Before I start this review, I feel it's important to have a moment of full disclosure:
My relation to Sonic Mania is kind of unique.
While I was still in high school, I originally cut my teeth in game development at a website
called Sonic Fangames HQ, or SFGHQ for short.
It might seem weird now, but there was actually a period of about five years where no real
Sonic games were being released.
I mean, yeah, I guess we had games like Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R, but those were spinoffs;
nothing more than distractions between "real" games.
And from 1994 to 1999, none materialized.
SFGHQ became a place for Sonic fans to make their own games during this five year lull.
I watched some of my friends grow up to become real game developers at that website, because
I was there, growing up right along with them.
Because of this, I have formed certain opinions on the games made by these people, and of
that community as a whole.
A handful of SFGHQ community members went on to work on Sonic Mania.
This makes Mania a very personal game for me; this isn't just an indie pixel art Sonic
game, this is a reflection and a judgement of my entire adolescence.
It is a product of our community.
And to be honest with you, there's some bitter-sweet jealousy mixed in with that,
because these guys got to live the dream.
They graduated from making fan games to real, official Sonic games.
If I'm being honest, I kind of expected them to mess it up.
I'd played the fan games these guys had made before -- and while stuff like Retro
Sonic, Project Mettrix, and Sonic Nexus were a decade old or more, I felt like it gave
me a pretty good idea where some of the development team's heads were at last time they tried
to make their own game.
Good as they were for fan games, could they pull off the real thing?
I was skeptical, because I didn't think any of us could, myself included.
SFGHQ had some extremely talented people in it, but most simply weren't on the same level
as making something like Sonic 2.
And why would we?
Most fan game projects were solo affairs, whereas Sonic 2 was developed by a team of
a dozen or more professional Sega employees.
I expected Sonic Mania to be a glorified fan game; passionate to be sure, but ultimately
clumsy.
Sega claimed they were helping guide Sonic Mania's development, but that wasn't exactly
comforting either.
Just look at Sonic 4.
Even at its best, it never held a candle to the original Genesis games.
Though I knew the people working on Sonic Mania were at least smarter than that, it
was still hard to shake my worries.
At least some of the worries I felt were also from the general fatigue of Sega constantly
banking on Classic Sonic nostalgia.
Sonic Mania represents at least the eighth time Green Hill Zone in some form has made
a return appearance.
While it could be argued that Mario always had the Mushroom Kingdom and Zelda's always
had Hyrule, Green Hill Zone and its associated reference material weren't crutches to be
leaned on until the release of Sonic 4: Episode 1 in 2010.
After that point, nostalgia seemed to become Sonic's primary focus.
It's like, hey, do you remember checkerboard hills?
Do you remember buzzbombers?
Or motobugs?
What about Metal Sonic, do you like Metal Sonic?
Here's all the Metal Sonic.
We'll put him in every game we have if that'll make you buy it.
At this point, it can seem like there are more Sonic games banking on nostalgia than
there are games to be nostalgic FOR.
Sonic, once a character embodied with so much forward momentum that they put it in his theme
song has spent nearly a decade being haunted by his past.
Instead of focusing on making games with new, good ideas, they were mainly being sold on
their nostalgic value, to remind us of other, better games.
That's largely because the developers at Sonic Team never seemed to get things right.
Despite chasing nostalgia, Sonic Team couldn't help putting their own bizarre spin on things,
often to embarrassing results.
Between poor controls, incorrect sound effects, and uninspired level designs, all these constant
throwbacks did was reinforce the idea that neither Sega or Sonic Team seemed to get what
made Sonic special to begin with.
This nostalgia was just a hollow gesture to boost sales, as none of the developers apparently
had any real affection or understanding of the old games.
But that's the first way in which Sonic Mania differs: Sonic Team's logo is nowhere
to be found in this game.
Previously, on games like Sonic Advance or Sonic Rush, Sonic Team would take the bulk
of the credit, even if some of the developmental legwork was done by another company, like
Dimps.
Sonic Mania is different, putting Christian Whitehead, Pagoda West and Headcannon's
names front and center.
