Beat the Dark and Last stories last night. Not too terribly much to add, as the characters are pretty much the same, just with different stages.
The Dark story areas for Rouge and Eggman felt like a step up from the Knuckles and Tails stages I guess, but weirdly enough I feel like it's because the Dark stages seem to have been "rushed," or at least given less attention. There's less of them and they're over quickly, plus Eggman doesn't have to deal as much with crappy instant death sand and dangerously placed dynamite on the Ark. Shadow's stages are weird, in that I'd argue only Radical Highway felt especially "strong," with the others feeling okay but not exceptional until he hit space (well, the Pumpkin Hill-esque stage made me angry with the goal ring floating off the ground, and I ran towards it thinking it would activate only to run off the edge and die. Bleh). The space stage, though, sucks. Those spinning poles aren't fun and they aren't programmed right (Shadow kind of tripped on them, especially the points where two of them met, in a weird, mildly glitchy manner), and they just HAD to add electric fences on them. The end in particular annoyed me, where you have to jump sideways off one and homing attack a spring, hoping the homing attack actually recognizes it at the weird angle and doesn't send you to your death instead. And the physics/controls in Rouge's final stage are atrocious. They were already bad on Sonic's flat surfaces in Crazy Gadget, and then they went and built planetoids. I'm not sure the game knew what the hell it was doing, seeing as gliding on the little planets sometimes worked "properly" and sometimes I was pretty much just flying.
The Last Story, though, is some crap. The time switches aren't fun and pretty much come down to trying to lock things just right and then if you fail wait to be able to activate again (the final Eggman room), and then also struggling with the camera/terribly slow swimming with Knuckles. The biggest crap was Sonic's segment, though. For some reason I either bounced off or got laser-beamed mid-air trying to hit that stupid artificial Chaos the first few times till I got a game over. Then I finally got it down, only to be messed with by the dumb sliding segment (the slide killing you if you go down it normally, then trying to land on the platforms for the time stoppers, then the camera flipping out when you go over top), leading to ANOTHER game over. Yuck. The Biolizard fight is also poorly thought out. The big issue is why the stage needed those little inlet areas on both sides of the ring, which because of the camera means you have to CONSTANTLY look for the gaps when he's moving. They either shouldn't be there or the camera should let you see them before they're right in front of them, because as is it's just the game highlighting the fact that the camera is your greatest enemy. The stupid bubbles also didn't play nice with the homing attack, and I found myself jettisoned into the boss's body WAY too many times.
Final Hazard isn't terrible as far as 3D Super Sonic fights go. It more or less works. The only weird things are the way that you can home in on the spots, but only if you TAP the acceleration when close enough, which isn't super intuitive, and the way the dialogue makes it sound like there's a switch button that (far as I can tell) doesn't exist.
The only other big thing I can think of is that the bosses are kind of a mixed bag. You fight the same (though according to the game not really) GUN robot too many times, and player character sized bosses suck as they almost always do in the Sonic series. At least they don't go down in 5 seconds like the bosses from Adventure 1. Though the final Shadow/Sonic boss fights deserve mention as a particularly crappy mess. They're so damn finicky trying to get a hit to land when they're not doing a super, which feels super rare and random. The biggest enemy is the camera, which WILL flip out and kill you if you try to repeatedly homing attack. Just a really frustrating, crappy boss fight.
In fact, the camera felt like it went the extra mile in the Dark/Last stories, and ended up as the cause of most of my deaths.
Oh, and it feels somehow silly the way "Sayonara" is said with perfect "an American would never say it like this ever" accent (did they rip it from the Japanese track or something, like with Knuckles' "Horahorahora!" and Eggman's constant "Yosh!"?)
