I know no one’s going to read this, but Sonic Advance 2! I thought they would improve some of the issues of the first game here, but in a lot of ways it’s worse. The stage design is 3x worse than that game and (very very very deep) bottomless pits and off screen enemies are everywhere, making the game feel harder than the first one but not for good reasons. The last two zones of the first game were like this, which was really annoying, but now it’s pretty much every zone. And while the special stages are actually good this time, the requirements to access them are not only evil (basically there’s 7 special rings in every stage that you have to find all in one run, but if you die you lose all of them. There’s also no indication as to where they even are, so it’s easy to get forced onto a path where it’s impossible to get one of them), but if you want to 100% the game, which I’m doing, you have to do it five times (you have to get them all as Sonic, Cream, Tails, and Knuckles to unlock Amy for some reason, and then again as Amy), and they still made it that only Sonic can go super and it’s still locked to the final boss. It’s not a skill issue, some parts of the game are just genuinely poorly designed. Other than that it’s mostly better and it’s still a good game, but I think those two aspects made some parts of the game, like Sky Canyon and beyond and most bosses (Sky Canyon’s boss in particular has a really dumb one hit kill attack and it sucks so much, and Egg Utopia’s boss is also bad because the game doesn’t tell you about a feature that is necessary to win the fight), just not fun for me even with save states (I just used them whenever I did something I’d rather not have to redo, like getting into a special stage), at least as Sonic. Overall I think this game might be slightly better than the first one, but I’d rather 100% the first game again 6 times than this one once. I have no idea why I make sure to 100% every game I play but I’m not going to give up now.
