Re-release this: Sonic Advance

The first original Sonic the Hedgehog game released on a Nintendo system deserves to see the light of day once more.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Sonic the Hedgehog games from the Sega Genesis era have been released and re-released and ported so many times now that you can discuss which of those versions is superior and which are disappointments. No such attention nor care has been given to Sonic’s underappreciated handheld adventures, however: sure, the Game Gear titles received a second life on the Nintendo 3DS digital storefront, but what of Pocket Adventure? What about the (superior) DS version of Sonic Colors, or the pair of Sonic Rush games? And, of course, the Sonic Advance trilogy on Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, which remain tethered to that now long-dead system.

Sonic Advance is pretty notable and fascinating even outside of what’s in the game itself. Sega had left the portable world behind years before exiting the console space, too. The Game Gear was discontinued in 1997, and was never a massive success even at its peak — Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was its best-selling game, with just 400,000 copies sold, and its “successor” system, the Nomad, was a portable Genesis, not actually a system with its own library. Just for comparison’s sake, the Game Boy had 66 different titles sell at least one million copies — it’s pretty understandable why Nintendo kept at it, while Sega decided to focus more on consoles and arcades.

Sega still saw value in the handheld space, even if they weren’t going to invest heavily into it, which is how a relationship with SNK began that resulted in games like the aforementioned Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure, for the Neo Geo Pocket Color portable. The developers of that game were SNK themselves, but many of the specific team members who worked on it would leave to form their own studio, Dimps. And then Dimps, which was formed and funded by a partnership including Sega, Sony, and Bandai, would be recruited to lead development on Sonic Advance alongside Sonic Team. It would go on to sell 1.52 million copies, nearly four times what the Game Gear’s best managed. An immediate return on the investment, that.

Image credit: Mobygames

Wikipedia, for some reason, notes that Sonic Team was “understaffed on employees familiar with the GBA hardware and so recruited Dimps.” Emphasis my own, because that doesn’t actually seem to be the reason they were brought in on this. According to the IGN interview that is cited as the source for the above explanation on the Sonic Advance page, Sonic creator Yuji Naka actually said that, “We do the planning internally, but for Sonic Advance, we used an external developer only because we don't have enough staff internally to work on the Game Boy Advance.” Which isn’t the same thing at all, especially when you consider that Dimps’ staff wasn’t overflowing with GBA familiarity, either. Sonic Advance released in Japan in December of 2001, while the system it played on released just nine months prior. Sonic Advance was Dimps’ first game as a studio, and you can’t credit anything they did with SNK as the reasoning behind this interpretation of the facts, either, as that company’s first GBA title wouldn’t release until after Sonic Advance.

Check those primary sources when you can, folks.

Sega, after switching to third-party development which would focus heavily on Sony’s Playstation 2 as well as Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance (and eventually Microsoft’s Xbox, though, that didn’t officially exist at the time of Sega’s initial announcement), made Sonic Advance the first Sonic title on a Nintendo system. Though, it wasn’t the first Sega-published game on a Nintendo system, nor the first Sonic Team title to grace their platforms: that honor goes to the GBA port of ChuChu Rocket, which was a launch title for both the Japanese and North American releases of the handheld. (And the existence of which makes that Wikipedia editorializing even odder.) Sega might have done what Nintendon’t, but now they did it on Nintendo hardware. Normal times now, but certainly strange times two decades ago.

However, Sega actually wasn’t the publisher for the North American version of Sonic Advance. That job instead went to THQ, which had signed a deal with Sega to publish 16 GBA titles between 2001 and 2003 — you’ve got to remember that Sega had just announced their conversion to being a third-party developer and publisher a couple of months before the GBA launched in Japan. They were going to need some help preparing themselves for this new role and extricating themselves from the old one, and deals like this with THQ allowed them the space to do so without as much juggling as would otherwise be necessary. Given Sega’s current publishing success, it seems wild that they’d ever need the hand, but they hit the ground running as a third-party outfit, and it was unclear at first how all of that was going to go considering they had been pushed out of the console business despite the undeniable quality of their games in the first place.

The first-ever Sonic game on a Nintendo system, planned by Sonic Team but developed by Dimps — which was funded by Sega, Sony, and Bandai — and published by Sega in Japan and much of Europe, but THQ in North America, and Infogrames, now known as Atari SA, in Europe. Got all of that?

Here’s the thing that strikes me the most about how Sonic Advance actually plays: it’s an excellent balance point between the various styles of the first 10 years of Sonic, which is fitting for a game developed to celebrate the first decade of the franchise. It’s more slow-paced than Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and that game’s sequels and 3D successors, with a real emphasis on the platforming aspects of Sonic. And yet there’s still plenty of speed involved, without the kind of reliance on systems that make it feel as if you aren’t really in control, either. In addition, it was designed with playing multiple (and different!) characters and styles in mind, but instead of having levels exclusively playable by Sonic or Knuckles or whomever like in Sonic Adventure and its sequel, instead, all of the game’s stages can be experienced with all of the characters.

From the game’s start, no unlocking necessary, you can choose to play the game’s six zones as either Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, or Amy. The stages have been designed so that you can play as any of them without an issue, but you will play all of the stages differently, depending on who you choose. And this is because of how each character is designed: these aren’t just palette swaps.

