The Sonic Advance games for the Game Boy Advance are very underrated Sonic games
Despite each entry being surprisingly distinct, there doesn’t seem to be any real consensus as to which one is the best.For me personally it’s 1 > 2 > 3
All three have their strengths and weaknesses. Advance 1 is the most pure Sonic 4 the franchise will ever get. Not only does it keep the tradition of including a new playable character (Amy), every stage is 100% original and it blends classic style gameplay with modern style visuals significantly better than the actual Sonic 4. It also doesn't rely on rehashing the genesis stages like Mania. Advance 2 is a totally different game. It's basically a proto boost formula game except theres no energy gauge but the level design is very much design to make you go as fast as possible and for the time at least it was really cool to play because of that. It was Sonic at his absolute fastest. These days it's just an okay sequel. Nothing really mindblowing but a good game to play if you just want a really fast Sonic game.Advance 3 is kind of the black sheep. It tries to combine the more platform focused gameplay of 1 with the pure speed of 2 and ends up with this weird mish mash where the level design is very confusing and not forgiving at all. The saving grace is that the team up mechanic leads to some interesting ways to play the game. You can outright cheese huge parts of the level with the right matchup and make bosses a total cakewalk. I'd say overall i'd go 1 > 2 = 3. It really depends on what you want from a Sonic game because 3 can be way more exploration based as well if you bother looking for the Chao which can be just as fun as going extremely fast in the more linear level design of 2.Alright i'm done with my Sonic autism post.
sovless
>>12533858I only ever played Sonic Advance 3 and it gave me way too high of an idea of the general quality of Sonic games. Not saying SA3 is mindblowing or life changing but it was very good and entertaining. It confused me how much people hated on Sonic on the internet until I played Sonic 2006 and saw gameplay for the other games. I did like Shadow as a kid, mostly because it was the only way I could play a game with guns as a 10 year old. It's an awful game but I have nostalgia for it.
>>12534101Most traditional 2D Sonic games are unironically good. It's when you venture into 3D that it becomes a mess. They just had no idea how to translate the series into the third dimension. It's kind of like Capcom's problem with Mega Man except way worse because X7 is leagues better than some of the crap 3D Sonic has put out.
>>12534101Fuck the haters, Shadow the Hedgehog is an absolutely playable game thats hated solely because it's a product of its era. If you weren't a preteen blasting linkin park and watching anime clips οn the old internet then Shadow the Hedgehog wasn't made for you. I AM ALL OF ME
>>12533858nah. i tried 1 for the first time last year and was done after a half hour. just wasn't fun to play. the criticism of not being able to react to what's off-screen is actually valid here given how small the gba's viewport is. it's also a dimps game and they've made more shit sonic games than good ones so it tracks
>>12534484>just wasn't fun to play. the criticism of not being able to react to what's off-screen is actually valid here given how small the gba's viewport isFor the Advance games, sprites were shrunk to better accommodate the smaller resolution. Sonic takes up as much of the screen in the Advance games as he does the Mega Drive games, horizontally, at least.
>>12534484>they've made more shit sonic games than good onesThey're not made by the same teams though. Like Sonic 4 EP1 and Sonic Colors DS came out on the same year, those are like night and day.
>>12534461Don't get me wrong, dude. When I say it's an awful game, I mean it in the sense of just how glitchy some of it is and how unpolished it is. I still enjoyed the hell out of it in terms of presentation, dumb fun and half-baked moral choice story it had. I still remember how edgy I felt. Seeing that cutscene for the first time when Shadow says "where is that DAMN chaos emerald?" gave me more excitement than I'm willing to admit. I'd be upset at something my parents did and I'd just brood like Shadow did and felt like a badass. Good fucking times, bro
Ive only played the first one and it is so frustrating. EVERY level has the same dumb tricks where they put a jump and where you land will have a spike come up and hit you. They use spikes in the most obnoxious places and it's almost entirely where the difficulty comes from.
>>12534057Pretty based take, I think 2 is better than 3 but I think I'm just biased because it was the first Sonic game I ever played outside of Sonic 1.
Historical revisionism after much shittier Sonic games came after it.
Personally I find Advance 1 to be a little boring, but okay. It's quite slow for a Sonic game and feels more like an average GBA platformer in terms of level design compared to Sonic 2 or 3&K, but has some great graphics and music. Advance 2 is a big improvement in some ways and is way more snappy but the idea of going so damn fast on a small screen means that you're going to wind up with a lot of trial and error before figuring the levels out.Advance 3 is a fucking awesome game though, the tagteam mechanic sets it apart from any other Sonic game and despite again being more of a standard platformer in terms of level design, it feels way better to play than 1 does and has tons of secrets to find in the form of the hidden Chao in levels that are surprisingly big. You have a good mixture of platforming levels and pure speed levels while being able to experiment with character combos to mix things up, and the whole package feels like they finally got everything straightened out. The bosses and Special Stages are all fun and they ditched Advance 2's awful autoscroll shit for (nearly) every single boss. I should give it another playthrough sometime.
>>12533940That's not surprising, the games being pretty different from each other is why everyone has their own favorite. For example I like 2 the best.
>>12535509>but the idea of going so damn fast on a small screen means that you're going to wind up with a lot of trial and error before figuring the levels out. Wouldn't be so bad if Dimps didn't love bottomless pits so much
>>12534461>thats hatedI don't think most people really hate it per se. they edgy shadow stuff is usually seen as amusing so bad its good cheese. I think people are just inclined to view 3d sonic as a jank mess in terms of gameplay.
>>12533858The first one was really hard. Didn't ever beat it with a single character, and was stuck on Amy's 4th level I believedid like doing "time trials" on the first level though
>>12534461
A real sadist designed this boss fight
>>12535767>that YT web layoutI'm growing old, anons... YT used to be so comfy
>>12533858>speed boosters next to loops eventually leading to either a two pixel tall ledge with a hidden spike trap underneath or a blind jump with a bottomless pit down below.>rolling down slopes makes you go slower than just plain running>screen crunchThere, that's the Sonic Advance trilogy in a nutshell.
>>12534505Plus, 1 is just a lot slower to compensate as well.Once they gave into speed complaints and added a P Speed mechanic to 2, that's when you get running into stuff you can't react to constantly.
remove the random pits of death from SA2 and the copius trap spikes from 1 and you're gold. How were humans supposed to collect the special stage medallions from SA2 as non-flying characters? Those later levels make it so hard.
>>12533858They all suck. Rush too
>>12533858>Press right to win the game
