YMMV / Sonic Advance 3

• Best Level Ever: Chaos Angel, which is very memorable for being one of few final levels in a Sonic game to not be in a factory or space area, instead being floating ruins that are on Angel Island. It is incredibly challenging, has great music, and looks stunning, and it's even less cheap than levels preceding it, (save for Act 3), making it feel like a worthy effort to reach.
• Breather Level: Advance 3 has Ocean Base Act 3. The first two Acts are incredibly long and vertically designed, but the third is a lot shorter, and the only hard parts (getting crushed and drowning in an underwater section) are easily avoided by taking a different path. Twinkle Snow is also easier than Toy Kingdom and Cyber Track, the two levels it's sandwiched between. Other than the boss.
• Contested Sequel: This game is criticized for issues like its obstacle and enemy placement bordering on Fake Difficulty, the Hub Levels being labyrinthe and unnecessary, and Special Stages taking a lot of time to access, but also well-liked for the team-up mechanic, great music, unique settings and the conclusion of Emerl's arc.
• Disappointing Last Level: Sonic Advance 3's Chaos Angel doesn't apply completely (the first two Acts are closer to Best Level Ever), but the third Act of it is just standing on moving platforms avoiding obstacles and killing enemies every so often.
• Game-Breaker: Some of the character combinations:
  • Note Sonic with Cream, where Sonic can not only get a fair bit of height, gain use of the homing attack and Cheese for enemies, but also breathe underwater, without a major sacrifice to his innate abilities that you would expect as some combinations often neuter one character.
  • Knuckles with Tails gives not only Tails' height skills, but Knuckles can double jump before gliding, making this pair very good for exploration. (The other way around is nowhere near as effective, due to Tails clumsily imitating Knuckles' gliding.)
  • Knuckles and Amy is basically the same, only replace the double jump with the insane ability to spin dash up walls.
  • Tails with Amy improves Tails' flying speed and height drastically, and allows him to use a hammer while flying. The hammer has a much larger attack radius in midair, rendering most of the levels extremely easy.
  • Amy as a partner in general is very broken. At the price of no longer spinning when they jump (Which has to be done manually with the attack button), every character's ground attack is switched out for Amy's piko-piko hammer attack, granting them access to Amy's double-power spring technique using said hammer. Not being able to spin-jump becomes trivial when you're soaring across the skies above the screen. Sonic and Amy also mutually gain a lot of speed and athletic options along with access to R-Trigger techniques. And Sonic grinds rails on his snowboard from the first game!
  • Amy and Sonic (specifically in that order) essentially turns her into a Master of All, combining his speed with her air options and hammer offense. There's a reason speedruns use this pair almost exclusively once she joins.
• Good Bad Bugs: Sonic's aerial Tag Action is nothing special on its own (putting your character into boost mode, which is neat but there's nowhere it's required to get through), but the way it works internally (putting your character on a grounded booster for one frame) is heavily abused by speedrunners and TASers to do another jump in midair. This is usually combined with another bug found with Tails + Sonic, where Tails keeps his horizontal momentum when he flies, to do huge leaps across horizontal-focused stages and clear them even faster than Sonic can.
• Heartwarming Moments: The final ending of Advance 3. Earn Your Happy Ending at its finest. After losing him in Sonic Battle to a Heroic Sacrifice, Emerl is finally allowed to live happily and peacefully. The Post-Credits Scene in Advance 3 has Cream chasing Gemerl against a black screen until she trips and hurts herself; then Gemerl comes back and comforts her, after which she gets back up and they happily run off together.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Advance 3 has gotten this complaint, particularly for several instances of borderline Fake Difficulty in its level design.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • In 3, Cream + Tails is arguably the worst team-up, as this combo inexplicably replaces Cream's useful flight for a far less useful umbrella hover and offers no real benefit to make up for it. Tails' tag actions are also rather redundant on her, since if you wanted to gain extra height with Cream, you'd just pair her with someone else and use her regular flight ability while also gaining tangible buffs from her partner.
