Mario fans when I show them try to show them actually good games like Sonic Superstars

one of my pet peeves is when people make dismissive, empty critiques like "this game has bad level design" with no elaboration. let me hit you with some facts: i've been playing the hell out of sonic superstars and it is CONSTANTLY fun. a little messy, sure, but messy in that way like sonic adventure ie where the whole thing's overflowing with creativity and vivacity. even when it's explicitly pulling from older sonic games it finds a way to spice things up... much like the beloved sonic mania. i'm just sayin'. in the first level alone (which is not green hill, hold your applause), you're bouncing between the (gorgeous) foreground and background and blasting up walls and around loops where like, the inside of the loop is facing you. it's badass!

i'd like to recant a statement from a previous iteration of this review and say that i love sonic superstars' boss fights. i don't believe a bit of challenge or obtuseness negates fun. the fang shmup fight is probably the worst, and like, even that one has some dope ass environmental stuff going on with the robot assembly and fang's little animations in the breaks between dodging his bullets. the keyword is variety. no part of this game is "samey".

now onto the real shit: superstars is SO SO SO pretty. the first thing that struck me was the sick way the rings would cascade towards you if you had enough when you took damage (not the first title to do that iirc but neat nonetheless). i could ramble for ages about how cool the levels based off of unused concept art are. and this is possibly the best the cast has ever looked in a 2d sidescrolly sonic. it's one of very few sonic games where you can play as classic amy- and she's the strongest character! her hammer jump is absolutely cracked and trivializes boss fights. a lot of people have also pointed out the return of fang, but MY favorite sonic superstars character is the New Girl trip. i want to give her a hug and a pat on the head. look at her dynamic with amy! truly the lovers of the century. it's nice to see amy doing anything other than thirsting over the blue boy for once. the other big Me Thing is, of course, the music. here lies perhaps my most egregious take: i love all of it. yup. all of jun's tracks. i live for that fake genesis snare. the boss fight theme is funny every single time. shit rocks. game rocks. i love sonic.

(if y'all are wondering why i posted this again, it got taken down cuz i broke a community rule. i have since edited the review)

edit: listen, if Cjer (follow them) and i had been able to play death egg as trip and amy we would have beat it in like 15 minutes. as it stands, i still enjoyed the final boss. wish i would have gotten to beat it instead of dying immediately in the winning run and watching cj crush it with one ring. during the credits sequence, cj was getting all the balloons and i was getting dragged along the back of the screen because i hadn't noticed it was interactive which i think is a good allegory for our entire playthrough.

I went back to go through these games recently and decided to finish this one properly since I left this one behind when I saw the mission system forced you to do side content to continue the main story and only played the other 3 Storm games instead.
And it's been both surprisingly better and worse on certain parts than I expected, easily the worst story mode of the entire Storm collection, this game has a total of maybe 5 or 6 cutscenes if you're being generous, with all of the story telling happening in text paragraphs during loading screens before the actual fights, but the 3 fights that have actual cutscenes are also possibly the coolest looking adaptations of those fights in any easily accessible Naruto game.
It's just a shame because 3 fights with cutscenes in a game that covers the entirety of pre time skip Naruto is just very very little and this leaves a lot of the build ups and smaller cooler moments completely out.

With that out of the way, there's tons of side content, so you have choices on what to go through to continue the story mode, since the Story is locked behind mission XP, which you can only earn by doing side content, the exploration in the open world is fun enough, collecting materials to do random fetch quests in the open world also doesn't get too old thanks to the game being fully achievement hunted in about 10 hours, achievement hunting is far from 100%'ing as actually all collectible achievements only go up to you collecting 50% of each collectible, which I was more than happy to settle for as getting actually all of it seemed to be a grind fest that'd require you to do way more than the game offers in terms of unique content.

It's a fun game to actually play, but it's hardly the best way to experience these arcs of the story and it's massively overshadowed by all 3 other Storm games after it that nail Story telling beautifully.