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

Page 47 on the Yearly Report briefly mentions its user score.

They tend to brush away titles that didn't hit their expectations from these presentation reports rather quickly. Samba got buried as well. It's why I just look at their data appendix reports, but even those can be messy due the way they just group everything into general buckets.

 

I think I might understand the input lag complaints of the PS5 version? I pulled up Sonic 3 AIR on my phone with a controller hooked in and almost immediately felt something of a difference between the two. Then I downloaded the PS5 version and it does kinda feel like that makes a difference, for whatever reason... Am I crazy?

 

I finally got a PS5 over the holidays with SxSGens and this. Played this first since I’ve played Sonic’s Generations before but I still wanna replay it before Shadow’s.

I haven’t seen many reviews or comments cause I didn’t want spoilers but there’s not much to spoil I guess. I just beat it and played the first few stages of Trip’s Story which is more of a “Hard Mode”. I’ll go back to it later.

So based on what I’ve come across I must be in a minority because I loved this game. Pretty much everything clicked for me (haven’t tried Battle Mode yet).

The biggest complaint I see are the boss fights. Typically Boss fights are my least favorite parts of any game because I really want to beat them and they give me anxiety, haha...however I thought these were very creative.

Did people want Genesis style where you could maybe get multiple hits? That’s only possible for certain ones. I don’t know. I watched 1 video and the person criticized having to wait your “turn”.

I honestly don’t understand because except the final boss they’re all quite easy to figure out and counter. Plus they’re short. Even the final boss isn’t that bad once you learn it.

Anyway what I loved the most was the aesthetic and tone. It’s so cute and whimsical. They clearly went out of their way to make it extra cute. The stages, the characters, (even compared to Generations) and the bosses (probably another reason they’re easier to face ha!)...can’t get over the shooter stage and going pew-pew-pew in the Eggmobile.

As for my own complaints I think sometimes the stages get a little cheap. Where there’s enemies or hazards placed just for the sake of knocking into them. This is especially true of the last stage. A lot of things are basically unavoidable. They knew it too because there’s a lot of checkpoint posts throughout the whole game.

Not much story telling. Would have liked more animated cutscenes. Thought there’d be more to the ending. I’m guessing Trip’s Story has more of the narrative.

 

There's overall flaws in how the bosses work. Many long wind-up animations, instant death attacks, it's super easy to lose your rings early on in the fight and thus access to your Super form, and what should be the cure to all these ailments (the Emerald Powers) just does almost nothing for the most part, with maybe 3 or 4 ever having utility in a boss fight with the other 3 being ENTIRELY situational. the Slow power in particular just has nothing going for it since once you hit the boss that's it and now its cooldown is even longer so you're just waiting for the power to run out so you can get back to the long waiting phase before you can attack again. And that's IF you don't get hit which just wastes the whole thing, and basically none of the bosses have checkpoints to let them recharge.

 

Were we even playing the same game? I like Superstars more than most, but the bosses are an absolute drag. If I was playing on PC rather than PS5 and Switch, I'd be looking for a mod that bypasses the boss fights entirely. Like them if you are so inclined, power to you. But they're about as objectively not "short" as is possible. Every boss fight puts you through several phases wherein you're barely doing anything and just stand around waiting for him to attack and eventually expose his vulnerability. You then get to him once before repeating the whole cycle again. The bosses are pretty creative, but they're so painfully slow. They bring the entire game to a standstill.

I've said it before and I'll continue saying it; the boss fights are the only reason I haven't been playing Superstars on repeat on like I did with Mania when it was new. Nothing about Superstars is as good as Mania and it misses the mark compared to the originals in a few ways, but at its core it's still a solid Classic Sonic experience. However, the boss fights are so immensely unfun and interrupt the regular gameplay every 2 to 5 minutes for 2 to 5 minutes that they make the game not worth playing. Resorting to time attack to or exiting to the menu upon reaching bosses kills the glow and any satisfaction garnered from going for score attacks also.

Superstars would be a better game without its fights. The majorty of them are just dreadful.

 

It’s funny how sometimes our experiences are completely different.

I agree, like Shilz said, it’s really easy to loose your rings so you have to start over a few times and the only Emerald Power worth using is Clone (Super form too I assume but haven’t collected them all).

What you’re saying though is one of the reasons I liked them. You get a breather between attacks and eases the pattern. Plus it makes them feel a little more cinematic. To me anyway.

I never lasted too long on any of them except the final boss. Like I said they’re all quite easy to figure out. Some attacks that initially seem hard to dodge are easily avoidable once you notice you don’t actually have to jump or over compensate for them.

 

Bullet is usually good for a couple of quick hits too, and Extra can help when playing as Amy or Trip. Most bosses can be beaten in under a minute.

 

It is funny, isn't it?

Getting hit isn't the problem I have. The bosses aren't hard. They're tedious. That is to they they take a long time and all you to repeat the same low effort tasks over and over. And then on the off chance you DO mess up (or if you're playing in Trip's story), they become brutally punishing. Speed Jungle 2 and Sand Sanctuary are just mind numbingly boring. The final bosses (both variants of Egg Fortress 2 and the Super Sonic fight) bring together all of the worst elements of all of the preceding fights.

