Sonic Mania Plus: Encore Mode Part 1: Green Hill Zone (4 Emeralds)

Compared to my Mania Mode playthroughs, I take a little more time than usual to explore the Encore Mode of the zones, but not all of the time.

I start out with Sonic and Mighty, but I can switch between them with a push of a button (Triangle in my case). You can't do this while you're in the air, but if your partner is completely off screen, you can also use this to call them to you.

You can find special monitors here that let you add the rest of Sonic's friends to your team. Each character counts as your lives, so it's Game Over if you lose them all. After gaining more characters, you can use a Swap monitor to switch in the character whose initial is the closest to your two active characters at the bottom-left corner. So if you're using Sonic with Mighty, and the "T" is the closest to their faces, you'll swap out Sonic for Tails, but Mighty will still be there.

After getting all 5 characters, Random monitors will then start appearing that can either do minor or major switcheroos to the whole team. I'll try to use this to my advantage to give each character some spotlight from time to time.

The basic layout of an Encore zone is the same as it was in Mania. What really changes are the placement of items, enemies, and other objects that you could probably place from Debug Mode. These changes may or may not take advantage of Mighty and Ray's new abilities.

This is VERY important, because Encore Mode also changes the location of certain big Special Stage rings. Take the first one you can find in Green Hill Act 2, for example. In Encore Mode, there will be a Fire Shield in its place. However, if you use that Fire Shield to burn down the spiky bridge up ahead, you'll discover a brand new Special Stage ring to enter into! The last one I could find in Act 2 is in the exact same spot of where it would be in Mania Mode, on the other hand. It REALLY varies. Just know that the Special Stages themselves are MUCH harder than the ones you find in Mania Mode.

Encore Mode also has its own useful Bonus Stage that puts you in a pinball table almost like Sonic Spinball. From there, you can use the Combi Catcher from Knuckles Chaotix in order to get more Rings, reset the table, collect shields or try to grab more friends!
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Besides all of this, and the fact that every zone has different colors, such as Green Hill taking on a sunset coloration, everything else is exactly the same, including the bosses, and the cutscenes that come right after them. Any brand new transition cutscenes you see here can also now be seen in the regular Mania Mode.