Sonic Advance 2 is the second game of the trilogy in the Sonic the Hedgehog series on Game Boy Advance.
Cream the Rabbit and her Chao companion Cheese join Sonic and friends in the battle against Eggman after he abducts her mother and Tails. The gameplay is definitely the most extreme in the trilogy; the focus on speed is greater (to the point of making all but one boss a running battle), all of the characters now have the ability to grind on rails, and they can perform tricks with a press of the R button after going off a ramp/spring to gain more momentum.
It's preceded by Sonic Advance (2001) and followed by Sonic Advance 3 (2004).
Sonic Advance 2 provides examples of:
- Actionized Sequel: 2 has much bigger emphasis on speed and acrobatics than the first game, starting with the fact that the playable characters begin levels as if they were about to run in a track & field race. Combat options are also more diverse.
- Area 51: The True Final Boss fight in the second game takes place in "True Area 53". What, if anything, it has to do with Area 51 is anyone's guess.
- Ash Face: Knuckles gets one after the Egg Saucer he was piloting is defeated.
- Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: Inverted with Advance 2, which pushes Amy into the background as a Secret Character and introduces Cream the Rabbit as the fourth main character in her stead. Cream is not a true Gimmick character but a Master of All, with maneuvering ability second only to Tailsnote and better attacking options than the other characters thanks to Cheese.
- Band Land: Music Plant Zone in the second game.
- Bonus Feature Failure:
- In an odd example, Sonic Advance 2 let you unlock the Tiny Chao Garden by meeting certain conditions in the game... Even though the first Sonic Advance had the exact same mode available from the start. The third game has seven Tiny Chao Gardens (one for each Zone), but unlike the first game, you cannot interact with them, only collect Chao for them.
- Also from Sonic Advance 2, there is Amy, who is unlocked after the game is 100% completed. She (who in the first game was slow and couldn't roll, but had her own advantages) is little more than an alternate skin of Sonic.
- Boss Bonanza: In Sonic Advance 2, the "XX" stage consists of a High Speed Boss Rush against every previous boss in the game before confronting the Super Eggrobo Z.
- Boss-Only Level: While Advance puts Boss Battles at the end of the second Act of each zone, Advance 2 completely separate their boss battles into "Boss Attack!" stages. The True Final Boss gets its own stage, "True Area 53".
- Boss Rush: In XX (yes, it's really called that) in the second, you must go through all of the bosses you fought so far in the game before you get to fight the Super Eggrobo Z (again, the Boss Rush bosses only take half the hits they originally required).
- Bottomless Pits: Present in all of the regular levels (the only exception being Leaf Forest in the second), though they are more common than the first game (looking at you, Sky Canyon). The second game suffers from "Bottomless Pit Syndrome", mainly because most of the levels have that as the only obstacle with the occasional Badnik or two.
- Continuity Nod: In Sonic Advance 2, Tails is kidnapped by Eggman! Now where have we heard this before?
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Amy's moveset was retooled in Sonic Advance 2, which requires some adjustment for anyone familiar with her Sonic Advance playstyle.
- Degraded Boss: The Super Eggrobo, the True Final Boss of Sonic Advance, returns in upgraded form, the Super Eggrobo Z, as the Final Boss of Sonic Advance 2. Ironically, as the Final Boss, the Super Eggrobo Z can be faced by any character without any Chaos Emeralds, a decided step down from the first game where only Super Sonic could fight it.
- Demoted to Extra: Amy Rose doesn't show up at all in any cutscene from Sonic Advance 2. She's relegated to being a secret character, and doesn't even show up in the character select screen at first.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The Boost mechanic originated in 2, but it functions quite differently from how it later would - it triggers automatically from running fast enough rather than manually (with your ring count affecting how fast you can enter it), doesn't hurt enemies, and allows for upgraded "boost attacks" by pressing the attack button.
- Evil Is Petty: After completing the second game as every character and by obtaining all 7 Chaos Emeralds as Sonic, the unlocked final boss will have Eggman kidnap Cream's mother, Vanilla, before the heroes' eyes, seemingly for no other purpose than to goad Sonic into a revenge face off.
- Fighting Your Friend: Knuckles is the pilot of the Egg Saucer if you play as anyone else, as he was tricked again. Sonic is quite peeved about this after the fight is over.
- Friendly Fire: In 2, Sonic has to destroy the robot boss holding his friends hostage. He manages to save Cream and Tails by destroying the robots holding them. For Knuckles, however, who was sealed inside the robot, Sonic destroys said robot, but burns Knuckles in the process. Knuckles chases Sonic in anger for this.
- Furry Confusion: Cream the Rabbit is a playable character in the second game. When Badniks are defeated, the animal used to power it pops out. One of the animals that can pop out is a significantly less anthropomorphic rabbit.
- Guide Dang It!: Sky Canyon in the second game is almost as infamous for this as Carnival Night Zone's "Barrel of Doom", as there is a specific moment where it is mandatory to use an R-Button trick to get through part of the level as Sonic, a move you'll only know how to do if you read the manual. Special Rings in 2 (especially them) might be very difficult for the player to locate.