 

The boss from the icy level in Trip's story (a blue bird or something) was particularly infuriating to me. Because I couldn't find a clever way to dodge its bombs, and the other bombs break the floor. So I kept dying from bottomless pits over and over and over.
I've watched a playthrough from Sam Procrastinates and he got stuck in that boss for like 20 minutes, for the same reason.

 

The correct strategy for it (and other difficult bosses in Trip's story) is to restart the level, stockpile rings and turn super. It ain't fun, but fuck Trip's story.

 

Hi pals do you also think Fang's head is too big

 

Not big enough

 

Make his head so big that he can’t cowardly hide his hitbox in the background.

 

I really like the atmosphere and music of the final Trip boss. I didn't like playing it for two hours though and replaying the same sections over and over again.

 

I just bought the Digital Deluxe Pack version on the 21st for 20 bucks, gonna give it a go sometime next month. I'm kind of excited to give Superstars a spin.

 

Been playing this game a lot lately and I guess it doesn't matter because this is well past the point anyone cares about the game, but I've re-evaluated it and while I still think it doesn't really get why Sonic was fun (especially in the same way Mania does) I don't really hate it as much as I used to and I'm capable of having a pretty good time with the main campaign in single player so much that I can replay it without much of a hitch.

I had a few thoughts on this game while replaying it, and I think the main thing about this game is that it isn't designed like a classic Sonic game so much as it is designed like a Nintendo style game. Like, a DKC/Crash Bandicoot/Celeste style thing. A lot of arcadey games from Sonic's era combined sort of a Mario esque progression with arcadey design tropes, and they often made your character very powerful in relation to the world that they exist in and focused the fun of the game around mastery of the mechanics (in Sonic's case, movement and level knowledge). The most modern example I can think of with this kind of design is Pizza Tower, a game where you can't die and the game is focused around mastering the levels. Sonic was much like this I think, where he's very strong to the point where you will pretty much never die if you have at least 1 ring and the skill of the game is focused around mastering Sonic's movement and holding on to your rings to get higher scores and times. In comparison, a Nintendo-style game gives you a more vulnerable character and expects you to do whatever you can to overcome the tough obstacles.

Sonic Superstars in comparison tries its best to make you feel helpless in these levels, the camera is really zoomed in on you in single player and the hazards, enemies and bosses in this game are more dangerous than before, making you not as powerful to them in comparison to classic bosses. You need a lot of endurance to deal with this game's bosses in particular, so instead of the arcadey style design where it's up to you to figure out how to beat them quickly while holding your rings, you fight Superstars bosses in a very similar fashion to Nintendo bosses. This isn't to say Superstars bosses are as good as Nintendo bosses, especially because those don't tend to waste your time AS much, but it's a very similar design philosophy. I think Superstars is overall very bad at expressing this kind of design and making it fun in its own right too, there are so many baffling choices in the boss design. You can do a lot to optimize your runs of these bosses and get them over with very quickly, particularly by abusing emerald powers like Avatar, the unique character abilities and the fireball, but this still requires a very fixed style of learning the game. But I also think this extends to the level design in general, where they try to make the game almost puzzly in it's design to make it feel more similar to traditional Nintendo-style platformers. The character specific acts embody this kind of design the most, where it's about making the best use of your character's abilities in specific scenarios rather than being looser in design.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've rationalized Superstars as just a very different kind of Sonic game in my head; a type of Sonic game that doesn't really agree with Sonic's controls the best. Sonic is not nearly precise enough to really facilitate this kind of design and it's much more fun having a looser kind of game where my enjoyment comes from my own desire to improve rather than the game beating me down and forcing me to.

Though with all of this said, I think that much of the graphics, art direction, music, too zoomed in camera, the boring character specific acts, the multiplayer that's glitchier than 06, Trip's pain in the ass story and the basically total RNG Super Sonic boss are all inexcusable which is why regardless of how much fun I have with the main campaign in single player I can't really rate this highly as a game, and I will likely never replay the game on a fresh save file without my chaos emeralds because at the very least Avatar is very necessary to get through the bosses in a reasonable amount of time.

Also, Trip's final boss would actually be pretty fun if it didn't force you to fight the first phase over and over and was more intuitive with how mashing out of his attack works. I actually enjoyed how tough the fight is.

 

I played about halfway through Superstars when it came out, and stopped because of the bosses being frustratingly long. I still haven't gone back in to finish the game. If they weren't invulnerable during their cycles, and like almost every boss in the classic games could be hit as many times as you could manage during each cycle, they would be fine I think. I honestly was enjoying the game otherwise, so it upsets me that the bosses turned me away from finishing it.

 

for me, most of the bosses were at least bearable, until you get to Nack

 

I never beat the game. Half way through it felt like they ran out of money and I ran out of interest.

I didn't mind the bosses, but I didn't like what they did to my boy Knuckles.

 

I beat the main story but never beat Trip’s. Seemed like too much hassle and tedium.