Sonic Superstars

[Deef]

Trying to hold off on impressions until I beat the final boss, so I can give the game a bit more breathing room.

But I will say, this game possibly has the worst bosses in the franchise. Mania's bosses are known for their issues. This is like that, times 100.

a)
Phases. Invulnerability phases. Everywhere. This is the 100% staple of every boss in Superstars. And it's baaad.

b)
No signals for vulnerability. The Flying Battery boss in Mania copped some flak for this; at times you could hit it and the hit just wouldn't register. There was no way to tell the difference, so even if you could hit it sometimes you wouldn't know if it was going to do anything.

Right, well, in Superstars this happens all the time. It's not even a bug, it's just how they're deliberately designed. It's basically that once you get your one single hit after its latest invulnerability phase, it goes back to being invulnerable even if it hasn't moved out of your way or changed appearance at all. Just... no damage now.

Along similar lines to this is some sogginess on signalling where exactly you can hit them. Yeah sometimes there's glass, go for that. Sometimes there are spikes. Avoid that. But sometimes it's all just some vague plastic and the game's like "Yeahhhhhhh.... nah."

c)
Memory and tedium. It's like they've asked how they can take anti-design clichés and really lean into them. Yeah, it's 2023. Bosses where you can't possibly win until you've memorised everything are cool again. And once you've beaten them, that's just the first pass and now the second pass has a bunch of new attacks so get ready for that again, except now you have to complete the whole first pass again each time you die just to get a second look at any attack in the second pass. And then we'll make the very final attack different too so you can do all that, then die, then have to do it all again just to die 17 more times before you get 1 more look at that final attack so you can die, again.

The 2nd- and 3rd- last bosses are all over this, so just keep trying and dying and spend about an hour or more getting annoyed by that. But the very last boss also throws RNG trash into the whole thing, and amplifies the invulnerability downtime massively, so it's just this gargantuan, irritating, bullsh***ishly deliberate abuse of your time. I've been retrying the final boss for hours, over different days, and it was clear from the very first attempt that it was just going to be another huge irritation.


End bosses aside, the problem is really just the shift to one hit only per invulnerability phase. It forces the battles into these long drawn out stories you have to sit through; they're really just dodging and watching exercises now. Then when you do finally get your turn for 1 hit, the fact this hit is often kind of soggy and unclear only makes it even less enjoyable.

I can't believe they made some public comment before release about how the game's bosses took direction from Sonic 3's. I don't know why they even bothered making such a remark.




Edit - Not significant really but a few with bugs too. Lagoon City can be abused by Tails, broken by an emerald power, and once managed to kill me after the boss was dead, the level was ended, and my score was tallied. I drowned. The Pinball Carnival boss is a bit of a janky mess in general.

[Deef]

Eh still haven't gotten to writing anything major about this one.
I really can't be bothered with more attempts of the final boss, and as a result, more plays of the game itself.

But I will say this, in case it wasn't blindingly obvious already, don't buy this one. Don't buy it for $60. Maybe for $50, consider it, maybe $40.

But for $95 it is basically an insult. It's not so much the content as it is the effort, but let's talk about the amount of content anyway, which obviously isn't anywhere near what you'd expect for a game at this price. The Witcher III, Horizon Forbidden West, maybe.
WRC is loaded with content, out in 4 days. $60.
Ark: Survival Ascended released today. $60.
Sonic Superstars with its 11 2D zones and a throwaway battle mode for $95... What the actual f***. I just don't understand how someone is being paid to set the game's marketing approach and decides to go with that price. Who do they think is going to buy it after the early adopters? Surely there is no way this will out-profit Mania. If it does, there is something wrong with everyone... and I guess I'm part of that. My bad.

But I started off by saying "It's not so much the content". So as weak as that content is, what really drives the insulting feeling is the effort. The production quality. The music especially, and the way the marketing pre-release hid everything that had that Sonic 4 vibe, even though that is the majority of Superstars' music: Senoue at it again, as if he was butthurt after all the hate Sonic 4's music received, so he used (abused) Superstars as his opportunity to validate himself by subjecting everyone to more of his crap; eager to prove that we'd really like it after all. NO, JUN. GO AWAY. Likewise with the Sonic 1-esque bonus stages. How are they here again? They were godawful to listen to in Sonic 4, and so they put them in Sonic Superstars again, and make them godawful to listen to, again!? Whotf is signing off on all these decisions.

So the game starts off sounding nice, but falls further into Sonic 4 music the further you go. And in the options screen. And the world hub screen. You can't escape it and it only gets worse.

Then the bosses are just bulls***. Just so badly, un-entertainingly, designed.

The textures are really sloppy in several levels.

