Sonic Superstars is so bad that it has me questioning the narrative of Balan Wonderworld.

Yuji Naka was famously booted off the Balan project by Arzest, an effort that supposedly involved former collaborator and creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, Naoto Oshima. Naka has since alleged that his ouster was the result of speaking out against the unauthorized use of fan music in one of Balan's trailers among other things, but a long history of abrasive behavior and eventual arrest for insider trading has cemented him as the villain in Balan's story. However, to see how poorly Sonic Superstars turned out has given me perspective on another of Naka's accusations: that Arzest was intent on putting out a buggy game and that he was trying to do his best to save it. I think the son of a bitch might've been telling the truth. Yuji Naka is being held as a political prisoner.

On paper, a classic Sonic game produced by series veterans Iizuka and Oshima sounds like a good idea. Even people with more functional neurons than me looked at Arzest's catalog and thought it might still turn out good. Great even. Sonic's pappy is back, it's a real meeting of the minds over there at Sega HQ. I'm sure they're both great guys, but I'm to the point where I think they're about as capable of leading a project as Keiji Inafune, they're so far from their lanes they're driving through a corn field. Nothing about Superstars captures the magic of the classic games or Mania for that matter, but instead parades around in its physics, no better at displaying reverence or understanding for the material it is inspired by than Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Any sense of spectacle provided by Sonic's speed is dulled by bad stage design and an overuse of set pieces, which are applied cookie-cutter between levels along with gimmicks and enemies, even those that might at first seem bespoke in the way a classic Sonic game ought to be. The creative bankruptcy is astonishing even when viewed in a vacuum, two whole zones reuse the same pinball trope and one of them even has an extra act. The last level's second act is just the first act in reverse, and watching the counter tick down from the seven minutes it took to complete act 1 made my stomach hurt.

Zones have an inconsistent number of acts, with some getting two, some three, and others one single monstrously sized act that can take as long to beat as a full zone. These single act zones play like a gamified lobotomy, with stage elements both unique and borrowed stagnating under their average clear time. Everyone who talks about Superstars likes to bring up how bosses can at times take as long to beat as a level, and this is both a true and fair criticism, but I think it's indicative of a larger problem the game has with its pacing.

You can speed these fights up somewhat by using one or two of your chaos emerald powers, and I do mean literally one or two. Most of these powers have such specific use cases that they're rendered all but useless outside of a small handful of instances, but the rush attack you get for collecting the first chaos emerald is good for getting two or three hits in the second a boss' invulnerability drops. That's my tip to you. Actually my tip to you is to not buy this game, and if you feel compelled to do so, smash all of your fingers with a brick so you cannot.

Superstars doesn't even get music right, man. Tee Lopes is credited among others, and you know how badly I'd love to say he's got another hit on his hands, but the dude just sounds like he's phoning it in on this one. I've never heard a single piece of music Tee has done feel quite so tired as some of what he's contributed to this game. Jun has also broke fucking containment AGAIN and is still pumping out dogwater 10 second loops that sound as close to real Genesis music as La Croix does to flavor.

There's a lack of cohesion across the entire soundtrack which also bothers me. You go from Tee's stuff to Jun's mess and then a bunch of other composers that are churning out crap that sounds like Mr. Blue Sky with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (this joke was submitted by Appreciations, age 9.) At least if you buy this game on PC - which, again, you should not - you can mod the soundtrack so it actually become listenable.

When Superstars was announced, I made a comment that the game looked like some tripe you'd download off the app store. I got pushback over this and changed my tune so I could fit in, a little lie I told because I didn't want to seem like an annoying pessimist. I should've held my ground because Superstar's art direction is pretty flat and its fidelity weak. Some zone have backgrounds that, without hyperbole, look like Nintendo 64 textures. I'm not even sure what I'm looking at here.(source.)

Iizuka recently made a statement that "pixel art isn't viable", and that does speak to an uncomfortable truth about how consumers view sprite-based games. Take a look at the Game Awards, which faced controversy after Nexon's Dave the Diver got nominated for Best Indie. A cynical assessment would be that it got the nom because it uses sprites and sprites = indie which means you can't reasonably charge full price. Counterargument: nothing about Sonic Superstars is worth 60$, it looks bad and plays bad too. I paid 35$ because, true to form, Sega put this out near Black Friday and their games drop in value faster than the coconut that hit me in the head and made me think it was still worth buying for nearly half price. I bought Sonic Mania four times, I'm willing to shell out for sprite games that I think are good, I am straight up mad I paid 35$ once for Superstars and I think I should be allowed to grab Oshima and shake him by his ankles until I get every cent back.

So, yes, you could say I went into this with some pretty negative biases. That's a fair criticism of me, the player. The fool, as it were, stepping in big mud pies for the amusement of everyone else. But somehow, Superstars managed to sink even further below my expectations. I thought I might walk out of this a little poorer, but that I may think the game is a 2.5. You know, mediocre. Didn't think I'd have a great time, but had no reason to believe I'd like it less than, say, Knuckles' Chaotix or fucking Sonic Frontiers. I didn't just step in another mud pie, I slipped on it and fell head first into a ravine. I got a neck brace on and I look all fucked up now.

You hurt me. We're not friends anymore.