Sonic Superstars will feature no returning levels from past games
Speeding off to new lands!
Sonic Superstars has only been a known entity for about a day but that hasn’t stopped Sonic Team from dropping new details about the project.
One tidbit that should be exciting for longtime Sonic fans is that in an interview with IGN Takashi Izuka (Sonic series producer) says that no past levels from older games will return in Sonic Superstars.
In Sonic Mania, Green Hill Zone changed up a little bit…And even Sonic Origins, we did have Green Hill as part of Sonic the Hedgehog. But what we wanted to do with Sonic Superstars is really create something new and go in there and create these brand new islands that you get to explore as Sonic… We wanted to take Sonic to [the] brand new North Star Islands and have Sonic run around in this new environment. So we wanted to make brand new places for Sonic to go in this new title.
If you’re not a longtime Sonic fan it might be surprising to find out that fans are happy about no nostalgic levels, but as Izuka hints at in the above quote, nostalgia has been a crutch the Sonic series has relied on since Sonic Generations back in 2011. Almost every major Sonic release since that game has featured either Green Hill Zone itself or Green Hill related imagery like Sonic Lost World’s Windy Hill Zone.
Even Sonic Frontiers, which was touted as a bold new direction for the series, couldn’t help shoving Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and Sky Sanctuary into the Cyberspace levels, levels that were already featured in Sonic Generations.
Izuka also commented on the game utilizing a simplistic story without cutscenes or text which is how Sonic stories in the genesis era were told. Izuka also comments on the game’s 2.5D art-style and how it will be used for gameplay purposes as well as aesthetic ones.
It is that 2D classic Sonic game, but because we’re using 3D models to create the world and the characters. We’re able to do things inside of that 2D gameplay formula that we couldn’t have done before. So sometimes it’s going to be sending the character back further into the world. Maybe it’s going to be turning the character, spinning the character in a way that we couldn’t really do with the classic look and the pixel art. Or it could be a boss battle that we’re going to have in this kind of 3D space. There’s all these things we can do because we have 3D models, even though we have a 2D game style and a game format, we’re able to play around and do things that the classic Genesis and Game Gear titles couldn’t do.
All in all this is a good sign that while Sonic Superstars is going back to Sonic’s roots it won’t be afraid to try new things.
About jmaldonado
A recently graduated creative writer hoping to work his way into the greater gaming sphere.
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kingbroly
10M agoI want to think that Sonic Mania showed up Sonic Team so bad that they actually start making quality games again, but so far it's very debatable.
mlt-malavida
10M agoIt kinda looks like the NSMB series aesthetic, very clean 3d models and background. It looks really nice.
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