I concur: the first sections of those zones merely act as an introduction to the original, new compounds that Whitehead and his team has cooked up for us. Sonic Mania does this on many zones: Chemical Plant, Hydrocity, the first Green Hill, … It got a fair bit of critique because of that, as it’s not seen as very “original”, and it should try to get out of its predecessors’ shadows. New gimmicks, jumpboards, background art, foreground tunnels, enemies, and so forth are introduced that blend perfectly with the classic first stage that has set the scene. Until you zip through it and progress to the next Plant Zone stage, where the music suddenly is a very catchy remix of the original, and the Chemicals in the Zone are multiplied. For instance, there’s the Chemical Plant Zone, of which the first act is almost an exact replica of Sonic 2’s Plant Zone, including loops, bridges to take before you run out of oxygen underwater, enemy placement, and even death traps. Many stages in Sonic Mania start of as a homage to the original 16-bit Sonic (2) game(s). Mania starts out as a classic Sonic game: with Green Hill Zone. “You can be Tails, there you go!” - we all know what that means… Well, one of the sisters was handed the second controller. I grew up with a MegaDrive, not a SNES, and my sisters and me played Sonic 2 and 3 over and over again. What makes sonic Mania so special for me is its resemblance with the older 16-bit era Sonic games. From Duke’s inspired Ion Fury to Castlevania-inspired Bloodstained spin-offs: they’re all lovely, but not without their shortcomings. Nostalgia can be very powerful (the whole Codex runs on it!), and the recent tendency to (re-)release many retro-inspired games is one of the few gaming trends that I applaud. However, if it did manage to touch something somewhere, read on. Now, if that video did nothing to you, then you can stop reading and go do something useful. Here's a link to the MP4-encoded video instead: /vid/sonicmania-intro.mp4. Your browser does not support HTML video.
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