I missed this thread when it first came up and wish I'd seen it then, but I was on the road, away from NeoGAF, and wrapped up in my impulse purchase of one of the biggest positive surprises I've ever played, Sonic Mania.
Advance TL;DR for those who don't want to read the wall ahead: this is the gateway game. Evidently not all the holdouts will warm to itSonic design is still Sonic designbut if you ever told yourself you might give the hedgehog one final chance to see what the fuss is about, even if Sonic never clicked for you, I know where you are coming from and can confirm that Mania is where you want to give Sonic one last begrudging shot.
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A month ago I was firmly in the "Sonic was never great" camp. I played 1 and 2 (including 2 on Game Gear) back when they were current, then took another crack at the series on the Wii VC, and never really did think of Sonic as a platforming series that was up to scratch with the classics, suspecting it would never have stacked up nearly as well (the reliably infectious music aside) were it not set up as Sega's mascot, its answer to Mario. And indeed, I
posted exhaustively to that effect in the "I don't understand Sonic" thread, where the few non-toxic posts that took the time and patience to examine the kind of mindset required of engaging with Sonic design were actually very valuable and convinced me to take a chance on a game I seriously doubted I would like, as the rapturous praise on Mania's release seemed to come largely from long-suffering Sonic fans overjoyed at its conjunction of retro competence and fan service, and I was not of their tribe.
The word "mindset" is really quite important here. My off-the-shelf example for the past year or so (before Mania anyway) has been Paper Mario: Color Splash, which is
immensely more enjoyable if you spend big and hit hard, abandoning the tendency towards hoarding consumables and saving your best breakable weapons for big or desperate moments, like you might in a typical JRPG or a game with tighter ammunition/durability management. (This applies to BotW as well: it's more fun when you don't hoard so cautiously that your inventory is constantly overflowing with precious, high-powered, hard-to-find junk.) Sometimes, approach is everything, and understanding how a Sonic game is put together isn't the same thing as understanding how to have fun with it.
To this end, the most valuable advice in the dregs of that other thread was to recognize the arcade underpinnings of Sonic's design and take it like Star Fox, thinking of the stages as built in a few distinct lanes where if you miss the lane change you wanted, suck it up, don't get attached to it, and keep an eye out for it on the next run. It's a pinball machine where you play as the ball, and sometimes you just won't get the bounces you want. From time to time you have to play reactively.
Now, the interesting thing about this kind of platformer design, where you are constantly zipping past points of no return, is that there
are equivalents to it in other games. It's there in SMB with the inability to scroll the screen left (the one and only thing that has truly aged in SMB, which I don't think anyone misses), and it's there throughout the platformer genre in the form of auto-scrolls or escape sequences. The trick to Sonic, I've found in Mania, is to grasp that it works just like these standard platformer tropes, but fools you because it doesn't
look like it works that way. It plays like an auto-scroller where the screen doesn't scroll because the point-of-no-return boundaries come at you in all directions, diagonals included, as you criss-cross over the rails.
It isn't quite my style, as far as first preferences go, but Mania finally convinced me that I can have fun with this design philosophy and find a certain exhilaration in getting lost in courses too twisted and tangled to ever map out in my head. There's something in its execution that clicks in a way that the original Sonic games never did, and I'm beginning to think I should return to the older games (particularly given the prolific recommendations that people who liked Mania should go back to 3+K) to examine what it's doing differentlyversus what was always there, awaiting the right mindset to engage with it.
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I do have a number of gripes with Mania, many of them offshoots of my general issues with Sonic. At times it is woefully unclear about hitboxes, collisions, deaths by squishing, and what you can or cannot touch in various forms/actions/power-upsyou have to learn a lot of enemy interactions by trial and error rather than pure observation of cues in their visual design or movement patterns. I still occasionally tuck into a roll from what I thought was a standing position when I intended to spin-dash. The undocumented ten-minute time limit is a failure of UI design that I would feel much better about if it counted down. And I honestly don't think much at all of Blue Sphere, although for some reason I keep diving back into it instead of just ignoring it at the checkpoint, so perhaps I don't dislike it as much as I think I do.
But for the first time, I'm finding that the game as a holistic package is riveting enough from moment to moment, zone to zone, that none of these grievances kill the overall experience. And a lot of credit has to go to the stage design, which is just tight and dense enough that if I ever come to a dead stop for whatever reason, the obstacles on the screen are worth playing with as a precision platformer, but there also exists an option to get back up to speed if I just want to zip on ahead. From my memory of Sonic 1, this was always what I thought was missing (especially as Sonic 1 lacks the spin dash, something I had totally forgotten): a sense of integration and contiguity between the fast game and the slow game, such that individual segments of the stage are interesting at both velocities, and you can make a transition from one to the other at will.
For the most part, here Sonic finally holds my interest
as a platformer, and the question, "Do I speed down the freeway or do I take the turnout in the corner of my eye?" is an interesting decision that is within my power and control to make. When you stop or slow down, there is a platformer in front of you worth playing, not an oversized track you fell off and are trying to get back on.
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A personal irony: it occurs to me belatedly that, as much as I've claimed that Sonic's design philosophy isn't really my design philosophy, its approach to one-off thematic gimmicks and branching pathways as an incentive to replay stages was actually the core of my approach to Super Mario Maker. And some of the criticisms that I received on my stages (for one: that if a player repeatedly fails to surmount a challenge, they may be psychologically driven not to seek alternatives, but to attempt the same route to prove they can surmount it) are not that far from my own reservations about Sonic.
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Last noteI found
the thread asking for an introduction to the fan service to be highly enlightening, and wish it hadn't been closed. I was certainly wondering about many of the same things coming out of Mania, and was similarly impressed at the strength of Mania's unified identity as a game, such that an untrained eye couldn't necessarily distinguish returning elements or characters from the newly introduced, as they all seemed to belong there side by side.
