Monday, February 19, 2018

More levels of Sonic Mania

at 12:00 PM
I finished the game over the weekend at the same time as doing Sonic 3 & Knuckles Chaos Emeralds, so some stuff blurs together. Probably anything good I say has been misattributed from the latter. I believe I left off after Flying Battery.

Press Garden is certainly the strangest of the new zones, whirling together snowy European architecture and the internal machinery of a printing press. It's a bit of fantastic surrealism more akin to Castle of Illusion than Sonic's typical Indiana Jones / circuit board dichotomy, colorfully realized all the same. Doesn't hurt that it sets the scene for some traditional gears-and-conveyors concrete design without resorting to the factory cliche. Act 1 is corridor-based (putting it in the Marble Zone genre) with the first really fresh-feeling gimmick, the bouncy conveyors - which I could've used a whole lot more of - along with an own goal-style boss battle set in a dynamic arena full of destructible environments!!. I like the idea of the crabbot enemies playing catch with saw blades, a rare enemy-enemy interaction, but in practice they're meaninglessly simple to defeat. Act 2 has a great breakable block theme that slows things down and adds new consequences to careless jumps. There's a nice inverse relationship between ice springs and ice spikes, fleshing out the concept into one of the best levels in the game.

Onto Stardust Speedway, where prospects continue to look sunnier. Unless I'm misremembering my Sonic CD, Act 1 is far remixier than those preceding, incorporating gimmicks far and wide (e.g. pull-strings from Marble Garden Zone). The use of spring cannons couldn't be a clearer ripoff of Donkey Kong Country, but hey, it's new to Sonic. Regardless of context, reviving material from CD is far more palatable than giving a ninth life to every blade of grass from Sonic 2, which left me imagining how much cooler it'd be to have a Gems-style remix drawn entirely from lesser-played adaptations like Advance and Rush. CD has been largely reclaimed as series canon, not least thanks to Whitehead's own 2011 widescreen port, and it would be nice to see the treatment spread further. This is where, for all that Mania presents itself as a love letter, it's very strictly fenced into the Totally Uncontroversial Popular Narrative (that Sonic == Genesis) and shows no interest in exploring the darker corners of the franchise beyond a wiki search for "polerbear". Mania wants to forget Sonic Heroes as badly as does MadHistoricalYoutubeFriend. This isn't the Sonic sequel that could've happened in 1995 - it's the Sonic tribute game that could've happened in 1995. The only reasonable points of comparison are the other reboots, leaving Mania looking terribly unambitious. Consider that Sonic Generations' best stage comes from Sonic the Hedgehog '06 - that's an impressive achievement. That's something new. Taking the best source material and making a good game of it is fine. It's safe. Taking the worst material and making a good game of it is inspiring.

Alright I'm getting sidetracked again. Back to... Hydrocity Zone? Really? Hydrocity? What's the rationale behind the selections here? Even as the self-appointed patron saint of the water level, the only justification I could conjure here is that water levels are a part of Sonic games, and here is the least bad selection. That's not a great reason to include something in your game. That the top path plays itself can't be blamed on dumbing down, as it's equally boring (though infinitely gracious) in Sonic 3. The new submarine boss here is great, another variation on the why-are-you-hitting-yourself formula, and the other Eggman encounter is cute, but characteristically forgettable. Surplus charm astride a void of substance.

This is the point at which Mania's overarching structure becomes distressing: we were doing one zone per game, roughly chronologically, and now we're starting to meander in the opposite direction. Optimally, here is where the old zones would exeunt, leaving Mania free to define its own personality, bursting forth from the remains of its ancestors. Unfortunately, here is where it instead decides to retrench.

One last glimmer of hope before the implosion, Mirage Saloon brings out a bright new aesthetic that deserves better gameplay pairing. We've had deserts before, but not this kind of American West ecosystem, and it's immediately a natural fit with the cartoon flavor of the characters. It's a shame Act 1 is spent rehashing the biplane variety stage, one of the series' least flexible recurring gimmicks that was only just resurrected (and also terrible) in Sonic 4: Episode II. The big handguns in Act 2 aren't notably different from the spring cannons in StarSpeed and the water spritzers are yet another non-interactive cutscene gimmick.

Here follow three old zones in a row, seemingly chosen at random, and the experience completely decoheres. I'm just playing a romhack at this point. I can't be bothered to discuss them individually, though Oil Ocean does bring the neat juxtaposition of Sonic 3's fire barrier with Sonic 2's most flammable terrain. Again, it would be even neater if S4E2 hadn't just done the exact same thing. Lava Reef I couldn't tell apart from & Knuckles, but I may've been half asleep by that point. Metallic Madness scores points with a funny joke where Sonic is thrown into the background layer to 'simulate' tininess, but where are the raps? And, though this has no effect on the quality of the game, I noticed around this point that Tails' path-finding seems to have taken a major hit in the Retro Engine. He frequently gets stuck behind a corner and incessantly jumps. Brain damage from all the near-death drownings?

Finishing it off is Titanic Monarch, certainly the highlight of the game and really the only part that's even remotely challenging. I like the use of the catapult spheres from the S&K bonus stages - they're loosely free-form yet present enough technical space to rehearse precise approaches, and they pause the action without sacrificing momentum. The warp labyrinth takes the familiar structure of the looping maze and tweaks the presentation with discrete endpoints - as someone who has always hated the falling loops of e.g. Sandopolis Zone, I found this to be a major success of spatial grounding. Does Robotnik have KEK banners tho? Wtf?

I died a couple times on the final boss; once in Oil Ocean 2 thanks to poison gas; and a bunch of times due to cheap crush collisions in Chemical Plant 1. This is an easy game which can mostly be conquered on first attempt*. The special stages are surprisingly strategic, the kind of design that improves on what was accomplished in 1994 while restraining itself to the same vocabulary, though I don't know if I have the enthusiasm to repeatedly find them. I ended up with four Emeralds. I didn't mention the return of the E-102s, but in context it's hard to care. They're lost in the noise of all the other boss fights.

Sonic Mania doesn't really illustrate to me that you can still make a good classic Sonic - nor the converse. What it does illustrate is that you can repackage content from classic Sonic and successfully sell it, and maybe this should've been expected from a team whose resume consists entirely of fangames and ports. Predictable or not, this strikes me as a bad lesson, and if the inevitable Mania 2 includes any recycled content at all ("hey, how come they never remade Press Garden Zone? that's a classic!"), I'll be leaving it on the shelf. If it's entirely new material I'll probably bite - about half the original stuff here was solid. For longtime fans, Generations and Sonic 4 are more challenging, more original, and more respecting tributes. For new fans, just play Sonic 1-3&K, they're on virtually everything for a combined price near Mania's and hold up extremely well. Just remember that it's okay to die and start over; this is not an "old-school flaw", and the second time is often even more fun than the first. If you've played those to death, then you've already played Mania. Maybe try Socket.

*My subsequent Tails run ended with 39 lives to spare, and would've been closer to 55 had I not gotten lazy on the OOZE2 boss. This is a very easy game.

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