Honestly, Sega can just put this franchise out of it's misery with this wet fart of a video game to focus on milking Yakuza and it's probably for the better. I'm perfectly okay with just playing Sonic Mania for the rest of my life. Why do we keep on parading Sonic Team for these games? A developer who has shown entry after entry to have failed to learn their past mistakes? They have only become more uninspired with each title. Each and every Sonic fan who buys these titles are at this point being robbed of their hard earned money.

Inevitably though, Sega is probably going to contract Sonic Team to do a Sonic Adventure remake due to the high demand for it and Sonic Team will probably advertise the thing as a "return to the series roots." Like a former 80 year old college basketball star going to his neighborhood court to shoot hoops again to relive his past glory, when in reality he's just going to hurt himself doing so and the kids on the playground will probably point and laugh at him. That's Sonic Team for you. A worn out developer that's mocked for their outdated game design methods, and I will definitely be there when that remake comes out and turns out, unshockingly, to be a disaster.

Maybe having a Star Fox like progression system that makes you replay the game from scratch to get different endings wouldn't have been so bad if they didn't keep Sonic Heroes godawful control and handling, terrible level design and added braindead shooting mechanics to the game, and to justify them, the game makes you shoot at numerous enemies throughout the levels to progress, similar to Sonic 3D Blast, and just like that game, it's also just as unfun here. So the fact Sonic Team wanted you to experience this embarrassing edge lord story for the ages of 10 and up 10 times to get a "true ending" just adds to the suffering. No thanks.

Sonic 3 and Knuckles was my favorite Genesis game before I played Treasure's Alien Soldier and for good reason. Sonic Team did a rare thing here and actually learned the lessons from the development of Sonic 1, 2, and CD and gave us the most consistently fun 2D Sonic game. I think the game can trip up in areas such as Sandopolis zone, but overall it's easy to return to this game and have a good time where I don't revisit the other classic Sonics nearly as much, or even the 3D sonic games to be honest.