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Sonic Advance - The Forgotten Series?


MedriFogmatio

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SonicAdvance1.png SonicAdvance2.png Sonic_Advance_3.png

I will say this, I have viewed this board several times and I can say this right now.  None of you talk about the brilliance of the Sonic Advance Series. The three games are pretty damn good games, the First and Second being the strongest and the Third suffering a bit from it's hub-world.  But otherwise the games are solid titles with fast paced gameplay.

 

 

 

 

I really don't see any of you talking about how good these games are. Is it unpopular? Is it forgettable? What has you not paying attention to these games? If you do like it, talk about it!

 

 

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I like the advanced games alot. I think (even though small) one of my favorite things is the after images sonic creates when he reaches full speed. Which started in Advanced 2. Looks real freakin' cool.

Edited by Urban Flow
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Its generally accepted the Sonic Advance games are solid games on their own, well for Advance 3 for some reason.

I haven't forgotten about them either. Its most likely we've talked the hell out of everything at this point.

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I really liked the series, but I feel the reputation seems to go up or down for some reason with the fanbase.

 

One day everybody will praise it.

The next day, it is "Dimps trash".

 

Personally, I thought it was a really good game. Leveling up Chaos was a lot faster in here.

I don't really know the beef with Dimps, but I think they've done good games for Sonic.

 

I like the advanced games alot. I think (even though small) one of my favorite things is the after images sonic creates when he reaches full speed. Which started in Advanced 2. Looks real freakin' cool.

Me too, I love that aspect, and honestly, I like Sonic Advance 2's running bosses, they're fun and make me feel like a bad-ass.

 

Its generally accepted the Sonic Advance games are solid games on their own, well for Advance 3 for some reason.

I haven't forgotten about them either. Its most likely we've talked the hell out of everything at this point.

Well, I missed most of those talks hahaha. Besides It's neat to look back now to see if they've aged well or not.

 

I think they've aged magnificently. The sprites and graphical work on them are amazing.

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I don't really know the beef with Dimps, but I think they've done good games for Sonic.

They made Sonic 4.

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I really don't see any of you talking about how good these games are. Is it unpopular? Is it forgettable? What has you not paying attention to these games? If you do like it, talk about it!

The same reason not many talk about any games pre-2006? They're really old now and long-time members discussed them way back when they were released. There's also the fact that a lot of older members have left and new younger members have joined that have only been playing games from the last few years. 

 

I think if Nintendo would finally add GBA games to the 3DS VC and SEGA released the Sonic Advance games on there, then more people could play them and we would probably see more discussion about them. 

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The beef with Dimps is that nowadays they don't make original games, they make watered down versions of console games although that's not really their fault but they showed a terrible inability to make a classic sonic game afterwards so that's the beef with them.

As for the advance trilogy, I think it is just an okay series but still a noteworthy shining beacon in the era of terribad console Sonic games. They all play very differently from each other, maybe too differently for their own good but I digress, it does give each of the games their own identity. My favorite is Advance 1, more of a Sonic 4 than the Sonic 4 will ever be. advance 2 is too hold right to win although it get really chaotic from Sky Canyon onward, and Advance 3 is probably my least favorite of the bunch because the forced teamwork gimmick gimps some characters' abilities and the hubworld is just tedious. I also don't like how the controls get worse as the trilogy progresses from tight and fluid in advance 1, to stiff and clunky in Advance 3. Overall a pretty average series I think, but still better than the console games at the time.

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I've only recently got the first one, it was on a cart that also had battle on it.

 

It's a pretty fun game, the first one doesn't really have a story (apart from the megadrive era "smash all the robots" plot) it's a lot of fun though.

 

Do the other two have much in the way of story?

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I've only recently got the first one, it was on a cart that also had battle on it.

 

It's a pretty fun game, the first one doesn't really have a story (apart from the megadrive era "smash all the robots" plot) it's a lot of fun though.

 

Do the other two have much in the way of story?

 

Sonic Advance 2 is the same Presence of Megadrive era.  However Sonic Advance 3 has a loose plot tied to Sonic Battle. It's VERY loose and is barely there. It's SMASH ALL THE ROBOTS, AND EMERL IS REBUILT BY EGGMAN, . .  And the manual says that the world has been split apart into different parts. Essentially Sonic Unleashed plot before sonic unleashed, but the master emerald is the plot mcguffin. 