This is more than a cheap bid at nostalgia; Sonic Mania reads like a true love letter
by fans, to fans.
Or, I guess, to use the game's own nomenclature: "by the mania, for the mania."
This is a game stuffed to overflowing with references to Sonic's legacy.
Like, yeah, you go back to Chemical Plant from Sonic 2 again.
But at the end?
It turns into Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine.
And, yeah, it's Flying Battery from Sonic & Knuckles, but it's also got parts of Sonic
CD's Wacky Workbench, Sonic 2's Wing Fortress Zone, and even parts of Sky Base from the
Sonic 1 on the Master System, all mixed together with it's own new, original, unique ideas.
I assume there are novel-length wiki articles dissecting all of the most intimate references
Sonic Mania makes to Sonic's history, and that's fantastic.
The love, care and attention this game received is obvious, and far exceeds Sonic Team's
own efforts in every aspect.
When talking about Sonic, most tend to focus on his speed.
Going fast is a defining aspect of playing a Sonic game, but there's a core essence
that the classic Sonic games were built upon to help facilitate that: number one being
that Sonic the Hedgehog is meant to be a very simple game.
Whereas most classic platformers of the era took notes from Mario's playbook and required
two separate buttons for running and jumping, Sonic the Hedgehog used only one button, which
allowed him to jump.
Without a dedicated run button, Sonic is basically always running, which is why the character
focuses on going fast.
This influences all of Sonic's control.
Unlike when Mario runs, Sonic has a longer acceleration curve.
Given a flat surface, it takes longer for Sonic to reach top speed, lending an element
of tension when enemies or other obstacles threaten to break the momentum you've been
building up.
But what really makes Classic Sonic special is how he interacts with the environment.
Hills and slopes will change Sonic's physics realistically, where walking uphill is a greater
struggle than running downhill.
This forms the basis of Sonic's rollercoaster gameplay, as you go barreling down hills,
around loop-de-loops, and through other amusement park spectacles.
Momentum isn't just earned, it's fought for, cultivated and meant to be protected.
And a well-timed spin only enhances your ability to build up speed, even letting Sonic go so
fast the game itself has trouble keeping up.
Sonic 3's manual infamously even has a line warning you about secret "traps" where
Sonic can get stuck inside of walls.
A result of characters moving SO FAST the game itself starts to break.
Momentum can also be a useful tool.
Jumping off of an upslope can provide extra vertical height, allowing for impressive shortcuts.
This is the core of what makes Classic Sonic special.
The best 2D Sonic levels are built with these things in mind, and Sonic Mania might be the
first 2D Sonic game in almost twenty years to show an understanding of how any of this
works.
Christian Whitehead and Headcannon's Simon Thomley obviously know their way around classic
Sonic, thanks to their work on remastering Sonic CD, Sonic 1, and Sonic 2.
This means everything in Sonic Mania works exactly the way it should.
Most importantly, Sonic Mania actually introduces a brand new ability: the "Drop Dash" that
only further emphasizes the importance of rolling into Sonic's ball form.
Unfortunately, I feel like something is a little lost; to me, figuring out where and
when to roll into a ball is pretty integral to the Sonic experience, because it adds a
little bit of extra strategy to keep track of.
That being said, nothing in any of the Classic Sonic games teach you why rolling is important.
It's likely most people finished those games without really understanding why, or even
how to roll in to a ball, and similar complaints could be leveled against Sonic 3's InstaShield.
The InstaShield extends Sonic's attack radius ever so slightly, making it easier to deal
with spiked enemies, but the game never makes that obvious.
The Drop Dash theoretically provides more opportunities for a player to experiment with
the benefits of rolling, but it's just not intuitive.
To execute a Drop Dash, you must first jump into the air, release the jump button, and
then, without touching the ground, press the button again and hold it for almost a full
second.
That probably isn't something you're going to stumble upon by accident, and Sonic Mania
itself never teaches you to use it.
The only way you'd know the Drop Dash was even in the game is if you watched interview
coverage of the game before it released, heard about the ability from a friend, or tried
digging through the instruction manual, assuming you could even find it.
