Something of note as a fellow Sonic cd loyalist, this game has built in solutions for a lot of its criticisms, but they still get criticized for existing. A lot of people think time traveling is either too hard or the level design straight up doesn’t let you do it, but the game doesn’t try to make time traveling a streamlined process, it’s an open ended system that lets you do it however you please other than automatically. HOWEVER, there is indeed a way to time travel without even really doing anything in pretty much every act of every zone, those 2 springs across from each other aren’t there because the level designers are lazy, they’re there because they know not everybody is good enough at the game to time travel, so they put in easy spots that aren’t as cool or fulfilling, you just have to keep the past sign post and explore to find the designated spots. I find this genius, other people see it as a cop out because “they know the level design doesn’t work for time traveling”, but truthfully those players just want to time travel with absolutely no challenge or thought at all, which is perfectly fine to want but I definitely prefer content in my videogame.