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

If you watch the original JP stream you can hear music more easily as there's less people talking. The Miniboss and Boss themese are the same as the first builds though. As I've said before, they aren't placeholders but newly composed/arranged for the game.

 

Oh yeah, this actually.

All that trumpeting about multiplayer but only for the format that doesn't gel naturally with the classic games' design (co-op), while showing no love for the format that easily does (split-screen racing). Bit of a miss.

In hindsight, I really wish that had been asked (why no offline split screen racing), instead of why no online co-op. Where's our "Teleport only"?

Possibly held back by the Switch?

 

Obviously if you solve the online co-op issue then you open up the possibility for other online modes. I'm not dead set on that this solution should only be used for the co-op mode, I would like an actual competitive mode too that isn't just pocket mini-games. The point is that they already went ahead and spent development time to get networking functionality working on some OTHER throwaway mode but didn't bother to go the extra mile to get it to work with the main campaign levels for two very dumb reasons. You can play with friends online, I don't know why people are sticking to the randos excuse. The lag issue can be addressed and minimized, these games are not that complex.
Last time I'm bringing up the multiplayer in this thread. I'm very clearly in the minority here.

 

Honestly I’m not all that interested in the co-op but I’m sure it’ll be entirely fine if you can go into it with the mentality that it’s basically for shits and giggles. While you can’t pick up and throw others like in NSMBWii, the camera isn’t locked to player 1 here, so imagine shenanigans could be had among good friends with people each trying to do their own thing. At worst, it’s more or less co-op as it was in 2 and 3&K, just with more characters, which gives that bit more agency to younger siblings.

In that regard, perhaps the multiplayer is overhyped, but it’s also understandable given the general marketing push for the Sonic-Tails-Knuckles-Amy friend group.

 

Honestly I am a little disappointed in the coop implementation. It is a unique appeal of the game and the levels have been designed around coop to some extent (the ring levers, gimmicks such as the squid transformations in the cyber level). If it isn't very enjoyable it's a bit of a shame.

It reminds me of Mario. I think Mario 3D World is far less playable in multiplayer even though that game is also clearly designed in part with multiplayer in mind. But ultimately that game was also very enjoyable in single player. So let's hope Superstars is too.

 

Man, that's really unfortunate. I don't think they're going to change much one month away from release. We'll be going from Speed Jungle-like bangers to lame boss themes, and I don't doubt that's going to sour the final impressions of a lot of stages. Best I can hope for is that they're intentionally using those boss themes because they want to leave the finished ones as a surprise for release, but I'm probably huffing copium right now.

 

Best we can hope for is the fan backlash is strong enough to get those tracks remastered, a la Pac-Man World Re-Pac, but Sonic unfortunately has no precedent for this.

 

Do we have any idea how well Mania/Frontiers did in Japan? I notice a whole lot more marketing for SuperStars at TGS this year... but I go back to the question I had last year, is it really working?

Did Frontiers at least crack 100k at any point? Mania had a lot of marketing back in 2017 too, but I don't know if classic Sonic was ever a big seller in Japan at all...

I feel like a lot of mysteries about the franchise make more sense when you understand just how wildly... different... the brand's success was there vs globally.

 

Honestly it may be part of the reason to switch to 3D graphics. Could be the case that nostalgia/fondness for pixel art doesn’t really exist in Japan, or at least to the same degree as in the west.

 

I've always thought the same. Especially since it's Sega of Japan that is often the issue.

 

Impressions from Twitter by a Sonic fan living in Japan at TGS.

EDIT: He also did a negative impressions too.

 

Eh not that small of a minority I think. I'm pretty sure the general public, especially younger people, have been scratching their heads about the co-op thing since Day 1. It probably just differs from generation to generation, but today it's kind of just a standard feature that people come to expect so they can play with friends who don't live right next to them.

But honestly, even though it confuses me to no end, it's probably a moot point because battle mode could be a complete travesty and we'll end up wishing they never included ANY online functionality in the first place so it didn't tank the game's review scores. It already looks really unpolished judging by the full gameplay footage released the other day. The mech animations look really wonky and unfitting (Metal Tails' model doesn't fully curl up, it just spins awkwardly with his limbs poking out to the side) and the stages and backgrounds look like a bootleg shovelware game called "Speed Friends SuperStars" rather than slightly toned-down versions of the actual stages.

 

The cyber level being gimmick central is unfortunately not surprisingly, all the stuff seen from it in trailers has been nothing but gimmicks.

Also not surprising they see the double jump as straight up better than flight and gliding/wall climbing, both of those options are slow despite more distance covered, while double jumping should still keep Amy's speed along with the extra height.

A lot of praise for controls/game feel is good, and looks like the level design feels good to navigate too (for the most part)

 

By minority, I meant on here. I generally refer to the community on here rather than anything outside. The outside world is a battleground.
I honestly don't know what people think about Superstars outside of here. Curious to know what Japanese reception is like as previously mentioned. I don't know if they liked Mania either.

 

I personally think Kai's Speed Forest track is better than Tee Lopes'.

 

Classic Sonic is so back.

 

I was excited to read some earlier article making explicit mention of the Sonic 3 inspiration for the bosses. One thing the classics really did nicely was that you really did not have to hang around for shenanigans with most bosses. If you just wanted to hammer away at it, rings be damned, you could, and the old "wait for the invincible pattern" was treated with the disrespect it deserves. At the very least, if you were waiting around for a hit, you could typically still then get multiple hits in.

I felt Mania was hit and miss (and more miss) with this, and I'm getting the impression that Superstars will be too, despite those earlier Sonic 3 comments. I feel like that particular aspect was strong in the classic games and is just fading away.

 

Couldn't disagree more with respect to the last paragraph. When I think of Sonic bosses that you just have to sit and wait for, I think Carnival Night 1, Big Arms, Flying Battery 1, Flying Battery 2 miniboss, Sandopolis 1, and the Lava Reef sandwich break. Sonic 3 was probably the worst offender in the classic games for this, especially given that five of those bosses you cannot manually damage, you must wait for them to be damaged with their own attacks.

Mania's bosses were awful for a host of different reasons, shit like the Flying Battery boss having no indication when it's solid or not (which is a pretty bad idea when the boss involves flinging yourself towards spiked walls), but I'd say the majority of them can still just be wailed upon if you don't care about keeping rings.

I agree that having to wait for invincible patterns is bad, but the classic Sonic games, especially Sonic 3, did it a fair amount too.

 

Bosses in Sonic games in general are either gimmicky or super easy. If it's gimmicky, the whole waiting for the right time to hit him is kind of annoying. If it's easy, you beat him in like 15 seconds and all the effort in creating the boss goes down the drain.

 

Yeah, the massive skill curve in the classic formula makes it very difficult to design bosses around it by default. I like Sonic bosses as a whole much more than classic mario ones from the same era, but the downside was that they can become very easy very quickly, but that's also just the way speedrunning works, and Sonic instinctively inspires speedrunning by default.

I don't care much for the forced invincibility route (it's essentially forced, unskippable cinematics), but all the same, it's not exactly an unusual part of the Sonic experience either.

Gimmicky stages bother me a lot more, but even that can work okay if the player still gains a lot of autonomy and different options for dealing with gimmicks. It was gimmicks with extreme automation that take away player control that kill immersion, notably from SA2 onward. However, again, these don't have to be full game breaking experiences if they are just part of 'one' zone and we don't yet have full context for ways the game might let us bypass them. And "obstacle course" Sonic isn't necessarily bad Sonic gameplay either, it's just not my preferred method. Getting A ranks in SA2 is closer to perfecting an obstacle course, and those could be a fun challenge to many players too.