Best GBA or DS sonic game

[Legendary Emerald]

To be honest none of them are that good, but I recommend Sonic Advance the most. Why? Because it's the first 2D Sonic game in years which actually feels like I'm playing a new Mega Drive Sonic game, I dunno why but it has that retro feel to it, even though it's not.

Sonic Advance 2's nowhere near as good- not enough robots/badniks for my liking, plus the level designs are boring.

Sonic Advance 3 would be my 2nd choice, but it's not very memorable, I can only remember a few levels, so it mustn't be that good, it didn't keep me hooked that's for sure.

I've never played Sonic Battle, Sonic Pinball Party or Sonic the Hedgehog, but they're not very highly rated, which is why I've avoided them.

Sonic Rush is alright, but overrated. I don't think it's as good as most people say it is, it's basically running as fast as you can to the finish and that's it, I know this is pretty much every Sonic game's goal, but even more so in this game, it's just running non stop with annoying music, and that's it.

Sonic Rush Adventure is the worst of them all, I HIGHLY recommend avoiding it, it's rubbish! It's got too much work involved getting to one island to another and it takes a lot of patience to get to a new island, I've been trying forever to get to the 3rd island, but don't have the patience as too much work's involved.

I agree with you on most accounts; I think I enjoy Sonic Rush 1 a bit more than you, though I agree with your complaints.

I also agree that Sonic Rush Adventure is worse than the first rush, but disagree that it is a bad game. I don't see how you can think that Sonic Rush Adventure has "got too much work involved getting to one island to another and it takes a lot of patience to get to a new island". Unlocking new islands was painfully easy for me, and even if running through the same levels over and over again got old, it at least made me want to get a higher rank every time (thus getting more medals).

But what I really don't understand is that you've never reached the 3rd island. I'm mean, really? What is the problem you are having, because you must be doing something wrong if you've been trying "forever" to get there and haven't yet. Perhaps you need to upgrade to a better boat before you can reach it? It's been so long, I don't remember anymore.

[Sean]

All it takes to get from one island to another is to draw a line to it. The waterbike has the lowest amount of "ink". If you can't find your destination, the islands necessary for the main story mode are always visible via outlines on the world map.

[Arioch]

I've never played Sonic Battle, Sonic Pinball Party or Sonic the Hedgehog, but they're not very highly rated, which is why I've avoided them.

That shouldn't turn you away. I'm sure like anybody else you've played a game that alot ppl didn't like, and it turned to a very good game (IYO). Before shunning the games atleast give them a try. Because ratings for games (after a certain point in life) are now Biased.

Sonic Rush is alright, but overrated. I don't think it's as good as most people say it is, it's basically running as fast as you can to the finish and that's it, I know this is pretty much every Sonic game's goal, but even more so in this game, it's just running non stop with annoying music, and that's it.

The reason this game got a very good rating was because it kept the roots of the Sonic game. The game was made so as to bring the good old game play back, not to add other features. I understand where you're coming from, because they could have done more for the game.

[Rusty Spy]

The reason this game got a very good rating was because it kept the roots of the Sonic game. The game was made so as to bring the good old game play back, not to add other features. I understand where you're coming from, because they could have done more for the game.

That's funny, cause this game couldn't be any less like the old games. You must be thinking about Advance 1.

Rather than beating levels in a quick pace, Rush is all about running as fast as possible and letting the level blur past you. Enemies are just bumps in the road that you barely notice from boosting nonstop, and pretty much every level boils down to boost, trick, boost, trick, rinse and repeat untill the levels over, and if your really advanced, jump.

The most the two have in common is that they share similar, if not, the same level themes, AKA, an excuse to not be creative, and the same 2-Acts-One-Boss structure.

[GameFarnsworth940]

here's what I can reccomend, seeing as how I have not played Advance 2 or Pinball

Advance 1- Best of the Advance games I played. (Excluding Battle) I played it constantly, untill I lost it =( but, it is worth recommending.

Advance 3- Not as good as the first. The partner AI is shitty. They can't keep up, and with the level design, you can barely keep your speed going. If anything, try it.

