus"/Encore is par for the course when it comes to DLC. I can understand how some folks can get upset because they expected more or don't yet know that those are always the expectations they should have going into DLC, but yeah you figure it out pretty quickly. There's probably been less than ten pieces of DLC since the term was adopted that have scored in the 8.5-9 range, and those are incredible exceptions. (And for the most part those exceptions are still not up to the same standard of quality of the main games they derive from.)


    Personally I'd give "Plus" a score somewhere in the 7.5-8 range, because I think there is some great stuff there. It's part of the free patch (though it probably wouldn't have been made without "Plus" being given the greenlight), but the Oil Ocean-->Lava Reef and Metallic Madness-->Titanic Monarch transitions are better and more elaborate than any of the transitions that shipped with the game originally. Flying Battery-->Press Garden is pretty good, too.

    Mighty and Ray are both well done. Good pixel art for both, great animation, and their unique moves are cool. I'm gonna get a lot of mileage out of both of them, especially in Mania mode. Runs with them are going to be super easy/even more of a breeze than a Tails run, so they'll be nice when you just want to relax and have a nice time going through the game, soaking in the atmosphere. (Turn off the 10 minute time limit with them in Mania mode for maximum laid-back exploration.)

    The color changes in Encore to me are definitely a mixed bag, but some of it's good. I'd rank the color changes from best to worst as: Oil Ocean, Chemical Plant, Hydrocity, Stardust Speedway, Titanic Monarch, Lava Reef, Mirage Saloon, Studiopolis, Green Hill, Press Garden, Metallic Madness, and Flying Battery. (This ranking will probably move around a bit when I play through Encore a bunch myself, but there's no doubt in my mind that I like the color changes to Oil Ocean the best by far.) It is kind of a bummer that the most visually improved zone with the color changes is Oil Ocean--probably my least favorite zone in the game--but man it is god damn beautiful now. Sure it's still kind of a gaudy cotton candy/bubblegum aesthetic, but damn it works and it works well. I like it way more than how it looks normally; it's gonna make playing that zone in Mania mode even more of a bummer now. Even the blue fog in Act 2 is still visually appealing (though the gimmick is still annoying). I'm going to enjoy that zone way more in Encore mode than in Mania mode, simply from it being improved so much visually. (Also going into the Act 2 boss fight with two or more characters in Encore now makes that fight way easier and improves it.) But yeah Oil Ocean is the only zone in Encore where I think the color changes are an improvement over the original.

    The design changes do seem very very minimal. I've played through "Mania" at least a dozen times, but I don't have each zone completely memorized. So I wouldn't be able to notice/figure out each and every change made. But it does seem minimal (with Chemical Plant having the most changes seemingly; well and MSZ Act 1 but that's obvious). Watching Mister Tea Mot's entire playthrough, I couldn't help but think the minimal changes that have been made might have been done specifically with speedrunners in mind. Slingerland is the only listed designer on Encore, and we know he's pretty clued in on the speedrunning scene. There were a couple changes, especially in Titanic Monarch, where I thought "those seem like they're gonna throw off speedrunners at first big time, but once they acclimate and get good at them they'll probably love them because they'll look good going through them with maximum efficiency." But yeah for most people (like myself) that don't have the whole game memorized the changes are so minimal we'll barely even notice them. Kind of a shame more wasn't done in that regard, but also if they had all the designers working on Encore and really putting a lot into changing the object/badnik/gimmick placement or even coming up with entirely new layouts, then at that point that's the sort of work that would probably be better saved for a sequel. Wouldn't want the designers to waste all their ideas just on this DLC. I do think there probably should have been slightly more changes than there are, but oh well--it is what it is.

    The pinball bonus stage is neat but yeah I'll probably go into it once to hear the music and reach the top and then never do it again (aside from when I really need to get characters in zones that don't have many character monitors). Was kinda hoping it'd be more elaborate/better realized and that there'd be multiple tables to go through and some sort of progression to it, but oh well. Once I got all the gold medals in Blue Sphere in the main game I then never went back into those bonus stages, so it's not a big deal to me that I won't be interacting with this new one much. Cool Saturn-esque 3D modeling, I love the music, etc., but yeah there ain't much there to sink your teeth into.

    Lastly when it comes to those new special stage layouts: yeah they're a pronounced step up in difficulty from the ones in the main game but personally I am so onboard for those. Super looking forward to mastering them. The ones in the main game became a breeze to get through pretty quickly. These definitely look like they'll take some more time to get good at. And I really love the design work put into them. I think Slingerland knocked it out of the park with those (if he indeed was the one that did all the new design work that went into them). Totally understand some will find them too difficult, but they're easy to skip if that's the case and no one should feel like they're missing anything by doing so. (The all emeralds ending ain't anything super special, and you could easily just watch it online.)

    Anyway them's my thoughts on Encore from watching Mister Tea Mot's playthrough of it. They'll probably change a little bit after playing it a bunch myself, but generally I know I'll feel very similarly after having done so. More than happy with what's here considering it's very low-priced DLC.
     
  20. Gonna side with CollectiveWater here too. A few people I know are really disappointed by this expansion but they never really sold it as anything more than minor, I think people got caught up in the hype. Personally what we're getting for free is already enough to make the update worth it, the 5 dollar bonuses just add to it. Like, I kinda empathize but they basically confirmed a lot of what we know about Encore mode as a whole like a month or two back. Encore Mode looks like a fun diversion and Mighty and Ray add a lot to the already chunky main game of Mania Mode, which has also seen as said before a ton of improvements. Plus will absolutely feel as polished as the main game because, well, it kind of is. Encore Mode on the other hand on its own might be rough to some, but I think I'll end up enjoying it a lot.