Easily one of my favorite Sonic games of all time. Is it perfect? No, it's flawed in a couple of areas, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I believe SA2 is a fantastic game that anybody who wants to get into Sonic should at the very least check out. The speed stages are some of the best gameplay the Sonic series has offered to date with solid level design and amazing controls. The treasure hunting levels despite the radar only going off one piece at a time, I can still enjoy these quite a bit given the great controls, as well as being able to take advantage of the level design to find the emerald pieces, not to mention the hint system is... an actual hint system unlike SA1 where Tikal just led you to the emerald's location feeling pathetically easy, I appreciate SA2's hint system because it requires you to stay focused and explore your surroundings in the level. The mech stages I enjoy, however they're definitely the weakest playstyle out of the 3, given the controls can be clunky as well as the enemy placement can be a bit cheap sometimes, despite this I think the platforming is fine enough, but where I really enjoy the mech levels comes in the form of locking onto multiple targets and scoring a lot of points as a result, this creates a risk VS. reward scenario where while you can lock onto many enemies, you also have to be careful not to get hit otherwise you won’t score the points or lock onto the enemies, however the reward being killing as many enemies as possible while scoring a ton of points feels pretty satisfying if you ask me. This further goes into play the ranking system, SA2 has easily the best ranking system in the series, with a solid skill ceiling that requires good play from the player, it's fun to rack up combos with the mechs, finding the emerald pieces early, or pulling off tricks in the speed stages. Another thing I appreciate about SA2 in comparison to SA1 is that it took the best gameplay styles from that game, trimmed the fat, and made the gameplay styles far more developed and in-depth. There’s also tons of extra content the game has to offer just like SA1, while not all of it is… well… good, I’d say that there’s still a lot of it that players can enjoy, and although I’ve never really been a big fan of the Chao Garden, I can see why people would enjoy this type of thing, even if it's not my personal cup of tea. While I can certainly see why somebody wouldn’t really enjoy SA2 that much in some areas, for me personally, this is a Sonic game that is heavily enjoyable from start to finish and an improvement over SA1 in practically every way possible.