Sonic Advance 3 (2004)

When I revisited Sonic Advance a couple of years back, I liked it quite a bit. By comparison, I felt a bit let down by Sonic Advance 2, which seemed too easy in its first half and too cheap in its second.

This third entry? It's... it's something.

I'll try to be gentle because this game has its fans, and everyone is entitled to their opinion. But it just didn't work for me. Some of the reasons:

• I criticized Sonic Advance 2 and Sonic Rush for their abundance of bottomless pits. Those are still here. Maybe not as many, but still more than I'd like.
• Almost without fail, if my ring counter got above 90, some unavoidable enemy or obstacle would crop up and take them all away. Even if you think I need to "get gud" and anticipate these better, the sheer amount of them makes this one of the least speedy Sonic games ever.
• The team feature never clicked with me. When the tag actions worked, I found them difficult to perform with precision. But much of the time, I'd go to perform a tag action and my partner would be nowhere on screen.
• In the Genesis games, Tails was mostly either a benevolent or neutral force... taking out enemies accidentally or falling to his doom. In this game, there are switches and platforms that are time-sensitive, but your teammate can (and will) clumsily trigger them at the least opportune times. Were these two features (teams and switches) developed in isolation and combined at the last minute?
• Everything looks the same on the overworld map, with very poor feedback on what the various numbers and rings to jump into actually mean.

On the plus side, movement in the game feels fine (which is far from a given for this franchise) and it's certainly the prettiest of the Game Boy Advance titles. But the gameplay additions push it further from what I'm looking for.