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

That did it, thank you very much. I defeated him immediately with no hassle. Aside from the unintuitive control prompt it was a pretty cool boss fight that was reasonably challenging. After finally figuring this and the Trip final boss out I'm pretty sure I won't struggle with them in subsequent playthroughs.

After clearing the game and reflecting on it after the experience settled a bit, I can say that I really enjoyed this game. It's a great 2D Sonic game. I'd give it a solid '8' which is pretty much what I was hoping for.

Also, I must say that I absolutely love Sky Temple's theme. For some reason it has connected with me more than any other song. It's probably my favorite song in the game and I'm pretty sure it's Jun Senoue's work.

 

"Support this product or we will never get another 2D/MD Sonic game again because ya'll were too critical" was an argument used to defend Sonic 4 Episode II (namely when Sega admitted they were hesitant on making a third episode), and it was about as convincing there as it is being recycled here. (Ironic too, given the faux "we want fan feedback!" marketing angle projected with that game.)

If Sega decides to stop production of 2D/MD Sonic games after Superstars, it's not going to be because of people whining about it on internet forums. It's going to be because they don't think enough people are going to buy future installments. Which, to be fair, was the case for the Sonic 4 series and could be the case for Superstars. But I don't believe the reasons why people voted with their wallets against Sonic 4: Episode II(/III) should be up for debate in 2023. And even if you like the game, it doesn't take much to admit there are some things (or many things) about Superstars that Sega/Sonic Team/Arzest could had handled better than they did.

It's Sega/Sonic Team's decision and their decision alone to decide post-Superstars to either take their ball and go home, or actually try again and do a better job next time. (Or at least hire a proven team (again) to do a better job for them next time, hint hint.)

 

Or they could use the feedback and patch the game. IMO there's lots of great stuff in the game and some adjustments to the tedious boss fights alone would resolve most of my complaints. Lets hope they patch the game.

 

With the combo of low sales and complaints Sega has been known to stop certain Series. Sonic 4 Episode 2 is an example of that. They didn’t improve it afterwards. They just stopped the series. They will not make Mania again because it did not do crazy numbers as far as sales despite it being the highest rated Sonic game for years. They would’ve made a Mania 2 if feedback mattered more than sales. This is why they made Superstars because they thought classic gameplay would be more appealing in 3d. The game is not perfect but at least it was a good first step.

It’s not even as bad as the classic stages in Generations. This game is getting bad feedback and does not seem to be selling that well either. Sega will stop this series before losing money. Despite people complaining about Frontiers, people were still buying the game. Nobody cared as much about the bad physics, the pop ins, lack of effort put into the cyberspace stages, and no other playable characters before the 3rd DLC. Superstars was toast before it even released. There were a lot of Classics fans already not feeling the fact the Mania Team were not behind this game. There were also Modern Sonic fans that wanted Classic Sonic gone and see this game fail because they feel the series should stop pushing Classic Sonic and move on.

Bad reviews and low sales usually are signs that we will not be seeing a type of game anymore with Sega. Frontiers got bad reviews but still sold well so you can still say, this is something we can build off of. You cannot say that with Superstars thus far. This is why I think it won’t get the same improvements and support Frontiers got. Superstars is not getting much fan support and some of the criticism is over exaggerated. I’d like to see a better version of a game like this but we won’t get that.

 

I'm pretty sure it would have sold a lot better if it was £30

 

How did Frontiers get bad reviews? Or Superstars, for that matter? They're both mid 70s everywhere I look.

 

Frontiers got a few reviews in the 40s, 30s, and 20s which is ridiculous. I'm surprised you have never heard of them. Games Hub, Digital Trend, PSX Extreme, and Games Radar. There are also people all over Twitter and Youtube bashing Sonic Superstars and saying the game is terrible. There are critics that scored Superstars in the 50s. Destructoid, Gamingbolt, GGRecon. The overall scores on these games are not bad but there are critics that scored them really low.

 

That's not how critical reception works. Lots of games have bad reviews from someone.

 

The recorded reviews for Superstars on aggregate sites that gave it a "bad" score (4/10 or lower) are outliers compared to the rest of the reviews the game got. Most of the review scores were mildly positive if not average / mixed, with a handful of super positive scores. If Superstars was being rated that poorly across the board, I guarantee you there would be way more negative reactions that what you're seeing now.

That's the whole point of the metascore, it's an estimated average rating out of the total number of reviews (positive, mixed/average, and negative alike). Likewise, the approval rating on Opencritic shows there are more critics that recommended people to buy the game more than there were people that didn't (although it's not by much).

This is the second time in, what, the last two weeks, that I have to point out the widely-reported fact that Sega did reach out to Evening Star about making a direct followup to Mania.

Yes, both parties couldn't agree to terms and both went on to do their own thing; but I'm getting annoyed at the implied narrative that Sega immediately wrote off any notion of working with Taxman and company again on a Mania sequel. (Or that Mania's commercial success was in any way insignificant.) It's firmly planted in revisionist history territory.

 

We've entered the doom posting arc.

 

Honestly, I don't think review scores have been representative of Sonic's performance for a long time. I think a lot of games we consider "mid" in the modern formula have actually done very well over time. Otherwise, modern Sonic stuff would never become as popular over the years as it has been.

IMHO, Sonic has always been rated an average of at least 1 point lower than it should be ever since SA2B came out and was an all around better game than SA2, but scored much lower with critics. Essentially, ever since the Dreamcast was discontinued.

Superstars' problems are less about critics, more about difficulty with targeting the audience and whether the core players themselves like the game and spread it via word of mouth, and its real problem is that it's just 'too damned expensive' for what it offers, above all else. Making it a flawed product on top of that which didn't quite meet the interests of a lot of classic fans (being a pixel art game), means it misses the mark in many ways.

