Sonic Advance
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 When Modern Sonic goes into the Classic Sonic gameplay and it gives an awesome result, unlike Sonic 4.
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Sonic Advance is a 2001 platform game co-developed by Sonic Team and Dimps and published by Sega for the Game Boy Advance. It was the first Sonic the Hedgehog game released on a Nintendo console with Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the GameCube, and was produced in commemoration of the series' tenth anniversary.
Plot
The story follows Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy as they journey to stop Doctor Eggman from taking over the world. Controlling a character, players are tasked with completing each level, defeating Eggman and his robot army, and collecting the seven Chaos Emeralds.
Why It Deserves Chaos Emeralds
- The game recreates very well the gameplay of the classic Sonic games (especially Sonic 3), and it's quite fun and also proves that modern Sonic can recreate the gameplay of classic Sonic well, unlike Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I.
- Tight and responsive controls, as usual with the Sonic franchise, as the characters will never ever be unresponsive, and it's make for the fun of the game despite not being as fast-paced as the second and third Sonic Advance games.
- For the first time in a 2D Sonic game, you can play as Amy Rose.
- The graphics are absolutely beautiful for a 2001 Game Boy Advance game, with them being extremely colorful and the sprite work being superb.
- In fact, the sprite work is so good that it has some of the most popular sprites of the entire franchise, especially for Sonic, Tais, and even Knuckles. These sprites also make up for some awesome sprite animation videos.
- The backgrounds are also very great, with them being extremely detailed and colorful, despite some of them being a bit like a rehash.
- Neo Green Hill Zone has an excellent background since it's quite colorful and very detailed, as it's also a beach that is very fun to look at, like most other beaches in the franchise.
- Secret Base is also pretty awesome, as it is very detailed and impressive for a 2001 GBA game; it's composed of a factory, and it's again fun and good to look at.
- Casinopolis is pretty great too, as there's a lot of detail and it's also a casino, as the title of the zone suggests. It's also pretty similar to Casino Night from Sonic 2.
- Ice Montain is also very great; it's detailed, and it's also pretty colorful.
- Angel Island is really good and also makes for a great level, as it's a mountain but not an ice one, and it's detailed and colorful, much like the other levels backgrounds.
- Egg Rocket had a sunset-themed background, and it's again very good and fun to look at, not to mention the details that were put into the backgrounds. It is also pretty impressive for an early GBA game.
- Cosmic Angel had a very amazing background and is possibly the best background of the entire game, as it's extremely well detailed for a 2001 GBA game and it's very good to look at, not to mention how colorful it is.
- X-Zone had, of course, a space-themed background, and while it's not as good as Cosmic Angel, it's still pretty good to look at, and it fits well with the boss rush and the final battle with Eggman.
- The soundtrack is absolutely awesome, unforgettable, and catchy, even for a Sonic game, as here the soundtrack is so awesome that you may want to listen to it for so long, and you will even want to dance to the soundtrack if you listen to it for so long, kind of like Bomberman Hero.
- The boss fights are quite great and fun despite being easy for most parts, as they all have paths that are fun to learn, and it can be challenging if you want to beat them without taking damages.
- Speaking of the boss battles, the X-Zone also had a nice call back to the older Sonic games, such as the first one and the second one being based off Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 respectively.
- The true final boss is extremely epic, filled with a great true ending after the battle ends; the true final boss would be as epic in Sonic Advance 2 and Sonic Advance 3.
- There's a level select system, so if you want to replay your favorite levels, try getting chaos emeralds, or even train for a speedrun of the game, then you can without problem. Speaking of the level select system, it is better than the one from Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis (which was terrible).
- The box art is very nice, with it being detailed, colorful, and also showing what main characters are playable (since we see Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy). The next Sonic Advance games would do the same thing for the box art.
- The game spawned 2 sequels, which we're as good, if not even better than this game, especially Sonic Advance 2.
- The level design is quite great, with many levels being made to be fun and fast-paced and designed with every character in mind, and there's hardly any bad levels in the game.
- Great opening, even for a Sonic game.
- Some of the zones are great callbacks to other Sonic the Hedgehog games, such as Neo Green Hill being a callback to the regular Green Hill from Sonic 1 and Secret Base being a callback of Metropolis Zone from Sonic 2
- The difficulty, while not really challenging, is still balanced; it's neither too hard nor too easy, and you can easily beat the game the first time you play it.
