Absolutely incredible, the perfect send-off to the Genesis and its philosophies. We got incredibly flashy animations and immaculately colored background, good-ass music with the crunchiest vocal samples, a weird little guy in a world of other weird little guys, and a willingness to change up level design to keep things fresh throughout the entire playthrough instead of just slight iterations on similar level ideas. Carries the spirit of Sonic in that way, but comes out a lot more consistent and even better presentation wise IMO. I always loved how act 2 of a Sonic zone could always be really different from act 1, and this game takes that even further where the 2nd "act", while still carrying a similar theme or idea, basically feels like an entirely new level that has its own great ideas. The grabbing mechanic really opens up how you can interact with and traverse levels, where someone skilled enough can go anywhere they want, making hunting secrets more fun than other 2D platformers with big levels (I love that in nearly every case if you climb up a giant wall by repeatedly grabbing it you're rewarded with a gem). The difficulty balance here is also just right, demanding in a lot of places but also consistently rewards the player with health pickups and lives so as to keep them motivated. I noticed several moments of intense levels or boss fights being followed by a level that, while still challenging, is more lenient and slower-paced, which again helps with motivating players to keep going.

Some bosses, especially the final one, feel like really mean difficulty spikes but here's a really important pro-tip for the final boss: in the second phase, when he does those lightning attacks that can kill you in one frame, before he does one just start spamming grab to the upper-right and 9 times out of 10 you'll successfully grab him and he'll do the black hole attack afterwards. During that, you can spam grab to stay in one place. With these two tricks, you can make the second half of the final boss pretty easy. But I was losing my mind trying to beat it without this knowledge, and felt really good over being able to find all this without consulting a walkthrough. Like I said, just the right amount of challenge. Hoping to come back to this and beat it with no save states, which I did use for stuff including the final boss. Speaking of bosses, I like being able to absolutely destroy certain bosses by grabbing them over and over again fast enough where they can't even let out an attack. Some may consider that to be broken but I prefer that over some "wait your turn before your first of ten hits" bullshit.

We gotta bring Ristar back. Any time I play a fantastic old 2D platformer that hasn't had any new installments in ages I remind myself that Bubsy was able to get two and feel like weeping.