Sonic Mania review – Light years beyond being just a tribute

The hardest part about this review is explaining 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog for someone who’s never played a 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog game before. Although, that seems almost an impossible task at this point since all of the original games have appeared on every platform since the PlayStation 2. SEGA preserves and makes its classic library more available than even Nintendo or Square Enix.

Years from now, I would be surprised if Sonic the Hedgehog nostalgia finds better footholds that Super Mario or Final Fantasy.

Contrary what you might believe, Sonic the Hedgehog was not always the spokesperson of SEGA’s home console, the Genesis. In 1989, SEGA managed to steal a majority of the gaming market away from Nintendo for a year or so by leaning on its former mascot Alex Kidd, its classic arcade franchises, and those sweet, 16-bit, arcade perfect graphics.

However, this run of success changed in 1990 when Nintendo launched the Super Nintendo, and Super Mario World shattered sales records and dominated the SEGA lineup. The company needed an answer to the newest Mario game, and it needed it fast.

“Fast” was where they found their answer. Sonic the Hedgehog first released in 1991, and while it never landed SEGA back in first place, it helped solidify it as a major player in the video game world for the rest of the decade. Sonic was everything Mario was not. He was a character created out of customer research and critical thinking, whereas Mario was born out of convenience with that iconic hat and mustache being easier to render than hair and a mouth in the 8-bit days.

Sonic was, for all purposes, cool, and Mario… we love him to death, but he’s not cool.

The game’s design would also follow in this ideology of distancing itself from Mario. Super Mario World was, indeed, an entire world. It was an expansive game with an enormous map that covered several levels. Mario could move about these levels freely, and he could find secret entrances and exits that lead to further branching paths through the world. When Super Mario World came out in 1990, comparisons to Skyrim aren’t really that far off. The scope was enormous!

Classic Sonic the Hedgehog games are often put on a pedestal with Super Mario World, but the comparison ends with them being 16-bit platformers. Sonic the Hedgehog games are not grand, expansive adventures. They are based more on SEGA’s arcade mentality and strictly linear in their progression, moving from one stage to the next, the same path you’ll take each time you turn the game on. It makes up for this and competes with Super Mario World on two grounds:

1. Sonic the Hedgehog games are flashy! The colors they employ, the music they blare, the speed that they run at all make Super Mario World‘s simplistic approach look kinda boring side-by-side.
2. Sonic the Hedgehog’s stages have many ways of running through them. You might be playing the same levels each time you turn the game on, but each stage has three, four, maybe five viable paths to take from beginning to end. Uncovering all of these paths and finding the most fun, the most efficient, and the occasional secret path is where the replay value comes from.

Classic 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog games have their shortcomings compared to Super Mario World, mostly in the physics department, but their bombastic arcade approach helped set a different tone for SEGA and allowed it to operate as Nintendo’s polar opposite, giving it a niche that helped it become the company it is today.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/sonic-mania-review/