Sonic Advance – Hardcore Gaming 101

This entry is part 26 of 26 in the series Sonic the Hedgehog

Following the Dreamcast’s discontinuation in 2001, Sega pulled out of the hardware market and started making third-party games for other systems. While the main Sonic titles would be made for consoles by Sonic Team USA, a series of original handheld adventures were created for the Game Boy Advance by Sonic Team’s Japanese department in collaboration with the newly founded Dimps (which was partially made up of former SNK members including staff who previously worked on Sonic Pocket Adventure for the Neo Geo Pocket Color).

These kicked off with Sonic Advance, a 2D platformer that faithfully captures the Genesis games’ gameplay in a very solid game worth playing for Sonic fans old and new. The story’s gone back to basics, amounting to little more than stopping Dr Eggman from getting the seven Chaos Emeralds.

Your goal is to reach the end of the level, while running, rolling and jumping your way through places full of various gimmicks and obstacles. You collect rings to stay alive, so long as you’ve got at least one, and you can find item boxes that give you extra rings, temporary invincibility and speed boosts, lives and a shield to protect you for one hit (as well as a magnetic shield that attracts nearby rings).

You begin in the tropical Neo Green Hill Zone, before sneaking into the mechanical depths of Secret Base Zone and through to the colorful Casino Paradise Zone. After that, you explore the waterlogged Ice Mountain Zone, climb up the ruins of Angel Island Zone and eventually reach Eggman’s lair in a trio of short one-act zones – Egg Rocket Zone, Cosmic Angel Zone, and finally Moon Zone.

From the start, you have multiple characters to choose from: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and, for the first time in 2D, Amy Rose. Sonic, Tails and Knuckles retain their aerial abilities from Sonic 3 & Knuckles; being able to use the insta-shield to more easily hit enemies, fly around for a short time, and glide and climb walls respectively. They can also pull off (mostly useless) melee attacks with the B button.

Amy can’t roll during jumps or while running, making her more vulnerable to enemies. However, she can use her Piko Piko Hammer to attack in mid-air or while standing still, and it can be used on springs to propel her farther than anyone else. It makes for an enjoyably different playstyle, and one that turns most boss fights into a cakewalk.

The boss fights are decent, with straightforward strategies to overcome but plenty of room to hit them whenever you like if you don’t mind losing Rings. That said, a couple of them can only be attacked at very specific times, becoming either slow or frustrating in the process. Ice Mountain’s boss is the worst of these, since you can only hit Eggman by jumping from falling icicles whilst dealing with sluggish underwater movement and trying not to drown.

Hidden in each zone is a special spring that takes you to the Special Stage, where you skydive through cylinders and grab enough rings while avoiding bombs to collect the Chaos Emerald at the end. There’s no Super transformation to unlock, but you’ll need to get all seven Emeralds and beat the game with all four characters to reach the true final boss.

Unfortunately, this is quite difficult due to the very strict ring requirements and the forced perspective obscuring where rings are. You need to be basically perfect, especially since you can’t retry without dying and finding the special spring again. It’s frustrating for completionists and people who want to get the true ending, and a blemish on an otherwise solid adventure.

Levels are compact but often dense, featuring multiple routes that intersect and ensuring that there’s always new places to explore upon replay. There aren’t many character-specific paths apart from the grind rails only Sonic and Amy can use, but that means you can reach just about anywhere with anyone if you get good enough. The controls manage to replicate the physics and movement of the original games, although they’re a bit sluggish when you’re trying to pick up speed (and especially when underwater). At six major zones, it can be beaten in little over an hour, making for a brisk adventure to enjoy on the go.

In general, Advance successfully carries over a lot of the strengths of Sonic’s gameplay, such as being able to seamlessly shift between platforming, exploration, combat and speedy thrills. It lets players approach the game with as much or as little skill as they can muster and still have a good time, and this is enhanced by some adjustable difficulty settings. You can disable the Time Off feature that would normally kill you when the level timer reaches ten minutes, and there’s an easy mode which removes some enemies from stages and reduces the amount of hits a boss can take from eight to six.

