Sonic the Hedgehog is one of my favorite game mascots of all time. I would probably rank him right behind Mario. Almost 2 years ago, Electronic Gaming Monthly’s April fool’s joke claimed that Sonic was an unlockable character for Super Smash Bros. Melee. It was obviously a trick, but the thought of playing with Sonic in a Smash Bros. type game was great. A few months later Sega announced Sonic Battle for the Game Boy Advance. Could it be? Is this going to be the Sonic version of Smash Bros. I had been dreaming of? After months of waiting and downloading screenshots I finally had the answer.

From the title, you expect this game to be much like Nintendo’s character battle game, so let’s go into the differences. When you press start from the title screen, the first option it gives you is Story Mode. This is good because Smash Bros. is pretty much a multi-player only game. It isn’t much fun playing solo, so I was very glad to have some kind of story guiding me through the single player side of the game. If you select story mode, the only character available to play with is Sonic. I found this odd, but I would have chosen Sonic anyway. You discover later that the Story Mode is divided into chapters, and different characters are the main focus of each chapter. If it let you choose Amy right off the bat, it would throw you near the end of the game and nothing would make any sense. If you just want to choose any character and just get into it, there is a straight up battle mode as well. Another obvious difference is that the battles are fought in 3-D, not the 2-D we are used to with Smash Bros.

The way the Story Mode works, you walk around to hotspots in town, and when you click on one a conversation breaks out between the characters, and usually so does a battle. Without spoiling too much, the story of the game involves Sonic finding a robot that learns fighting moves by watching people battle. You can program it with moves it has learned, and it also grows stronger by absorbing chaos emeralds. Of course Dr. Eggman is after him, and Sonic and friends spend the game fighting him off.

In most of the battles you have a set number of lives, and you have to reduce the opponent’s lives to zero before they do the same to you. Sometimes you have to get a certain number of “kills” before your opponent to win. Even more seldom are matches where you have different goals such as a time limit. Quite often after you beat someone, it will jump back to the conversation screen and the opponent will say something along the lives of “This time I won’t hold back!” and you have to fight them again, and they usually have twice the lives as the first time. I found this to be very annoying. I would have rather just had to fight them once with the higher life total rather than going back and forth. The battles also vary between one on one, two on two, and even one on two or three at a time. I found the fights where you are outnumbered to be quite frustrating, and usually require cheap tactics to come out alive. There is also not much variety, and you find yourself fighting against the same people over and over again. This is just another annoying and fun-sucking aspect of this game.