Sonic Mania Plus: How to Change Characters (Encore Mode)

How to Change Character in Sonic Mania Plus (Encore Mode)

In Sonic Mania Plus’s new game mode, Encore Mode, you’ll be able to play with all five characters together as a team to take on Dr. Eggman and the Heavy King. You technically only have one life, but as long as at least one of the five characters is still up and running, you can keep going. If you get hit with no rings, the character you’re playing with will drop out, and if you keep that up until everyone is gone, it’s game over.

Let’s explain how character changing works in Sonic Mania Plus and how to change characters. You start Encore Mode with two characters, and after that, you obtain new ones such as Tails, Knuckles, or Ray by finding what was formally 1-UP boxes around a level. On the bottom left of your screen, you can see who is currently active (you can only use two characters at a time) and who is next up to take over if someone goes down. If you don’t see their first initial there at all, that means they haven’t been rescued yet. Again, finding the 1-UP boxes will bring them back. An important note: getting 100 rings doesn’t do anything in this mode.

In order to actually switch one of your active characters with someone on the bench so to speak, you’ll need to find new character swap boxes which are pretty common for the most part. When you hit one of those boxes, whoever you currently are using will be swapped for the next character up to take over. If you find a (?) box, that will randomly swap out two characters. Those are a little harder to find.

If you want to switch your currently controlled character, with the other one that is active. Simply press Triangle, X, Y (PS4, Switch, Xbox One). If you hear an annoying “boing” sound, it means that either you don’t have any to swap to, AKA you’re down to your last character OR the character is currently off-screen and cannot be swapped. If the problem is the latter, come to a complete stop, hit the swap button, give it a second, wait for the character to catch up, and then hit it again and that should do the trick.

That does it for how to change characters in Sonic Mania Plus’ Encore Mode. Be sure to search Twinfinite for more guides, trips and tricks.