Admittedly, Advance is so focused on recreating the original gameplay that its new contributions can feel uninspired. Most of the zones don’t offer more than typical examples of standard Sonic level archetypes like beaches, casinos and mechanical bases. While each zone has unique gimmicks such as underwater sections and transportation pipes, they can start to blur together after a while. It’s only the end that things change up, with an exciting ascent up a rocket that jettisons its sections every few minutes.

Part of this can be chalked up to the game’s visuals. They’re generally quite good, offering expressively animated characters, a great variety of colors to allow for bright environments that are easy to make out, and a smooth framerate that means the game runs and plays well. However, the art direction for the zones leans into more grounded depictions, much like the Sonic Adventure games, and they often end up looking rather generic as a result.

Where things really shine in the presentation is the music by Tatsuyuki Maeda and Yutaka Minobe. It features catchy energetic tunes which compliment the brisk gameplay and inform the mood of the various locales you visit, such as the easygoing jazz of Casino Paradise or the upbeat excitement of Angel Island. Combined with nice touches such as using organ chords and square wave basslines for texture and substantially reworked Act 2 arrangements, it makes for one of the more obscure but delightful Sonic soundtracks.

Incidentally, this is one of the few Sonic games made after the early 90s to feature some of Masato Nakamura’s music from the first two titles. The invincibility theme, a few menu themes and a couple of later boss tracks are arrangements of his Sonic work, which aren’t utilized often outside the original games (presumably due to the expense of paying royalties).

For the first time in a handheld Sonic platformer, there’s multiplayer modes available for up to four players. These modes include racing through stages, hunting for Chao in a Capture-the-Flag type mode, and collecting as many rings as you can. The first two modes require everyone to have their own copy of Advance, while the last one works on a single cartridge. Players can play on their own or in teams, which allows characters to use exclusive abilities to help each other such as Sonic giving a speed boost to their ally or Amy launching their ally into the air. There’s also a Time Attack mode for single-player where you can replay stages and try to get the fastest time.

Advance also features Tiny Chao Garden, where you raise and take care of a Chao like in the Sonic Adventure games. Rings earned in the main game can be used to buy food to upgrade the Chao’s stats, and toys to amuse them. More games can be won in the minigames either pre-installed (a rock-paper-scissors game and a memory game), or by connecting the Game Boy Advance to a GameCube with a link cable and downloading them from select Sonic Team titles such as the Sonic Adventure ports and Phantasy Star Online.

The link cable is also useful for transferring rings, eggs and items bought in the Tiny Chao Garden into either of the Adventure games, but NOT vice versa. It’s important to note that there’s a bug in most versions of Advance where deleting the save data will prevent any new rings from being usable in Tiny Chao Garden. This glitch has eventually fixed for the version that was bundled with Sonic Pinball Party in 2005, as well as a budget Japanese “Okaidoku-ban” re-release in 2004.

Advance was popular enough that it’s the only one in the trilogy to receive ports, mainly to mobile devices of the day. The first and most famous port was to the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage, under the name of Sonic N. It’s a straight port, albeit with the multiplayer and Chao Garden modes removed, and it plays quite well. However, the N-Gage’s vertical screen results in a zoomed in screen that cuts off the sides, making it difficult to see what’s coming. You can opt for a cropped mode that restores the original aspect ratio, but it’s much harder to make out specific details.

Gameloft made a Java port in 2011. Depending on the power of your phone, you’d get a very minimalist take where Sonic runs through blocky recreations of the first two zones or a more visually faithful but truncated adventure where you can only play as Sonic through four zones. This was also ported to Android phones with touchscreen controls.

There was another Android port, though this one was developed by SEGA and only released in Japan, both on the Android marketplace and through SEGA’s “Puyo Puyo! Sega” service which provided many downloadable mobile games for ¥300 per month. Although the multiplayer and Chao modes are still gone, this is the most faithful port as it retains all the stages and characters. There’s a few changes including options to quit or restart the stage in the pause menu, a reworked if wonky MIDI version of the soundtrack that also removes the Masato Nakamura tracks, and motion controls for the Special Stages to make them even harder.

Despite the touchscreen controls, this port works pleasantly enough and would be overall serviceable if not for the technical issues dragging it down. It doesn’t seem to have been well optimized for a variety of devices, meaning that it can run smoothly or be dogged by low stuttering framerates depending on what you play it on. This port has since been delisted from the marketplace and “Puyo Puyo! Sega” shut down in 2022.

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