Battle- Best on GBA, hands down. It's an interesting concept, but it woks really good. I did enjoy the customizeable fighter as well.

Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis- Lucky for me, I don't own it. It's horrid. Full of glitches. I played through most of Green Hill at my firends house, but I just couldn't go on. (a glitch got me stuck in the ground because of a spring.) Avoid it at all costs.

Sonic Rush- Fun, but I hate the bottomless pits. Never liked playing through stories with two different characters on games, but atleast the zones order was modified a little bit for Blaze. Get it, you'll be glad.

Rush Adventure- Big improvement. Not as many pits, Wi-Fi, extra missions, and you only need to complete the story once. (Blaze was just an alternate character you could use this time.) My only problems were using the submarine and the special stages. Definate buy.

Chronicles- Never got around to finishing it. Can't give a recomendation yet. Sorry.

[Semi-colon e]

Sonic Rush Adventure is the worst of them all, I HIGHLY recommend avoiding it, it's rubbish! It's got too much work involved getting to one island to another and it takes a lot of patience to get to a new island, I've been trying forever to get to the 3rd island, but don't have the patience as too much work's involved.

You must really suck then, getting from island to island is well easy. Also how can you say it's rubbish if you haven't even got to the third stage?

Anyway, I definitely recommend Rush Adventure. The sailing may be a bit annoying but it's simple, and the rest of the game is great.

The Advances all have fatal, frustrating flaws in each one, and the first Rush is very overrated compared to Rush Adventure. Rush has many boring sections where you just fight enemies, retardedly slow paced boss fights, and aside from a few levels, most of them feel the same, even WITH level specific gimmicks. It's not by any means a BAD game, but it's not great either. Rush Adventure is less tedious, and while it's easier, it's far more fun and there's less bottomless pits everywhere, and great boss fights which you don't spend most of the time waiting around.

[Cany the hedge]

Like others have said, I definitely think Sonic Rush Adventure is by far the best handheld Sonic game, and to me one of the best Sonic games period (yes, I actually am comparing it to the classics). Everything about that game is amazing: the levels, the soundtrack, the light-hearted story (a nice change from some of the more "dark and edgy" stories of recent Sonic games), online multiplayer, and just everything else about it.

^

This.

I can say what I think. But after reading many of the op“nions here, I gotta agree.

Try the advance series if you must. But if you actually want to get hooked by the game, try the Rushes (especially Sonic Rush Adventure. But I gotta say, I love Marine as a character, she´s got quite a potential, and character development).

Edited June 23, 2009 by Cany the hedge

[Tornado]

Sonic Advance

Advance 1 is essentially Sonic 4 if it was farmed out to another developer. It plays, controls and feels pretty much like Sonic 2 with some quirky Sonic Adventure/Sonic 3 elements thrown in (this was by design). The music is alright (pretty good in theory, but let down by what I assume is Dimps' unfamiliarity with the hardware, so it comes out kind of scratchy as befell so many GBA games). Honestly, the main problem with this game is that its plays the role of a Mega Drive game but with sterile, rather unimaginative level design. Casino Level, Ice Level, Flying Ruins Level, Space Station level, the gang is all here; and it was all presented better back when it was done the first time in Sonic 2/Sonic 3. Keep in mind that it isn't bad, per se, but it isn't memorable enough (other than maybe Cosmic Angel and Egg Rocket, and Cosmic Angel is a wannebe Death Egg anyways). That being said, if you want actual, true to life classic Sonic gameplay, this is the best way to get it (Pocket Adventure be damned), and it has aged far better than almost all of the other handheld Sonic games. It even has the code to make Tails follow you if you play as Sonic!

