YMMV / Sonic Advance

• Anticlimax Boss: The "final boss" in the first game (once again, not including the True Final Boss) is pretty disappointing, basically just being Dr. Eggman's mobile with a few weapons attached.
• Base-Breaking Character: Amy Rose in the first Sonic Advance. Some enjoyed her unique gameplay style and the new challenge she provides to levels because of it, while others disliked how slow and how differently she plays compared to the others and wished she was made more consistent with Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. Advance 2 made her moveset more consistent with Team Sonic (mainly because her unusual playstyle wouldn't mesh well with the speed-focused gameplay at all), which likewise divided fans on whether it made Amy play better or made her lose her uniqueness. 3 made a bit of a compromise by giving her back her more unique Advance moveset on her own, but also allowed the player to use her 2 moveset by pairing her with Sonic.
• Best Level Ever: While it definitely falls into That One Level territory, Egg Rocket is also pretty awesome. The whole level takes place inside a rocket, and you have to climb up to the top of the rocket before it seperates its segment. It's a really unique gimmick that makes the level feel very tense, yet rewarding once you make it into outer space.
• Broken Base: For Advance, it's the question of how accurate are the physics to the classic trilogy? Near pitch-perfect and a worthy successor? Or an inferior mockery of the classic games? The chief complaint is how weighty the characters feel in comparison to the Genesis games, taking slightly longer to get to top speed and having shorter jump lengths in comparison to the first three games. Some don't notice a difference and/or consider it necessary for the smaller screen of a handheld, while others say it makes the games nigh-unplayable.
• Contested Sequel: Sonic Advance is this to the original classic games. Depending on who you ask, they're either worthy successors that stay true to what made the original Genesis games great, while evolving the formula at the same time, or they're poor attempts that pale in comparison to the classic games and have too many gameplay and design flaws to be considered on par with them. The more widely acclaimed Sonic Mania would further increase the divide, with Advance series fans considering the trilogy a worthy predecessor that indirectly helped lay the groundwork for Mania and critics seeing Mania as doing everything the Advance trilogy wanted to do without its various problems.
• Disappointing Last Level: Sonic Advance's Egg Rocket/Cosmic Angel can come off as this to some for going overboard with the hazard placement and not being as fun as the levels before it.
• Fandom Rivalry: One inner rivalry has popped up between fans of the trilogy and fans of Sonic Mania. Largely over which is the better direction to take the 2D classic gameplay. Many prefer Mania due to it being closer to the Genesis games both from a visual and gameplay standpoint, while others prefer the Advance trilogy due to them doing new things with the classic gameplay and not being as reliant on nostalgia as Mania was. Unsurprisingly, debates on whether or not Mania's traditional and classic approach is better than the Advance trilogy's bold and modern approach or vice versa tend to get quite heated.
• First Installment Wins: Most consider the first game in the trilogy to be the best, largely due to its level design, physics and general mechanics being the closest to the classic Genesis games. Its sequels tend to be more contested by comparison (though still by no means bad), due to both titles deviating from the Genesis games in some way.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Surprisingly, Sonic himself gets this. He was inexplicably nerfed here, no longer being able to turn into Super Sonic in regular levels, lacking his elemental shield attacks from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and losing his Insta-Shield's invincibility. Add to that fact he doesn't have any truly unique abilities like the others other than his rail grinding in the first game (where it felt really tacked on). As a result, choosing Sonic makes the games harder to play than with the other characters (except for Amy). Even in Advance 3 where he is made more unique, his speed and speed boost Tag Action aren't as useful as the other more exploration-based Tag Actions, with only a small handful of areas even requiring Sonic's instant speed boost; most ramps simply have their own speed booster.
• Most Annoying Sound Ever: Somehow, the spin-dash sound (which was already a bit grating on the Genesis titles, in which Adventure would give us a break after getting the Light Speed Dash upgrade) had gotten worse.
• Porting Disaster:
  • Sonic N, a port of the first game to, of all the things, the N-Gage. While the game itself runs fine enough, the vertically oriented screen makes it a grueling challenge to play due to the significant Screen Crunch,^note Pressing the # button does scale the game to fit a 4:3 aspect ratio, but this also causes the graphics themselves to become crunched, still making it difficult to see. not to mention the removal of the Tiny Chao Garden and multiplayer.
