I'm trying the Sonic Advance series for GBA, and it is insane how much of a glow up Sonic Advance 2 is compared to Sonic Advance 1.

For context, right now, I'm playing through as much of the sonic series as I can. I would abbreviate the titles more, but then it would sound like I was talking about sonic adventure (I love both adventure games).

I didn't realize how much I just did not care about Sonic Advance 1 before I played Sonic Advance 2. Sonic Advance 1 is... Fine to me, and that's it. It truly is a nothing burger to me, cause it just feels like a retread of Sonic the Hedgehog 1 on Genesis. Just with less iconic aesthetics. Which means that Advanced 1 is also a downgrade from that, IMO. It has the extra playable characters, which is nice, but eggman is as basic as he gets, the only difference is that his boss builds are SLIGHTLY harder. Barely, though. It's also REALLY short. I beat it in one night.

Sonic Advance 2, on the other hand, pleasantly surprised me. The tricks they add give you more freedom in platforming. They have the same playable characters and more, including Cream (who is hilariously overpowered, and I love that. Even the music and aesthetics feel like a huge upgrade. Way more memorable tracks than the original. Go listen to the "hot crater" tracks. One of my favorite tracks in this series, and there are a lot of amazing musical artists in the series. They even added the homing attack, which is pretty useless in 2d, so you barely use it, but it's a neat addition.

The boost you get from running at top speeds that they added gives the game a much faster, much more rewarding top speed, with lots of sections that take great advantage of it. The farther you go, the more traps there are that you can fall into at those top speeds, and I get how that can be annoying, but I like having to focus, and I like the difficulty boost. IMO, unlike Sonic Advance 1 (which wasn't fun enough for me to play with multiple characters) Sonic Advanced 2 actually was fun enough for me to experiment with the other ones.

Apparently the boss fights are a little divisive, but I honestly loved them. The fact that you're running for almost all of them for the first time is honestly awesome to me, and it makes for a better challenge. And in my opinion, up till this point, most of the bosses in the 2d series were too easy (I get it though, since most of those games didn't have save files). Some people hate them, but once you memorize their boss patterns, these bosses feel awesome to speedrun. (which becomes important at the end lol). There are a couple of really shitty and janky decisions here and there though. Especially the sky canyon boss, that whole fight is horrible, makes me want to kick Eggman in the nuts, repeatedly, as hard as I can.

I've heard that the special stages are awful to enter, and that's probably true, since I haven't seen one special stage. But I often just go for the regular ending. That might be heresy, but the game has way more content than it's predecessor.

Anyhow, this makes me SUPER excited to play Sonic Advance 3, and eventually Sonic Rush, by the same dev team. After I play Sonic Heroes.