Izuka and one of the art directors from Sonic CD & Knuckles Chaotix is on board & overseeing production on the game. They are even helping Taxman & Company with the original zones appearing in Mania!
Okay, that's great, thanks! I was worried it would be a case of Sega basically turning a fangame into an official release (like Capcom did with Street Fighter X Mega Man) but if people from Sonic Team are helping with things beside production, this is great news to my ears.
Eh, with the way Sonic team changes staff and the inconsistent quality of their games (apart from being consistently bad-mediocre) I'm not sure what them being attached adds. I've been wishing for someone else to make a Sonic game for a long time because Sonic Team keeps pushing for changes that I feel make the games worse.
The person most responsible as far as I'm concerned for the success of Sonic was Hirokazu Yasuhara, who was the main game planner and level designer for the Genesis games as well as director. His amazing knack for game design is what made Sonic great, and his departure coincided with Sonic's fall in quality. Level and general game design got way worse and the series lost focus.
Takashi Iizuka started working on Sonic games with Sonic 3. He took control of the series following that, becoming director of Sonic Adventure. I consider him responsible for a lot of the bad decisions made with the series. For example, in an interview about Sonic 4, he said this:
"As you know, Homing Attack was an action featured from Sonic Adventure and it didnt appear in the classic series. In Sonic 4 the Homing Attack is added, and this provides sense of speed that none of the classic series have."
Everything that Sonic Team has been involved with time and time again has taught me they don't get classic Sonic. I'm just happy they finally hired a team that does get classic Sonic. I just hope they don't try to force homing attack and boost stuff into Sonic Mania.
I actually don't mind this one too much, if only for playing like a ghetto Panzer Dragoon game (Wasn't there a scrapped dragon boss for this bit? A PD tribute might have actually been the intent of Sky Chase), which is far more inoffensive than practically every other Sky Chase variant in the series.
The problems with Sonic Adventure's Sky Chase is it has no challenge whatsoever, it's too long, and they make you do essentially the same level twice. Well, 4 times since you have to do them in Tails' story, too.
I think it would work as a bonus stage where you have to collect rings, though.
Oh yeah, these too! They added such a nice bit to the progression of the game.
What surprised me was the artwork for the map in Lego Dimensions:
It's basically Angel Island, but it has Green Hill Zone, Aquatic Ruin Zone, Chemical Plant Zone, Sandopolis Zone, Ice Cap Zone, Lava Reef Zone or Red Mountain, and Carnival Night Zone.
When I first saw it I was shocked because I had an idea for something pretty much just like this for a way to make 3D Sonic work. Basically every Zone would have an open world adventure platforming act and a linear platforming act. the linear acts would connect the open world acts and gradually transition between the two. I had the idea of starting out in a Green Hill type open world act, opening the path to the linear act, and then the linear act would involve a river being polluted by chemicals from a chemical plant, which would be the next open world act.
