Special Stages in Sonic Advance 2 are a series of special levels. For a character to enter a Special Stage, the player must find seven Special Rings hidden throughout an act and finish the act without losing a life. This requires that the player is fully aware of the Act's layout as finding seven Special Rings can be a painstaking task.

Unlike previous games in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, these Special Stages have many unique features in terms of gameplay. When successfully cleared, the player is rewarded a Chaos Emerald.

As the Chaos Emeralds are not shared, each character is required to collect the seven Emeralds separately. If Sonic collects them all, he can access True Area 53. If any character collects all seven, the game's Tiny Chao Garden mode and Boss Battles in Time Attack become available to the player. If all the characters have collected all seven Chaos Emeralds each, Amy Rose becomes a playable character.

Gameplay[]

Once the player successfully enters the Special Stage, the player has to control the character around a large, rectangular, 3D environmental stage, with their main objective being collecting 300 Rings within two minutes. However, there will not be three hundred Rings physically on the stage so the player should collect Rings in succession; collecting Rings in succession will raise the ring multiplier to x2 (meaning that a physical Ring becomes two rings) and as long as Rings are collected in succession the ring multiplier will continue to increase until it reaches x9. The multiplier increase is only temporary; if no Rings are collected after a short amount of time, the multiplier will reset back to x1. There are gimmicks such as a dash panel and a Spring which can accelerate the character or launch him/her up into the air respectively. The only obstacle in the Special Stage is the Robot Guard returning from Sonic Adventure, who constantly chases the character. Touching it will damage the character, making the character lose some Rings. If it touches the character while having no Rings, the Special Stage ends in a failure. The Robot Guard is indestructible, but if contacted by a Spin Jump from a character, the robot will temporarily be knocked down. The arrow and color next to the character will indicate the direction and proximity of where the Robot Guard is. (Green means far distance, yellow means fairly short distance and red means very short distance).

When having thirty seconds left on the timer, the music will change and the timer will flash red, indicating that the player does not have much time left in the Special Stage to pass the objective. When having three hundred Rings, a figure of an Emerald flashing green, red and blue will appear indicating that the player has passed the objective in the Ring Count.

The Chaos Emerald earned depends on the Zone the player entered the Special Stage from:

• Leaf Forest: Red
• Hot Crater: Blue
• Music Plant: Yellow
• Ice Paradise: Green
• Sky Canyon: Gray
• Techno Base: Turquoise
• Egg Utopia: Purple

Gallery[]

Screenshots[]

Gallery
Sonic in Special Stage 1 Sonic in Special Stage 2 Cream in Special Stage 3 Tails in Special Stage 4 Knuckles in Special Stage 5 Amy in Special Stage 6 Knuckles in Special Stage 7 Special Stage results screen

Level maps[]

Gallery
Stage 1 map Stage 2 map Stage 3 map Stage 4 map Stage 5 map Stage 6 map Stage 7 map

Music[]

See also[]

• Special Stage (disambiguation)