The Shrine

Anyone else here playing this? I'm amazed at how much fun I'm having with this game. Everything about it looked fun, but I still had my fair share of doubt considering how bad most modern Sonic games have been. This game however has blown my expectations away. It's hard, but the challenge feels fair. I haven't felt like I've had a ton of cheap deaths, but that each death has been because I didn't respond fast enough or correctly. I can't wait to play more!

I played Sonic as a kid but never particularly enjoyed it so the nostalgia misses me. I've watched a bit of it on Twitch though and the music is god damned amazing and the art is gorgeous, though.

I agree with you on the music, in fact, I have a copy of the soundtrack ordered on vinyl.

Yep, bought it day 1, loving it. I actually hit the 10 min limit twice because I was exploring the stages lol.

I've come close more than once *laughs* It's an amazing game. They really hit the ball out of the park.

The levels seem to be way too big if you don't just keep on moving in one direction the whole time.

Don wrote:The levels seem to be way too big if you don't just keep on moving in one direction the whole time.

So the thing about this game is that it's a Sonic game, but you can tell it was made by fans and kinda has the fan game jank to it, which means the difficulty and way it is designed strictly adheres to shit fans loved about the original games.

So if you want to finish the levels as quickly as possible you have to travel the highest part of the stage, the higher parts of the stages are quicker and shorter, but it's hard to STAY at the higher part of the stage unless you know where to make specific jumps and shorts cuts and shit. It's like this all the way through including the massive difficulty spike at the end.

It's kinda like when that Megaman/Rockman Unlimited fangame came out, I tried that shit for 5 minutes and realized these crazy people made the stages in a way where every jump had to be precise or you'd die just from missing the jump. Sonic Mania isn't nearly as bad as that, but you can tell that they probably wanted it to be but reigned it in a bit in QA to make the game more accessible/fun.

Eric wrote:

Don wrote:The levels seem to be way too big if you don't just keep on moving in one direction the whole time.

So the thing about this game is that it's a Sonic game, but you can tell it was made by fans and kinda has the fan game jank to it, which means the difficulty and way it is designed strictly adheres to shit fans loved about the original games.

So if you want to finish the levels as quickly as possible you have to travel the highest part of the stage, the higher parts of the stages are quicker and shorter, but it's hard to STAY at the higher part of the stage unless you know where to make specific jumps and shorts cuts and shit. It's like this all the way through including the massive difficulty spike at the end.

It's kinda like when that Megaman/Rockman Unlimited fangame came out, I tried that shit for 5 minutes and realized these crazy people made the stages in a way where every jump had to be precise or you'd die just from missing the jump. Sonic Mania isn't nearly as bad as that, but you can tell that they probably wanted it to be but reigned it in a bit in QA to make the game more accessible/fun.

I'm pretty sure what made the original Sonic great was that you hit a red bumper or some speed boots and accidentally clear the level before you knew what's going on because you're going so fast. If people were into exploring a big world they'd be better off playing Zelda or a Mario game instead, and exploring is kind of antithesis of the whole going very fast deal because you have to slow down to actually explore. I can see that it's also running on an archaic lives system that was dumb 20 years ago and never even made much sense in the original Sonic games other than annoy you because the Sonic games were ones where you never died until the last stage and then you die 20 times in a row and game over until you figure out the trick or never play the game again. In fact this is probably why fans shouldn't be making games because they rarely understand what made it great, though like you said it's not enough to get in the way.

This reminds me of how Azure Gunvolt is basically a speed run simulator because the creators thought everyone who played a Megaman game is a speed run fiend. Never mind that Megaman is actually very resilient against most damage and the core gameplay is actually very attrition based. People happen to try to avoid damage precisely because all that damage you take adds up and farming energy capsule/E-Tank is boring, but the base Megaman game doesn't resolve around never getting hit in the entire level.

So this game reminds me a lot of Azure Gunvolt in the sense that it's supposed to be a game you play through once to beat it and then you've to grind for a while to get the real ending. I never found the Sonic games to be intriguing enough to try to get the real ending and you usually don't get very many practices on the Chaos Emerald bonus stages. To compound things, they usually go in sequential order and the ones you really need practice on tends to be at the end so you usually have to be trying for a full through just to get enough chances to try the later Chaos Emerald stages and then actually being able to beat them. Or you can just stop playing the game because it's not like the real ending is anything thought provoking. Now in the modern era at least you can save and load even in action games so you don't have to start over but that just means you keep on do Emerald Green Hills over and over, similar to how Azure Gunvolt you just keep on run the same stage over and over to get the items you need to actually have the stats necessary to beat Nova while wearing Joule's necklace assuming you're not a platforming God.

I actually like to explore in a Sonic game but I wonder what's the point. You get rings and maybe some 1UP but you don't really need those lives most of the time. You can pick up a shield and then either everything bounces off you because it's the right shield for whatever the element the zone is or you lose it pretty quickly, though either way it's not like having a shield really matters in a game where it's hard to die. I think each zone you should at least be able to map it like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night so that there's a point to take the off beaten path, though that'd also get pretty annoying when you get to the stupidly huge zones at the end where you can run out of time even trying to find the closest way out let alone go off exploring.

I also managed to go through the entire game without figuring out how to do the new drop spin dash move and it's totally useless anyway. I still can't figure out why on the Stupidopolis boss where you've to fight something shooting missiles, sometimes you can jump over the missiles and sometimes you can't, because the missiles aren't always moving toward you or something so sometimes you jump and land exactly the same distance from the missile and then the missile moves and you get hit, or maybe that's why there's a lightning shield at the level so you can double jump over the missiles?