  • While Cream + Tails is often considered the worst team, Tails + Knuckles isn't far behind it. While it does uniquely let Tails use an Instashield in midair, it's only situationally useful due to lacking i-frames and reach. His other abilities are arguably even worse - his grounded B button attack is firmly Awesome, but Impractical with huge windup and short reach, (and also stuns Tails if the B button is mashed too much) and it also replaces Tails' flight with an imitation of Knuckles' glide...something he can already do by using Knuckles' aerial Tag Action.
  • Sonic's Tag Action as a partner has the ironic effect of making him virtually redundant as a lead, since anyone he's teamed up with becomes as fast as him but with more abilities, reducing him to a glorified Stat Stick. Amy in particular essentially turns into a better Speed character than Sonic in the Amy + Sonic team.
• Memetic Mutation: Among those who follow speedruns: "No... Yeah!" This is due to the strategy for Twinkle Snow Act 2 using Amy to hammer a spring and essentially clip out of bounds. This causes her to fall off-screen and "die" after grabbing the goal ring, only to re-appear in her victory pose right after. Her death and victory voice clips playing in quick succession leads to prime Mood Whiplash.
• Padding: To access Special Stages, you first have to find the ten hidden Chao in a Zone so the game will place a special key in a randomly-selected location in every Act, then find the key and complete the Act to collect it. Thankfully you can replay stages to build up a stockpile of them, but this combination ensures only dedicated fans and completionists get the true ending.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In order to get the Chaos Emeralds in this game, you have to scour levels for Chao. On paper, it encourages exploration and finding every route on a level; in practice, it encourages whipping out the old guidebook, because the levels in this game are so huge and labyrinthine that it would take ages to find them normally. The only thing you get in the way of help is a "map" in the Sonic Factory that tells you what Chao you've already collected and how many Chao are in each Act...and nothing else.
• Tear Jerker: Gemerl, if you subscribe to the theory that he's actually Emerl rebuilt and reprogrammed by Dr. Eggman. Now with no memories of the events of Sonic Battle, he's forced to fight against his former friends until History Repeats and he's exposed to too much of the Master Emerald's energy. This time, however, he transforms into a horrible mechanical monstrosity that goes berserk and flies into space, forcing both Sonic and Eggman to have to put him down once again. Fortunately, this time he ends up surviving and is found washed ashore on a beach by Tails, who restores his original programming and turns him into Emerl again.
• That One Boss:
  • The boss of Toy Kingdom can be somewhat irritating, as the boss spawns enemies that can be annoying to defeat if Amy is involved, and the Gemerl bomb can be hard to dodge and can easily knock you into the inescapable pit. It generally becomes easier as the fight continues, though, as the arena space increases.
  • The boss of Twinkle Snow, where you have to ascend platforms that fall when you touch them and get them to hit Eggman. He also has a mace which knocks you into the Bottomless Pit below if it gets you. Also, the mace can knock down platforms too, which screws you over if that was the one you were about to jump to. Basically, this boss functionally has only OHKO attacks, can't be hit directly or by Cheese, and it doesn't matter if you can fly or not. This is one of the bosses where Amy shines at because of her awesome high jump ability.
  • Egg Pinball, the boss of Cyber Track can be an utter nightmare for Cream & Amy. Neither character can spin jump in this formation, with Amy only being able to perform a brief hammer spin, making the task of hitting the colored orbs the boss fires a challenge in patience and precise attacks. Worse, Cream's signature ability has no use here, as the boss cannot be attacked directly, nor can Cheese target the orbs.
• That One Level: The later Zones in the game, particularly Cyber Track and Chaos Angel, can be pretty damn evil with bottomless pits scattered everywhere and some nasty enemy and obstacle placements. In fact, 90% of Chaos Angel Act 3 is a moving platform ride across a colossal pit with a lot of enemies, spikes and other things that will knock you off!

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