The Drop Dash is an incredibly smart addition to Classic Sonic's moveset, but the game
does a poor job of communicating what it is or how to use it.
Classic Sonic level design is an interesting beast.
A lot of Classic Sonic levels have, at their most basic, two paths: a faster upper path,
which is full of more risks but also more rewards, and a slower, more casual lower path
that most people fall down to after being knocked off the upper path.
Some levels in Sonic 2 may have as many as three or even four overlapping pathways, and
Sonic 3 expands things even further with character-specific paths that can only be reached if you're
playing as Tails or Knuckles.
Sonic Mania picks up the torch from here, with what are some of the biggest, most intricately
detailed 2D levels ever created for a Sonic game.
Though it cuts back on some of the character-specific routes, there are zones in Sonic Mania that
are larger than most Sonic 3 levels.
But that's also the game's biggest problem, because it ends up being too much of a good
thing.
One of Sonic 3's biggest levels is Carnival Night Zone, Act 2.
It's so big that if you aren't paying attention, it's possible you'll reach
Sonic's time limit.
What this means is that if you exceed ten minutes in any given level, you'll fail
that level with a "Time Over" and have to restart from your last checkpoint.
In that context, now consider what I just said about the size of Sonic Mania's levels:
it's not uncommon to find yourself pushing six, seven, even eight minutes or more for
every level past Chemical Plant Zone, and that's not even factoring in extra time
spent inside of special stages or the blue spheres minigames.
Y'see, something else Sonic Mania brings over from Sonic 3 is the emphasis on exploration.
The only way to get the "true ending" in one of these Sonic games is to collect
all the Chaos Emeralds.
To do that you have to slow down and look for hidden rooms containing warp rings that
send you to one of the game's special stages.
From there, you must catch a UFO that's stolen one of the seven emeralds.
On one hand, if you pump the brakes and hunt for these secrets, you're almost guaranteed
break that ten minute limit.
But on the other, if you hurry through levels, you'll never get that true ending.
You have to pick one or the other, and the game does a poor job balancing this.
Speed runs may finish these stages in significantly less time, but that's dedicated play focusing
on practiced routes, which is far removed from how the average person will experience
the game.
Especially on their first time through.
Now, the upcoming Sonic Mania Plus will contain an option to turn the time limit off, but
it's worth mentioning it's on a menu normally containing secret options that must be unlocked
before you can select them.
It's possible you'll have to finish the game once or meet some other secret requirement
before the you can turn the time limit off, but I'll cover that in a separate follow
up video after Sonic Mania Plus launches.
Right now, in the game's original state, it's a huge problem, and makes it feel like
the game is fighting against its own design.
Even if you are afforded the option to disable the time limit in Sonic Mania, the sheer size
and complexity of these levels ripples through the rest of the game.
If you look at other classic 2D games from the early-to-mid 90's, most have levels
that take around three minutes or less to clear.
Mario, Mega Man, Donkey Kong Country, Kirby, Castlevania, and even third-stringers like
Bubsy or Cool Spot rarely ask the player to remain focused for more than three consecutive
minutes, maybe four tops.
And this is even kind of baked into a lot of modern games.
Think of a game like Uncharted: Over the course of ten or fifteen minutes, you might spend
some time climbing, which leads in to a stealth section that goes wrong and turns in to combat.
Even if the overall scene is long, the way it engages the player is constantly changing
every few minutes.
That's because, after a while, doing the same things in the same level for so long
gets to be kind of exhausting.
That's not to say Sonic Mania is short on ideas or can't support its seven and a half
minute levels.
Like I said earlier, any given zone is like three or four different stages mashed together.
It's a lot of very compacted things with nary a pixel to be wasted, but that starts
to wear on you.
Maybe this will only play to my North American viewers, but by the time I finished Sonic
Mania, I had a feeling that can only be described as the third night of Thanksgiving leftovers.
Okay, so you have Thanksgiving, right, which is a Holiday with origins in the harvest celebration,
where farmers would have all this food from crops they planted in earlier in the year
and everybody eats until they feel sick.
