I loved this as a kid as I would play and beat this and then hook this up to Sonic and Knuckles because it was intentionally all 1 huge game with the Sonic 3. Best Genesis Sonic game out of the 3. Again this falls flat to the Mario Series.

Pretty good sequel. Not much added compared to the second one, but nice.

After the first Sonic game, I didn't see the need for endless sequels. And I wasn't a fan of the introduction of Knuckles.

Managed to evolve the series nicely from the first game with overall better level design than ever, great music and minigames and bosses and so on, the ability to save your game and even choose to play Tails too if you like.

*Michael Jackson yell*

Michael Jackson and Sonic: two beloved, popular figures who nonetheless managed to ruin the childhoods of innocent children

While this is a technical improvement in the sense that it gives you more abilities to work with that make for more interesting interactions with level design, the level design itself didn't quite sit as well with me. The gimmicks often took too much control away from you or were just outright unintuitive. The approach to the game was to make Sonic grander but not really better, so much of the problems Sonic 2 had are pretty similar here.