Game Breaker / Sonic the Hedgehog

General

• Bosses can be one of the more difficult aspects of Sonic games, because if you get hit, your rings can potentially scatter out of reach. However, in most 2D Sonic games, your last ring will ALWAYS fly to the left if you get hit. This means that in most boss areas, as long as you DON'T wander too far to the left, it's usually possible to get hit and recover your one remaining ring again and again, effectively preventing you from ever dying. Even better, your character will always fly in the direction opposite of where they were facing when damaged, meaning as long as you attack only while facing right, you can easily recollect that one single ring as needed. This doesn't work in every game, though: some, such as the Sonic Rush series combat this trick by either having the single ring fly in a random direction when you're hurt and/or making them go further if you get damaged too many times in a row (eventually making them fly offscreen before you have the chance to grab one), and some bosses may also have a One-Hit Kill attack that ignores your ring count.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2

• In Sonic the Hedgehog 2, all seven Chaos Emeralds could be gathered in the first zone, since there are enough checkpoints in Emerald Hill Zone to get all the emeralds. This (naturally) allowed you to breeze through the game casually, the only challenge being the final level, in which the player has to fight Mecha Sonic and the Death Egg Robot with no protection.
• The PlayStation 3 version of the game adds the ability to save the game whenever you want, and reload from that save without penalty. With the ability to use save states, suddenly the game's challenge goes right out of the window.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles

• Launch Base Zone has alarm sirens that summon dive-bombing Fybots, but if you hold a spin-dash in the alarm's trigger area, it will continuously defeat them, allowing you to rack up a massive score and the accompanying extra lives.
• The impossible-to-miss first giant ring in Mushroom Hill comes back if you quit and reload, effectively giving you infinite retries at the game's Special Stages.
• The shields in the game are so useful they can trivialize most bosses: the fire shield gave Sonic a flying tackle that could be spammed without much risk; the electric shield provided Sonic with a double jump that ruined the whole point of the boss being out of reach; and Sonic's default Insta-Shield's reach is just enough to break several boss battles if you time it correctly.

Knuckles' Chaotix

• Charmy the Bee was seemingly designed to be the "easy mode" character, but he destroys the challenge so hard that it feels like you're playing a completely different game. The other characters have various movement abilities like gliding, climbing on walls or ceilings, and limited air dashing. Charmy essentially has all those things combined and more, being able to fly like a missile for an unlimited time and easily destroy enemies by ramming into them. Because of this, he nearly ignores the partner system altogether; while others need the assistance of their partner to progress, Charmy can just drag them behind him while he breezes through everything. He's also a fraction of the size of everyone else, which makes him much harder to hit. His closest thing to a weakness is not being able to throw his partner, but this move is rendered completely pointless by all his other abilities.

Sonic Adventure

• Tails in Sonic Adventure, due to his flying ability. In Windy Valley, you can skip the entire level just by flying over everything. Compared to other 3D Sonic games, this one has easily the most overpowered flight ability. Tails gets a lot of height, distance, and speed. He can slowly descend to the ground or quickly dive down. There's no real height or distance cap beyond your momentum and flight stamina, which only drains while you're holding the jump button. Other levels, such as Sky Deck, become laughably easy once you find all of the shortcuts that you can reach just by flying. The Jet Anklet upgrade makes it even more broken: Tails is even faster than Sonic when he flies! The upgrade makes Windy Valley a joke and makes the rest of the game noticeably easier (when you're not wrestling with the camera, anyways). It's also one of the only upgrades you can get as soon as the intro ends, as there is literally nothing stopping you from getting it.
• Sonic's Spin Dash is unusually flexible in this game, as it activates at the press of a button and can be started anywhere (similar to Classic Sonic's move in the HD version of Generations). An easy way to build up speed is to simply spam the action button. Combining a Spin Dash with a well-timed jump on a slope also allows Sonic to fly into the air, allowing some degree of Sequence Breaking.

