Game #1089: Sonic Advance 3

  One last spin jump.

 I've been reading a lot about how Sonic Advance 3 has cheap level design and how it's the weakest of the series and.... are the labels of my SA 2 and SA3 carts switched? Because every criticism leveled against SA 3, SA 2 did but worse.

 For this entry, they went a bit wild with the gameplay, adding a new Tag System. Now, you must play as a pair of characters, the CPU taking over your partner and.... just getting hit over and over again. All characters return, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Cream and Amy, the latter three needing to be unlocked by playing as Sonic. There are two elements to the tag system: Tag actions, which are performed by holding down R and specific abilities. Tag actions are universal, whenever Tails is your partner, holding down R will have him carry you and fly, Knuckles will glide with you on top of him, etc. Where it gets interesting is in how your main character's abilities change depending on his or her partner. For instance, Knuckle's basic two-hit combo turns into SA 1's uppercut if paired with Tails. Sonic only has access to the just-defense move with Knuckles as his partner, and can only perform the homing attack with Cream as his partner. You could argue that this is a bit limiting, but I'd argue that it offers more ways to play the game.

 The basic flow of the game has changed too. Now each world is comprised of three stages and a boss, and while there's one world less, for a total of 8, overall, there are more stages than in SA2. Each world has a mini-hub that you must traverse to pick every stage and... it's something I didn't really like. These mini-hubs are boring and feel more like a chore that gets in the way of your progress than anything else.

 Now, as for the level design... I'll give SA2 this, the good levels in that game(1, 2, 3, 4 and 7) are better designed than any level in SA3, because Sonic Advance 3's levels do come with some of the bullshit that plagued SA 2's worst levels(5 and 6). That said, none of the levels in this game are as atrocious as SA2 as its worst, so I'd say this game is much more consistent. Even when I died to bullshit, such as ramps that threw me directly onto spikes or bumpers that led me directly into enemies... it never felt hopeless. I'd just retry the stage a few more times and be done with it, because no stage here is as bad as Sky Canyon. The unfairness level is manageable from beginning to end, which is more than I can say about SA2.

 It's not the grand finale I was expecting for the series, and I admire some of the changes they implemented with the tag system. That said, yeah, there's a fair amount of unfair and almost unavoidable obstacles, since you can't see them coming quickly enough, everywhere which makes the game a bit less fun than it could've been. Honestly, I don't think I'll be revisiting the Sonic Advance Trilogy anytime soon, but at least two out of the three games were decent, and I believe SA 3's tag system makes for an engaging mechanic that the previous two games can't match.

 6.0