 

Elsewise there is no story to the Advance series, and it's all about gameplay.

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Sonic Advance as a whole is brilliant and solid and pretty underrated - as much as I miss how the classic gameplay leaves a little with the second two games (spin dash starts to become redundant and etc) they're basically blueprints of how I would do a Sonic game, different characters to play as optionally with their own moves, great music, great sprite animations, and moderately challenging. SAdv1 felt a little too slow, but it's also proof that true classic Sonic games exist in the modern era. 

 

I also don't understand the beef with Advance 3 - yeah the hubs were a bit silly, and the tag moves made it easy to break stages a lot, but apart from those things it was great! I adored playing it in CoOp.

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Sonic Advance as a whole is brilliant and solid and pretty underrated - as much as I miss how the classic gameplay leaves a little with the second two games (spin dash starts to become redundant and etc) they're basically blueprints of how I would do a Sonic game, different characters to play as optionally with their own moves, great music, great sprite animations, and moderately challenging. SAdv1 felt a little too slow, but it's also proof that true classic Sonic games exist in the modern era. 

 

I also don't understand the beef with Advance 3 - yeah the hubs were a bit silly, and the tag moves made it easy to break stages a lot, but apart from those things it was great! I adored playing it in CoOp.

 

Sonic Advance 3's level design is what really makes it a black sheep. It's Crush-happy and it has very cheap traps. It's not a bad game, just has a bad reputation.

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Ah there were a few too many crushings and Chaos Angel Zone did have a lot of bottomless pits, but I still loved the music, character variety and stage themes as well as how much content and replayability the game had.

 

Shamelessly, Sonic Advance 3 is my favourite Sonic Advance game.

Edited by SuperLink
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Sonic advance 3 happens to be one of my favourite games, I loved it so much i bought the previous 2, I loved the tag team, there was a ton of hidden moves and abilities. (It took me a while to realise pressing down and B made new drop attacks and up and B made new ones too :))

i wish theyd bring back something like this, with more than just sonic and tails.

the music i loved, I used to sit and listen to the music like an mp3. I enjoyed collecting the chao scattered around the levels, and felt really achieved when i managed to 100% the game :)

 

sonic battle which you also diddnt mention, i felt was a great game and felt like part of the series (other than the art style)

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I love all three Advance games, and they honestly rank among the top games in the entire franchise for me.

Advance 1 took a bit to grow on me, as the first game of the three that I played was Advance 2, so Advance 1 seemed much slower and, dare I say, clunkier than its sequel. It definitely grew on me as I found it was more like the classic games and treated it as so. It's got Egg Rocket and Cosmic Angel Zones in it too, so it has to be good, right? The only part of the game that I actively disliked was the Special Stages. They played pretty poorly and the means to access them (the springs) was tedious, harking back to the Game Gear days of finding a specific single object in each level to get the Emeralds.

Advance 2 is my favorite of the three, though that stems from the fact that I had it during a pretty depressing period of my life and it, along with Sonic Mega Collection, was one of the few things that I really enjoyed in that time. It does have the fastest gameplay of the three, and yes it does amount to copious amounts of "holding right to win", looking back on it. The levels are more straightforward than Advance 1, for sure. It had excellent music, though. Egg Utopia Act 1 is still one of my favorite Sonic tunes ever. The Special Stages were meh, and getting to them (the golden rings) was also rather tedious, and much more so than Advance 1, as you could often completely miss a chance to get a ring fairly easily.

Advance 3 gets a lot of flak, but I still like it. Though I'll admit, it's mostly because of Gemerl that I like it. Nevertheless, it had some neat tropes used for its levels. I especially liked how the final set of levels was a dark Angel Island rather than an Eggman base or something. It had its share of cheap deaths/level design (I'm looking at you, Ocean Base barrels and Chaos Angel Act 3), but overall the level design didn't severely bother me. The Special Stages were the best in the series, by far, but finding the Chao was tedious along the lines of the rings from Advance 2.

All in all, though, the Advance series is awesome.

