I was PRETTY satisfied with not knowing much about this until they released a trailer for that generations remake thing with Emerl in it and I was like wait why is Emerl here. What the fuck is going on with that. So I needed to play Battle to find out the all-important Sonic lore. Joke's on me I still have no clue what's going on with any of this shit.

Now, the GBA is a system with only two face and two shoulder buttons, so making an actual multiplayer fighting game on it could only be described as an act of hubris, which I love. The sprite work is fantastic, and it's probably fun to play with your friends if you actually all have GBAs and link cables and shit, a situation that I have never in my entire life encountered.

Actually trying to play the thing sucks shit, though. The idea of a game-original character that you customize by mixing and matching everyone's moves is actually kinda forward-thinking, and even Street Fighter is doing it now. But actually getting even a complete moveset onto your Emerl is a massively tedious undertaking involving grinding out hundreds of battles. And they're boring. Playing this game against the computer is boring. I'm currently unemployed and I still don't got time for this shit.

Story mode is very strange since you kinda switch between playing as individual characters and just Emerl, but it is a fun series and stupid little episodes where each Sonic buddy goes on a little adventure to babysit a robot. Everyone has fanfiction disease where their characterization is off and overly focused on like, one thing. Especially Amy, oh my god. She was bad BEFORE but this shit is just unpleasant.

I didn't actually play past Knuckles' story before getting bored so I read the game script on Gamefaqs, a guide which is mostly dedicated to the authors extremely angry arguments about the game's canonicity. It kicks ass and I recommend checking it out.

For a long time I couldn't figure out that you had to hold up to hang onto the pipes in level 2 so I couldn't figure this shit out at all, but now I understand. This is just exactly what you want, it's got the sick music and the sick ninja moves and I was basically able to face slam my way through it but I know when I look further in I'll kick it up to a 5/5 because I have barely any idea how to actually play it but I know there's a high skill ceiling. I've seen it. I've felt it. There's a block funtion I repeatedly forgot existed.

I guess the maze level is kinda like what the hell but not in a hugely big deal kinda way.

Addendum it helps that a friend beat this without even using Shuriken or dying recently, multiple times. So I'm here like well whatever problem I'm having with a boss attack I KNOW there's a way