Sonic Advance 2

This is an interesting case. The whole game is designed for MOAR SPEED over actual substance, something that strangely most of the fanbase loves for the 3D games and the Rush games but hate when it comes to this one. The graphics, the music, the gameplay, the controls, the physics, the level design; it all fits that goal fantastically. Even the rather gimmicky boss battles flow fantastically if you approach the game understanding what it tries to do: It isn't supposed to be a heartwarming epic of amazing proportions. Its supposed to be one big time trial, essentially a single player racing game that is good in quick, 10 minute bursts at most. That simplicity is both its genius and its weakness. On the one hand, it doesn't pad the game with fake difficulty until very late in the game (unless you want to actually get the Emeralds, at which point the problems become obvious), and it doesn't really even pretend like its trying to emulate old school Sonic games. On the other hand, compared to the otherwise worse-in-every-way-Advance 3, the whole thing is quite shallow. A tough game to pin down because of it, because what you take from the game largely depends on what you want to take from the game rather than what the game actually offers. I love it. I love its replayability and its style over substance gameplay, but I am truly sad that Dimps decided to keep reusing the concept for more than this game. I think it is therefore, while not as good objectively as Advance 1, arguably just as fun.

Sonic Advance 3

Awful, Awful, Awful, Awful, Awful. They took the Sonic Advance 2 Everything-goes-1-million-miles-per-hour controls, saddled it with level design made entirely of pits, cheap spike placement and slow platforming (level design which, I should add, thoroughly punished speed, completely going against how the game wants to be played), and tied it together with gimmicky team gameplay that allowed them to call the poor level design a "feature." The music is catchy, and the emerald collecting is the best in the Advance series, and a couple of levels are memorable (not really good, just memorable), but the game otherwise offers nothing that Advance and Advance 2 don't do much better. Frequently claims are thrown about that Advance 3 brought the series back to form after the apparently awful Advance 2, but it is really the same game with much worse gameplay (because it isn't as streamlined. Imagine if Mario Galaxy played like Sonic Unleashed but the levels weren't changed to compensate and you have a good 3D approximation). Its also the farthest away from the rest of the series in terms of interface, lacking even the score counter.

Sonic Pinball Party

A nice playing, albeit rather uninspired Pinball sim. Much better than the Pokemon Pinball games as an actual pinball game, but that is where the problem comes in: Its a pinball sim more than a Sonic game. Other than the tacked-on Chao Garden, tacked on story mode and tacked on character marquees when you are playing, this is essentially Samba de Amigo Pinball with a couple of other table designed thrown in. The NiGHTS table is much better in this regard, but still not perfect. As such, while the game is perfect for Pinballin' on the go, it (other than the Samba de Amigo table and maybe the NiGHTS one) doesn't really have much depth or lasting value. I still recommend it, however. The Sonic tables, while uninspired and only barely-Sonic related, are nicely designed. The NiGHTS table has creative and fun goals (also, its NiGHTS!), and the Samba table, while simple, is incredibly difficult and deceptively deep. The game also has some pretty good music, ranging from remastered songs from Sonic Advance (thus higher quality), GBA chiptune versions of the music from NiGHTS (which works surprisingly well), some remixes from the Genny era and pretty slick renditions of various other Sonic Team music.

Sonic Battle

This one is difficult to line up. Its like Smash Bros. crossed with Final Fight, and it works at first. The story is well-written and emotional (even though Sonic Team decided that the idiotic crap in ShtH would be better and retconned it), the characterization is pretty good (except for poor Amy) and the gameplay is actually pretty solid. However, the games biggest triumph is (again) its biggest downfall. The customization flat-out ruins any challenge this game had at around the halfway mark, because by that time you can start taking the best moves of each character and begin sweeping matches without even being touched. Its a shame, because if the customization aspect was thought out more this wouldn't be a problem, and the game would hold up well (if a bit button-mashy) gameplay wise. Its still worth a purchase, though, especially at whatever prices it would be now.

Sonic Genesis

Sonic Spinball

A surprisingly faithful port of the game. Amazingly, the GBA's resolution issues aren't that much of a problem in the game so much as the rather poor D-Pad are (though even that is acceptable). Sega wisely included an option to hide the largely-irrelevant score bar from the top of the screen (or make it transparent), so it plays just like it did in 1993. I'd say its about as good as Pinball Party, though for a completely different reason. Why Sega didn't hire that company to port Sonic 1 will probably be a mystery for all eternity.

