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

Yuji Naka is not currently incarcerated. There were reports that he was, but they were a mistranslation. Prosecutors want him to serve 2 years but a final decision won’t be made until July 7th (https://www.videogameschronicle.com...d-to-2-5-years-in-prison-for-insider-trading/)
That said I think you’re correct that Sonic Team would not be interested in working with Naka for a while and that Ohshima may never want to work with him again

 

This feels like an extrapolation from the presentation of each game more than it does the moment-to-moment experience. It's weird to dismiss both being classic Sonic games as a reason to call them similar, because...classic Sonic games are similar to each other. That's kind of the point. Everyone was just here before arguing that we needed a Mania 2 with all-original stages, but if that's significant enough to differentiate Mania from Superstars, it sounds like our Mania 2 would hardly be a Mania at all, since it apparently is enough to categorize such a game on its own. It's hard for me to view some of the additions in Superstars as that radically-different from, for example, Mighty and Ray, or encore mode.

 

If Superstars were made with sprites it would be Mania 2 essentially.

Even the background-foreground thing in Superstars we already had in Mania's Metallic Madness.

 

WHAT

I swear, what a let down after getting such great news.

 

I’d actually go a step further as well and say Naka seems like the kind of guy who would see Iizuka on-boarding Oshima for a sonic game after their apparent falling out and take it as enough of a personal offense to not want to work with Sega for the foreseeable future either

so just all around mutual exclusion happening here

 

At least to me what Mania is is an exaggeration of regular Classic Sonic with things like its excessive pill-shaped slopes instead of a journey through an environment that just so happens to contain slopes and curves and tubes. Maybe similar things could be said for Sonic Rush, but I still feel like that manages to feel like you're exploring a world instead of looking at a theme contained in a level design. It's the difference between Mario Maker levels and the levels in a nintendo-made Mario game. (Adding further to this is reused gimmicks in levels that they weren't originally from, like the Hydrocity bubbles being from Triple Trouble or Stardust Speedway's Marble Garden gimmicks.)

I don't want Arzest to become either stuck doing 2.5d Sonic games or just retreading Ohshima's time at Sonic Team (but I'd still love for them to continue to work with SEGA and publish new games with them)
Buuuuuuuut I would love to see what they could do with a new NiGHTs or NiGHTs: Journey of Dreams remake, or maybe remakes of older Sonic games that have no reasonable way to port them to modern systems, or just generally assisting and supplementing Sonic Team's existing creative staff from time to time.
In either scenario I hope they continue to be an independent studio. If I read news SEGA acquired them one day I would genuinely feel bad because that pretty much means that all the people who make it a worthwhile collaboration are at risk of being removed from the equation entirely.

Also I'm interested in knowing Ohshima's feelings on the project after it's all said and done. I take a genuine interest in who he is as a creative mind and he had a bunch of interesting ones for his previous game. The "interview" they put out for Sonic was only really good for listening to two friends talk each other up, while otherwise Iizuka has been doing all the talking about the game and the actual collaboration.

 

Come on, the man has a family.

Yeah, I definitely see that happening. The dude would not take kindly to this at all lol. Though not having Naka involved would make it much more likely to get Yasuhara back at some point. I don’t think there’s much bad blood between Ōshima and Yasuhara considering they did that panel together a few years back.

If I or pretty much anyone here on the board had to pick one of the three OG team members to be left out of a return to the series, it would definitely be Naka. He was a 68k wizard back in the day, but having Ōshima’s art and Yasuhara game design would be too good of a combo to pass up.

Honestly, I think the involvement of Yasuhara in a Sonic game would do more than even Taxman and Stealth when it comes to giving people confidence in the project.

I agree. I was very interested in the interview but it was really just nothing. I wanted to hear more from Ōshima. I don’t think he’s the director on the project (has one been announced?), so it’s understandable, but I still wanted to know his feelings about returning to Sonic after how much it has evolved and what his goals are with the project.

 

Emerald powers and co-op are nothing like Mighty/Ray and encore mode. Superstars has physics similar to the classics, but that's about it. The main progression has very different principles (one button is gone, lives are gone, no-permanent-powerups is gone). The gameplay loop is nothing like Mania (or the classic games).

Which isn't bad, but can't be dismissed. How you approach and improve in the game is completely different, and thought in modern terms that classic games couldn't possibly have been, and Mania deliberately wasn't.

 

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how lots of Splats Badniks are clustered together? That is kind of hilarious.

 

I think we might be seeing several moments of badnik clusters throughout the game. They seem designed to compliment the Avatar Emerald Power.

 

I just want Sega to directly build off a game’s foundation for once, since we could have gotten Mania 2 but of course we didn’t. That said Ohshima has to right to decide what he wants to do next, and if it’s not sonic then so be it.

I also really want Yas back for a future game.

Well… the one button mindset is gone to accommodate the emerald powers but all the characters’ base movesets adhere to the one button philosophy.

 

But the "base moveset" is permanently upgradeable with the emerald powers. These aren't different things.

EDIT: Now again, and this must be said, this isn't about "Superstars bad" and "Mania good" or the other way around. These aren't value judgements. And for people like us, who already know how to navigate the way classic Sonic motion play is normally played, it may not make that huge a difference.

