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

claiming a conspiracy when Superstars didn't do as well as they like is insane. Sega wants to make money. There is no benefit to putting a game out to die, not just because of sunk cost, but because it also damages brand reputation beyond that specific game.

also I dunno how you missed that SonicxShadow gens has classic sonic in it

I get to spend a lot of time in an allergy clinic because my body hates itself and I am always amazed when a kid in the lobby waiting after their shot has a Sonic shirt on. and it's always Classic. I think the modern and movie designs might be too complex to be easily parseable on a shirt or similar, though of course we have the movie toys, backpacks etc.

 

The classic design is huge for branding right now. There’s no way that SEGA are going to get rid of it as a core tenet of the series, we just might have a break for a bit after Superstars underperformed.

 

Truth be told, I did laugh at how paranoid my post must seem like while writing it. And while I did let my personal biases regarding this series affect it quite a bit, I still entirely believe in it.

Brands caving in to the demands of an angry mob has become all the rage as of recent. Just take a look at how Disney has ruined all post-2018 Star Wars productions, how Hollywood executives want scripts to be approved by "super fan focus groups" and how Mark Zuckerberg wants his social media platforms to respect both factual information and made-up bullshit equally. It has never been a better time to be an angry nerd making demands on the internet, and I have no reason to assume that Sega would treat them any differently than the rest.

And even if that were utter and complete bullshit, anyone who knows even the slightest bit about marketing should be able to tell that for one reason or another, Sega is clearly conditioning audiences to expect less Classic and more Modern in the future. Talking unfavorably about Your Creation X and and favorably about Your Creation Y is a common marketing tactic used to message audiences about what to expect from you in the future. It's used by everyone from large corporations who are rebranding to musicians who are changing genre.

I have, actually, or the first few levels anyway. While everything else about the game represents everything I hate about this series, the core gameplay is actually pretty alright in my opinion. Funnily enough, my biggest issue with it is also my biggest issue with Superstars; The unlockable abilities break the pace and are completely situational, and any attempt at encouraging the player to use them just feels like a desperate attempt at making them seem useful.

 

You can't both claim that SEGA is caving to the mobs while also claiming that Shadow is being pushed heavily by SEGA despite being this hated character for 20 years, by your own admission that just means SEGA went against their wishes and made him a central character again with his own game.

 

I agree with Jaxer on a specific point. I think SEGA is overly critical on Superstars performance. The game flopped domestically but did well enough in the western markets, especially the US where it was able to land in the Top 20 on a competitive month.

I don't think it was malicious though. I think they just had unrealistic goals after the success of the films and Frontiers where they just expected the Sonic name to do the heavy lifting. A low budget looking title outsourced to schlop factory Azrest pushed at $50 wasn't going to inspire confidence.

At the same time, I'm glad they're being overly critical because maybe that will lead to a better quality title in the future. I just hope the wrong lessons aren't taken because Superstars wasn't all bad.

 

Thing is, we don’t have official numbers so it’s hard to say just how well the game did. It doing “poorly” is essentially conjecture because all we have to go off of that is the top 20 list and SEGA themselves saying that it did poorly.

Frankly, if SEGA say it didn’t meet sales expectations, I’m willing to believe them instead of conjuring up a conspiracy theory that SEGA are systematically trying to phase out classic Sonic just cuz, lol

 

"Classic Sonic games" are simply not the main series anymore. Those seem to now largely be in the realm of lower budget throwback spinoff material. It's not going anywhere, but it's not gonna become more than that, and that's okay. The only people who should be upset about this are the Advance/Rush bros, who have likely been booted from their niche and replaced by us Classic Sonic Elitists™.

I'm pretty sure that's Sonic himself.

 

If only developers behind Superstars removed every single boosters for all zones, that would be great... This isn't like Chemical Plant where casual players cannot build their speed of their own. Do I have to mention Hydrocity Zone too?

 

There's enough data out there to gather that the title hit over a million units sales in the US and the game being a massice dud in Japan. The financial reports saw a spike in Sonic franchise game sales in the period that Superstars came out, but below the same period that Frontiers came out.

I know for a fact that SEGA missed their forecast. My point is thatI believe SEGA's forecast for Superstars were far too ambitious and unrealistic considering the quality of the title they put out. Had they been more humble (and not priced the damn thing at $60) they'd probably be waving a different flag.

 

There's no mystery here. A company isn't going to randomly come out with a public statement that their game "turned out to be a disappointment". Just as we saw here, it's going to come up during an interview, which usually happen during the marketing hype period before the release of another game, and in this case a movie. Or maybe during an investors meeting or something along those lines, where they'd want to know what products did well and which did not.

 

Ive been replaying the DK Country series lately starting with the rerelease of Returns. Imagine if Superstars had half the polish these games did! Superstars is good, but it just wreaks of lack of polish. Level transitions are bland, the cutscene animations are doodoo, the level select screen is bland… if they fixed up little things like this the game would be pretty satisfying to go through on repeat playthroughs.

