Unironically a god tier game. I'd dare to say that the dumb, edgy action is precisely what a random child like me got me hooked.
Wonder if this is the first game I genuinely bothered to master? It's not a full 100% completion, mind you - there are like 300 possible routes and nobody wants to play all of them just for a different ending title (although there were people who did), but I got to the true ending, and that wasn't exactly easy.

As a fun memory, my brother could control Sonic with a second controller and we played some of the levels together.