Sonic Mania Plus SPOILER THREAD with UNMARKED spoilers!

Also, to say something positive about Encore in "Mania Plus"--I really like how Chemical Plant, Stardust Speedway, Mirage Saloon Act 1, and Oil Ocean all look. Those are definitely my favorites so far. Also the changes to CPZ Act 1 are pretty good; funny to see people get goofed up playing it because their muscle memory of playing it all a certain way is failing them in the parts where it's somewhat different.

Would not be surprised at all if the final build of "Plus" has some more different object/badnik/gimmick placement than currently seen, and some slight alterations to the colors. Will be interesting to note those differences. And so cool that between the transitions, the Sweep badnik, the eyes moving when captured in ice animation, etc. they were able to include a bunch of stuff they originally wanted to that went unused or wasn't able to make it in for the initial release.

 

Just Gaming44 on YouTube has uploaded the full Angel Island Zone music track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xyn7mfJYFM

Edit 1: Didn't realise I was beaten to the punch by this post in a page prior. My bad! ^o^

Edit 2: There's an extended variant by Morris on YouTube.

 

Not perfect (Not Sunset Hill Zone or Splash Hill Act 3), But MUCH better than Sonic Maniamix.

 

I'm curious about Eggman still being there in Encore mode despite it seemingly taking place after Mania mode. Iirc, the Heavies never seemed to have any intention of cooperating with him, and they even just revived themselves in the Encore intro...Yet there he is doing his same ol' thing.I mean, I guess it's just like, weird spacetime multiverse shenanigans? Like, he had already gone to whatever alternate Mania dimension, and a separate him also went to the Encore dimension where almost everything is slightly different? Though it's the same Heavies and same Sonic and co. in both. I don't know a dang thing. This is confusing.
I'm surprised they didn't go with having an Eggrobo pilot the old robots and chalk up all of Eggman's machines being good-as-new to Ruby shenanigans. To be fair, though, this entire thing was a gift to us from Team Mania and I'm not complaining all that much about it. If they don't feel like bothering to handwave the boss stuff (aka taking the S3K Knuckles route option) I can't blame them.

 

I've now uploaded a full playthrough I did of the Encore mode zones in the 1.04 version of Mania:

Gameplay begins at 6:40 (I had start again because the game reset).?



I don't play the blue sphere bonus stages because when exciting them it always causes the game to reset. I also don't play the special stages because this also sometimes causes the game to rest upon exciting.

 

I'm gonna stay away from the gameplay spoilers for now, but can anybody confirm if the tag team function works for all character combinations? Or is it just Sonic paired up with Mighty/Ray and that's it? Do we know if tag team is exclusive to Encore Mode or if it will work in Mania Mode as well?

 

As much as i like mania's encore mode, i cant help but feel like the boss fights are a missed opportunity... I mean imagine if EVERY boss had a slight difficulty change, like knuckles' story in sonic 3K!

 

Well obviously the final game will play exactly like this leaked and hacked build.
Surely that Stardust speedway screenshot was for nothing

 

^What's your point? That's the only boss that received any notable changed. All the rest were untouched and, since game is pretty close to release and a lot of the level changes have been pretty janky, I can guarantee that the boss's will remain the same in the final release. At best deal just be some quality of life changes.

Just saw the full gameplay. Only palette changes I like are Metallic Madness, Stardust Speedway, and Titanic Monarch.
Mirage Saloon is mostly okay, but the day / night cycle should be flip-flopped since the next stage is in the daytime.
Chemical Plant, Studiopolis, Press Garden Act 2, and Lava Reef are all passible.
The rest are pretty bad. Hydrocity would have been okay, but the background colors for both acts are too dark and act 1's background color scheme is really dull.

 

I'm going to assume Eggman and the other heavies (like Rider) are present because the mode that people are running right now is actually Mania Mode (hinted by the lack of Tag Team and other stuff like the ending). The *actual* Encore Mode is definitely going to run differently.

 

The levels themselves are definitely Mania Mode. Aside from the palette differences, there's plenty of object changes throughout the levels as well.I Doubt the bosses will change at all. It would be nice if they replaced all of the Robotnik sprites with Heavy King to give the guy some presence outside of just the Super Sonic Final Boss.

 

Assuming "Mania Mode" is a typo there, yes - the stages and their pallets/object layouts are clearly the Encore Mode variants. That much isn't up for debate.