Now, to the DS:

Sonic Rush

Honestly, I never saw why people loved it so much. It plays like a somewhat-more-streamlined Sonic Advance 3 (but with most of the same level design problems), only instead of poorly thought out team gimmicks it has poorly-thought out 2-screen scrolling. It also replaced the nicely animated (though low-res) 2D sprites with oddly-animated, ugly 3D models; an odd decision that I thought was finally learned when when the Neo Geo Hyper 64 failed. It also has voice acting. Yay progress! Honestly, I might be biased because I played the superior Rush Adventure first, but I just never got into it (I'm only about halfway into my copy). It also introduced the boost button, pretty much the single worst thing in the Sonic series as it stands now; and it removed the deeper trick system that the Advance series had in favor of a "spam the A-button system." The music is much better than the sequel, though; so there is that.

Sonic Rush Adventure

Here we go. While I'm not sure as to whether it is better than Advance 1, it is certainly the best game in the series since (handheld or not). The music is poor, but it improved upon Sonic Rush in every other way. The level design is worlds better, the 3D models look much better, there is much more variety in the gameplay, the boss battles are better (though still kind of meh), and the LoZ ripoffs are actually mostly fun (the chief exception being the submarine sections). The story is still the convoluted mess that anything vaguely related to STH'06 will be by default, and I can't say I can stand Marine, but it's lighthearted take on things is nice. The missions after the fact are also quite challenging, and many of them are quite original as well.

Sonic Chronicles

A toughie, this. The story itself is far better than anything Sonic Team has put out since 2004, but it is a bit fan-fictiony in spots. The battle system is clever and fun at first, but drags on in the second half of the game. The chao equipping and trading is a good idea, but it makes it far too easy to dominate at the game because of how common powerful chao actually are. The item system does a good job at personalization of characters, but money is so scarce that you are essentially limited to what you find instead of things you buy. Some characters are too powerful (Cream), some characters are too weak/useless (Shadow/Rouge), some characters are too awesome for the short time they are playable (Robotnik). The SatAM/Archie references are great, and the game does a great job of characterization for characters that are incredibly Flanderized in actual Sonic Team games (Read: Amy. Robotnik is also quite awesome, but he is already pretty good in Sonic Team games), but others stick out for being just as cliched as in the main games; and the characterization is just odd for most of the heroes in the beginning. The music is passable in very few areas, awful in most others, and well below what the DS is capable in all of them (as I understand it, this was a last minute forced change, though). The final boss fight is anti-climactic, and the overall resolution of the game's Big Bad is forgettable. Overall, there are very few objective things wrong with the game; but subjectively it is all over the place.

Edited June 24, 2009 by Tornado

[Nacho]

Sonic Advance 2 was AWESOME, my fave out of the Advance series and I can't believe people hated it. it was hard, fun and I still play it. Rush and Rush Adventure are both great, can't go wrong with either of them.

[Sean]

I should emphasize an incredible problem with Sonic Advance 3: its more platform-heavy than Sonic Advance 2 obviously, but its physics engine has more in common with 2 than it does with 1 - which makes it too much of a chore to time jumps right because Sonic and the others speed up incredibly fast when jumping for some insane reason. Faster than they ever did in previous 2D games, anyway.

2's physics aren't designed for platforming at all, so in a sense 3 is like the worst in the bunch (and I mean absolute worst, oh my god some of these handheld games are more painful to play than Sonic 2006, can't believe I actually bought/completed them), whereas 2 sucked but it set out to accomplish what it wanted to do.

Edited June 25, 2009 by Jake

[Tornado]

I should emphasize an incredible problem with Sonic Advance 3: its more platform-heavy than Sonic Advance 2 obviously, but its physics engine has more in common with 2 than it does with 1 - which makes it too much of a chore to time jumps right because Sonic and the others speed up incredibly fast when jumping for some insane reason. Faster than they ever did in previous 2D games, anyway.

