Sonic Advance

Sonic Advance
Developers: Sonic Team, Dimps Publishers: Sega (JP/EU/AU), THQ (US) Platform: Game Boy Advance Released in JP: December 22, 2001 Released in US: February 4, 2002 Released in EU: March 23, 2002 Released in AU: 2002 This game has unused code. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused music. This game has debugging material. This game has revisional differences. This game has a prototype article This game has a prerelease article

To do: Document the unused Chao Garden stage layouts

Sonic Advance marks a long-awaited (at the time) return to the series' 2D roots, combining the classic gameplay of the Genesis titles with Sonic and co.'s "modern" designs introduced in Sonic Adventure. It's also the first (and certainly not last) Sonic game to be developed by Dimps.

Sub-Pages

Prototype Info

Prerelease Info

Build Dates

Present at 0x7F8F4C (Japan v1.0), 0x7F8F48 (US), 0x7FF02C (Europe), and 0x7F9078 (Japan v1.1):

Japan v1.0	0.69Wed Oct 31 18:01:36 2001
US	0.69Wed Oct 31 18:32:29 2001
Europe	0.71Wed Nov 21 13:22:30 2001
Japan v1.1	0.72Thu Dec 20 16:05:10 2001

Unused Graphics

Artwork	Description
	Unused frames of the playable characters flipping vertically, presumably planned to be used whenever gravity switches in Egg Rocket and Cosmic Angel Zone. The characters simply instantly flip with no animation in the final game.

(Source: AsuharaMoon)

Unused "To be continued" Screen

There's an interactable object that, upon being inserted on any level, will trigger this "To be continued" screen, presumably meant to be used in one of the game's endings. It could also be a leftover from a demo of some kind. Doing so also breaks the game by sending you to a soft-locked multiplayer screen instead of back to the intro.

(Source: AsuharaMoon)

Unused Music

Invincibility

An alternate invincibility tune, which was later used in Sonic Advance 2 and 3.

Debug Save

To do: Verify that this is intentional behaviour and not just a bug.

Not having an SRAM chip on the cartridge will unlock everything in the game. This is also the case for the other Sonic Advance games.

Revisional Differences

The original releases in all regions have a rather severe bug:

An address keeps track of the total amount of rings collected in the main game. When accessing the Tiny Chao Garden, the value in the address is read and stored by the Tiny Chao Garden to keep track of the ring count. When deleting the save data, the value gets erased.

As a result, rings collected in the main game will no longer transfer to the Tiny Chao Garden until the total amount of rings collected in the main game matches that of the value stored by the Tiny Chao Garden prior to the save being deleted. This was fixed in the various double pack releases containing Sonic Advance and the Japan only v1.1 by not erasing the ring total when deleting the save data.

The original US and Japanese versions have English and Japanese language selection. The double pack releases added Spanish, French, and German from the European version.