Sonic Mania has too much replay value?

Advance 3 tried. There was some shortcuts and hidden goodies that only certain team types could get.

Agree with the rest of the post, though.

 

It really does. There was a perfectly serviceable Sonic Mania topic already.

It's really disheartening to see genuine, interesting research be pushed down the board by "I like xxx" and "I don't like yyy". Think what could be achieved if the energy spent writing essays was put into wiki work!

 

Retro isn't exactly the best place for conversations in general outside of fan modding and/or amatuer game development. That said, your argument that there should be less content in Sonic Mania due to your own subjective dislike for the added characters isn't a solid one. Sure there could be more paths for Mighty and Ray but as other have pointed out, Encore Mode more than makes up for that. Something else which isn't brought up is how Ray is essentially the king of Speedrunning now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JkRvAakjO0

Like I said before, if you aren't having fun then just stop playing.

 

And your solution to this is to remove them entirely?

Mighty has spike invincibility as well making him defacto easy mode character and as I mentioned before, Ray is the speedrunning king (which you would know if you spent some time in the Time Trial mode). If you don't enjoy either of those, that is on YOU. It's not an objective statement which is why nobody takes you seriously. Removing them entirely is NOT a solution especially when that would ruin Encore mode which relies on characters as lives.

YOU are forcing yourself to play extra characters. Stop pretending as though you don't have free will. Compulsively playing a video game is a mental illness. This isn't up for debate.

Except your ENTIRE ARGUMENT is to remove those characters. Not make them better but to REMOVE THEM. Nevermind that myself and others have played the game multiple times with all characters without your specific subjective emotional problem. It's like you're pinching yourself but refuse to stop on the flawed basis that the given action should be fun and instead of stopping, your solution is to cut off the two fingers you are using to pinch (leaving the three fingers that aren't). Just stop pinching yourself.

 

Here's the sticking point. Since Mighty and Ray (and Encore Mode, but I'll get to that in a second) were added later, the game was already finished. Sure, they could have retroactively changed more parts of the level design around, but they didn't. Maybe it was time restraints, Maybe it was lack of money, Maybe they wanted the levels to be consistent to the earlier version, they just didn't.

Encore Mode, however, was a place where they did tweak a lot of things in minor ways, and they have added a tiny bit more. And they could have loaded more exclusive paths for the two new characters, but let me describe a scenario that may happen to a player.

-Player is currently controlling Mighty through an area exclusive to him.
-Player either dies or hits an item that swaps characters. What's important is that the player is now stuck as someone else.
-Player can't proceed forwards and is either forced to reset, or at the very least backtrack.

That doesn't sound like much fun, and since the Encore Mode's level design has to account for you being any combination of characters and still be able to make forward progress, they couldn't have lengthy "Character only" stretches like they did in Sonic 3&K's zones. Just look at some of the Knuckles-only areas in Mania Mode, and compare them to their Encore Mode couterparts, and you'll see added platforms to make it accessible to everyone in case this happens.

I bet if they make a Mania follow-up that includes more characters past the core Sonic/Tails/Knuckles in the base game, they'd have time to plan better sections for the extra characters, but at the same time, we all know that things can be cut during development.