But it still looks the least like Sonic.Īfter turning back the clock as such, Sonic Mania freely advances on its imagined future frontier, embellishing and refreshing familiar appearances with more storage capacity than could ever fit in a Genesis cartridge. Sonic 3 & Knuckles may be the best Sonic game, and its approach to level design informs much of Sonic Mania. Interestingly, Knuckles, who debuted in Sonic 3, has also "reverted" to the same style despite never having used it originally.
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Presenting stages as real locations became the series norm-even in throwbacks like Sonic 4 and Sonic Generations-but whether due to a revelation from Sega or the advisement of Christian Whitehead (who previously worked on rereleases of Sonic 1, 2, and CD), Sonic Mania wisely returns to surreal landscapes constructed out of pop art, as well as Sonic's sharper, cartoonier form. This approach worked well enough at the time (especially with CRT monitors obscuring the image), but it's proven a bit less memorable than the iconic original style.
Likewise, the stages were coated in a dense layer of semi-abstract visual noise and chaotically-assembled tiles to try to trick the eye into seeing something more detailed and naturalistic than it actually was. While Sonic's sprites in this game were merey edited from Sonic 2 rather than captured from high-poly 3D models as in Donkey Kong Country, Sega's artists were clearly aiming for a similar result, rounding off sharp edges and positioning highlights for a greater sense of dimension with a plastic veneer. By the time Sega got to Sonic 3, however, the next generation was already looming on the horizon, and they strained against the Genesis's capabilities to present something nominally more realistic. The very first game, Sonic the Hedgehog, featured a whimsical visual style with scenery wrought in flat geometry bent off in sharp angles, and Sonic 2 and Sonic CD served up more of the same. One significant aspect of this was the conscious decision to walk back some of the later revisions to the look of the characters and their world. This is just what Sonic Mania delivers, and while it takes no pains recreating the specific limitations of the Saturn (it features a higher display resolution and liberal use of transparencies, for one thing), it convincingly takes Sonic's original aesthetics and draws them one step into the future. At the time, Sega's flagship character bore the expectation of pushing the envelope in terms of technology, but in retrospect, it's easy to envision an alternate history where the series simply stuck to what worked and continued its initial streak of classic side-scrollers unabated into the 32-bit era, standing alongside such lush 2D games as Super Tempo and Princess Crown.
In reality, Sonic rather lost his way following Sega's 16-bit heyday, going dark for years amidst the disfunctional development and eventual cancellation of Sonic X-treme before finally making the jump to 3D a generation later in 1998's Sonic Adventure. devised Sonic Mania as a Sega Saturn game that never was.
In that respect, it's less like Mega Man 9, which strived to present itself as an authentic NES game made in 2008, and more like Shovel Knight, which Yacht Club Games made to look like an NES game if the system hadn't been replaced by the Super NES but had instead continued to see incremental increases to its capabilities in the form of mapper chips. As Kim alluded to in her review, the driving conceit of Mania during its development was to not only deliver yet another Sonic game as it would have arrived on the Genesis but to imagine how the classic formula might have been affected by the technological advances that immediately followed. I love pixel art and old games in general! Please send inquiries to Mania is finally out, and if you're a Sonic the Hedgehog fan who loved the old games-especially if you only enjoyed the old games-it absolutely is the continuation of that same spirit and quality you've been waiting for ever since 1994's Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Contributing author and lifelong Mega Driver.
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