[Open Assets] [v5.2] The Mystic Realm v5.2

have you ever played mystic realm? well i have, and if you haven't then save yourself and don't, let me tell you how bad this mod really is.

first, the level design looks like its from 20 years ago and has awful texturing and some levels are just mazes.

second, the difficulty is not consistent at all, jade coast and tempest valley might be really easy but then verdant forest comes in being a very confusing maze filled with enemies, flame rift act 1 is really easy but then act 2 is a huge mine field of enemies and right after that is midnight freeze zone, which is one of the easiest zones in the game and if you know where you're going you can easily beat the entire zone in less than 2 minutes and just when you thought the later levels are gonna be easy, you get hit with sunken plant which is by far the worst and hardest zone of this entire level pack, most of the level is extremely slow and it takes place underwater with a lack of air bubbles and a ton of enemies, death pits and hazards, right after that is aerial garden which despite its difficulty its in my opinion the best stage in this pack, as the name implies you're platforming on "gardens" over a massive death pit for most of the stage which is actually executed pretty well, but what isn't executed pretty well are the enemies, the entire stage has hordes of jetty-syn's that rush towards you and can knock you off a platform or just be generally annoying and they piss me off, i am glad they got replaced with hive elemental's and bumblebore's in the vanilla 2.2 secret stage, but the actual worst part is the boss fight which is almost never in your reach and keeps flying either way too high or way too low. now we can talk about the secret stages which are unlocked when finishing aerial garden zone act 3 with all emeralds, prismatic angel is a good zone and its a fun and challenging level while the second act is really hard i still found it enjoyable, mystic realm zone on the other hand is a really hard boss fight with multiple phases and takes way too long, it gets very chaotic very fast and is not that fun, the emerald stages aren't that bad but i often found myself getting lost and taking a lot of time because of that.

third, the record attack emblems, most of them are really easy such as the time and ring emblems for the main campaign stages, the emerald stages emblems are a little harder especially the time emblems but otherwise they're decent.

fourth, having to find shrines instead of emerald tokens is an interesting idea but the locations for some of them are just terrible and some have them in plain site but require doing a bunch of steps to reach, a great example is aerial garden's an starlight temple's shrines which require searching the entire stage for multiple buttons to unlock the gate preventing you from reaching them and nowhere does it tell you about this.

fifth, the only redeeming factor about this level pack is the music, i don't have much to say about it other than its good.

overall mystic realm is an outdated level pack with many flaws and even for its time it was not that great.

In contrast to what Shadey said, this old thing holds up surprisingly well despite not really having been actually updated (level design changes) for a Final Demo-ish level pack. Multiple paths is nice, and the new emerald collection method of Mystic Shrines is pretty cool. Though the true final boss is... pretty bad and tries to be way too hard, and Prismatic Angel doesn't have too much depth being platforming that is very cheeseable as Sonic + Tails, there's still pretty good levels here. Labr. Woods is a maze with well-designed clues to escape. Not saying other things here except the Bumblebores are a pain to deal with and Aerial Garden relies purely on death pits.
Great pack, but there are some problems. I get this is old but dude PAZ should've been better than this.

I played the hell out of Mystic Realm before 2.x dropped, and when 2.x finally came out, I was so disappointed in the new level designs, by comparison, I wished they had just cancelled it and called Mystic Realm the real version.

Yet everywhere I look are these posts dumping on it for being less inspired than new 2.x content. Baloney. It took the main team years to make a full level pack that had some semblance of the same quality, and it wasn't that good.

Mystic Realm is king. The only question for me, are the newer versions a downgrade because it keeps getting changed by the people who aren't happy with it?

One of my friends told me to try this mod, unfortunately, it was not up to my expectations. After completing the base game entirely, I can safely say that the levels and overall design of said levels could use some critical work, while it may be true that mystic realm was out at 2.0 or 2.1 era, which probably would be good at the time, does not hold up to today, If I may give suggestions, I think slopes in some of these levels would work rather nicely, such as some sections where they use stairs and some hills that requires jumps, some of the enemy placements and obstacles in levels could be better too. Out of all the levels Aerial Garden was the worst experience out of its entirety, sure its the last level, its supposed to have some challenge I presume, but the challenge does not seem fun and I do not really learn anything other than just having a very precise jump, as a Sonic player (Mainly cause i view sonic as the main experience of the game), Doing this kind of platforming kinda sucks, especially when you have to go max speed to reach certain distances. The final levels in the vanilla experience, like Egg Rock, I viewed as challenging, I died numerous times when I was a beginner, but there are cool things to learn from it, it has unique ways of designing traps and obstacles, which isn't presented in this mod. Some may have a distaste towards what I'm saying, I think this mod can have much more potential, but at its current state it feels rather boring and very short for my play style, please listen and learn from this.

For the first level pack for SRB2, it's still holds up till this day (in my opinion)