And the emerald powers... oh man. If anything drives the point home about things being low effort, it's the emerald powers. They are so.... honestly even the word "shoehorned" feels like it would be giving them too much credit. "Shoehorned" makes it feel like they've been squeezed in to have some kind of purpose. I guess, technically, that's what they are. But really all the emerald powers are is nothing but contrivance. I had to look that word up. The emerald powers have literally nothing to do with anything. So the water power lets you swim easily and climb waterfalls... you'd think that at least makes it feel like it is interwoven with the game's flow a bit. But nope, even that just feels meaningless and I swear that is literally the most involved thing the emerald powers let you do. Vision. Pointless. Avatar. Pointless free boss hits only. The giant vine. Wtf. Just.. wtf. Who ... just... ughhhhhhh...

*pinches forehead*

It's not that the game itself is that bad. I mean, I really haven't sunk my teeth back into the levels so who knows.

But all the accessorising features just betray yet another cheap shot at slapping a game together and hoping it magics up some money. It has that smell of Sonic 4 being made for mobile. Super Sonic's after images are dithered. Not transparent. Dithered. It's a tiny thing but it's symbolic.

Oh and the battle mode? Yeah, as I mentioned before, absolute throw-away mode. What's worse is that so much of the main game is oriented around medals, yet medals are meaningless outside the battle mode, which you will play for 4 minutes.


Fruit acts? Only for medals.
Sonic 1-esque bonus stages? Only for medals.
Special stages where you've already collected that emerald? Medals.
Even 100 rings now only gives you a medal.

All of these things mean nothing if you don't play the Battle Mode, which you won't because of how simple and feature-poor it is. Again, I feel like I'm given something too much value with my choice of words. It's not feature-poor. It's feature-less. Press start. Compete in 3 random battles. The end.

But you can dress up your avatar by buying parts with medals which is a massive, massive, stupidly massive grind.

Just ughhhhhh.


So where was I?

Oh yeah. So everything is just so... not badly... lazily thought out. Everything is for a cheap sell. Battle mode. Emerald powers. The Sonic 4-nostalgia cash in. Lazily, terrible boss designs.

For $95.

And you have to download another 500MB of Epic Online Services, then sign into Epic even on Steam, to play it online.


I don't understand how they expected this to make money. I can't see there being a Superstars 2.
$40-50. Consider it then, at a maybe. Or just pirate it; I feel like they're practically asking for that to happen.

[unfnknblvbl]

And thus, the Sonic Cycle is complete once more.

Edit: in all seriousness, it's time Sega handed the franchise over to the only purple who have made a decent Sonic game in this century: the fans. Each year they should pick a team that made a good fan game (or mod) and commission them to make a fully sanctioned official game. Or make the grand prize of each year's Sonic Hacking Contest to be an official release.

There's been hundreds of really excellent fan projects over the past thirty years, from ROM hacks to full games. It's time hand it all over.

[Madmya]

Ooof, brutal.

Cheers for the impressions, Deef. I think I'll get it when it is inevitably dirt cheap, say around $30. Sonic Frontiers has remained stubbornly expensive though.

[GeneraL CyberFunK]

Ugh my gut feeling knew this game was not going to land as we'd hoped. It just looked ''OFF''

[Deef]

Yeah my gut certainly changed over its pre-release. Just prior its release it was clear there were a few too many questions, and especially too large a lack of reassuring news, so I knew I wouldn't be getting a $100 game (obviously). But I'm a bit more disappointed than expected.

What bugs me a lot is that I look back at the marketing and see what they did. It's not that they only showed us good bits. Rather, they actually showed all the good bits, ie., there was nothing else left. It's like the game that was pitched was hiding, rather than championing, the game they were planning to sell.

Those nice poppy music videos, for example; the ones that blended all the BIZ and SJZ tracks together. There were many comments on Sonic Retro expressing opinions on those tracks; some happy, some average, but the tunes also generated an overall community impression that more of this was a good thing. But in reality there wasn't (much) more of it. There was much more Sonic 4 music instead. The rest of Superstars' music is just not at the level of what was promoted so uh... yeah thanks for promoting it, guys.

So it feels a bit seedy to look back at that kind of thing. If one ignores Bridge Island, Speed Jungle, Pinball Carnival, and Cyber Station, I genuinely can't sit here and think of something else to praise to the same level. No other zone pops. The remaining music only gets worse and worse. The bits that looked cool in the trailers were practically all of the cool bits in the whole game.

Could've just been me getting over-excited early on, which I admittedly did. Embarrassingly heheh.

So... welp, I am indeed now in that next level of distrust for any new Sonic release. While I always had the assumption that new Sonic game = bad Sonic game, that simply felt as if it were a law of nature. I didn't actually have a more conscious reason for the assumption. Now I do. Superstars makes more clear what was always so obvious: The only drive powering any Sonic game's production is "Will it sell".

