Overview

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Review

Release Date: 02.05.2002
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: THQ, Inc.

Reviewed by Ash Paulsen on 6.19.2004

Review Rating: 7/10

User Rating: 7.8/10

Back towards the Game Boy Advance’s inception, Sonic Team and THQ made a wonderful move: they partnered up to work together and bring new two-dimensional Sonic games to Nintendo’s mega-popular handheld, a natural choice of platform for today’s 2D action-platformers. As opposed to his more contemporary 3D outings, these games would be designed more in the vein of the hedgehog’s classic Genesis outings and give long-time fans of the blue blur more of the classic high-speed action they remembered so fondly. The first result of this partnership was the start of what has since become a very good, long-running series: Sonic Advance.

From the start, you know this is classic Sonic. The story is the same as you remember it: even after seemingly reformed after the end of Sonic Adventure 2, Dr. Eggman (yeah, they call him that here too) has hatched a new plan to take over the world, and it’s the job of long-time heroes Sonic and friends to stop him. There’s not even really a catch or “special plan” this time around; being the first Sonic Advance game, the story is the most basic it possibly could be and serves as little more than a reason for Sonic and his buddies to be running around the various stages towards their final conrontation with Eggman. It’s classic, it’s charming; it’s good vs evil at its most basic. (Thankfully things would get at least a little more interesting with future installments in the series, though.)

Visually, Sonic and friends have never looked better (or at least they didn’t until Sonic Advance 2). These are some of the most expressive, fluidly animated sprites I’ve seen and they really do a wonderful job of bringing out each individual character’s personality. Yeah, Sonic and Knuckles may travel through the same levels, but aside from the characters playing differently, they feel different too; the characters here really bleed personality that’s all their own, and these personalities somehow manage to hold up incredibly well even after series fans getting used to seeing them walk, talk and express themselves in Sonic Adventure 2’s cutscenes. The game’s stages aren’t quite as impressive but are still attractive nonetheless; some of the backgrounds come off as being a little bland and lifeless, I think, but everything is bright, colorful, and generally attractive.

Sonic Advance’s soundtrack doesn’t hold up quite as well, and those looking for freakishly hummable, well-composed Sonic tunes here will be disappointed. Low-quality, early-Genesis era synths are the name of the day here, and a lot of the songs just aren’t that interesting or motivating. That’s not to say that there aren’t a few winners – among a few others, both Ice Mountain acts sound particularly great and then there’s my favorite, the dramatic, mood-setting Egg Rocket zone – but on the whole I was left unimpressed and wanting more, especially from a Sonic soundtrack. Nearly every last sound effect in Sonic Advance is taken from the old-school Genesis games, which is not only charming but perfectly effective as well, as those games had some of the most memorable and definitive sound effects of their era.

The gameplay is classic Sonic as well, right down to every last Ring you collect. Your chosen character – either Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, or Amy Rose – will make his or her way through the game’s twelve levels, divided into six Zones with two Acts each. At the end of each second Act is a battle with Dr. Eggman, who, upon his defeat will escape from the destruction in his flying pod (did Eggman and Dr. Wily go to the same evil scientist prep school?) to prepare for the next showdown with our heroes. The game does a good job of keeping the difficulty level consistent with your progress in the game, and while most of the game is generally pretty tractable and easy to pass, the game’s final few stages (especially the final two, yikes) will have your palms sweating and hoping the end of the act is on that next, barely-reachable ledge. It has to be said that the game has a disappoingly super-easy final battle, but then again, if you can get all of the Chaos Emeralds with Sonic, the “final” battle might not be so final…

Despite all four characters traveling through the same areas, Sonic Advance does a remarkable job of making the experience feel fresh with each character, making it actually fun to play through the same game four times using a different hero. Your paths through the levels can vary pretty considerably depending on how you play each character – for example, Tails can reach areas Sonic will never see thanks to his flying abilities – and even more interestingly, your strategies for fighting the bosses will have to be slightly tailored to the character you’re using. Amy can’t damage enemies by jumping into them like the other characters, so you’ll have to work out new ways to score hits using her signature weapon, the Piko Piko Hammer. It’s little differences like this and considerably drastic variations in the way each character feels that keeps the game fresh after you’ve already finished it with one character. And, of course, collecting all seven Chaos Emeralds will keep you busy for a good deal longer than the time it takes you to finish the game; finding the special springs that take you to the special stages can be tricky enough, but actually passing the special stages once you get to them can be amazingly hard, even after you get the hang of the mode 7, quasi-3D setup.

What the game doesn’t do a good job of is delivering the super-speedy, super-frantic gameplay that this series is associated with. This feels like one of Sonic’s slowest games, with a larger than usual amount of enemies and slow, calculated white-knuckle platforming segments breaking up the ramps, loops, and corkscrews that Sonic usually blazes through. Past games in the series have always done a great job of balancing hold-your-breath speed with enemy-basing and white-knuckle platforming, but Sonic Advance just doesn’t achieve this balance. Simply put, the game feels wretchedly slow at times and more often than not you’ll wish you could just spin dash into a full-on run without having to worry about probably meeting an early demise for it.

Despite this rather core gameplay fault, however, Sonic Advance is a fun little platformer that’ll remind you why you love Sonic so much (if you ever forgot, that is). The gameplay needs to be faster and there could be a couple more levels or at least longer levels – the game feels a little short – but these are both problems that Sonic Advance 2 would eventually fix. You have to remember that this is Sonic Team’s first attempt at a GBA Sonic game, and as such it is a little rough around the edges. It’s certainly the weakest of the three Sonic Advance games, but that’s not exactly saying much: the game is still good, quality fun and serves as a great precursor to a sub-series that only gets better from here.

Box art