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle

• In the multiplayer mode:
  • Amy: She may be slow and can't jump high, but she gets her specials every 10 rings rather than 20, and her freeze doesn't lock her opponent in midair, meaning she can send them plummeting to their death. It's not uncommon for her to continuously kill you and freeze you into submission. She's also faster on rails than other characters.
  • Metal Sonic: Lacks specials, but he moves much faster and jumps much higher than the rest of the 'hogs and he has an invincibility shield to boot.

Sonic Advance 2

• Cream renders every boss powerless as her Cheese attack move will always hit from any distance during the fight. Simply pressing B repeatedly without even moving can guarantee an easy victory.
• If you're trying to learn where the Special Stage Rings are without cheating, Tails is the best character to use because his flying ability allows you to change elevations quickly and can potentially reverse any mistakes made during your search. Cream also has a flying ability, but it's more suited to horizontal distance and she doesn't have as much stamina.

Sonic Advance 3

• In Sonic Advance 3, all you have to do is choose Knuckles as your main character and Tails as your partner. This combination increases both Knuckles' gliding ability and Tails' flying ability to an insane degree and allows you to beat most levels easily.
• Tails is cheap thanks to the fact that his Spinning Tails attack does damage to the boss from below, considering most bosses are designed to be hit from above.
• Amy Rose may be more of an example of Difficult, but Awesome, but using her hammer attack on springs in Sonic Advance and Sonic Advance 3 makes the spring launch her twice as far, oftentimes sending her soaring over large chunks of the level. In Sonic Advance 3, having her as your partner replaces everyone's ground attack with a hammer attack similar to hers. Enjoy your flight.
• Tails paired with Amy. Amy makes Tails flight the best in the game as it lasts long, is easy to control, moves quickly in any direction, and gives tails a hammer to use, meaning that he's not limited to hitting enemies from below.

Sonic Heroes

• Team Chaotix's Team Blast destroys all enemies and turns them into rings which fill up your Team Blast gauge, which can chain endlessly in certain areas. This makes several boss fights a complete joke as a result, especially when the team is at max level.
• Thunder Shoot. It's actually not very helpful when the flying characters are at Level 0, since it only stuns enemies and doesn't damage them. Leveling up, however, changes this. At Level 3, it deals heavy damage, targets multiple enemies, attracts rings, has incredible range, and is lightning-fast. Thunder Shoot can easily take down any section where the game forces you to fight a large group of weak enemies in a matter of seconds, including some of the boss fights.
• Amy's midair tornado attack, unlike Sonic's, travels froward. The team boss fights can be ended in literal seconds by opening the fight with it.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2006

• Sonic's Purple Gem custom action turns Sonic small by holding down a button. While in this state, Sonic's Homing Attack is replaced with an infinite double jump. This allows you to pass some sections of Action Stages just by double-jumping, and makes it much easier to find Silver Medals.
• Sonic's Red Gem custom action slows down time. Including the in-game timer, making it a bit easier to S-rank some missions.
• It's possible to skip large sections of Omega's levels thanks to a bug with his hover function: pressing the hover button in midair makes Omega cancel all vertical momentum briefly. This means that, by rhythmically tapping the hover button, you can make Omega fly. This also allows Omega to visit places he isn't even supposed to go, including Shadow's section of Wave Ocean (you even get Shadow's dialogue!) and Sonic's, though the latter has no enemies to fight.
• While a lot of Silver's game breaking tricks such as the Telefling tend to be trickier to pull off for the average player, his Water Bounce is not. As Silver, if you do a full jump and then perform his default melee attack just before falling into a body of water, he will instead bounce off the surface of it for as many times as you can keep the proper rhythm. If you make the conscious decision to skip over obtaining his Shock Bracelet(Which makes him do a stomp attack if you hold down the attack button in the air) then you don't even have to time anything, he'll skip for as long as the button is held down. Water Bouncing alone can make mincemeat of several of Silver's stages and allow for some hilarious sequence breaks.

Sonic Chronicles

• Cream the Rabbit has a move called "Refresh" that, when used, restores PP for everyone on the team. She can also heal everyone at once, rid everyone of status effects at once, etc. Her inputs kind of tricky? No problem. Equip her with Ferox, a Chao that makes all POW moves never fail, and watch the game suddenly become piss-easy. "Refresh" also affects Cream, and at rank two (which you can get the minute you recruit her thanks to Leaked Experience), the move costs 8 PP and restores 10, meaning everyone else can perpetually use POW moves for absolutely no cost.

