I had a lot of fun with this, far more than I was expecting. Did an encore mode playthrough this time and it was a great experience. Great level design that encourages speed and exploration. And the character switching added much needed variety to the levels. Bosses were easy though, just damage boost into them and you win always. Also the special stages in encore mode were kind of cancerous, if they had a restart button I'd do them all, but after trying the second one I gave up because it was too tedious to exit the level and return to the ring to keep retrying over and over again. On a positive note though, it has amazing music and the art style is so clean. I really hope Sega publishes a sequel to this which is fully original with no old stages, but there has been no news on a sequel so far which is worrying.