Análises recentes de msElboim

Fun little game, although it can get repetitive. I wish you could move faster after some endings.

I'm a simple reviewer. I liked a game so I recommend it.

I recommend it.

PL@Y |T N()W#!1

Good:

+ Classic JRPG feeling
+ Unique Potions=EXP mechanic
+ Outstanding music
+ Fun and addicting gameplay
+ English dub is surprisingly not embarrassing most of the times
+ Subaru

No good:

- No official Japanese voice acting (although there's a mod that fixes this)
- Most of the lines have no voice acting in both Japanese and English (although the English version has much more voice acting)
- A little old (graphics, controls, pacing, etc)
- You can get "stuck" once or twice, when the game wouldn't let you leave an area until you poke around and figure it out

I played the original in Japanese when it came out 9 years ago, and loved it although I understood almost nothing. I started playing and immediately remembered the addicting feeling of running through a dungeon and collecting everything I can. This game is pure fun for me, and it's great that now I can understand everything.

Recommending this game is very complicated. I believe it will be hard for players who are not hard-core fans of the retro Sonic games to enjoy this, and I will do my best to explain why. But overall, it is recommended only to those who have played the original Sonic trilogy and loved it.

What I played: Main story as Sonic & Tails, Tails solo and Knuckles solo. I got 5 Chaos Emeralds with each characters, and around ten unlocks through the Sonic 3 Blue Orb Special Stages. I watched the rest on YouTube (other endings, etc).

What I liked:

• + Wide Screen.
  
• + Outstanding pixel graphics and animations, especially in the new zones.
  
• + Outstanding music, especially for the new zones.
  
• + The intro is amazing.
  
• + New Blue Rings item is cool and feels rewarding.

What I didn't like:

• - A delay of two weeks for PC users only, which was probably just to add a DRM. I felt a slight delay every time there was a transition between Act 1 and Act 2 of a Zone, which might be a DRM check. I could be wrong here and it could be fixed, but it did bother me during gameplay.
  
• - Sonic sprite is "fat" and weird, and the "ninja run" looks horrible. I liked the Sonic 3 sprite better.
  
• - The Special Stages from Sonic 3 are long and tedious, and only reward you after the game and not during the game. After doing some I tried to evade the rest.
  
• - The Chaos Emerald Special Stages control bad and are not fun. The 5th one took me ages to complete, and I gave up on the rest.
  
• - The level design can be unpolished and unfair at times. Spikes, spikes, spikes - and they all look the same. Surprises that you cannot evade behind every corner. Some zones are Sonic CD level of unfairness. Too many mechanics, even in the new zones, are ripped from other zones in the Sonic series and just recolored to fit. Some are done so lazily that they are not even recolored, but rather just copy-pasted.
  
• - Unbalanced bosses. Some are too easy, some are too hard, some are just auto-scrollers.
  
• - Too many fade-out (sometimes between zones, sometimes between areas in the middle of a zone!). While some zones are beautifully connected like in Sonic 3, some are just connected with a lazy fade-out and fade-in, like in Sonic 1, or Sonic running while you have no control.
  
• - The Classic shield is in the game for some reason, although the Elemental Shields were suppose to replace it.
  
• - The new Air-Spindash move is not as fun to use as the Insta-Shield from Sonic 3, and after playing it for some time I didn't find many uses for it. You can use the Insta-Shield but only after unlocking it and only in a no-save run.
  
• - Annoying music plays when you take Speed Shoes instead of playing a faster version of the zone theme. And like the other retro Sonic games, it plays during Invincibility and Super transformations, cutting the beautiful zone music.
  
• - Too many ways to be crushed to death, and every time it happened it felt unfair or buggy.

Review:

My favorite retro Sonic games are Sonic 2 and Sonic 3&K. The reasons are, mostly, level design. The zones in these games are beautiful, and the colors of the badniks and tools in the zones match perfectly. Overall you enjoy the ride. Except for some last zones in both games, they mostly feel fair. When you die it was your fault.
My least favorite are Sonic 1 and Sonic CD, and again, it's mostly because of level design. In these the zones throw random things at you, hide badniks in the background by coloring them in a way that is hard to see, places spikes after a spring only to troll you, and uses rough and unpolished mechanics that do not work with the intended way of playing the game. Basically, they are unfair.

Instead of taking only the good stuff, Sonic Mania tries to take everything. It wants to cramp so many moments that it just can't decide. Every zone, even the new ones, is a fusion of 2-3 other zones from Sonic 1, 2, 3 or CD. Every mechanic is taken from these games and is recolored. Even the new zones use old gimmicks between new stuff. But Sonic Mania never stops to ask itself if a certain mechanic is balanced or fair or even if it fits the zone. It just grabs everything, and takes a lot of the bad stuff with the good.