Sonic is the fastest, of course, and can grind on rails. While he doesn’t have his homing attack from the Adventure games, he can perform a second spin attack in midair, which gives you a little more of an aerial boost, or allows you a second chance to attack an enemy while in mid-air. Tails doesn’t have that extra running gear that Sonic does — only Sonic gets the whirlwind running animation for his legs — but he can stop and fly upward, which can lead you to some areas you might miss or simply can’t reach (or figure out how to reach) while playing as Sonic. Knuckles, too, isn’t as quick on his feet as Sonic, but he can float across great distances, and you aren’t even tethered to a second character and odd physics while doing it.

Amy is vastly different than the rest, and the toughest to play, because she doesn’t just change how you approach the stages, but how the game even feels to play. Amy is the slowest and can’t spin up for speed like the other three characters, but can instead do a little hop to get going faster. And also, she has a hammer: Amy doesn’t turn into a ball to attack foes, she just hits them with that hammer — why else do you think she’s carrying that thing around? Like I said, vastly different: you have to reprogram yourself far more for Amy than the other two non-Sonic characters, as they’re still, at their core, protagonists of a Sonic the Hedgehog game, playing Sonic the Hedgehog stages. Meanwhile, hammer.

You will want to explore, too, as Sonic Advance does not use the system of “have X rings before hitting a checkpoint” to find the special zones, the successful completion of which will earn you Chaos Emeralds. Instead, there are hidden springs, seven of them, which you will need to find in order to reach the special zones. The special zones are a bit different than in game’s past, too: instead of the Sonic 2 style pseudo-3D running, now you’re falling down a lengthy hole in a 3D space, riding a surfboard. There are traps to avoid, boosts to… well, probably avoid, too, so as not to miss rings, tricks to hit at the exact right time for a boost in collected rings, and checkpoints that determine whether you’ve collected enough to continue or grab the Emerald.

Once you’ve found all seven Chaos Emeralds and completed the game at least once with each character, complete it again with Sonic, and you’ll reach the actual, hidden final zone, and the true final fight and ending of the game. It’s quite a bit of work to get to that point, but everything is so well-designed and so thoughtful, and the four characters different enough, that you don’t mind having to play again and again to get to that point. And this is a 2D Sonic game we’re talking about: it’s not exactly JRPG length to begin with.

It helps, too, that once you’ve collected a Chaos Emerald, you’ve got it forever. Collect one with Tails on a Tails playthrough, and it’s logged as collected for everyone else, too. So you don’t need a perfect final playthrough in order to reach the true ending and true final zone: you just need to have put in the effort across your previous playthroughs, and taken the time to explore the various paths and secrets of the game’s six primary zones.

They’re all great, and original, too: unlike Pocket Adventure, which was heavily based on the Genesis version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic Advance is its own thing. The first zone finds you in a green zone, sure, but one with beaches and different design elements than the usual, and even the more robotic-style level toward the end has a nifty twist: the level takes place within a spaceship that’s taking off and heading to space, and is therefore broken into segments that will fall away over time. You have five minutes to get from one segment to the next before you fail, because the one you’re in disconnects and falls back to earth. You’re also not really in a position to fall in this stage, either, despite the design of it that invites such a thing. Remember, the bottom fell off already, so be careful!

Visually, Sonic Advance animates well, and is both busy and interesting enough with its little graphical flourishes — water falling on the head of your character when you stand under a waterfall, for instance —that it reminds you of how much of a shame it was that Sonic Team didn’t get to create a mainline Sonic on the Saturn. Like the GBA, the Saturn was a 32-bit system, and studios that developed for the former would often make SNES-style games that had much more going for them on the hardware side. Additional graphical tricks and horsepower hidden by the system’s portable nature: consider, for instance, that Treasure claims that Gunstar Heroes simply could not have been made on the Super Nintendo, but they developed its sequel on the GBA.

Granted, we might have seen Sonic Team trying to utilize the 3D capabilities the Saturn did have given the push for those games at the time, even if they weren’t the strongest point of the hardware, and not have received a console version of what ended up happening on the GBA. Still, I can wish things had happened, you know? And regardless of what could have been, Sonic Team still did the planning for a trilogy that seems an awful lot like what Nintendo did with Super Mario 3D Land, in that it created something where the idea was it could logically slot into the franchise’s past, utilizing the hardware of the present: in 3D Land’s case, it was meant to represent a midpoint between the solely 2D past of Mario and the full 3D it inevitably moved to, whereas Sonic Advance gave us a glimpse of what a side-scrolling, 32-bit Sega Saturn Sonic might have looked like.

There is no Sega Saturn Sonic, but there are three 32-bit Sonic Advance games that actually do exist. Not that you’d know that, given how little Sega has done with them since their original release. Sonic Advance sold over 1.5 million copies on the Game Boy Advance, and then was forgotten as far as mainstream platforms go. A worldwide N-Gage port in 2003, and then an Android release in 2011, but only in Japan. It’s also available on J2ME worldwide, so it’s not that you can’t get it, but yeah. Maybe release it as part of a compilation at some point on a system that people have in their living room, or in a modernized with quality-of-life improvements form a la SNK’s slate of individual Neo Geo Pocket Color releases. Something besides the relative and unfair nothing that’s marked most of the game’s existence.

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