I think what Axanery's saying is that since these layouts are being forced to load in Mania Mode rather than Encore Mode itself, it's possible there will be some additional differences we're not yet aware of in terms of things like bosses, etc. - it's possible there could be 'tweaked' Encore Mode versions (think the Knuckles bosses in S3&K) which aren't loading due to the game being in Mania Mode.

A few more observations:

• Since the stages are loading in Mania Mode, Encore Mode's character switching dynamic isn't present, so we're still not sure how much that will affect gameplay or whether additional partner characters can possibly be unlocked as the player progresses.
• From what little I've seen, there appears to be an abundance of new 1-up monitors in the layouts - however, the Encore Mode screenshots we've seen suggest there isn't a traditional lives system in place for that mode, so it's possible these will have a different function when the layouts are loaded in Encore Mode proper (possibly replacing one of your current characters, Chaotix-style?).
• Outside of Angel Island, we've not seen any level transitions or cutscenes either, due to Debug Mode being active none of the level transitions play in the available footage, though I'd assume even if they had we'd still be seeing the regular transitions due to them being loaded up in Mania Mode - I'd expect many of them to be the same, but if there are any differences then they still remain to be seen. I expect at least Hydrocity > Mirage Saloon will be different, to account for the brand-new Act 1 (either that, or *everyone* will get knocked off the Tornado Knuckles-style at the start of Mirage Saloon in Encore Mode) - though since the new Mania Mode transitions still don't quite seem finished in the leaked patch, it's anyone's guess whether any Encore-specific changes in that regard will have been completed either, even if they're in there somewhere.

It's fair to say that although this is a massive leak we're still not seeing the full picture, here. I feel sorry for the dev team, as I'm sure they wouldn't have wanted the Encore Mode stages spoiled in this way! = (

 

Yes, you are correct. As I said previously, I don't know the specifics of PSN and am extrapolating from other platforms. Humans review the build and basically click a button somewhere to approve or reject it, then whatever else happens goes through the system normally. It's not the reviewer's job to make sure a game gets released.


I agree with everything in @McAleeCh's post above this. We got to see an unfinished beta of Encore mode basically.

 

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how the new MSZ Act 1 is transitioned into. Considering how much work they put into it, and how the level itself seems to be indicating to the player "yes, we the developers are aware of your criticisms of the original Sky Chase-esque Act 1," I'm almost surprised it isn't being added to Mania Mode as well like the boss changes to Stardust Speedway. Though I get that'd be hard to do because the new Act doesn't have all the shenanigans with Bark, Bean, and Fang (Heavy Magician), and also the elements of the stopped/deserted train in the new Act 1 would make less sense for new players. Another point of interest is what Knuckles Act 1 when you play as him in Encore mode will be--will it be his exclusive Act 1 from Mania mode, or this new Encore Act 1? (I'd guess the former, but who knows.)

My assumption would be most of the transitions from one zone to the next will be identical with their Mania mode counterparts, except of course with the new colors. And about those colors, since we now have higher quality footage from OcelotBot:

I really love the newly added, previously missing level transitions in Mania mode, Angel Island (which when the background loads in properly and the zone is non-glitchy looks beautiful, especially the animation on the plants sprouting out of the ground and the water--really wonderful work), Tails animation for CPZ Act 1, the changes made to the Stardust Speedway boss, the art and animation for Mighty and Ray, etc.--all of that looks incredible. The color changes in Encore are more of a mixed bag to me, though. I *really* like the color changes in Encore for Chemical Plant, Stardust Speedway, Mirage Saloon Act 1, and Oil Ocean zone. And I think most of Green Hill looks good, aside from the sky. A lot of the other color changes aren't my cup of tea, though. But like with everything we're seeing, there could very well be further changes/improvements that have been made when it comes to the colors between this accidentally-pushed patch beta and what's in the final build. Definitely pouring one out for the beautiful blue hues of Metallic Madness Good Future, though--ya got robbed.