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Pretty sure Tornado hates Advance 3 with a burning passion, and I somewhat have to agree with him on the terrible and cheap enemy placement in this game, is far worse than anything Sonic 4 or Sonic 2 Metropolis Zone has to offer, it does however hold my favourite levels from the Handheld titles, even if the levels themselves are utter mind fucks and cheap level design with bottomless pits, things that crush you and automated sections that are insta-kill if you choose wrong, Cyber Track and Chaos Angel have freaking awesome music.

 

Sonic Advance was forgettable to me, i hated the difficult special stages when they tried to apply a 3D stage to a 2D sprite game, was awful and what the hell was up with Sonic Advance 2's special stages? The only ones that were decent were the Tornado ones in Advance 3, but good luck finding the 8 Chao in every stage THEN the Chao key to unlock the special spring, and did I mention if you fail the special stage, you have to go and get the key AGAIN? before re-attempting it? I also feel the tag-team action slowed the game down a lot from what we had in Sonic Advance 2.

 

I like them, but they can't hold a candle to games like Rush or Rush Adventure, or even the classics, but I honestly think that these games should have been the continuation on from the classics because they are the closest thing to them, especially Advance 1.

Edited by Black☆Rock Shooter
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Sonic Advance is a fine game and I do enjoy a playthrough very rarely.

 

Sonic Advance 2 is very love-it-or-hate-it.  I love it, partly because I got it at a very pleasant time in my life, and completely out of the blue too (I had no idea a sequel even existed until I saw it in a shop one day).

 

Sonic Advance 3 I WANT to love but argh it has so much cheap difficulty and the unmemorably huge n' fast level designs SAdv2 introduced lose their charm when extended to three acts per zone.  They tried to find a middle ground between Adv1 and Adv2 with some slower segments but most were just flow-breaking rooms with moving platforms activated on timer switches.  Despite being slower than SAdv2 there were a ton more cheap difficulty spikes too.

 

 

 

All in all though at least the one consistent thing about these games is that the music is utterly A-class stuff.  It's a crying shame we never got OSTs of these with improved sound quality.

 

 

I would love for them to release a "Sonic Advance Collection" for the 3DS sometime, containing the Advance trilogy, Sonic Pinball Party, Sonic Battle, and Sonic Pocket Adventure for NeoGeoColor.  Maybe throw in ChuChuRocket or some other lil' SEGA GBA games as unlockables.

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Advanced 1 is pretty fun yet pretty dull at the same time. It's a fairly rudimentary Sonic platformer, but it's very well made with good level design. I also liked the differences in the characters  Sonic is the hard mode; Tails is the easy mode; Knuckles is the normal mode and Amy is the hardest mode (although I love playing as her because of how challenging it is.)

 

Advanced 2 I have never played, but from what I've seen, It looks quite a downgrade in quality compared to Advance 1 and seems to focus on speed over platforming.

 

Advanced 3 is, by far, the best in the series and the best portable Sonic game made in the series so far. The game has a very nicely designed levels with a good mix over speed and platforming, the level tropes were unique like the toy kingdom and the partner gimmick was done well and added a new dimension to the game. It also meant that you didn't have to play the same game about 4 times just to get the best ending; you just play the game once. This issue being rectified is enough for me to say it's the best in the advanced trilogy.

 

Also

 

I would love for them to release a "Sonic Advance Collection" for the 3DS sometime, containing the Advance trilogy, Sonic Pinball Party, Sonic Battle, and Sonic Pocket Adventure for NeoGeoColor.  Maybe throw in ChuChuRocket or some other lil' SEGA GBA games as unlockables.

THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS.

Edited by Khezu
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(Can I also just say it's a completely inexplicable pet peeve of mine when people call them "Sonic Advanced", "Game Boy Advanced" etc.  It's there on the box.  ADVANCE.  THERE IS NO PAST TENSE).

 

*breathe*  *breathe*

 

Having said that though, taking that "past tense" context, "Sonic: Advanced Collection" would be a neat name for said compilation game.

Edited by JezMM
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I remember I Marathoned  all three games in like 2005? I was going through my gamer mode, and being an avid 13 year old fan, I ran through these games like tissue paper. Twas a memorable time.

