So out of all the main Sonic games on the Game Gear, this is usually considered the shitty one. And having played through it for the first time in years just now, I have to say that it's not as bad as it's made out to be. It seems that one of the main goals of this game was to make something that looked like Donkey Kong Country. So this means a bunch of ugly pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds that haven't aged as well as the previous games in the series. And since Sega really wanted to make sure you saw how pre-rendered everything was, it's more zoomed in than any other GG Sonic game. Luckily, the developer did know that if they did that, then they needed to slow it down a bit so the player had time to react. While this definitely disappointed a lot of people, and I personally would have preferred smaller sprites and a faster game, it still feels like a Sonic game and for the most part controls fine. The main problem is the level design. Green Hill Zone and Yellow Desert Zone are really the only ones that are much fun to play, and Blue Marine Zone has to be the worst underwater level I've played in a Sonic game. And since this game only has 5 zones, this means 20% of the game's content is a frustrating, drawn out mess. The music isn't very good, though it's not terrible, but the boss fights are the best of the 8-bit games and finally feel like those of the Genesis game (my favorite is Robotnik in a Son Wukong robot, which was bizarre and awesome).

So is this the nadir of the GG Sonic games? No, I'd still say it's more playable than Sonic 2, but there still isn't much of a reason to play this when you could pick up Sonic 1, Triple Trouble, or even Sonic Chaos.