Advancing Beyond Sega Hardware: Sonic Advance (Game Boy Advance, 2001)

NOTE: This review is part of a retrospective of the Sonic franchise. Feel free to read the other Sonic reviews I’ve done here - https://expithecat.blogspot.com/search/label/sonic%20retrospective

Whew, I sure said “Advance” a lot there.

Background and History

March 31, 2001. Despite Sega’s best efforts to keep themselves going as a hardware manufacturer, it was pretty clear that the Dreamcast wasn’t destined to succeed. Sega’s future now was not as a hardware manufacturer, but rather, a third party developer, developing games for other systems - including ones made by the very company they were best known for rivalling. And on December 20, 2001, alongside the GameCube port of Sonic Adventure 2 (or Sonic Adventure 2 Battle), Sega released their first original Sonic game for a Nintendo system - that being Sonic Advance for the Game Boy… Advance.

Alongside Sonic Team themselves, the game was developed in part by Dimps, a studio formed by developers previously credited for working on Sonic Pocket Adventure. The game went back to the style of the classic games while also incorporating elements from the Sonic Adventure games such as rail grinding and the newer designs for all the characters. The game was announced on January 30, 2001, and in Japan was released on December 20th of the same year, making it’s way over to the states and Europe the following year.

Personal Experiences

Admittedly my personal experiences with this game aren’t exactly too interesting. While I did have a Game Boy Advance and technically did get my start on the Sonic series on said system, Sonic Advance wasn’t the game I started on. No, that was.... Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis.

Yeah.

But I do remember that as I got more into the Sonic series, I did hear about this game, and it was another game in the series that I had wanted to play. But for some reason, I just never really got around to it for the longest time. I think I tried the game a few times on emulators but didn’t really play much of it (to be honest I used to have a hard time getting into games on PC emulators for some reason), but it wasn’t until 2019 when I first picked up an actual copy of the game and played through it. And well, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I didn’t think it was anything too mindblowing, but I did consider it to be an A-tier Sonic game that had a lot of the appeal of the classic Sonic games I grew up with via their later ports. It was definitely a game I could see myself going back to and… well, I obviously did with this review.

Plot

Eggman has come up with a new plan to turn the woodland creatures and build his Eggman Empire, while also planning to capture the seven chaos emeralds for greater power. And, well, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy must stop him.

It’s... your basic classic Sonic plot, so let’s move on.

Graphics and Music

Seeing as how the Game Boy Advance was a step up in power over the Game Gear and the Neo Geo Pocket Color - this being a 32-bit ARM7-based handheld compared to those 8 and 16-bit handhelds respectively, it’s safe to say that Sonic Advance is a step up graphically from those games. Environments come off to me as more detailed and colorful when compared to the respective Sonic games on those systems. For the Game Boy Advance in general it is pretty standard as far as 2D games for the system go, but being both an early GBA title and the first Sonic game on the system, it definitely looks pretty good and translates the Sonic style well.

Although this is intended as a classic throwback, the style does give me more of an impression of what a Sonic Adventure game would be like in 2D. As mentioned, this game uses the updated character designs from the Adventure games. Pocket Adventure also did this, but seemed to have kept the classic proportions (and also Eggman’s design was the same as his classic one for most of the game), where the designs are more translated directly to a 2D game in this case. But the environments also give me that vibe. I’m not sure what it is - I guess just the way they seem integrated with the character design, but it feels like that’s what they were going for.

And the soundtrack, well, it’s good. I wouldn’t say it stood out to me in particular among other Sonic games, but I mean, the Sonic series has always been known for having good music and I don’t really think this game was an exception. I do think it is somewhat hindered by the GBA’s not so great sound capabilities as well, but it’s a fine soundtrack for what it is.

Gameplay

As mentioned, this game serves as more of a return to the classic style of Sonic games, being the second time to do so after Sonic's 3D debut considering that Pocket Adventure was a thing (and trust me it won’t be the last time we apparently go back to sonic’s roots). And like Pocket Adventure, I don’t think I need to go into how the classic Sonic games play again, considering that most people, especially the few people reading this, have an idea.

The game returns the feature of having multiple playable characters with their own abilities. that was present in Sonic 3 & Knuckles. And like Sonic 3 & Knuckles, you have the original trio - Sonic, Tails and Knuckles, but you also get the option to play as Amy Rose. I think the first time I played this game I used Tails because, well, he’s my fav, but with the classic trio it’s worth mentioning that you have their abilities from S3&K - Sonic has his insta-shield, Tails can fly and Knuckles can glide, although with Tails in particular they also added his tail swipe from Sonic Adventure 1. 

