I've completed three or four randomizers of this game. I've lost count. Every time, there are two specific moments which I audibly say "oh fuck this game" out loud - it's either getting lost in Aquatic Mine (conveniently available as a first stage at least 2-3 times now), or it's when I have Shadow dramatically ramp off the first jump in Sky Rail, off the stage, into the kill plane, while the Chao Kindergarten music is playing, as Omochao starts talking about mating rituals, and Shadow reaches mach 5 to his death. Somewhere in the middle of this journey, my objections melt away as I figure out why the supposed boundaries of the game don't matter - I accidentally clip through a wall and realize I can use this knowledge to skip the Flame Ring. (Outer Wilds?? eat your fucking heart out???) A bunch of Chao drown themselves across a pond to the climatic Live and Learn, like their life depends on it. It does. By the end I'm on the verge of tears as Sonic says his heartfelt goodbye to Shadow: "NEED MORE MEMORY, BUD!"

What I'm saying is - even if you take this anxious mess of emblematic (ha!) 00's angst, cut it into scissors, smear a glue stick against a wall, chuck the pieces at it, then shoot an entire bottle of ketchup across it while blasting Jamiroquai, DMX, Pendulum, Streetlight Manifesto, and Foo Fighters all at the same time inside a moving car, it never crashes! You come out of it with a pending arrest warrant, but I swear it still ends up worth it and ready to go again. I don't know why! There's just something here, man. Something special.

The level design is so slapshot. Have you ever stopped running in the middle of the speed levels and looked at a broad view of what they... do? They're linear, and there are these big dash pads that they tell you to go this way, and the second you walk around one you look around and tell yourself "what the FUCK were they thinking?" Then the game suddenly jets Sonic in some direction because you happened upon the middle of some half-scripted segment, and the game asks you, "what the FUCK were you thinking?" But they probably realized people were doing this, so they made it non-linear by putting STUFF right in those sections. Instead of just moving along, eventually you're constantly looking for the places it fucks up! Guess what? There's SHIT there! Every time. There's a life! There's a lost Chao!! There's a fucking upgrade!!! There's a pipe in outer space and you whistle at it and a skunk pops out. God dammit. Brilliant.

This game is a pile of confetti ideas, and it's best every time you throw it up in the air and ignore the complete mess it makes. Suddenly you forget how the walker missions aren't designed around anything, and the emerald stages are horribly winding messes by choice, and the speed missions are designed around psychically predicting you'll be holding the analog stick in a particular direction even though the camera has no vestibular system, and that this jank is all desperately held together by tamogachis and kart racing. The aesthetic does a Weekend at Bernie's on the gameplay. The misplaced mix of edge and "what if we all just got along........." optimism shoots it through the fuckin door and into the horizon. It's incredible. I think about how much this game sucks every time I play it. By the end I'm laughing or crying. I can't tell which. I never care.

No one makes five different functional video games in one with umpteen different music directions starring an edgy antihero against jarring heavily-contrasted rainbow palettes. Why? Because it's stupid. And I love this stupid, stupid game so much.