 

Speaking on my part, the reason I haven't tried it yet is because it's still 60 euros in my part of the world and I've determined it's not worth the price because it looks pretty unpolished – it looks like it has a bunch of bugs, inconsistent music and mostly unfun bosses. It also looks like a fairly short game.

This is very, very subjective, but to me for a 2D platformer to be worth 60 euros (or even half of that), it has to even look basically flawless.

And to compare, I basically got Mania for a 10th of that and even comparing footage, Mania just looks better for what it is.

So I'm waiting for a possibly really big lucky discount in the future.

Or even with the disappointing financial performance, maybe hope for them to go for the risk and make a properly high-quality sequel that fixes all of the issues of the first entry.

I mean yar-haring it is a possibility, but I do think I'd like to support the creatives that worked on the game if I can?

 

For sure. As a Certified Sonic Freak, I happily bought it just to see what was up with it, but I’d never recommend it to anyone. It’s just not great.

a good game? Sure. But definitely not a great one.

 

Keep. My. Hedgehog’s. Name. Out. Your. Gotdamm mouf!

 

While I really don't like this whole "2D games shouldn't be 60$" -narrative that keeps popping up every now and then (Anyone who remembers Metroid Dread's launch knows just how insufferable this discourse can get), I entirely agree that you don't get your money's worth with Superstars.

It's definitely the most content-rich 2D Sonic game to date, don't get me wrong, but if you don't give a rat's ass about the Battle Mode, you're essentially paying an extra 20 bucks for nothing.

Actually, now I'm left wondering how people who didn't care about the Chao Garden felt about the Adventure games' pricing on launch.

 

I never really cared for the Chao Garden and I got a lot out of Adventure 1 and 2 as a kid. Adventure 2 especially has a ton of optional content outside of Chao

 

That's why I specified the full price tag element is very subjective because I don't mind high priced games (the staff/creatives always need to be properly compensated and a game's price can help that from what I understand), but I do have a personal threshold for it.

I've gotten a lot of time out of the Adventure series without ever touching the Chao Garden, especially via the Sonic (and Shadow) stages. I think the general replay value and perhaps the A-rank requirements of those might've actually saved those games for me.

Although, I never paid full price/got them really cheap, so hard to judge in that sense. I think they're definitely worth their current Steam price tags, especially during sales.

 

The comment about Superstars underperforming doesn't specify whether it was domestically or internationally - it's possible that what he meant by "underperformed" means "we wish it did better in Japan". SEGA is a Japanese company, and while the global gaming market is several times bigger than the Japan market and therefore it's much more vital to cater to, Japanese sales also matter a lot, since, as I understand it, those earnings do not need to be repatriotized (taxed less, more readily available, probably a bit more complex than that) So a game doing disastrously bad in Japan, even if sales were good internationally, does hurt a lot, especially for the marketing and sales teams in Japan - Sonic Superstars was pushed a quite bit in the region too, I remember it getting a Famitsu cover, some sort of cross-promotion with a metro/rail company, and big adverts on train stations.

As for my opinion on the game itself, it's fine, it's the full price (or near-full now that games are being 70USD...) that really hurts it, especially when Mania was like what? 30? 20? It's not a different game in scale, scope or type, even if it *may* have been a lot more expensive to make. Makes me wonder if the decision to not charge full price for Sonic x Shadow was them overcorrecting with Superstars. Arzest doesn't make great games but I geniunely feel this is them trying in very earnest to make a game that was a worthy successor to Mania, even if it turns out to very much not be that. It's clear this was Ohshima's baby and that he was giving it a lot of love. It makes me feel that people are overly negative on it. Sometimes a game is a B-game, an unpolished game, a game made a bit cheaply, and those games exist and as far as a game "of that nature" goes, Superstars is of a much higher quality than the vast majority of those. Playing Blinx 1 and 2 made me also realize how many things in Superstars are iterations of Artoon's ideas there - the Emerald Powers feel a bit like the Time Powers of Blinx, and the customizable robot in multiplayer mode is exactly like the customizable cat/pig for Blinx 2.

 

I find it hard to imagine Superstars doing terribly in Japan specifically would stop SEGA from mentioning the game at all in their 2024 fiscal year report and their 2024 annual report, even though they mention transmedia assets that, well, I don't think made much of a landing in Japan either (Paramount+ Knuckles series). The 2023 report was launched mere days after the game's release, so it doesn't have much to add, and still talks about it more than the following reports. They're not obligated to talk about every game, but that they don't give it even a passing mention, not even when talking about the many ramifications the brand is going through and the many things with Sonic's name that are out there, is conspicuous.

Whether that's fair or not is entirely another matter though.