This is Amy Rose’s first time being playable in a 2D Sonic game, and I actually played as her and Sonic in my replay of the game for this review. Amy Rose’s playstyle is definitely unique - you don’t have access to stuff like the spin dash and don’t roll into a ball to damage enemies. Instead, you have to use her hammer on bosses and stage enemies and also have a “dash” move that can give yourself a small burst of speed if you need it. And to be honest I actually enjoyed playing as Amy Rose here, she’s definitely a bit more challenging to play as, sort of serving as this game’s hard mode, and I think her unique playstyle oddly enough made her probably the most fun character to play as for me. I know there are some people who don’t like Amy as a playable character here, and I can understand - she definitely deviates the most from the classic Sonic characters and due to the reliance on her hammer to damage enemies, bosses and whatnot can be a bit more annoying, but at the same time I can’t really deny that I really liked her. That’s probably influenced by some bias too, I mean, Amy’s honestly my second favorite character in the series (...and also my transition goals), but still, she was definitely a unique playable character. There have been hacks of Sonic 1, 2 and 3&K that replace Sonic with Amy as the playable character with her Advance moveset and after playing this game I might actually consider trying those out.

And it also makes me wish she was playable in Mania.

But anyway, onto the level design, probably the biggest appeal of the Sonic games for me - I think this game does a good job of incorporating those classic elements. The levels are still full of branching, alternate pathways that make the game even more interesting to replay which I think is also helped by the different playable characters here. There are also some level design elements incorporated from the Adventure games - particularly rail grinding seems to have a big emphasis with this game’s levels, which I think makes for a good addition. It also just works well with the control of the characters and giving off the sense of speed and flow that is pretty much a staple of Sonic games.

That said, I don’t think it’s necessarily all great. Egg Rocket, while it wasn’t the most painful level or anything, had a lot of level design elements I didn’t really like. It honestly just felt there was a lot more of the Sonic “trial and error” shit here compared to in other levels and the level designers seemed to have some sort of fetish for spikes and bottomless pits here. There were cases where I found myself speeding off of a platform and wasn’t sure whether I was over a bottomless pit or anything, and sometimes spikes would just pop out of the ground in areas I would jump over and leave me no room to avoid them. It’s probably the only level where I found the level design to be obnoxious but regardless it was still somewhat of an annoying level and my least favorite in the game.

I also gotta say that I did find the special stages to be annoying - both in terms of accessing them and actually playing them. Admittedly, I didn’t go for all the emeralds in any of playthroughs of this game and I rarely ever 100% Sonic games, so it wasn’t too big of a problem for me, but I think it’s worth talking about.The special stages are accessed by hunting down a special spring, but these springs only appear once in every Zone with the exception of Ice Mountain where it appears once in each act. I feel like they were going for Sonic 3 & Knuckles’ approach to special stages where you found a bunch of giant rings, but the fact that there’s only one in each zone for the most part makes hunting them down a lot more tedious, and in some cases they can definitely be kind of a bitch to get to.

And on top of that, the special stages themselves are just not very good in my opinion. It goes for the same “pseudo 3D” situation that Sonic 2’s half pipe stages go for, only this time you’re falling down a tube or whatever this is supposed to be, and it pretty has the same issues with depth perception that those pseudo 3D special stages in previous games did. Should also say I tried the first special stage and I can swear there were times where I was literally on top of the rings I was supposed to collect yet didn’t actually get them.

But despite those issues, I still found traversing through these levels really fun. It definitely does it’s job of going for what the classic games were doing with open levels containing branching pathways and whatnot allowing for more replayability. I think the additional elements from the Adventure games also help the levels feel fresh and fun, as if this was an evolution of the Genesis games. I’ve seen a lot of people consider this to be the “true” Sonic 4 and I can definitely see that with how this game sort of evolves the classic formula. Admittedly, this game is short, but I still find myself wanting to replay it because the levels themselves are just really fun and have a lot of that classic Sonic replayability in mind.

Conclusion

So, yeah, this was one of my shorter reviews, but I think I made my opinion on the game pretty clear. It’s definitely a nice game, and for those looking for an evolution of the classic gameplay, I think Sonic Advance did a good job of that, and despite it’s issues it’s still very much of a solid 2D Sonic title in my opinion. I definitely consider it an improvement upon the Game Gear games and Sonic Pocket Adventure, and especially that… one other handheld Sonic game, and well, it’s just a lot of fun.

I would recommend the game, especially if you enjoyed the classics to any extent. Unfortunately the game hasn’t been re-released on any major platforms - it was brought on the Wii U via the Virtual Console as well as on Android but for some reason only in Japan and as far as worldwide options go, well, the Wikipedia page says it was re-released on “J2ME” and I have no fucking clue what that is, and if you’re one of those five people who own an N-Gage the game was also re-released on that as “Sonic N.” But that aside the game isn’t too expensive to buy a used copy of, and of course, there’s always emulation.