Sonic Advance

Sonic Advance is a side-scrolling platform game reminiscent of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games released for the Sega Genesis. Players journey through an island to defeat Doctor Eggman, who is attempting to capture its animal population to turn them into evil robots. Players select one of four characters, each with their own unique set of moves. Sonic the Hedgehog is fastest and can perform an "insta-shield" that protects him for a moment; Tails can fly or swim for a short time; Knuckles the Echidna can glide through the air, swim above water for a few seconds and climb walls; and Amy Rose can destroy enemies using a hammer.

Except for Amy, each character can defeat enemy robots by jumping and curling into a ball, or by performing a spin dash on the ground to gain speed. By entering a cheat code, players can control Sonic while Tails runs alongside him, similar to Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992).

In January 2001, Sega, facing financial troubles with the underperformance of its Dreamcast console, shifted from first to third-party software publishing, with Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's Game Boy Advance (GBA) being primary focuses. A team of developers was formed to begin development on Sonic the Hedgehog Advance (later renamed Sonic Advance), a Sonic game for the GBA to commemorate the series' 10th anniversary. Dimps, a studio formed by several former Neo Geo Pocket Color developers and funded by Sega, Sony, and Bandai, developed the game with assistance from Sonic Team. Sonic Team conceived the game, but was understaffed on employees familiar with the GBA hardware and so recruited Dimps. Several Dimps members worked on the critically acclaimed Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure (1999) for the Neo Geo Pocket Color.

The developers decided to return to a gameplay style similar to the original Genesis Sonic games, which Naka felt was refreshing. Despite this, they also incorporated concepts from Sonic Adventure (1998) and Sonic Adventure 2 (2001), such as the ability to grind on rails and the modernized character designs by Yuji Uekawa. As the Sonic games released for the Dreamcast allowed players to download minigames onto the Visual Memory Unit (VMU), the development team decided to expand upon this by using a similar concept with the GameCube's GBA link cable, making Sonic Advance one of the first games to use the cable.

Sonic Advance received "generally favorable reviews", according to review aggregation website Metacritic. The game sold 1.21 million copies in the United States, making it one of the bestselling games for the GBA. It earned $36 million by August 2006. During the period between January 2000 and August 2006, it was the 12th highest-selling game launched for the GBA, Nintendo DS or PlayStation Portable in the United States.

The game's presentation was well received. Chris Johnston of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) and Matthew Keil of Extended Play called Sonic Advance the best-looking 2D Sonic game, and Matt Helgeson of Game Informer regarded it as better-looking than the series' Sega Genesis entries. Ricardo Torres of GameSpot praised its detailed scenery and animation, describing them as solid and faithful to the original Genesis games. Michael Cole of Nintendo World Report described its use of graphical techniques as elegant, praising its anime-inspired character animations, and compared them positively to the critically acclaimed Super Nintendo Entertainment System game Super Mario World (1990).

In 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine named Sonic Advance among the best games for Nintendo consoles. Later that year, they ranked the game 75th on a list of greatest Nintendo games, calling it "the finest Sonic game since the Mega Drive golden years, and remains a 2D classic". GamesRadar called it the 13th best Sonic game in 2017. The same year, USgamer named it the sixth best, stating that while it did not feel like the classic Genesis games, its graphics were "gorgeous", which helped make the game a standout for the franchise.

Sonic Advance was the first Sonic game released for a Nintendo console. GamesRadar considered this to be highly significant as Nintendo and Sega were fierce rivals throughout the 1990s; Sonic Advance helped end this rivalry by "reducing Sonic's die-hard brand loyalty to a distant memory from the halcyon-toned 1990s". The two companies worked closely in the following years, collaborating for the first time in 2003 with F-Zero GX. In 2007, both Sonic and Nintendo's mascot Mario featured in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Nintendo Power wrote that Sonic—created as opposition to Nintendo—seemed at home on Nintendo consoles; GamesRadar said Sega and Nintendo were now "like old friends".