Being able to cancel the super forms freely is the key to this. In Superstars, Super Sonic is less a transformation and more an invincibility monitor you can turn on and off at will. Press Factory 1, go super and smack the boss while he's electrified, then cancel out and save your rings.
I wholeheartedly endorse this opinion. I'm not a really fan of how "friendly" the Superstars aesthetic is. Feels too much like a Mario imitation (not as bad as Lost World, though). It's not bad, it just feels a bit plastic-y and generic. I like the characters to have a bit more personality to them. In general, Sonic 4 Episode 2 is hugely underrated IMO. I seem to be in the minority on this, but I love the art style, and the general aesthetic feels like a natural evolution of the Advance series. It's a decent template for how a really good "modern" 2D game could look. It'd be great if the series could stop consciously dividing itself between classic 2D / modern 3D.
hah, reading this just made me remember about how Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee look the way they do explicitly because the devs wanted the game to look "safe" - that is, when a parent walks into the room and sees their kid playing the game, they would be put at ease. I wonder if there was a similar philosophy here on some level?
I like that the game wasn't afraid to draw from older, removed/unimplmented concepts in the series but given you've got a reasonable shot of being right in that, they needed to return the metal sonic 'jumpscare' intro somewhere they had in some of the first stage of Knuckles' Chaotix prototypes