Compounding the problem is that the actual platforming bits, particularly later in the game, would be pretty bad regardless of what the physics engine wants to do; with many of them being rather blind leaps of faith that Sonic 2 GG would be ahamed of. Furthermore... You know what? Screw it. Laziness Attack:

Quite frankly, its the worst in the Advance series, and scarily close to the worst of the handheld titles overall (ignoring Sonic Jam, of course). The level design is atrocious, being made up of a series of death pits, cheap enemy placement and bland areas, none of it being able to decide whether it wants to do platforming or speed (making the obvious changeovers incredibly jarring). The gameplay is poor, trying to mix Sonic Advance and Sonic Advance 2 gameplay together, completely ignoring that Sonic Advance 2 only worked (just barely, mind you) because the level design and gameplay was designed purely to work off of the speed (imagine platforming being a core focus of Advance 2 and you get my problem). MOAR SPEED was perfectly acceptable in Advance 2 as a nice change of pace. MOAR SPEED was awful in Advance 3 because Dimps made it obvious that they felt it was a good idea worth pursuing, as well as deciding it would be good to actively punish you for attempting it.

The team gimmick is painfully drawn out, with your teammate being completely useless until you run into whatever completely arbitrary obstacle that Dimps decided to put in your way to pad game length. The music quality is awful in spots, as if they used the sound driver from a GBA launch title (something that Sonic Battle also suffers from even worse). And worst of all, Dimps didn't seem to get the message and made Sonic Rush about the same (though that game also has some problems of its own).

I did like the special stages, and I do like that they made actually getting to them not as tortuous as it was in Sonic Advance 2, but you still had to play the game to get to them.

[Sean]

Yeah, 3's physics being tweaked for the better wouldn't have changed a thing. The first thing I noticed about the game when I beat it was the atrocious level design, far worse than anything I've seen in any game before or since, and I only just realized recently that the ass physics were a part of the problem, which for some reason I had taken for granted at the time.

[Rusty Spy]

2's physics aren't designed for platforming at all, so in a sense 3 is like the worst in the bunch (and I mean absolute worst, oh my god some of these handheld games are more painful to play than Sonic 2006, can't believe I actually bought/completed them), whereas 2 sucked but it set out to accomplish what it wanted to do.

Advance 2 works quite well for platforming when moving slowly because you don't accelerate as fast in the air as in Advance 3. So as a result, the game allowed for both slow and steady movement, but also let you zoom off at fast speeds at will, offering a great balance of slow and fast gameplay.

[Tornado]

Advance 2 works quite well for platforming when moving slowly because you don't accelerate as fast in the air as in Advance 3. So as a result, the game allowed for both slow and steady movement, but also let you zoom off at fast speeds at will, offering a great balance of slow and fast gameplay.

I just checked on my PSP, and it seems you are correct. While the difference isn't that massive (at least not with Sonic), it is doubly ironic:

1. The game whose entire collection of necessary slow platforming areas are taken care of 30 yards into the first level first level has passable low speed controls.
   
2. The game which has slow platforming forced upon you by bringing you to a dead stop every 30 seconds from max speed has finnicky low speed controls.
   

Which means they had something that was at least workable and made it worse. Its like Dimps didn't even know what they wanted the game to be (as if the level design didn't make it obvious enough). Edited June 25, 2009 by Tornado

[Crystal Kingfisher]

I'd say Sonic Rush Adventure for DS games, Sonic Advance 2 out of the GBA ones. That's just my preference, mind.

Same. SAdv2 is my favorite GBA Sonic game, and SRA is my favorite DS Sonic game. The first Rush was good too, but I could never beat the Night Carnival boss. It's really hard. The second one (SRA) is better IMO, but I think it could have been harder, but not extremely hard like Rush 1. With the GBA Sonic games, like I said, SAdv2 is the best one, but SAdv1 is good as well. SAdv3 is very overrated.

[Sean]

The one thing I liked about Sonic Advance 2 was its incorporation of the trick system, which unfortunately never had seemed quite as accurate or satisfying in later games than it did here.