Sonic Mania Plus SPOILER THREAD with UNMARKED spoilers!

I think the pinball stage lasting forever could be resolved if you stop the player dropping to a lower portion of the table once you progress.

Also one thing that really bugs me is how big Ray's head is, in the cartoon he is as short as tails, in the game he is as big as sonic and mighty including their larger hitboxes instead of really being based on tails hitbox and height.

 

I haven't finished Encore Mode yet (up to Metallic Madness), but one thing that has really struck me is the wealth of options and strategy opened up with character swapping. I've played a significant chunk of the game as Mighty and Tails (until I accidentally hit a ? monitor); they balance each other well, so segments that might be hard for one are easy for the other. Mighty's ground pound has its uses, but I've gotten the most mileage out of it as a quick dodge or cancel on a fucked up jump that might otherwise get me hit by an enemy.

Ray and Tails are interesting in their advantages and disadvantages. I love Ray's maneuverability in tighter spaces and ability to correct short jumps forward without breaking flow, both things Tails is weak at, but his inability to gain height without plenty of horizontal room is definitely a bit of a weakness in levels like Flying Battery. Overall, I think I still prefer Ray to Tails as a flyer (and definitely Mighty to Sonic or Knuckles), but if I do have Mighty and Tails, I'm not gonna try to swap him out and risk getting a less useful combo like Mighty and Knuckles.

The whole risk/reward factor of switching out characters is really one of my favorite things about Encore mode, and one of my favorite things I've ever seen in the Sonic franchise as a whole. The ability to swap gameplay styles with the press of a button is loads of fun, and the decision to get or not get a monitor that changes out one or both of your two characters adds a ton of depth beyond the core platforming. Heck, even the frustration of accidentally getting a ? and winding up with a less useful combo such as Sonic/Knuckles or Ray/Tails makes the game more interesting. In fact, I think after I beat the game I'll do another run where I change out my characters at every opportunity with no regards for strategy. I think there's a lot of potential fun in making it just a little bit more Mario Party-esque with just a bit more random chaos.

Edit: Also, the pinball bonus stage is fun, but it's too easy. I understand the intent of making it rise, so that the more stuff you want to get the better you have to be at it (makes it harder to stack up all 5 characters at once), but once you get used to the weird pin-ball phys-ics and how the flippers work it's pretty easy. Not intuitive, but easy.

edit 2: FORUM CENSORSHIP IS AN UNFUNNY SHITSTAIN. I was using that term about pinball and physics in an appropriate and relevant manner specifically related to physics as they apply to pinball in an actual pinball bonus stage.

 

Funny - When I got to that bonus stage, my very first thought was "Some poor sap is going to walk right into that word filter by accident". :v:

 

Titanic Monarch 2's boss in encore mode was pretty refreshing. In Mania Mode you can pretty much wreck him quickly but that doesn't really work here. I think this was the first time this fight ever lasted long enough for me to go to Heavy Rider's sequence.

Overall I enjoyed Encore mode a lot. I heard a poster mention yesterday that it's not much of a "hard mode", and I think this kind of rings true. Even though it is more hazardous, some bosses are slightly upgraded, and the special stages of course are significantly trickier, you'll still push through the game with relative ease if you're familiar with these kinds of games. I think I only lost a single character three times at the most.

Now to get the rest of those hellspawn emeralds (four more to go).

 

I had more trouble with the Chaos Emeralds and keeping my ring count consistently above 50 rather than ever suffer a Game Over at all in Encore, even when Metal Sonic Kai juggled three of my characters into a pit. Heck, if you're good at Titanic Monarch, Encore now gives you an Electric Shield early on as almost a freebie, which coupled with unlocking Super and keeping the shield can let you cheese the rest of the zone so long as you don't lose it too early to cut off your ring flow.

Even then, though, you also can't cheese Eggman so readily now that the patch forces you to get thrown into Heavy Gunner's portion at least. That's a lot of time and rings wasted if you go Super.

 

Dev diary with Christian Whitehead is up

You can see the title screen of Discovery in the video.

And if you ordered the Japanese version of Mania then you'll see the soundtrack has a cool reversible cover as well!
https://twitter.com/knucosuke/status/1019799487349325825?s=19

 

*Slowpoke Mode*

Much like most here, I've found Ray more fun and fluid to play as compared to Mighty - easy heights with modest amounts of momentum is really damn neat. Though I kind of expected this since comparing both from pre-release trailers for both, anyway.

On that end, the way Ray tends to curl into a ball when his glide ends or is interrupted allows him a semi-Megamix style play, curling to a ball to dispatch enemies and keep the momentum going. Wish we still had the uncurling function from Megamix for Classic-titles, lowkey.

 

I tend to not have Steam open and so Sonic Mania hasn't updated on my end, "Last Modified: 25/09/2017". Is that of any use? I'm unsure since there doesn't appear to be many files in the folder.

 

There is a way to make steam download an older version of the game. It's a bit of a process but I used it to downgrade Garry's Mod a few months ago and it worked like a charm so it should also work for something smaller like Sonic Mania.

 

Absolutely loving all the new content. As many others have said, a good portion of my issues with the base game were addressed here. Still disappointed by several things, though:

- You can't get the Pinball Bonus Stage in Mania Mode until you get a perfect on all of the Blue Spheres stages. I can definitely get all of the Silver Medallions, but I'm too much of a scrub to get the Gold Medallions. While I'm all for there being some kind of reward now for getting all Gold (unless there was prior, and I'm forgetting), but I feel like a Bonus Stage where you can acquire rings, power ups, lives, and continues should have been the default. There's a "get all Gold Medallions" mod out there already, right?

- No multiplayer during Encore mode, and still no online multiplayer, is disappointing. Online co-op still feels to me like an incredibly natural place for the series to go.

- When we learned that there were seven new Special Stages, I foolishly got my hopes up for Super Emeralds and Hyper Sonic. :v:

 

Question about Encore's good ending: Do all 5 characters always appear, or only the ones you have? I had all 5 when I got it, so I couldn't tell.

 

Not sure if this has been pointed out, but I saw this on /v/



Subtle :v:

 

Yep, spells Nah. It was discovered some months before release actually.

 

Is anyone else experiencing the opening animation only playing in black and white. Some people on the SSMB have also experienced this.

It's rather peculiar, seems to be a Steam problem as far as I know, but could be on consoles too.

 

Kind of curious why they never went with the s3k style ring amount = bonus type, or have it swap between pinball and spheres each lamp post hit or something.

 

Just checked my Steam version, no oddities here on either version of the opening. I've seen people have weird color glitch distortions out the arse on Steam too, so I think the colors just break for some people sometimes.

 

Yeah, I've experienced the black and white opening animation as well. This seems to have happened since Steam got the 1.05 update. My laptop security scanner then refused to run the 1.05 version because it found an infected file...

Thankfully the console versions still has the previous update 1.04 version.

 

In case anyone is wondering I have attached some photos of the Japanese version...once im home in a couple of days ill upload better pictures
https://www.imageshack.us/i/polCmYFZj

https://www.imageshack.us/i/pncxwRqKj

 

Hate being the bearer of bad news but don't see this posted yet. Sega pushed a new version of Denuvo with the Sonic Mania Plus update that seems to be causing widespread issues including game slow down and glitches. I don't see anyone here reporting issues like severe slow down so perhaps the issue is only affecting a small number of users?