Iizuka: “Sonic Mania Will Feature More Stages Than Any Classic Sonic Game”
A belated Dengeki Online E3 interview with Takashi Iizuka was recently translated to English, where we learned something about Sonic Mania’s zone total. It’s massive:
There are the most number of stages in the Classic Sonic series ever. For that reason I want to say, I try not to overwhelm you so much as to keep your enjoyment.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles, combined, had 13 stages. Sonic 2 had 11. Sonic 1 and Sonic CD had 7. So it’s certainly not out of the question that we may have, at the very minimum, 15 stages. And with there already being known that the ratio of new and old stages it 60/40…that’s going to be quite a few new stages.
This post was originally written by the author for TSSZ News.
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You don’t call it Sonic Mania for nothing! Just like Mickey Mania for SNES and GENEIS.
Hope is better then nothing.
Playing devil’s advocate, the translation uses the term “stages”, which could mean zones or acts, and maybe he wasn’t counting Sonic 3 & Knuckles as one game but two. If we look at acts, Sonic 1 had 19, Sonic CD had 21 (right?), Sonic 2 had 20, and Sonic 3 & Knuckles combined had 25-ish. Sonic Generations, for reference, had 18 plus 7 bosses. If Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles are separated, from Iizuka’s statement alone, all we can be sure of is there will be at least 11 zones plus a final boss.
Regardless, having over 10 zones is amazing. Can’t wait for August!
He might also be counting special stages.
Assuming the HBHs are exclusive to the brand new stages (based on what we’ve seen so far) There are, at the very least, 5 HBHs in the teaser image. If the 60/40 ratio is anything to go by, would mean we’ll have at the very least 12 full zones.
If they’re not counting S3&K as a single game, I’m quite confident with this estimate.
And now we need to know how long Forces will be???
Or rather how munch meaningful content does it have. Generations has a hour to a hour and half max without the bad filler missions. The avatar is ripe for filling the game with the most boring filler stages imaginable on top of eating into the time spent developing content for the two Sonic, I expect the two Sonic will get less content devoted to them than they had in Generations because of this. People will get excited at the aspect of DLC stages but I expect it will just be junk for the avatar to wear
That’s Sonic Forces. This is Sonic Mania.
I don’t know where I was going with that. Nvm lol
It would be good if they could manage to keep everything under warps until release, the response would be massive if turns out it does indeed have a record setting amount of levels that isn’t found out until people are actually playing it. I’m willing to trust Iizuka on this one, when he first made the comment about ratio of levels I remember Whitehead and co doing some wink and nudging not to worry about this pointing towards a high level count meaning there would be plenty of new zones.
I remember them saying more old stages than new stages. I don’t remember a mention of this ratio. o_O
Ooh baby this is gonna be good. I guess this was part of the reason they pushed it back: To have more time for the crap ton of other stages.