Usually, you have so much food for Thanksgiving that you have enough for leftovers on the
second night, where you usually also eat way too much.
And by the third night, you've eaten so much food that the mere thought of another
dinner roll or sweet potato makes you feel a weary, deathly ache deep within your bones.
That's kind of what it was like when the credits began to roll after almost six hours
with Sonic Mania.
Enjoyable as it was, my body just couldn't take any more, whether I wanted it or not.
Unfortunately, Sonic Mania's length problems don't end with just the levels themselves.
One of my big fears going into Mania was how the game would handle boss encounters.
Boss fights are something even seasoned developers working on big budget triple-A games can and
do get wrong.
And for indie games, especially FAN GAMES, boss fights miss more often than hit.
Too many modern boss battles focus more on making the boss you're fighting in to a
character.
Usually what this boils down to is fighting a boss that's invulnerable for long stretches
of time in order to give them moments to show off their personality, either through big
flashy animations or long attack patterns that must be avoided.
That looks cool, but in terms of gameplay, it means you're waiting for the boss to
repeat a stupid mistake over, and over, and over so they can expose their weak point and
give you the opportunity to hit back.
That's less a fight and more like standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs hoping
your rival will fall down them.
And hoping they'll do it more than once.
It not only insults the player's intelligence, but it makes the enemy they're fighting
look like an idiot for letting it happen so many times, and above all else, it's just
boring.
This was definitely true of the new Hidden Palace Zone boss added to Christian Whitehead
and Simon Thomley's remastered mobile version of Sonic 2.
While it was cool looking, deciphering the tedious steps required to actually damage
the boss just wasn't fun, and I was worried this kind of logic would carry forward to
Sonic Mania.
Thankfully, most of them aren't quite that bad, but the main problem is the boss fights
just never end.
When you reach the end of Hydrocity Act 2, for example, you face two full length bosses
back to back.
Phase one has you guiding bombs into propeller blades, and phase two is just a carbon copy
of a boss from Sonic 3.
No changes, no twists, just the exact same boss from Sonic 3.
If two bosses back to back sounds weird, consider then the fight with Metal Sonic at the end
of Stardust Speedway: it's FOUR entirely separate phases as you scramble your way up
to the top of a tower for a final showdown.
Depending on how quickly you get through everything, this one boss fight by itself can take anywhere
from 3 to over 7 minutes to finish.
To put things in perspective, if you collected all the Chaos Emeralds and came into this
boss fight as Sonic's ring-draining Super Sonic form, you would need between 200 and
500 rings in order to make it through the entire boss fight without losing your powers.
I don't know if there are even that many rings in Stardust Speedway Act 2 total, because
it's one of the shortest levels in the game.
It has to be, for how much time it takes to fight Metal Sonic.
Those are the two worst examples, but too many of these boss encounters don't respect
your time and don't do a good job rewarding skilled play.
Take the boss at the end of Studiopolis Act 2, which is basically just a random number
generator that tells you whether or not you get to damage the boss.
A textbook Sonic the Hedgehog boss has simple mechanics, is easy to hit, and goes down quickly
once you know the trick.
Eggman is more often than not a damage sponge; whereas a boss fight in something like Mario
adheres to Miyamoto's so-called "rule of threes" because it usually only takes
three hits to defeat, Eggman usually takes eight hits or more.
It's imperative that players can freely wail on Eggman because of this, and most of
the boss fights in the Genesis games are more about managing a quick, aggressive assault
instead of standing around waiting for your turn.
Too many of Sonic Mania's boss fights lean on a crazy reference or a cool visual concept
when that's only half the battle, and the amount of time you spend fighting this stuff
just makes the exhaustion issues I mentioned earlier even worse.
Because let's be honest, one of the last things you feel like doing after playing through
a super long level is fighting an equally long boss fight.
The argument could be made that the bosses and the levels are just fine the way they
are.
That I'm the one overdoing it, that I should pace myself and exercise better self-control
to avoid burning out.
Such an argument completely misunderstands the concept of pacing itself.
