I love you Tails, but you have disappointed me so. You might think silly of me to be let down by such a game. Even if a metroidvania with Tails using all his little gadgets and doohickeys is a really cool concept for a Sonic spinoff that gives my boy the spotlight he needs, this is still a Game Gear title after all, so naturally you’d expect something short of stellar.

But the thing is, this game starts off really good!! Apart from it taking me too long to figure out how to change abilities, the levels are fun to go through and Tails controls well. His movement physics aren’t bad and the flight option allows for some unique exploration challenges not typically seen in the genre to this day. I was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I was having!

It’s once you get a few levels deep do the cracks start to show. Eventually you are required to do a fair amount of backtracking, using your abilities to open the routes that you’ve missed. Of course, this should be fine in theory but I found two main issues:

Firstly, Tails can only carry 4 abilities at once, if you want to swap them out you need to leave the level you are in (by walking either all the way to the end or back to the start), then return to Tails’ House and swap them out. Obviously this kinda BLOWS because your time is wasted if you don’t happen to bring the right thing with you. It may have been a hardware limitation, or maybe it was intentional to pad out the play time, but if Tails simply had access to all his abilities at once, he would be able to spend less time faffing about for no reason.

Secondly, Alternate paths are often very camouflaged. You will certainly walk past a mostly regular looking wall without knowing that it could have been blown up with the 3rd or 4th bomb ability that you unlocked. In general, bad level design is more common as you get further into the game, so I resorted to a walkthrough and much more common save states for the second half.

Other than those fundamental problems, the rest of the experience was just alright, the item selection is half creative and fun (abilities based on Sonic, Knuckles and Fang are here!), but half useless or samey (which you probably won’t even entertain trying out because again, your slots are valuable). The story is simple and cyuuuuuute but nothing to shout about. Level theming is VERY underwhelming for a Sonic game (even if we do get to swim in a submarine), and the few boss fights are mostly mediocre with one or two cooler ones.

It may be because I spent more time in the levels but I thought the music was good and for sure one of the better game gear soundtracks! Some nice compositions here! I was a little disappointed to not find many covers / rearranges on youtube, rare sonic fanbase L, but this one I did find was indeed very nice.

So here I am disappointed purely because my hopes surprisingly shot up at the beginning, but it's okayyyyyyy... Tails Adventure may be very flawed, but it was a cool time and as a certified Two-Tailed Fox stan I am quite glad I played through it since it does carry my enthusiasm for his character very well. Safe to say we probably ain’t gonna get anything like this from SEGA again.