Sonic 1 invented the idea of working to get momentum. Sonic 2 gave you free momentum on the ground via the Spindash, and Sonic 3 gave you free momentum in the air via the Elemental Shields. Sonic Mania never improves these mechanics. It removes the Insta-Shield in favor of the new Air-Spindash, which is just a shortcut of using the basic Spindash. It's fun to use, but doesn't make the game more interesting. At the same time, they left the classic Sonic 1/2 shield, which is completely useless since the Elemental Shields exist. Again, they just wanted everything, even if it's useless.

Rings disappear too fast after you get hit, so it's harder to survive in unfair situations, and like I mentioned above, being crushed is very common. Being crushed was never fun in Sonic games. It always felt buggy or unfair, but this time... In my first playthrough I died maybe once or twice by losing my rings, and more than ten times by being crushed by things that I couldn't see or evade. It always felt unfair and made me want to stop playing. The least fun I had was against a certain boss that was built around crashing you. That boss alone took me more tries than all other bosses combined.

But here's the most important feature that was missed: the bonus stages from Sonic 3. These bonus stages were SHORT and fun. You didn't have to win to get stuff, you just had to play one of three mini-games, which could give you rewards such as Rings, Extra Lives or Elemental Shields. This is the main reason for these bonuses - you could get which Elemental Shield you wanted, even when that specific shield wasn't in the zone. In Sonic Mania you can only get an Elemental Shield if it was placed in the zone for you. It's not there as part of the game, it's there just for nostalgia.
The Sonic 3 Orb Special Stages in Mania are long and tedious and never reward you during game, but rather give you unlocks and achievements after the game.

Lastly, the bosses. Some were so easy that I killed them before they even managed to attack me, but some killed me so many times that I wanted to throw the gamepad. Again, one specific boss can crush you to death in a matter of seconds with every move and is simply not fun. But here's the thing - it's not progressing right. One boss can be very hard, and the next can be very easy. If the first bosses were easy and the last ones were hard I could understand the reasoning behind it, but it's just a random mess.

The level design can be great at times, but can also be all over the place. It's like every zone was designed by another person. Except for a certain airplane ride and the last zone, I would like to replay only the new zones. All other zones were mostly just alright. Even though I would love to replay them in Sonic 2 and 3, I wouldn't bother with the Mania versions.

Also, a certain zone from Sonic CD should not have existed, at all, and there are no excuses for adding it to Mania. There's NOTHING good about this zone, except for the last boss, which is cute, fun and should've been in any other zone instead. The zone itself is a terrible task, and the mid-zone boss is the worst in the game.

For me, Sonic Mania was not as fun as I hoped for, and I can recommend this game only to true 2D Sonic lovers. Be prepared though, with all the good that is Sonic 2 and 3, there's also the bad that is Sonic 1 and CD.

It's a very good attempt though, and I can only hope that there will be more games like this in the Sonic series. Maybe next time SEGA will have the courage to try a real sequel with no cheap recycling.

I can't believe I paid money for this. This is not Season 3 of the Walking Dead, but rather a very disappointing side-story.

Although Javi is a fun character and I like him, I didn't like any of the other characters, and all of them felt like a bunch of idiots who just force themselves into trouble for the sake of pushing the story forward in an unnatural way.

This game is shorter than the first two seasons, it's boring, like always the choices don't really matter, and the writing is so bad I just can't believe I finished it, holding myself not to drop it and watch the rest on YouTube. Characters can say one thing, and in the next sentence say something completely contradictory, like every scene in the game was written by a different person.

This is a drag that no one should go through. Do yourself a favor and skip this one. Clem is also not a main character this time, so if you liked the first two seasons you won't miss a thing.

YES.

A waste of time. Watch it on Youtube.

One of those rare gems in gaming. This is the beginning of indie for me. Together with Braid and World of Goo, this is a masterpiece in our era.

It's a swimming Metroidvania, and if you don't know what that is, you might not like it. You need to search and explore and sometimes dive into dark waters that will kill you in an instant, but when you master the game (and cooking!), you will love it. It's a surprisingly deep love story, a great mechanic-wise game, has wonderful music and not as short as it seems.

If you're into Metroidvanias, this game is one of the best in the genre.

I've bought it on Steam only to have it here as well, and still waiting for the never-coming sequel.

If only the point-'n-click destination from your character was fixed, this game would be in my top 10. It's beautiful in every sense, and I've played every other Amanita design game because of it, but that small problem (which was solved on mobile!) tears it apart.

I cannot recommend it, but I will anyway - in the hopes that this will be fixed one day.

Explanation: You can only interact with things that are physically close to your character, and you walk pretty slow. So if you want to test something on a big screen, you have to walk all the way towards it only to see if it's interactable.