People who play video games inherently fall into bad habits because of the nature of play.
Gaming and addictive behavior can be very closely related, because fun games are the
ones you don't want to turn off.
It's the best kind of problem to have as a developer, but it's still a problem nonetheless.
It's the job of the game designer to find ways to snap players out of those bad habits,
because the players themselves will rarely do it on their own.
If Sonic Mania has problems with pacing, it shouldn't be up to me to pace myself, because
the game should be giving me more places to stop and recharge.
This is the ACTUAL reason levels in all those other games tend to be so short: completing
an objective is a lot like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence, insofar as it lets
you stop and take a breath.
I get that Sonic Mania is supposed to be a maniac's tribute to Sonic the Hedgehog,
but it also asks you to hold your breath for a really, really long time.
To engage in a little bit of back seat game design, there are ways Sonic Mania could have
handled its length problem and still remained enjoyable.
For example, instead of two acts per zone, Sonic Mania could have implemented the original
Sonic's three act structure.
This would allow them to keep roughly the same amount of content they already have,
but spread it out with more opportunities to stop and recharge.
Actually, as long as we're mentioning recharging, Sonic Mania also could do a better job saving
your progress, too.
For example, let's say you're at Flying Battery Zone, it's act 2, you've gone through the
entire 6 minute level, and you rage quit at the frustrating spider boss at the end of
the level.
You just shut the game off, that's it.
But, 30 minutes later, you cool off and decide to try again.
In the current version of Sonic Mania, reloading your save file from Flying Battery will start
you all the way back at the beginning of Act 1, erasing up to 15 minutes of work.
That's unacceptable.
It needs to be better at letting you resume your progress from wherever you left off.
Ideally, it should be resuming from the last checkpoint you touched.
Because let's be honest, it's not 1993 anymore.
People are playing Sonic Mania on the bus, or during their lunch break at work.
What if the batteries on their Nintendo Switch are dying, and they don't have time to finish
the level or get to a charger?
Sonic Mania isn't built to consider these kinds of scenarios, and it probably should.
Heck, being able to resume from the middle of the stage may even help with levels feeling
too long, because it would free you to stop playing whenever you felt like it.
As an extreme example of dealing with this game's length, Sonic Mania could even implement
Sonic Jam's "Easy Mode."
For those of you who don't know what that is, I'll explain: So Sonic Jam was a Sega
Saturn collection of the four main Sega Genesis Sonic games.
It came with all kinds of extras and even a few bonus modes, including a brand-new "Easy
Mode."
When easy mode was enabled, you'd face fewer enemies, have more power-ups, and even skip
entire levels.
That might sound kind of lame, but hear me out: There was nothing better than to kick
back on a chill Sunday afternoon and play through a highlight reel of Sonic's best
moments.
You could start the original Sonic the Hedgehog at 4pm and be done with Sonic 3 & Knuckles
before dinner.
The real, full, original versions of those games were still there when you wanted to
take things seriously, but having a more casual mode available made for a nice, breezy, relaxing
experience.
For a game that can sometimes feel like a grind, that's definitely something Sonic
Mania could benefit from.
Sonic Mania's breathless enthusiasm for the hedgehog's 16-bit history is both its
most powerful strength and greatest weakness.
This is a game so bursting with passion that it is near its breaking point.
The multitude of cheap cash-ins during the Mascots With Attitude fad in the early 90's
serves as a reminder that Classic Sonic's gameplay is a tricky recipe to get right.
The Sonic Mania Team has done a better job than anyone else has, including Sega and Sonic
Team themselves.
After a certain point it becomes pretty clear that either Sega isn't interested in what
people originally liked about Sonic the Hedgehog, or they genuinely have no idea how to replicate
it.
Sega should be the masters of this sort of game already, teaching the newbies how these
games worked, not the other way around.
It's like this freaky ouroboros, where it looks like Sega is being shown how to make
a Classic Sonic game by people who learned all this stuff FROM Sega 25 years ago.
Imagine graduating from school and having to re-teach all of your algebra lessons back
to your math teachers because THEY'RE the ones that don't know the answers.
