3/18/2024 0 Comments Sonic mania extended introThe boss fights are a low point definitely but I don't feel they drag the game down. The game was evidently hurried to completion and the boss design was eh. Yeah, I figure that that's where I'll leave it. Then you have others that need significant tweaking SPZ1 takes forever and the player does barely anything (or does nothing if Super), crush-deaths in FBZ2 feel cheap and it's really unclear when you can bump the boss, Metal Sonic Kai results in a number of unfair deaths if you don't land your attacks just right, HCZ2 did not need the second phase which was just a bigger version of the S3 Act 1 original, Sonic's MSZ1 can leave you waiting for ages to get an ample attacking opportunity and the depth perception is pretty rough, and TMZ2 was not the most exciting note to end on. CPZ1, SPZ2, PGZ1, OOZ1, TMZ1 these fights are all chores that aren't fun to play through. This was the case in S3K and it's exasperated in Mania. Whilst having a boss at the end of every act in S3K was a novel idea, they can start to feel like pace-breakers if they take too long to go down or if the most effective strategy is to just damage-boost to victory. A number of boss fights could have been scrapped or at least heavily revamped, I guess? So many of them just feel like busy-work that don't add much enjoyment. I can put out a few criticisms because obviously no game is perfect, but I genuinely don't feel that any changes would have made the game better in any particularly significant manner. Act 2 of all those other stages took things even further, whilst Hydrocity Act 2 falls back on the original so hard that I just have to assume it was because they ran out of time to fully design a new act. Act 1 is massively different from the original, and the same is pretty true of Oil Ocean, Lava Reef, Metallic Madness and Stardust Speedway. It very briefly introduced whirlpools and collapsing platforms at the start of act 2, and then proceeded to forget all about them just moments later. Most telling is the layout of Act 2, which is even closer to the original version than even GHZ1 or CPZ1. Visually and audibly it's the most vanilla of all of the returning stages, it's in the latter half of the game which feels a bit less refined than the earlier portions, there are more S3K stages than S1/2/CD (although you can also say that it's the only S3 stage). We know that at least one stage would have been cut from Mania had the game not been delayed, and unless someone can tell me otherwise then I suspect that it was Hydrocity. All playable, all serviceable, not all polished up neatly. I don't think that any significant content was missing from Mania's initial release or that the content that we got was unfinished, but I do think that it was pushed out in a state that the quality varied from "finely tuned to perfection" to "near-finalised draft approved for playtesting". Not everything got fixed though, and I think a lot of the issues would have been fixed if the game wasn't put out so soon. Tons of bugs and some of the issues outlined above were addressed in Plus/v1.4 updates, including the total revamp to the Stardust Speedway fight. And these problems apply mostly to later parts of the game. There's plenty more to add to the list, but it's telling that a lot of the problems weren't to do with the gameplay going wrong but more to do with presentation, performance and balance. level length can be wildly inconsistent they're not one-off cases like Knuckles' Carnival Night 2 in S3K, the level length here flip-flops all the time.as noted by others, the second half of the game seems to drag a bit.
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