Sure. Reality check. Of course business is business and all game devel-- NO! There's a difference! And the Sonic IP highlights that difference. Every Sonic game is always an attempt at an appealing shelf product that doesn't give a toss in the slightest about whether it's a good game. Bullet points are the only goal, and in achieving that goal even just simple IP sensibility -- forget about actual pride -- is always thrown out the window. There's no over-arching concern for any game to actually be any good, which makes it feel like the whole drama is a directive from Sega itself. The business directive for the whole IP seems, very deliberately, to be "limp from one title to the next". It doesn't matter what they do, classic or not, because that's just what Sonic is to Sega. I never really noticed it so hard. I guess the decades of dull physics distracted me.

But now this long-awaited revitalisation of the classic formula makes it obvious enough even to me personally, as they still palmed the game off to some not-even-has-been, still embraced low-effort production values, and still gave creativity about as much enthusiasm as I give my tax returns.

You found it extremely difficult to nail the classic physics in a 2.5D world made in Unity? Oh, like those 2 fans did over a decade ago in Sonic Fan Remix? Can we stop celebrating the kindergarten achievements?

No, they won't. The whole IP is a scam. Sega is to Sonic what EA is to anything EA touches. The only way it changes is as unfunk said, and Mania made utterly clear: The IP needs to not be in Sega's hands.

[Madmya]

Sega in general are pretty much nothing now.

[unfnknblvbl]

A lot of younger people seem to really like the 3D Sonic games. I just... I just can't. How the shit they can look at the massive success of 3D Mario and not see a formula for Sonic is beyond me. They just think that Sonic must be fast all the time, but the classic games were at least 50% about exploration. All they need to do is clone Super Mario 3D World and put Sonic in it, and winner winner, chicken dinner

[Deef]

tl;dr - I tried the game again for the first time since October. Didn't refresh my impression.

Having not touched this game for 3 months, I gave it another try. Maybe the bad first impression was just a first impression.

Nope.

I still hate the Sonic 4 music, and the thinking that went behind that. That has to be the worst thing, because you can't escape it.
Still hate the bosses. I still marvel at the bold italics audacity that went into the decision to deliberately cite Sonic 3's bosses as their inspiration.
Still can't look at the emerald powers without thinking how much of a cheap gesture they are.
Still see all the little bits of texture laziness. Even at it's best, I sometimes genuinely wonder if I've accidently left this on the low detail setting. Hint: There is no such setting.
The special stages have to age the worst of any Sonic game's special stages; I just don't want to go near them now, which is a thing because sometimes you enter one accidentally anyway. Oh and you can't pass one of the levels without at least 1 emerald power.

And this is just trying the best levels. And that's another thing I hate most (I hate a lot of things most). I hate that the prelaunch hype for this game was literally the entirety of the game's only good content. All the crap stuff, which is most of the game, was hidden. Especially the music.

I hate that everything is about medals, which do absolutely nothing except buy ludicrously grind-walled skins, only for battle mode, which I won't play because I hate seeing how insipid and cheap a cash in that was. Battle mode is literally there to be a bullet point. So Fruit acts have zero point. Rings have zero point after staying alive. Special stages, bonus stages, hidden medals, all completely meaningless if you don't play battle mode.


I try to forget all that and just enjoy the levels, but I still just don't feel it. Not sure if that's not just older me expecting more advanced entertainment, or perhaps being too jaded by everything else. I mean, the classics had repetitive levels. But something feels wrong here still, even at their best. Sonic Mania's 4 original zones are great; Studiopolis and Mirage Saloon being up there with the best in the entire franchise. So yeah, Superstars is doing something wrong. I think it is repetitiveness; a lack of landmarks and things to change it up. Which then brings my thoughts back to the emerald powers, but they're terrible, not just for how lame they are, but for distracting me with the reminder of how little respect for the player went into their design. I mean... the target audience isn't just 9 year olds, surely.

Maybe I just didn't give the right levels the right extra chance. So I went back and tried, but then, oh yeah, those other levels have the garbage Sonic 4 music and I reach for Alt F4 again.


Trip was awesome. A welcome addition and the right way to do it imo. That's about the best bit of the game. The character animations are good too. The ice level has a throwback to the Death Egg emerging from Lava Reef... I only just noticed that today. Kinda cool, but nowhere near as good looking as Sonic3&K's version, and not even on the same chart in terms of epic-ness. The whole moment doesn't really try to be cool, then suddenly succeeds at being very not-cool as it is ended by a giant sasquatch standing still holding up a rock for you. That's all he does. You never see him again, you can't go back to look at him. He's just there and you run past like "Thank you giant sasquatch for punctuating what could have been a cool scene with your confusing presence". And then it's straight into bulls*** boss number 37.


I'm never going to beat the last boss. I hate it.

I'll probably give the game one more try at some point, but I know I'm pretty much already set. The laundry list of bad things just distracts me too much.