But for people who have never touched a Sonic game before, or never touched a game at all, or for people who never engaged very much with Sonic, the way they'll interact with the game and what the game will ask of them is very different from what some 1991-1994 games did, as is expected, or from what a 2017 game went out of its way to replicate, generally speaking.

 

Let me rephrase my thought: Mania and Superstars are similar games because they're both classic Sonic games. But they are still very different classic Sonic games. I'm not dismissing them being similar, because they are. But they still have very different end goals.

As far as classic Sonic goes, Mania sticks out as one specifically made to be a celebration of Sonic, with all of the nostalgia whoring and callbacks to match - things that only longtime fans can appreciate. It still doesn't do much more with the formula that hasn't already been done previously. The one that sticks out the most is the Drop Dash, which is an invaluable tool for speedrunning and is super fun to use. Otherwise, it added two new characters, which were fun to play as, but had again already been done in every previous classic Sonic game. Encore Mode was a nice breath of fresh air, but even that was a little disappointing for unrelated reasons.

The same can't be said for Superstars, which adds multiple new things to evolve the formula as a whole. New global gimmicks, new playstyles and ways to expand the levels in the Emerald Powers, a greater focus on the Emeralds in general, a 2.5d artstyle to allow for more elaborate and twisty level design, the layer-switching mechanic, new 10-second bonus stages that act as level warps, the focus on co-op, and likely more. These are things that alter the entire gameplay experience, and it's progressive in a way that Mania simply chose not to be.

And that's not a bad thing! Mania is incredible in its own way, and obviously paved the way for Superstars. The significance of the game cannot be understated. I love the game to death. But it was choosing not to be the next evolution of classic Sonic - it was simply a really good classic Sonic game. Superstars is appearing to be something more.

 

That feels like an admission that Mania is basically just Sonic 3 with different levels. But that would mean to me that Superstars is only as different from it as 3 was from 2, or 2 from CD, or CD from 1. And honestly, 1 and CD feel way more different to actually play due to their level design than Superstars looks like it's going to feel like to play to 3 and Mania.

 

Yes, this is essentially the conclusion I've been drawing. I consider Mania to be a pack of very high-quality levels wrapped in a visually-pleasing bow, with a few new elements sprinkled on.

You could say this about every classic Sonic game, but they were all so drastically different from the last in different ways that aren't immediately visible, so I don't think it's fair to describe them that way. Superstars looks to follow this in my opinion.

 

You know, in a alternative route, I think Nitrome would be great option to work with another 2D Sonic game.

 

"Classic Sonic isn't actually as homogeneous as we often make it out to be" is an argument I can get behind, but I wouldn't say Superstars is as different from 3&K as 3 was from 2 and so on. Again, 1, 2, 3(&K) and CD have very similar core loops, the most different of them being 3&K due to it having a save system and sequential campaigns. But even then, the rules stay the same, so the reason you'll go about it is very similar. CD may feel very different, yes, especially if you're destroying the teleporters, but this isn't even the only way to play the game, and the way you get better at the whole package is still similar. If you're not that good at it, Sonic CD is just a fancier Sonic 1.

For starters, the reason you'd play the game a second time at all would be because you couldn't finish it the first time, which is entirely impossible in Superstars: the reason you'll play a second time will always be a "positive" one (to get more stuff, not to make up for a failure). There being no permanent fail state to Superstars is as huge a deal as it'd be for them to change the physics system. In this regard, I expect Superstars to be more different from 3&K than, say, Sonic Advance is.

Oh, also, what is this about? I saw it in the footage, but I absolutely didn't understand how it works. Like where does it warp you to? Has anyone talked cleare that up, or is it obvious from the videos an I just didn't get it?

 

You are absolutely correct that people who get the emerald powers will interact with a classic sonic game in an unprecedented way. But, Iizuka has stated that getting the emerald powers is optional. Thus the core one button control scheme is preserved for a significant portion of the game. My point isn’t about the differences between Mania and Superstars. It’s that, unlike Amy in Sonic Advance, all the characters’ base movesets still adhere to the one button philosophy.

 

I don't see why S3K having saves wouldn't invalidate the "permanent fail state" argument. But it's hard for me to take lives vs. no lives seriously in this regard because it seems like a question of degree, not of kind. It's basically just variants on the amount of stuff the player has to redo stuff when they screw up, and it certainly seems to fly in the face of a statement separating Superstars from other classic games when the dominant version of those games currently has both saving and no game overs, and I'm not really seeing a big outcry over it from most people in either instance.

 

I mean, it's as optional as Super Sonic or the spindash in Sonic 2, or I suppose in Superstars itself. Not strictly required to clear the game, but why would you not use it if you can? The very concept of "base moveset" incorporates that kind of gameplay now. We make up that difference because we know what a game is like without emerald powers; Superstars, by itself, doesn't.

There's no outcry because we're living in 2023 Anno Domini, in which games aren't made with that in mind and people generally don't care because shorter sessions, carryovers and whatnot are the norm. Sure, S3&K heavily undermines permanent fail states because the game doesn't reset, but it still was made with that in mind, whereas Superstars just doesn't. S3&K still has lives, and considers 1-Up enough of a good incentive to reach certain places or retain a certain amount of rings or reach certain multiples of a score to not have to redo more than just going back to the last checkpoint. That's what makes it a question of kind and not degree: Superstars, by principle, has none of that, so the reason why you'll get better at the game is, also by principle, very different.