Sonic Mania somehow manages to pull success out of that impossible paradox.
This is the game Sonic 4 should have been.
Heck, this is the game Sonic Generations should have been.
It's biggest flaw is that, like I said earlier, it's too much of a good thing.
Which is a pretty significant flaw.
Maybe if it was still 1994, I was still 11 years old, and I had an entire summer vacation
ahead of me, things would be different.
Maybe then, Sonic Mania would become my new favorite Sonic game, surpassing even Sonic
3 & Knuckles.
But it's 2018, I'm about to be 35, and my plate is overflowing with other things
to do.
I've changed, the world has changed, and Sonic Mania hasn't.
Undoubtedly that's mission accomplished for a development team so focused on retro
gameplay.
But it makes it difficult for me to play it in the same context I do with the old 16-bit
Sonic games.
I like those old games enough that they are almost constantly in my rotation.
It's rare for me to go more than a few months without messing around with one of them.
But, with Sonic Mania, once I properly finished the game as all of its characters, I just
haven't had the urge to go back to it.
It's levels are too long and too complex for a quick pick-up-and-play session, especially
once you also start thinking about its tedious boss fights.
Sonic Mania is not unlike asking a superfan to describe their favorite thing in the world:
it's a rambling, way-too-deep conversation that keeps going even long after you might
have lost interest.
It's got a lot of ideas and expresses a lot of love, but it just needed a little more
tempering.
I wouldn't call it the best Sonic game ever made, but I might be willing to call it The
Ultimate Sonic game, if that makes sense.
I still really like it, I think it's an impressive accomplishment, I just don't
know when I'll ever get the urge to play it again.
Sonic Mania contains everything that made Sonic great, compressed into one of the most
densely packed games in this series, for better or worse.
If you're the type where finishing a game just once is never enough, Sonic Mania will
keep you coming back.
Just... make sure to pace yourself.
Thank you all for your patience while I put this video together.
I actually wrote most of it last September, but then my life was turned upside down.
Between moving to a new state, the PC version delay, being in the hospital, my desktop breaking
down and more, it has been a long, difficult road in getting this review done.
I'd thought about just waiting until the release of Sonic Mania Plus, but y'all have
waited long enough, so stay tuned to a follow up video when that releases.
Thank you goes out to Claris Robyn for usage of her Sonic Mania speed run footage, there's
a link to her channel in the video description.
I definitely recommend giving it a look if you want to see what real high-speed Sonic
Mania gameplay is like.
Special thanks go out to my Patreon supporters Logan, Brando, Juan Pablo, Dave M., Setsune
Wiefel, Conor F., Thomas G., Tom B., Monuma, Nolan, Fiesta, Matt, Ryan M., Keith, Connor
S., Sam, Tim, Anders, Ryan L, Christopher, Rose, Lucas and Stephen.
You guys have all been saints.
Actually, speaking of Ryan L, for those of you that don't know, that's Rlan2, the founder
of Sonic Fangames HQ, the website I mentioned way back at the start of this review.
Given how many people working on Sonic Mania were members of that community, I was surprised
Ryan wasn't given a special thanks in Sonic Mania's credits.
If it wasn't for Ryan and his Sonic Fangames HQ website, there probably wouldn't be a Sonic
Mania.
Be sure to thank him by reading his blogs, and playing the games he worked on over at
Halfbrick and now PikPok.
He really deserves the recognition.
And if you want to follow me, I have blogs and social media and all that fun stuff, too.
You can also support me financially through Patreon so I can keep doing more of this kind
of stuff in the future.
I also release exclusive music, video, games, and Patreon donors can even hear the original
version of this review that I recorded back in September of last year, so there's tons
of reasons to pledge your support.
I even have links for Ko-fi and PayPal.me for those of you who don't like rolling
monthly donations and only feel like donating once.
Just visit Patreon dot Com slash BlazeHedgehog to learn more.
And finally, as cliche as it may be, liking this video and subscribing to my channel does
help me out more than you realize.
But I won't twist your arm about it if you don't want to.
See you in the next video!
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