- There are many replay values in this game.
Too Slow Qualities
- The special stages are absolutely terrible, with the rings being extremely hard to get due to how bad the collision is for these special stages. This makes these special stages some of the hardest special stages of any Sonic games.
- Not only that, but it's also very hard to find the special stage springs in the levels, as they are in only one level of a zone, and if you lose them or if you find them but fail the special stage, then you have to restart the entire level just to retry and get them.
- Fortunately, the special stages would be improved in the sequels, such as in Sonic Advance 2, but it was still very frustrating to beat them in the second game, and the third game would have the best one since they can be fun and are decent in comparison to the previous Sonic Advance games.
- The game is extremely short, as it's only 50 minutes for a playthrough, and even if you go for collecting the chaos emeralds, it's still short and would last only 2 hours.
- The mobile ports, while not bad and extremely faithful to the original Game Boy Advance and N-Gage versions, are unnecessary since they don't have the same feel as the GBA original version. Take a listen to know what we talk about.
- The game is a bit slower than the sequels, which is one of the reasons why this game is sometimes considered to be the weakest of the trilogy.
Reception
Sonic Advance received very positive reviews by both critics and fans alike, with a 87/100 on Metacritic[1], many praised the soundtrack, the graphics and the controls but criticized the fact that It's slower than the sequels and the special stages.
Trivia
- Sonic Advance is the last game for a long time to feature many old recurring elements from the series. Signposts and Sonic's leg spin animation would not be featured again until the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 4, yellow Springs would first appear again Sonic Generations, and the Capsules, (while seen in a mini-game of Sonic Advance 3) did not appear again before Sonic the Hedgehog 4.
- Sonic Advance was notably the first game since Sonic The Hedgehog 2 to feature any of Masato Nakamura's classic Sonic songs, most notably the original Sonic The Hedgehog theme via the Invincibility version of it.
- The 2011 Android port replaces the remix of the Invincibility theme from Sonic 1 with the game's intro theme, and the Sonic 1 and 2 boss remixes in X-Zone with boss songs from Sonic the Hedgehog 4 due to the rights to the music from Sonic 1 and 2 being owned by Dreams Come True and meaning Sega has to pay royalties to them every time they use the songs.
- This is the first 2D game to feature collectible Animals from Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 who are also kept inside Badnik and Capsules like the original Animals in earlier games. Notably, a few original Animals, including Flicky, are seen alongside with new ones in the game's good cinematic ending.
- Sonic Advance is the first game since Sonic the Hedgehog 3 which has introduced multiple Item Box power-ups exclusive to multiplayer. These power-ups are also featured in the multiplayer modes in later sequels and Sonic Rush and Sonic Rush Adventure.
- Hitting vertically and diagonally oriented Springs with the Hammer Attack will greatly increase their launching power, allowing Amy to get to places and take shortcuts/paths that Tails and Knuckles cannot.
- With the game having separate difficulty settings, each playable character and their move set can have different degrees of difficulty. Sonic's gameplay is the hardest overall due to his lack of any ways to take shortcuts and means to effectively fight the late game bosses. Tails' flying skills makes it easy to complete and scout the Zones and search for the Special Spring. Knuckles' movement capabilities make it easy to find power-ups and bypass hazards that Sonic would otherwise have to tackle head-on. Amy represents a unique challenge due to her lack of traditional attacks which are not automatic like the others but have more range and uses than the others, she is also the best at fighting bosses due to her longer range.
- Sometimes, when the game crashes, the screen will turn sky blue and gray boxes come in from both sides of the screen, and then stop in the middle. This is more likely to be caused when the game is ran through a corrupter or on certain copies of the game. The screen closely resembles the lobby for Single Pak VS Mode, and uses the same music, which is not present in the Sound Test. The gray boxes screen also appears in Sonic Advance 2, albeit with a white background and different music.
- The original releases of Sonic Advance in all regions have a rather severe bug: deleting the main game's save file does not delete the Tiny Chao Garden data, but once you do so, Rings earned in the main game do not transfer over to the Tiny Chao Garden. There are two ways to revert this; using a video game enhancer such as GameShark or collecting the same number of Rings that had been collected before the game data was deleted. This was fixed in v1.1, only released in Japan, and in the Sonic Advance and Sonic Pinball Party combo pack.
- This is the second game to feature Amy in the Sound Test, the first one being Knuckles' Chaotix.
Videos
References
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