Now let's talk about the story. This game takes place between 8 Bit Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, and in the story Dr. Robotnik has stolen the red chaos emerald from south island to power nuclear weapons. Sonic now has to retrieve the red chaos emerald from Robotnik before South Island sinks with the help of Tails, marking the first time Tails was playable in an 8 Bit Sonic game.
There are only 6 levels in the game. Not zones, levels. This results in an adventure that lasts less than 15 minutes, which isn't a good tagline for a Game Gear title that costed full price at it's original release. The only thing to note about this game is that this was the last game released on the SEGA Master System EVER. Except in Brazil.
For some reason, the Master System is still the most popular gaming device over there after three decades. The people SEGA gave full Master System publishing rights to (AKA, the Brazilian government) are still pumping out games and producing consoles for a system mostly everyone in North America, Europe, and even Japan forgot about. That's the reason SEGA never seems to port their Master System games to newer hardware. It's because the Brazilian Government owns full publishing, production, and development rights for the Master System, including games SEGA made themselves!
Anyways, this game was released after the deal, heavily limiting supplies of the Master System version outside of Brazil, making the US or Japanese version of Sonic Chaos on the Master System one of the rarest video games of all time alongside Nintendo World Championship, Birthday Mania, Air Raid, and King of Fighters 2000. Luckily, this version was re-released on the Wii Virtual Console (RIP) and the Game Gear version is available as a hidden unlockable in every version Sonic Adventure DX as well as being found on the Sonic Mega Collection on Game Cube, PS2, and Xbox.
The gameplay is similar to the previous 8 Bit games with a few major differences. First, this is the first 8 Bit game is incorporate the spin dash introduced in Sonic 2. You can also do the Super Peel Out from Sonic CD, but why would you use a dash that doesn't damage enemies compared to one that does? The other change is the addition of Tails as a playable character, who is basically an easy mode.
Playing as Tails gives you extra lives and continues as well as infinite flight, basically making Tails an easy mode. However, Tails cannot enter special stages, which are new to this game compared to the previous two. This doesn't really matter, as chaos emeralds literally do absolutely nothing. They're literally just collectibles as they don't unlock a better ending or extra content. Sonic also has a power up that allows him to temporarily double jump, but that isn't really that important.
Finally Sonic Chaos finally fixed the problems found in the first two 8 Bit Sonic games, like not having rings against bosses and not being able to recover rings when you get hit. However, this isn't enough to save this game from it's extremely short length, it's biggest flaw.
Overall, Sonic chaos isn't really worth your time. It's a perfectly fine game, possibly better than the first two gameplay wise, but since it is the shortest Sonic game of all time, I would have to rate it a 6.5/10
Good
- The addition of the spin dash is really good.
- Tails is fun to play as, if a little OP.
- It's a decently solid Sonic game.
- The screen crunch on the Game Gear version is mostly fixed, as this game was developed for that system and not the master system.
Bad
- The level design is extremely simplistic.
- The game is extremely short.
- The special stages are bland.
- The addition of the super peel out is completely unnecessary.
- The master system version is extremely rare.
6.2/10
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