- Idle Animation: Bizarrely, the second game does have those as well, but they're only accessible by holding up on the D-Pad for whatever reason.
- Sonic stretches out his legs and then starts repeatedly grinding his foot on the ground.
- Cream gets an ice cream cone from... somewhere and starts licking it (while Cheese begs for some through Puppy-Dog Eyes).
- Tails falls asleep.
- Knuckles adjusts his gloves and performs some practice jabs.
- Amy briefly yawns, notices the player and begins hopping in place to keep herself active.
- Lethal Lava Land: Hot Crater Zone in the second game is claimed to be one, but it's only indicated by the name and the warm glow of the background scenery - the player encounters no lava whatsoever in the actual stage.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Knuckles is tricked into fighting Sonic again by Eggman in Sonic Advance 2, becoming the pilot of the boss machine in Sky Canyon when you're playing as Sonic for the first time. This only happens when you reach this boss (the Egg Saucer) as Sonic for the first time; if you reach this boss as any other character or you replay it as Sonic after beating Knuckles and unlocking him, the machine will have Eggman himself in the cockpit like all of the boss rush bosses and will use the standard boss theme.
- Load-Bearing Boss: Beating 2's final boss causes Egg Utopia to fall and explode. Strange though, given said boss is fought in XX Zone, which is shown on the map to be a separate space station to Egg Utopia.
- Long Song, Short Scene: Sonic Advance 2 has the two tracks that play when Vanilla is kidnapped, and Sonic turns into his Super form. The theme of "True Area 53" is a Boss Remix of those two songs.
- Memory Match Mini-Game: The Tiny Chao Garden features the Chao Memory mini-game, where you try to match up seven pairs of cards while a Chao moves them around.
- Mythology Gag: In Sonic Advance 2, Tails is rescued from Dr. Eggman in Music Plant Zone, calling back to his own venture into music.
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Nintendo Hard: In the second game, you have to collect seven very well hidden SP Rings and not die at all before finishing a stage. Many of these rings were in difficult to access areas and backtracking was hard and, in some cases, impossible. Dying made you lose everything, forcing you to restart the entire stage. On top of that, you only got one shot a finishing the special stage; failing meant doing all of that over again. Sonic Advance 2 may have had the hardest activation of the Special Stages, but their stages were much easier than the ones in Sonic Advance 1 or 3. 3's stages were incredibly difficult compared to the previous game, especially the last one, and while the first and second games had strategy guides published to walk you through the locations of everything important, the third game didn't have one to help you out, so you were completely on your own for that one. - Noob Bridge: In Sonic Advance 2, first act of Sky Canyon Zone, it's impossible to progress without using an air jump move that's only usable while not in ball form. (Up + R) If you miss it the first time, you'll end up in a pretty dangerous area with blind platforming. Continue on and you'll reach another point where you must use the move or die, and the only hint is a bunch of rings shaped like an up arrow.
- Not the Fall That Kills You…: In Advance 2, after clearing True Area 53, Sonic loses his Super form and has to desperately dive to catch Vanilla. How exactly this constitutes saving her is not made clear, though the ending cutscene seems to suggest that he can fly in his normal state, suddenly.
- Secret Character: Amy Rose has become this in Advance 2. Only becoming playable after completing and collecting the 7 Chaos Emeralds with all 4 characters.
- Shout-Out: The Humongous Mecha that serves as the Final Boss of Sonic Advance 2 is called the Super EggRobo Z.
- So Last Season: Downplayed. The upgraded versions of the Humongous Mecha True Final Boss from Sonic Advance are Degraded to merely the Final Bosses of Advance 2.
- Sound Test: The second game has it unlockable by beating the game with all Chaos Emeralds for two characters.
- Speed Echoes: Get fast enough and afterimages follow you. The distance between the echo and the character depends on how fast they're moving.
- Stationary Boss: The final boss of the main game in Sonic Advance 2 is a giant robot that stays on the right of the room that fires its arms and shoots lasers from its eyes. It won't move; the player has to use rising platforms to reach and smack the bot in the head.
- Turns Red:
- The Ice Paradise boss in 2 begins dropping its bombs at a faster rate after 4 hits.
- There are two targets on the Egg Saucer in Sky Canyon: the cockpit, and a laser turret. Destroying the turret will cause the main hand to become more frantic when it attacks.
- Useless Useful Spell:
- Played mostly straight in 2. When you go into boost mode, you can a special attack that would let you attack while losing a bit of speed and momentum. Most of these attacks were useless because there very rarely are any enemies in your path to use it on and since you're going that fast, you'll likely already be hit or react too late to use it. The only somewhat useful one (fittingly) is Cream's Chao rolling attack, which gives you a split second barrier and attacks enemies while still running. Even still, there are very few points in the game where you'll ever use the attacks.
- In 2, even basic abilities like flying, gliding and attacking often fall to the wayside as the levels aren't really designed around exploration and your jump and roll will handle basic enemies just fine, so it's rarely worth killing your momentum to use them. Even against bosses, all but Cream's attack are useless as the boss moves away far too fast to ever hit with most attacks, and you can't enter Boost mode to use your boost attacks there, either.
