I was frustrated with the game during my Oil Ocean crisis, and felt like this type of save system shouldn't be implemented in games anymore. So, should Sonic Mania save your progress right before the boss fight? I thought so initially. Both Sonic Mania and Shovel Knight choose to challenge you sometimes, but Sonic will punish you harder if you lose. There's a difference between challenging and punishing. Saving the player's progress right before the boss actually allows designers to make the boss more difficult, because the player is allowed to practice the fight as often as he wants. However, since I had a checkpoint right before the fight, I could continuously practice fighting him and I didn't get frustrated at all. He absolutely crushed me and I consider him much harder than the Oil Ocean boss. One of the bosses that gave me the most trouble in recent memory was the plague knight in Shovel Knight. Other games have a different approach to challenge. I'm guessing the percentages, but you get my point. I was trying to learn how to beat the boss, but had to spend 90% of my playtime beating levels I've already beaten multiple times, and 10% practicing the difficult part. My problem was that Sonic Mania let me practice a couple of times, and then sent me way back. But the only way to master something is by practicing, learning from your mistakes and trying again. I like it when a game says – you're going to have to master this challenge to progress. The thing is, I want to get good - at the part that is difficult. And it wouldn't help if I testify that I usually enjoy challenge in games and consider it an important part of the experience. Now, I know that as soon as someone starts complaining about dying in a game, someone will come and suggest that they "get good". On top of that, this zone was my least favorite in the game, so having to play through it again and again wasn't my idea of a good time. The boss at the end of this zone felt not only difficult, but also unfair and poorly designed. The Oil Ocean zone is where I hit a wall. Even if I was occasionally frustrated after losing to a second act boss, the levels in Sonic Mania were generally fun to play through the second time, and I never got stuck for too long. There's a significant difficulty spike right at the end of the unit.ĭuring the first 8 zones of the game I found this arrangement to be manageable. The smallest unit of progression in the game, the zone, is quite big by modern standards.Ģ. We have two things here that are potentially problematic when mixed together:ġ. I would like to focus on the scenario where this boss is difficult. It could be easy, or it could be quite difficult. Then we have the second act, which is usually not much harder that the first, and finally the boss in zone 2, which is kind of a wild card. The bosses at the end of the first level are on the easier side, so the difficulty spike there is rather small. As long as you have at least one coin, you won't die by taking damage. The levels in Sonic are usually quite forgiving thanks to the damage system. Let's analyze the difficulty curve for a typical zone. The zone is essentially the smallest unit of progression in the game, since anything other than beating a zone doesn't count as progress that the save system would track. Since each zone consists of two levels, a game-over during the boss battle of the second level means that you must play through two full levels before you can have another go at it. When you run out of lives in Sonic mania, you're sent back to the beginning of the zone. The game was pretty much everything I expected, until I had my first game-over during a boss battle, and I realized it might be a little bit too faithful to the original games. When Sonic Mania was announced, I was excited to relive this part of my childhood with a new game that stays true to the original formula. My best friend growing up had a Sega Genesis and we played Sonic games to death on it.
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