 

 

 

Sonic Advance was a pretty solid, if a little forgettable, title. The most noticeable thing about it is that it made Amy a playable character, but she fortunately played so different from the triple threat that she was a pretty unique experience, and it made the game a lot harder to go through. Other than that, not much different from Sonic 3 & Knuckles...so meh.

 

Sonic Advance 2 I had a lot more fun with, mainly because of the focus on speed, and the levels being a lot more memorable. The levels are fast-paced, but still have a bit of platforming so it's not completely linear, and every character have a crap load of new moves to transverse the level. The only blight on this otherwise good game are the goddamn special rings, fuck them to hell.

 

Sonic Advance 3.....is a mixed bag for me. On one hand, the tag gimmick is new, and it allows your character to unlock a plethora of moves, the Chaos Emeralds are significantly easier to get, and the levels opts for a mix of Speed and Platforming. On the downside, the tag gimmick I feel wasn't utilized to the fullest potential, and because of the mix of Speed/Platforming, it leads to schizophrenic level design and enemy placement.

 

 

 

So all in all, they were ok. Nothing revolutionary(unless you count Amy & Cream as "revolutionary"), but they were manageable.

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I play the advance series just as frequently as the genesis classics. They were basically Sonic 4, 5 and 6 to me (until they actually made Sonic 4). Advance 1 comes the closest to feeling like the Genesis games, and Advance 2 and 3 expand upon that in welcome ways. I feel Advance 2 is the weakest of the 3 mostly because of cheap level design and how it began the hold-right-to-win level design that became more prominent in Rush. Advance 3, while the least graphically interesting, is my favorite of the 3 for combining the speed of the second game with much better level design, and I really can't wrap my head around how people dislike it so much. The hubs are small and easy to navigate, there's a lot more platforming than Advance 2, the Chao are far less annoying to find than special rings, and the tag actions are completely optional. It's one of my favorite games in the whole series.  It was a missed opportunity that none of the levels from these games made it into Generations.

 

And the music in all 3 is ear sex.

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Here's my opinion:

 

Sonic Advance: Great game. Played the shit out of it, it got to the point where I could speedrun Neo Green Hill Act 1 in 28 seconds. Just a great game that had the potential for great sequels.

 

Sonic Advance 2: Ewwwww. The gameplay is nothing like the first one, now its just constant running...this marks the "fall of Dimps" in my book. The art direction, however, is fantastic.

 

Sonic Advance 3: Played it a couple times, but I don't remember it too well. I do remember that unlike Advance 2, it wasn't constant running.

 

If I were to go back in time, here's what I think Sonic Advance 2 should have been like: None of this constant-running crap. Game play is the same as Advance 1, but now with S3&K elemental shields, 3 acts per zone, and checkpoint mini-games. More zones, like around 10 instead of 6 (or however many there were in SAdv1). Now that's what should have been Sonic Advance 2, and it would have also made a great game.

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I personally like the advanced trilogy a whole lot, my fav being the 3rd one and here's my opinion on all of them from what ive played:

 

Advance 1, while I don't have the game myself, I did play my cousin's copy when he still had it and went through all the levels, my main beef with the game being how weird it felt to jump and stuff on there, plus the railing felt a little weird, and oh my god those springs were hard to find but I enjoyed it though and the overall game was very fun with some great level design's and a nice little chao garden too (that can also connect to adventure 1/2 chao garden I might add).

 

Advance 2, out of all of them, this is actually my least fav, while I do enjoy it, I gotta admit the game throw's a lot of cheap shot's at you and its not only from random pits, its also from not doing rail jump's at the right location's and then having a stage that literally kills you if you do get the jump timing right (looking at you death egg zone). Also, jumping makes you lose all momentum for some reason (kind of like SMBB) and the special rings are a very big nuisance to collect, but aside from these the game is okay, just needs more working for it.

 

Advance 3, once again this one is my favorite of the trilogy, because not only does it introduce the awesome power of teamwork (see what I did there) but it also gave me some of the best levels and best gameplay out of the 3 too, minus sand ocean, plus this one in my opinion had the best music out of the 3 and it also gets points for having somewhat of a continuation from battle. Overall I really liked the advanced series and I hope that a collection or digital downloads are made so I can play through them on console too.

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