My 1st impressions after beating Sonic Advance 3. The weakest of the advance series, fans will enjoy, others may not.
Zones are, for some reason, there to explore rather than acting as a nice way to divided all the acts. As well, the way these zones act are already a big turret for me to even play the game. I understand they were trying to go with a sonic adventure vibe, but the zones are just far too shallow and pointless to really make anything worthwhile by having them there. The game would have easily benefited with a quicker menu option.
Getting chaos emeralds are even more tedious than ever as well. While in the first two games getting chaos emeralds was simpler, you got the chaos emeralds by both collecting 50 rings and finding a spring to the special stage or collecting 7 rings scattered throughout certain levels. SA3 however, has you collecting all the chao's in a zone, and SA3 doesnt just stop there, after getting each chao you then have to find a key found in one of the acts of said zone to unlock the special stage and then past the stage in order to get the chaos emerald. This new way to get chaos emeralds is really off putting to me, and it just ruins the concept of skill in getting a chaos emerald, and replaces it with tedious treasure hunting.
On top of that, the majority of the ending levels are just too long for their own good. In my opinion, Sonic does best when each level is around 3-4 mins long around the first time beating it, and about 2-3 during speed runs, if not faster. During my playthrough however I sometimes got to around 5-6 mins. just trying my best on getting to the end. While I'm not the best sonic player, I have to say that a lot of these levels just drag on. It gets annoying when you keep dying at one spot only to realize you were only half way through the level. Not to mention that a few levels have small loops here and there that makes progress annoying as hell because if you mess up on one part it's pretty much back to start. I also want to know why partners are able to hinder your way through a level; its just really dumb to see the CPU use up a platform that will fall if you or the CPU land on it.
As for the other parts of the game, mainly the new partner system, not a fan. While I usually have something good to say or something of the like, SA3 just makes me mad at what might have been. The partner system just seems a bit broken to me. The way it gives advantages and disadvantages toward certain pairings just makes it control bad, and it's just awkward in the long run. Too many things change with each different character in order to play them like you usually would pending on your partner. For instance, having pretty much anyone but tails as your partner automatically makes sonic lose his tricks and his ball when he jumps. This makes for a lot of annoying mechanics rather than nice additional ones. I understand they don't want to make a truly broken pairing which breaks the game, but changing the way the character moves, runs, and walks makes playing a game based on physics really hard to adjust too. Frankly it just got to the point of just sticking to sonic and tails because they seemed to be the only pairing that actually worked.
Conclusion: Sonic Advance 3 is easily the weakest in the series, and this is due to a lot of interesting ideas being executed in a mediocre fashion. While SA3 certainly isn't a bad game, it really tries too many things at once to really create a robust system for any of the new ideas it wants to try. At the least, SA3 can be enjoyed by fans, but it's better if everyone else plays one of the earlier games in the advance series.