I couldn't remember which of the two Game Gear Tails games was the good one, and when I asked in a small discord channel I am a part of, Vee said Tails' Skypatrol was "peepee poopoo" and refused to elaborate further. Others I follow have left similarly vague assessments of Skypatrol, so it seemed like the only way I was going to find out why it's so reviled was by playing it myself, which I did via the Sonic Gems Collection. I also followed this up with a replay of Chaotix, Mega Man 7, and a no save states run of The Lost Levels, so I had what I like to call "a really bad weekend."
At first glance, Tails' Skypatrol resembles a side-scrolling shoot-em-up, which would make some amount of sense for the character. Tails is constantly flying forward and dies the second he touches the ground or a wall, but rather than presenting the player with wave after wave of enemies, each stage is built more like an obstacle course. You have to use Tails' ring to grab onto objects like rails, minecarts, weights, balloons and bars in order to fling him around hazards and through hidden areas, all while maintaining your flight meter by collecting mint chocolates. I think this should enter into Sonic canon the same way chili dawgs, Eggman's coffee, and Knuckles' grapes have (sometimes Knuckles lets the grapes ferment so he can get goofed up. It's a problem, but a functional one.)
The issue here is that the Game Gear's microscopic screen requires everything to be blown way the hell up in order to be readable, and considering every object you latch onto has a habit of sending Tails careening towards the edge of the screen at high speeds, navigation starts to become a matter of trial and error. Poor screen real estate piles on top of bad controls, lousy stage design, and grating music. It never improves and by the end of the first level you'll have a solid understanding of what makes this game so miserable to play. Funnily enough, the first two stages are also far harder than anything in the second half of the game, so add poor difficulty balancing to the list of grievances, I guess.
Aesthetically, the only thing bearing any similarity to Sonic the Hedgehog is Tails himself. There's no rings or chaos emeralds to collect, no badniks or other familiar bits of Sonic iconography. Even Witchcart's gang is so decidedly un-Sonic looking that when they showed up in the Archie comic series, they were so drastically redesigned to fit in with everyone else that they played more as fun references than genuine inclusions.
This all starts to make sense when you consider that Skypatrol was never intended to be a Sonic game to begin with. Rather, it was being developed for an unannounced handheld that was meant to compete with the GameBoy, but when the hardware was scrapped, Japan System House moved development over to the Game Gear, which had similar specs. Development for the game was apparently complete and potentially had ties to Disney (Tails is shown fighting Pete in pre-release footage), which provides some context as to why Witchcart's gang looks the way they do. Programmer Alice Kagamino was asked about this Disney connection on Twitter, and while she could not confirm specifics, she did clarify that character designs did not change much between builds.
Regardless of the fact that Skypatrol was retrofitted to be a Sonic game, it's still not very good. A real Star Fox Adventures scenario where the core game is bad anyway. There's some good ideas here, though, and it's not hard to envision a version of Skypatrol that has a satisfying sense of flow and more screen space to breathe, the problem is that these concepts are wasted by committing to hardware that is inherently too limiting.
To put it another way: this game is peepee poopoo.
At first glance, Tails' Skypatrol resembles a side-scrolling shoot-em-up, which would make some amount of sense for the character. Tails is constantly flying forward and dies the second he touches the ground or a wall, but rather than presenting the player with wave after wave of enemies, each stage is built more like an obstacle course. You have to use Tails' ring to grab onto objects like rails, minecarts, weights, balloons and bars in order to fling him around hazards and through hidden areas, all while maintaining your flight meter by collecting mint chocolates. I think this should enter into Sonic canon the same way chili dawgs, Eggman's coffee, and Knuckles' grapes have (sometimes Knuckles lets the grapes ferment so he can get goofed up. It's a problem, but a functional one.)
The issue here is that the Game Gear's microscopic screen requires everything to be blown way the hell up in order to be readable, and considering every object you latch onto has a habit of sending Tails careening towards the edge of the screen at high speeds, navigation starts to become a matter of trial and error. Poor screen real estate piles on top of bad controls, lousy stage design, and grating music. It never improves and by the end of the first level you'll have a solid understanding of what makes this game so miserable to play. Funnily enough, the first two stages are also far harder than anything in the second half of the game, so add poor difficulty balancing to the list of grievances, I guess.
Aesthetically, the only thing bearing any similarity to Sonic the Hedgehog is Tails himself. There's no rings or chaos emeralds to collect, no badniks or other familiar bits of Sonic iconography. Even Witchcart's gang is so decidedly un-Sonic looking that when they showed up in the Archie comic series, they were so drastically redesigned to fit in with everyone else that they played more as fun references than genuine inclusions.
This all starts to make sense when you consider that Skypatrol was never intended to be a Sonic game to begin with. Rather, it was being developed for an unannounced handheld that was meant to compete with the GameBoy, but when the hardware was scrapped, Japan System House moved development over to the Game Gear, which had similar specs. Development for the game was apparently complete and potentially had ties to Disney (Tails is shown fighting Pete in pre-release footage), which provides some context as to why Witchcart's gang looks the way they do. Programmer Alice Kagamino was asked about this Disney connection on Twitter, and while she could not confirm specifics, she did clarify that character designs did not change much between builds.
Regardless of the fact that Skypatrol was retrofitted to be a Sonic game, it's still not very good. A real Star Fox Adventures scenario where the core game is bad anyway. There's some good ideas here, though, and it's not hard to envision a version of Skypatrol that has a satisfying sense of flow and more screen space to breathe, the problem is that these concepts are wasted by committing to hardware that is inherently too limiting.
To put it another way: this game is peepee poopoo.