Sonic series producer, Takashi Iizuka, who also attended this year’s Summer Game Fest has been doing a few interviews regarding the recently announced Sonic Superstars.
Starting off with Gamertag Radio’s audio interview, which you can listen to bellow:
Here are a few notes from the interview:
- Each of the 7 emeralds have their own abilities
- Mentioned abilities: water, avatar (both shown in trailer), spikes (mentioned by interviewer)
- 3D Special Stages are where you collect emeralds
- Bonus Stages based off Sonic 1
- There are specialized/easier special and bonus stages for co-op
- Wanted to do 4-player co-op for a long time, Iizuka (through translator) says was co-op “removed” from past games during development
- Wanted to maintain high-speed for all 4 players, doesn’t elaborate on how co-op will work (is asked about split-screen but Iizuka does not acknowledge that part of the question)
- Wanted to have surprising moments in each stage, Iizuka says this was lesson he learned from SA1’s development
- Eggman has “employed the mercenary fang” and they have an evil plan together. They are joined by an additional character we’ll see more of in the future
- They have been working on this game for “quite some time”, the dev team is busy trying to finish game
- Unfortunately, he does not give details on dev team members (even Ohshima is not mentioned)
IGN also interviewed IIzuka-san, who gave us a few more bits of info, this time assuring us that the game won’t feature old zones like Green Hill and Chemical Plant, but new zones instead:
“In Sonic Mania, Green Hill Zone changed up a little bit,” Iizuka said through an interpreter. “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.”
Iizuka-san also explained how Sonic Superstars is a return to the classics:
“One of the things we wanted to do is make sure we really had the roots of that classic gameplay solid. And I’m sure the classic gameplay, you’re playing as Sonic, you jump, you go into a ball and you attack the enemies. The very first thing the team did was went and replicated that classic gameplay down very precisely. So when you’re playing Sonic Superstars, you’re going through the core classic Sonic game loop. You’re running, you’re jumping, you’re getting into a ball, you’re defeating enemies and you’re continuing forward.”
Iizuka-san also mentioned to IGN that there won’t be voiceover or a lot of text in the story. Instead, the story will unfold simply by watching characters move around and interact with each other in between levels, similarly to the classic games.
Regarding the game’s aesthetic, Iizuka explains that using 3D models have enabled the team to do things that they couldn’t do in full 2D:
“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.”
Stay tuned to Sonic City for more Sonic Superstars News and Updates!
Source: Gamertag Radio, IGN