Sonic Generations

• The Act 1 shield powerups. The Flame Shield lets you air-boost to speed through linear and open-air sections, and the Thunder Shield allows you to double jump, letting the player breeze through most sections that would otherwise require fancy platforming.

Sonic Mania

• It's possible to get all the Chaos Emeralds before Chemical Plant Zone Act 2, which gives you access to the Super Transformation from just the second zone in the game. This allows you to easily breeze through the rest of the game, especially since most stages are very generous with rings.
• In the DLC Sonic Mania Plus, Mighty is basically Sonic except the Drop Dash is replaced with a ground pound. However, when curled up into a ball, either through ducking, Spin Dashing, or jumping, projectiles bounce off of him and he bounces harmlessly off of spikes, rendering him nigh-invulnerable. What keeps him from being too overpowered is that he can still take damage when not curled up into a ball.
• Ray, still in Sonic Mania Plus is absolutely ridiculous. His glide can reach insane levels of speed and he can speedrun a level faster than Super Sonic can ever hope to. Now, knowing that the Super Forms grant you Super-Speed, try to think how fast Super Ray can get the job done.
• And then there's "Debug Mode" which completely breaks the game. It pretty much allows to change characters, receive huge amount of rings and already transform into Super Sonic, and that's just a tip of the iceberg, because the player can actually receive the goal post, which is useful for these who find a specific level too hard to beat. And while debug mode is no news for Sonic (you can use the code for it in other classic games) it's the first time when it can be unlockable - you just need to collect 16 medallions from Blue Spheres levels so it can be received even before the 2nd half of the game starts if you're good at it.

Sonic Frontiers

• The Spindash returns in Frontiers, and it is as powerful as it was in Sonic Adventure, if not more so. On its own it gives Sonic a massive speed boost with near-instantaneous acceleration, and unlike this game's incarnation of the Boost it can be used to deal damage to enemies; if that wasn't enough, when used on a surface with enough of an incline, it can be used to gain both immense distance and incredible altitude, and when used right it can sequence break a fair number of platforming challenges. While its insane power is locked behind needing to S-Rank a series of challenges across every island, meaning that it's not unlockable until the very last section of the base game, starting a New Game+ file after obtaining it allows it to be used from the get-go; furthermore, the New Horizons update doesn't just give it to Sonic as a base move when starting Another Story, it also makes it an unlockable skill for all four playable characters, meaning that it can be chained with Tails' flight and Knuckles and Amy's glides to gain incredible speed, height, and distance, breaking a vast number of platforming challenges.
• Similarly to Sonic's Spindash, the strength and usefulness of Tails' flight rivals its Adventure incarnation. He performs almost exactly the same as he did in Adventure, only this time in an open zone area, which means that many of his platforming challenges can be completely skipped by simply flying towards the objective from a high enough position.
  • The one thing even more broken than Tails' regular flight ability is his full-ring special move, the Cyclone. Once this skill is unlocked, if Tails boosts with a full ring gauge, he summons the Cyclone, which not only boasts incredible speed but can even be used as an actual plane to gain unlimited height. Its one limitation is that it uses the boost meter as fuel, but even that can be addressed with a simple infinity Cyloop to gain infinite fuel. Simply put, with the Cyclone, one can practically skip almost all of Tails' challenges. The only difficult part of this would be obtaining enough skill points to unlock the Cyclone in the first place, which itself can be addressed by Tails' aforementioned sequence-breaking flight.

Sonic Superstars

• While the characters have their own abilities and the stages are somewhat balanced around them, when it comes to bosses Amy shows what bringing a hammer to a mech fight can do. Her kit is simple - a double jump, an aerial hammer swing, and a forward charge - and yet it's the former two that basically crushes robots into scrap metal, being able to safely attack bosses in some instances when they otherwise would be invulnerable or unreachable, which drastically reduces the amount of time you need to bring some of them down. Pinball Carnival's bosses go from tough to an absolute joke, and even the final Eggman robot can go down quickly in its second phase just from Amy alone.