Now... we can move on to the Worlds. The worlds are separately themed areas with multiple stages within them. Each one has somewhere around 30 stages, give or take, and has an entirely separate look to them from other worlds. The first world is basically desert ruins, while the second is prehistoric, and so on. While the worlds have some pretty decent themes, in the end every stage is played the same, and most separate stages per world are just like the other stages. The biggest change is generally a lengthening or shortening of the track, with identical layouts. From what I can remember, each world only has about three or four different actual types of stages. The standard that’s repeated constantly, a more dungeon-like stage that loops, and the boss area. With already excessively repetitive game-play, this stage repetition does not help the game. At first, it’s not bad, but after a short time it begins to openly annoy.

The storyline is also... basically trash. It’s not so much the story itself that’s bad, but rather, how they execute the story. Robotnik/Eggman takes a major back-seat in this game, having almost no purpose, and instead is replaced by an evil, straight-razor weilding Genie who lives in a floating Palace. To assist you, is the Genie of the Secret Rings, a female genie who is very gentle but never really gives that much assistance. She mostly serves to move the story along like a silent narrator.

But like I said, it’s how the story is executed. Other than maybe two or three throughout the entire game, all the cutscenes are still images that are extremely dull-coloured (as though they are in an ancient book), whose only movement are little character cut outs that slide slightly. This is accompanied by excessively long, boring text that feels more like someone wrote down a vague storyline late at night less because they cared and more because they had to, and simply wanted to get it done.

Basically, the story is just thrown in to say the game HAS a story. Even StH attempted at a fairly in-depth storyline.