This may be the best mega man game ever.
Okay so:
1. The levels are godly they're so well designed and are an absolute joy to play, they're brutally hard but never feel very unfair which always makes me have fun with them and they really help shine a light on how good the weapons are in this game
2. This game has the best selection of weapons in the classic series except for maybe 11 but I'm split on which one is better. They're all (except like Magma Bazooka) in my experience amazing and have so many different situations where they're useful. My preferred way to play is always to do Galaxy Man first since his weapon is insanely useful for like every other level.
3. The bosses are amazing. Every robot master feels fun to fight (shoutout to Tornado Man I love that fight) and the other bosses are great and a super fun challenge to beat
4. THE MUSIC IS SO GOOD just listen to it okay shoutout to Galaxy Man's theme specifically
5. Weird point but I love this games use of colour. It fills out a really nice colour palette in my head with all the robot masters having a distinct colour and their levels having really nice colouration. This is something I get very particular about I don't know why but this game NAILS it
It's peak...

It's not 2010 anymore we can stop pretending Jontron's video was a legitimate review of the game.

The controls are very responsive. Watching some people play, it seems like some don't know you can press a shoulder button to turn. Beyond that I have no idea what issues one could have controlling this game. The short length on top of optional collectibles gives different satisfying ways to beat the game. Could go for just the emeralds or you could get the emeralds AND the 5 coins while still having to win the race. Great for speedrunning.

It's not super balanced but come on, it's a Sega Saturn 3D platformer racing game not the next Esports craze. I actually like challenging myself with some of the objectively bad characters and still winning. On the off chance I get a 2nd person to play this with me it's cool I can handicap myself playing as Amy while they pick Super Sonic or something. And it's really nice the characters all are actually different in their own ways.

One of the best soundtracks in the industry. Just floating around with tails doll listening to "livin in the city" is a better experience than most things on this planet. And I struggle to think of a single album that's filled with exclusively bangers like this game's ost.

I honestly couldn't ask for more. Besides maybe more content but honestly only 5 tracks helps make it very replayable. Years later I got into Retroachievements and someone made a great set for this game that makes it feel a bit meatier relatively speaking so that's cool.

Love the graphics too. There really isn't a single thing I can really think to complain about. Nothing whatsoever I don't like. One of those games that proves a game CAN be perfect.

In all the time building up to this game and Mario Wonder, I have constantly argued about what "soul" means for a video game. To have a "soul" means to have substance, a reason to exist in the first place, something of inherent value. There are many games I would argue that have a vast "soul," Fallout New Vegas, Lobotomy Corporation, hell, even something like Tsukihime has some value buried deep down inherently. So the question then becomes, what does a game with no "soul" look like?

Enter Sonic Superstars.

While this game may have the facade of Classic Sonic down, it lacks any of the charm that makes any of those titles feel fresh and exciting. Every stage feels dead and lifeless as if they were put into an AI Sonic Level generator and shat out like pig slop; All the most generic and bland concepts. We have bitchless Green Hill, we have bitchless Chemical Plant, We have bitchless Death Egg Zone, everything so utterly devoid of true originality.

None of these stages brought any semblance of joy to me, even with the physics being relatively similar; going through these vapid, boring worlds left me tired and unhappy. While the game isn't offensively bad in the way that something like Sonic 4 is, it represents an arguably worse issue: Pure Unadulterated Mediocrity.

Starting first with the Chaos Emeralds, while the Special Stages are mostly mindless nonsense, the Chaos Emeralds have functions beyond granting you your Super State. Each Emerald has individual powers, a concept not seen since Tails' Adventure on the Game Gear. In theory, these would all be very cool, but in practice, almost all of the abilities are situational at best, and borderline useless otherwise.

What is the purpose of the Vision power when the game doesn't blatantly tell you to use it? Fucking nothing, absolutely nothing. The ability to turn into water is so situational, given that most of the areas in the game don't have water, and it isn't even that helpful when used. I guess the beanstalk one is helpful, but if you play Tails (like me), it doesn't serve much purpose. The ones I got the most use out of were the Screen Nuke (the first one you get for some reason) and the Slowdown Power. The slowdown power was helpful in particular instances in boss fights, and well, the Screen Nuke is part of why this game isn't even worse in my eyes because let's talk about the bosses.

Sonic Bosses have never indeed been the pinnacle of boss fights, especially in Classic, but usually, they were a relatively speedy process. Superstars decides to nix that and make it so that bosses can only be damaged at certain times, removing the strat of multi-hitting a boss that the older games and even Mania used. This results in fights where you must wait before you can do anything. Waiting in a Sonic Game, indeed, we have reached the point of stupidity I didn't think was possible. The Screen Nuke exists because it can essentially chain hits on bosses, annihilating them to make them less lengthy… Not that it matters because some of these later boss fights start getting so long you'd wonder if you're playing Sonic or a JRPG.

Not to mention this game still falls into annoying tropes I hate, like random shmup level near the end of the game that plays like shit and wastes your time. Hell, at one point in the final level, the game has you go through the same four level gimmicks in a row, like three fucking times, and then the next act have you do it all backward; I cannot make this shit up.

I'm sure all this will come across as foaming at the mouth, but you must understand I love Sonic. Sonic is my favorite platformer franchise, and I am so sick of seeing it fall back into mediocrity when games like Mania prove that this franchise can move forward. But here at Arzest, I can see the only thing being moved forward is level gimmick after level gimmick, hell there was even a Gimmick Programmer in the fucking credits.

There are other things I could say: Unlimited Lives is stupid, the character-specific and fruit stages are literal wastes of time, the music is forgettable minus the one Tee Lopes track, and every level looks boring.

The profound lack of soul comes from the fact that Sonic Superstars is what happens when you make a mass-produced Sonic game, gentrified Sonic the Hedgehog. All you have are some dull level concepts and a bunch of wasted potential.

To think I wanted to make a video comparing this game to Mario Wonder… I have to scrap it because it'd be like comparing a Coughing Baby to a Hydrogen Bomb.