Sonic Advance 2

Sonic Advance was a hit on arrival, and Dimps and Sonic Team began work on a sequel soon afterwards. Despite being developed in just eight months, Sonic Advance 2 goes in a radically different direction with its core mechanics; one that aimed to emulate the thrill and spectacle of Sonic Adventure 2 within a 2D format. Although it’s not for everyone and undeniably has issues, it’s a fascinating and challenging platformer that helped build the foundation for what the series would become in the late 00s. 

Dr Eggman’s up to his usual tricks of kidnapping critters to put into his machines, and this time he’s even managed to kidnap Tails and Knuckles. Sonic heads off to stop Eggman and ends up rescuing a young rabbit named Cream, and she wants to help save her kidnapped mother. The story’s still basic, but you get brief cutscenes where Sonic chats with whoever he manages to rescue. 

Advance 2 retains most of the mechanics from before, but what’s changed is the emphasis on speed. While 2D Sonic games have always allowed you to go fast, it’s never been pushed so strongly until now. You can easily reach blistering speeds, and collecting rings lets you achieve that sooner. Levels are slanted downwards, with ramps to launch you into the air, boost rings to propel you forwards and grind rails that everyone can use to pick up speed.

There’s a new trick system to accommodate this, where pressing the R button in the air while uncurled pulls off an aerial trick. Depending on which direction you hold the D-Pad, you can boost upwards, shoot off left or right, fall straight down, or move slightly backwards. It’s flashy, but an important way of reaching certain areas or avoiding oncoming hazards, and crucial to clearing later stages. 

The faster pace results in a tougher, more intense time with a mentality not too unlike a snowboarding game with routes to learn, shortcuts to remember and pitfalls to jump over. As a result, it’s harder to get into than most Sonics, especially since you can’t see what’s coming and won’t know until you repeat levels enough to learn them off by heart. The game and level design are so focused on mastering speedy stages that if you’re not into fast and challenging platformers, there’s little else to enjoy. 

But if you can make it past those hurdles, what’s there is a unique Sonic game full of tricky rollercoaster stages and moments where you either survive by the skin of your teeth or triumph with a style previously unseen in 2D Sonic. While levels are largely alike, featuring many of the same gimmicks and obstacles to help or hinder you, this encourages you to understand and use them to your advantage. This comes in handy when encountering zone-exclusive situations like the bouncing platforms in Music Plant Zone or the wind-based obstacles in Sky Canyon Zone.

This time around, the extra playable characters act more as slightly different options to the regular experience. You start off with Sonic, and can unlock Tails and Knuckles by beating the third and fifth zones as Sonic. Tails’ flight and Knuckles’ gliding and wall-climbing come in handy for reaching higher routes and correcting botched jumps, but otherwise aren’t much different. The same can’t be said for Cream the Rabbit, who you unlock after beating the first zone and acts as something of a beginner’s character. She can’t fly for as long as Tails, but she can attack onscreen enemies with her Chao companion Cheese – and this thankfully includes the bosses. 

Boss fights have you running after Eggman’s machines, trying to dodge their attacks and hitting them at the right time. They’re quite difficult due to how easy it is to be thrown back and how hard it is to get in a hit, even though rings regularly appear to ensure you’re not helpless. Too often they go over the edge and become frustrating timewasters (especially Sky Canyon’s boss, which has an insta-kill attack!). It doesn’t help that there’s no continues, and that you’re only able to resume from the beginning of a zone on your first go, so getting a game over means you have to replay the whole zone before you can try fighting them again. Advance 2‘s level of challenge becomes overwhelming here, and that’s not even getting into the mandatory boss rush in the final zone. 

Cream’s attack allows you to (ahem) cheese those boss encounters, and since she’s unlocked from so early on, it seems like she’s there to allow players who can’t handle the boss fights to still experience the rest of the game. That’s a nice addition, but perhaps not enough considering how hard the boss fights are for any other character. Amy Rose is also available, now with the ability to roll while jumping and moving, but she’s a secret character who can only be unlocked if every character gets the seven Chaos Emeralds.

On that note, the Special Stages have been completely redone. They’re now open fields where you must run around and collect 300 rings within two minutes, all while avoiding Zero (the robot that chased Amy everywhere in Sonic Adventure). These are quite tough due to that high requirement and the awkwardness of moving around a psuedo-3D space on a D-Pad, and what makes it worse is that accessing them in the first place is no easy task. Placed throughout each level are seven SP rings, and you need to collect them all – without dying – to reach the Special Stage. 

While this does play into the idea of learning the level layouts, since all the rings are placed along a specific route through the stage, it’s a lot to ask the player to do in one go and then only have one shot at getting a Chaos Emerald. What’s worse is that unlike Advance, every character needs to get the Emeralds individually, which combined with the game’s general challenge demands too much of completionists. 

Admittedly, you only need to get all the Emeralds as Sonic in order to reach the true final boss, though you still need to beat the game as him and the other three characters. Getting the Emeralds as everyone else simply unlocks extra bonuses such as Amy Rose, the sound test and the Tiny Chao Garden of all things. The latter operates much the same as before, while swapping out the Janken minigame for one where you launch Cheese into the air to collect rings. Thankfully, the multiplayer and Time Attack modes aren’t locked away, and can be accessed at any time.

In terms of its visuals, Advance 2 keeps plenty of its predecessor’s qualities such as a steady and fast framerate, lively character animations, and bright colorful environments that are easily readable no matter how fast you’re going. Where things improve is in the more angular surreal art direction for the stage designs, from the frozen cityscape of Ice Paradise Zone to the digital aesthetics in Techno Base Zone, which make for a more striking looking adventure. 

The soundtrack by Tatsuyuki Maeda, Yutaka Minobe, and Teruhiko Nakagawa does a good job at creating upbeat boisterous tracks that fit the frantic gameplay, along with a few ventures into different genres thanks to the Act 2 remixes. That said, the intensity of the arrangements can become quite abrasive, especially in later zones like Techno Base and Egg Utopia.

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