Complete step up from Sonic 1 and a solid platformer overall. Much better zones this time around, though I feel the fun zones are more stacked towards the 1st half of the game. The Special Zone minigame is better than Sonic 1's, but its no Blue Spheres. Playing as Tails actually adds nothing to the game, as he's identical to Sonic gameplay-wise. Sonic 2's length is ideal for any given Sonic game, and Sky Chase was a cool breakaway from the gameplay loop. The final zone was sick and the final boss kicked my ass as a kid.

Not my favorite 2D Sonic but its easy to see why its other's favorite.

Honestly one of the best 2D platformers ever. It's dampened slightly by a terrible bit of late-game levels (my playthroughs tend to end after Oil Ocean), but not enough to dispel my overall enthusiasm for this game. I don't even mind the special stages, because at this point they're practically permanently etched into my brain.

When I was younger, I thought Sonic just wasn't for me. I'd tried and failed many times to get through the first game, but always stopped at Marble Zone. I might have even said once or twice that Sonic was never good.

Sonic wasn't good. At first. Until this game.

This game owns.

I beat this game on an iPhone when I needed games to play on my commute to work a few years back. Just like I thought it would, to me it feels like an improvement over the original. The soundtrack is better, the flow is better, the finale (which took me quite some time on that touch interface) is better, etc. Aside from the Chemical Plant Zone boss where you keep falling through the floor most of the difficulty is fair and can be overcome through trial and error and learning. And compared to the underwhelming end of the previous game, this game's end stretch felt quite challenging and rewarding. If I could think of one issue I did feel like I could skim through some of the levels way easier than some of the original Sonic levels which means I may have missed more stuff by not taking as much time, and it also means some levels might be a bit too easy to get through, but that's more towards the beginning. But that also means that the game does a better job of emphasizing Sonic's fast flow.

So overall I think Sonic 2 builds well upon what the first game did.

Chances are that if you had a Genesis back in the day then you already played Sonic 2 no questions asked. Hell you know when you played this game too much when you can go super sonic against the first boss without any cheats. Sonic 2 is a very different beast compared to 1 but not only it payed off for Sega, it created the rough blueprint of a 2D sonic game. The second player had very little impact on gameplay unless you went real slow but it was really good if you had a sibling or someone else to play with that was not really skilled in the game. Good game all around for that time.