Despite its cute style, this might be the most difficult Sonic game. You control Tails as he flies around with his ring gadget. You can throw this to enemies and interact with objects using it.

The screen will automatically scroll to the right, and you need to interact with objects like mine carts, weights, balloons and poles to get Tails into the right position. There are also enemies that shoot at you. If you touch the ground or ceiling, you die. When enemies hit you, Tails will spin out of control for a bit (and if he touches the ground, he dies). Some objects will also cause Tails to die. With how small the Game Gear’s screen is, you don’t get much time to react. So there will be a lot of death.

If that doesn’t sound bad enough, then you’re in look. Tails has a limited flight meter. If this runs out, you die. So you have to make sure you collect sweets to fill this up while avoiding everything else.

This game is difficult in a rather frustrating way.

One other odd thing is the boss design – they look like they were made for a different game, they look like characters from a toddler’s TV show.

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.

This game is strange. Everything about it is strange. When I first played this as a kid on Sonic Gems Collection, I thought it was going to play like a traditional sonic game, and was confused when touching the ground in the game meant death. Trying to play this like a platformer will leave you completely confused and frustrated, because this game is actually a shoot-em-up, with weird path-finding elements as you interact with objects to actually get tails to the places in the levels you need to go. The characters and bosses (besides tails) are all original, strangely designed, and never show up in any sonic media ever again. It's no surprise this is one of the extremely rare japan-only sonic games. I'm glad I can finally say I've completed this though, it feels good to breeze through a game that caused so much confusion and torment in the past. If you like sonic and can play by the games rules it's worth a play for sure.

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played on Retroarch

Next on my Sonic Marathon, ummm I don't really have much to say? It's like 15 minutes long, all the stages are the same. Difficult as hell tho damn they really wanted ppl to take their time with this game. Yeah that's about it, the screen crunch is annoying. I didn't hate it, but I didn't really care for it. Below average. Meh.

hey first tails solo game yayyy

You ever play a video game that you'd describe as "Nothing"? Tails' Skypatrol is one of the most "nothing" games I think I've played in a while, barely firing off a single neuron in my brain beyond the occasional thoughts of "This makes me want a Gradius III mod that replaces Vic Viper with Tails", and "Jesus fucking christ I can't tell what's in the background, foreground and the plain that contains objects that can kill me, why do foreground elements hide the flight meter?" Beyond that, I've barely felt more passive in a roughly 30-45 minute long gaming session.

Finally sat down to play this game and it was fine I guess. I think I like it more than most people seem to do but it’s an easy shmuplike game where you fly around and hit enemies and avoid obstacles. It’s fun for what it is but the biggest issues I had were the screen size issues the GG normally has and the lack of unique obstacles. I swear the game loves to use stuff like balloons, blue poles, weights, and minecarts in every level and it can be a bit repetitive and it’s a shame that’s all it usually has no matter the theme. Same goes for the enemies as while there are stage specific ones, a few enemies get used all the time.

Difficulty is quite easy in this one too as you can’t die from enemies instead hitting the wall or floor will kill you. You need to eat mint candies to keep your flight meter up which ended up killing me in the final stage. I’m also not a fan of how I basically had to stay on the bottom path to get mints and checkpoint bells. Bosses are also kind of boring as you just smack smack and smack some more until they’re down. You can throw them but I couldn’t figure out how to do that without doing it by accident. They also just don’t really look like Sonic characters though I have read this was supposed to be a Disney game early on.

The game does look nice for the Game Gear but the music is completely forgettable as it usually is for the system. It was done by Chikayo Fukuda and Kazune Hiiragi. Wish I could say any of it was that memorable but it’s just there and you’ll forget about it in a day probably. Really I just don’t have much to say here.

Tails’ Skypatrol is inoffensive at best for me. It does what it does well but the game is short so it doesn’t have much of a lasting impression. There can be fun here and there especially if you can go fast and get away with it but it just needs more variety and stages. This gameplay would never really catch on even outside of Sonic so sadly we’ll probably never see a refined take on this kind of gameplay. It’s not a game I’d recommend nowadays and surprisingly it’s still used in the canon for Sonic but that whole side of Sonic is messed up anyway. If you do decide to play it, it’ll be over before you know it!