  • The first game also received a Java port by the notorious Gameloft (who later created the mobile version of Sonic Unleashed), which predicable results. The framerate is choppy and borderline unplayable on most phones. Secondly, the soundtrack was changed to cheap MIDI arrangements, with the classic boss themes in X-Zone being replaced with music from Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I not helping its case. Other issues include the controls being mapped to a virtual D-pad, and missing visual and sound effects. You're also forced to play as Sonic for the entire game.
  • And finally, the first game also received an in-house Android port that never left Japan. While significantly more content-filled than the Gameloft port (maintaining all the characters, visuals, and SFX), it still manages to suffer from a choppy framerate, MIDI soundtrack with music from Sonic 4, and being forced to play with a virtual D-pad. Oh, and Sonic's still the only playable character in this port.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: For those who didn't like Amy's much slower style of play in Sonic Adventure, Sonic Advance had a lot of people warm up to her thanks to her playstyle in that game, thanks to it still being fairly speedy yet still incorporating her unique moves.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Sonic's Insta-Shield lost its invincibility, and was rendered further useless in Sonic Advance 2, with its level design direction and the fact that Insta-Shield is overriden by the Homing Attack most of the time.
  • Getting the Chaos Emeralds is a large pain. In the first game, it's the Special Stages themselves being awkward to do. In the first game, the additional requirement to beat the game with all four characters to reach the final boss.
  • Super Sonic being locked to the True Final Boss just ends up feeling redundant. While the 3D Sonic games had the excuse of usually changing the gameplay and worrying about the added speed in the third dimension, Sonic Advance heavily take cues from the original trilogy, where Super Sonic was already proven to work just fine in.
• Spiritual Successor: The first game is sometimes treated as "Sonic the Hedgehog 4" over the official thing, due to its closeness to the Genesis games and introducing a playable Amy to a 2D game, just like Tails for 2 and Knuckles for 3 & Knuckles. Even in the wake of Sonic Mania and people dubbing that "Sonic 4", the sentiment that the first Advance game gets the title can still be found since while Advance had all original stages, Mania mostly reuses old ones.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The theme for the Tiny Chao Garden is notoriously known for using exactly the same three notes of the first and second chords of the Underwater theme of Super Mario Bros.. And knowing that this game was originally released for a Nintendo console (it even carries an "Advance" title), this sounds more like a Shout-Out.
  • The boss music from the first game sounds a lot like the Jaws theme.
  • Also from the first game, the first half of the Neo Green Hill Zone themes sounds hilariously similar to the refrain of "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music. (The melodies do eventually diverge, though.)
• That One Boss: Ice Mountain in the first game, especially as Sonic. As an Underwater Boss Battle with a high level of water, drowning is always a risk and jumping on the falling stalactites to make it to the surface is tricky. It's easy with Tails, Knuckles or Amy — the former two because of their ability to swim, and especially the latter due to her hammer jump letting her reach the surface easily, and thus completely bypass the otherwise quite-annoying process of getting there to either breathe or attack Eggman — but not so much with Sonic.
• That One Level:
  • The last special stage has a ridiculous Difficulty Spike from the sixth stages. Fortunately, retrying them isn't that hard, but you can still expect to spend at least an hour retrying them.
  • Egg Rocket in the first game can be a pain no matter who you're playing as, especially as Sonic or Amy, as the Zone is quite confusing to navigate, laden with bottomless pits and annoying enemy placement, and has fewer and farther-apart checkpoints than the other zones in the game. It's also timed when you enter the rocket; there are three sections with their own timer, and being left behind in one when the clock hits zero will see you get detached from the Egg Rocket and take a life.
• Unfortunate Character Design: In Advance 1, the animation for when Tails is being carried by a wind current has a single mysterious dark pixel on his behind. Advance 2 removes it from the first and third relevant frames but not the middle one. Then Advance 3 makes this pixel very noticeable when Tails flies away in the opening or boss clear scenes. Some interpret this to be mere unfortunate shading in the pixelart and others see it as a deliberate anus joke due to Tails being a canine character.

---