Sonic Advance 3

Sonic Advance 3 is a fast-paced 2D platformer featuring similar gameplay to its predecessors. The player controls one of five characters simultaneously with a second one as a sidekick; alternately, a second player joins and one controls each character. The two characters run and jump through a series of seven levels, destroying robots along the way. The player collects rings in levels and boss battles as a form of health: upon being hit by an enemy or harmful obstacle, the player's rings will scatter and can be recollected. The player starts the game with three lives, which they lose if the character is hit with no rings in their possession, crushed, drowns, falls into a bottomless pit, or exceeds an act's ten-minute limit; losing all lives gives the player a game over.

The levels contain features like vertical loops, springs, and rails that the player can grind on. Each level is divided into three acts, punctuated by a boss fight with Doctor Eggman at the end; all three acts, the boss fight, and two minigames that grant the player extra lives are bound by a hub world. Within each act, the player collects Chao creatures; finding 10 in all 3 acts in one zone grants the player access to a special stage, where a Chaos Emerald can be found. Collecting all seven Chaos Emeralds, which can be done after completion of the main campaign, allows the player to fight an extra final boss for the game's true ending.

Prior to the game's events, Doctor Eggman builds a robotic assistant named Gemerl, using parts from the robot Emerl who was reactivated and later self-destroyed in Sonic Battle. Eggman attempts an experiment using the Chaos Emeralds to perform the Chaos Control technique, but it goes awry and tears the world apart. This action separates Sonic and Tails from Amy, Knuckles, and Cream. Eggman intends to create a segment of his impending empire on each chunk of the planet. Sonic and Tails travel through the game's seven levels to retrieve the Emeralds and undo Eggman's actions.

The final boss fight takes place at the Altar Emerald temple. If the player defeats Eggman there without having all seven Chaos Emeralds, Eggman and Gemerl escape and fall off the edge of the temple. Peace is restored to the world, and Omochao snaps a picture of the five heroes. However, the game alerts the player that the Emeralds must still be collected for the true ending.

Sonic Advance 3 was published by Sega in Japan and co-published by THQ in North America and Europe. Like Advance 1 and 2, its development was shared by Dimps and Sega subsidiary Sonic Team since the latter was understaffed on employees familiar with the Game Boy Advance hardware. Yuji Naka, then President of Sonic Team, had limited involvement in the development of Sonic Advance 3, and he conceived of the team-up dynamic. While the game is fundamentally 2D, it features some sprite scaling to create pseudo-3D rotation effects.

THQ announced the game in a press release on September 11, 2003. The game was later exhibited at E3 2004.

Sonic Advance 3 received positive reviews from critics, with respective scores of 79% and 80% at review aggregators Metacritic and GameRankings. GameSpot named it the best Game Boy Advance game of June 2004, and nominated it for the year-end "Best Game Boy Advance Game" and "Best Platformer" awards. It later won Handheld Game of the Year at the 2004 Golden Joystick Awards and sold over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone.

Critics gave mixed opinions to the team-up dynamic. com celebrated that Sonic Team had "finally [come] up with a way of introducing teamwork and variance between characters that doesn't overwhelm Sonic's bread-and-butter gameplay." Maragos singled this out as the main divider between Advance 3 and Sonic Heroes, a game that he found surprisingly linear in level design considering that it, unlike Advance 3, was in 3D. Maragos, GameSpot's Frank Provo, IGN's Craig Harris, and Game Informer's Lisa Mason appreciated the increase in replayability Sonic's friends brought.