That's not to say it couldn't be improved with a patch or 2. I also think games can get a second wind in terms of sales if you time it right and market the sale price right. But we don't even know what Sega's goals with this game are, I just have a feeling they've not been met yet.

 

Well, I'm not saying the main problem is the reviews but it's a contributing factor to why the game is not selling well. It's the sales. There is not much press on how this game is doing as far as sales other than Japan. Japan always ignores Classic Sonic content. We also have a small idea of how it's doing in the UK. It was charted top 5 for a week and we have not heard anything else from it since. Now all of a sudden we are getting all of these commercials that we did not really get before the game's release. They should have marketed the game like this before its release. I know a lot of people who did not even know of its existence.

 

I don't think it's good to use sales figures, especially Japanese ones, as a predictor of how the game will affect the future of the series. The only core Sonic platformer to ever sell badly was Lost World, and that was mostly just cause it was stuck on the Wii U. A decade later and we're still talking about Frontiers, which is as much a descendant of that game as it is the other boost titles.

As I've said, this game probably wasn't afforded a huge amount of time or money, which means it doesn't necessarily have to set the world on fire to be a success. If this is part of a strategy to establish an efficient development pipeline for smaller 2D Sonic games, all it really has to do is not crash and burn. Other issues can be ironed out later.

Like, I know we love doomposting and all, but I've had to say several times over that Sonic's healing process is not about being the greatest video game ever made but about not having major embarrassing fuckups. That's why the 2010s decade wasn't nearly as mean to Sonic Team as the late 2000s was, it's why Frontiers is considered as good as it is, and it's why even with its problems, Superstars is never gonna be sitting in the category of games fans hesitate to talk about.

 

Honestly it sorta does seem like Sega aimed for a strat where they could milk $60 at launch from hardcore fans and drop the price for the holiday season to get casuals, would've just been better to delay the game period, iirc there aren't any huge spotlight stealing games coming this month (said games being family oriented stuff like Pokemon, Mario, etc)

Half expecting a patch to come out in the next few weeks addressing some of the games issues, just in time for Black Friday

 

Everyone SHUT UP

New Digital Foundry just dropped

 

"This is the price for 60 frames per second. Seriously, if this is what it takes to reach that target on the Switch so be it."

If these low res JPG backgrounds are the only way for this game to reach 60FPS on Switch most of the time, maybe Arzest ought to get some good Unity programmers

 

This view is very common among the fandom and is completely incorrect. I'll use Metacritic as a baseline. It's true that Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 re-releases did much more poorly than on Dreamcast, but you also have to balance that against the pretty favourable reviews for Sonic Heroes (6/10 or 7/10 depending upon console). Shadow the Hedgehog was trashed but that was an awful game.

A lot of people have criticisms of 2008-2010 coverage of Sonic but I don't think it's unreasonable at all. I don't think Sonic Adventure deserves a 5/10 but it's also not an outrageous score. Seems reasonable for how flawed it is. Sonic Unleashed has 6/10 and deserves that score. And Sonic Adventure 2 was actually reviewed rather favourably to be honest at 6/10. I think a lot of Sonic fans would think that score is fair for the whole game. Generations did well at high 7/10. Lost World got 6/10 which I think is a fair review. Forces got 5/10 which is fair.

Now it is true that there are individual reviews you can pick out in 2008-2010 which you can mock, but if you look at the complete gaming critic landscape, I don't think it was that unreasonable. Certainly not unfair or fuelling Sonic bias as people conspiracy theory branded across the internet.

Most recently, If anything I think critics are far too generous and the most recent games are vastly overrated. Taking Metacritic average scores, Sonic 4 scored around a 7/10 which I don't think anyone would agree with now and would consider too generous. Colors scored well at around 7/10 or 8/10 on both original release and re-release. Everyone seems to hate that game now. Frontiers got 7/10 on average and actually deserves a 4/10. Superstars got a 7/10 and actually deserves a 5/10. Of course, some reviews are accurate (Forces deserves a 5/10) but I wouldn't say any game since 2010 was underrated.

 

Not for nothing, but this whole discussion about review scores shows just how useless they are in the grand scheme, at least if you're trying to use them to measure things objectively. Scores are simply used to measure a general consensus, but shouldn't really be used as the end all, be all for judging the quality of games. There have been games that have 9/10 and 10/10 that I've thought were trash and 5/10 and 6/10 games that I thought were amazing.

Another thing that people never consider is that critics aren't going to sit down and play these games for a long period of time to explore them. Critics will play the game for a few hours and write down their first impressions and general thoughts before moving on to the review another game. They don't have the luxury that you and I do of just sitting down and exploring what a game has to offer. This is why the Fighting game genre tends to be reviewed so differently between critics and people who actually compete in those games, the experience is entirely different.


Sonic, for better or worse, is an extremely polarizing series that you probably aren't going to discover anything meaningful about it on your initial playthrough. If the game can't hook you on its first playthrough, more often than not, you're gonna give it an average score and go about your business and miss out on anything else the game has to offer. Mario games hook you from the time you pick up the controller and start playing the game, Sonic games do not.

Mania feels like the exception to this rule, but that game was also mining a lot of people's nostalgia from a time when there was a lore more goodwill surrounding the series.

 

Yeah there's no way this is how things had to be. There are plenty of far prettier games on Switch with far more complex images being rendered that deliver 60fps near enough flawlessly.

 

I already thought that Lagoon City was easily the weakest zone in the game visually but wow I had no idea how much worse it looks on Switch, that is dreadful.