Really looking forward to seeing the new pinball bonus stage--guessing that's gonna be pretty rad. Also I previously expressed the humble hope that DirectInput support would be added to the PC version of the 1.04 patch, just so Saturn controllers would work with the game out of the box and people would no longer have to futz with converting and mapping it to Xinput via Steam's controller settings. One other thing I realized when playing the PC version last night: would be great if the opening and ending animations could be fixed to play back at the proper speed. I have a pretty good machine that can play most modern polygonal games at high settings (4-core 3.5 GHz CPU, 12 gigs RAM, a modern video card, etc.) and of course the game itself runs great, but the opening and ending animations play back at a very low speed/run like molasses. This seems like a widespread issue--doing a search about it brings up a bunch of other people saying they playback very slowly on their machines as well. Would be great if that could be fixed for the PC 1.04 patch, too, though again just like the DirectInput controller issue not a big deal if it ain't.

 

On a somewhat related note regarding the dev team - Stealth is going full speed ahead on his own independent projects. I got an update on his Patreon last Wednesday saying he's working on his custom engine and has made some substantial progress so presumably (though I guess we knew this from a while back) he's completely off the Mania Plus project for now having finished his contribution and contracted work. We also know other team members are done too going by their Twitter posts so I guess the entire team is done - though nothing from Taxman who could potentially still be working on this - though with everyone else finished presumably he is too. So I'd say Mania Plus is very likely done and dusted - but that doesn't necessarily mean this build is the final one. I doubt it is. Sega should seriously just green-light another Mania project and re-hire everyone - though according to Iizuka they're still having discussions and a think about that so we'll see.

I guess for now we should just enjoy Plus this Summer and hope for the best for the future.

EDIT: CollectiveWater's posts in this thread are incredible and awesome - as you can see above. So much intelligent information and thoughtful insight. You're awesome dude!

 

Thanks 360! You are rad, as well. (Everyone here is.)

And yeah, we should all definitely keep in mind that this 1.04 patch was accidentally pushed on April 17th, meaning it's a build Sony probably had for a couple weeks if not longer prior to that. So everything we've seen is from a build that will be 3+ months older than the one that gets released on July 17th. (Since the physical versions are launching on July 17th, my presumption is the build that is on all those discs and cartridges will be from at least a month+ prior to that--they gotta give time to manufacturing to put all those packages together, of course.) So yeah, there will surely be some differences between what we've seen from this accidentally pushed beta patch build and the final one released on July 17th, and of course this is exactly the sort of community that will pour over and document those differences.

(As much as all this leaked stuff sucks for everyone involved, it does provide even more symmetry between "Mania" and the classic era games that inspired it, since early prototypes/betas, unused assets, etc. occurred and got leaked in that era and now the same is happening with "Mania.")

 

I was also able to debug into Angel Island with Tails & Knuckles.

When Tails & Knuckles transition to Encore Green Hill they both turn into Sonic, with Sonic's normal moveset. So you can't play through the Encore zones with Tails & Knux in the 1.04 version of Mania.


Oh and there's always one shitty person who has to try and ruin everything. Someone has tweeted Sonic twitter about the playthrough I uploaded yesterday and said "you know what to do, Aaron"

Wow, what an asshole.

 

I also got some vague Rusty Ruins vibes from it.

 

Pretty much THIS.

What I've played has been really fun, but it's no where near the finished version of Encore mode. I couldn't even watch the level transition-cutscenes because I had to keep enabling debug mode so that each zone kept the Encore palettes. I also couldn't get the good-ending because playing a special stage more often that not causes the game to reset.

What we can expect from the finished version of Encore mode:

Mighty and Ray playable.
A fully playable Angel Island without the messed-up background.
A complete beginning and ending-transition custcene for Angel Island.
Tweaked boss fights (not massive changes), we can already see minor changes to some in the 1.04 version (as well as the partially changed MS boss fight).
All complete transitions.

IMO Encore mode won't have an extra-lives system. It will be like in Chaotix. The suspicous number of extra life item-boxes I found in my playthrough will probably be used to swap characters like they did in chaotix. Lets say for example; you start with Sonic and choose Mighty as your partner. You might encounter an item-box with a picture of Tails. By breaking the item-box Sonic will switch to Tails. So you are now playing with Tails and Mighty. You then find an item-box with a picture of Ray, and once you break it Mighty will then switch to Ray, so you now play with Tails and Ray. Hopefully this makes sense?

It's not clear whether we'll be forced to use Ray or Mighty to get passed some of the level design in Encore mode. In my playthrough of the 1.04 version I was able to get through all of the level design just by using Sonic. I didn't need Ray or Mighty (accept for their specific routes in Angel Island). This in my opinion makes it highly plausible that the level-layout changes in Encore mode are still incomplete.