I had interest in learning how to speedrun a Sonic game for years, but I didn't have the motivation to speedrun any game seriously until the pandemic. One day when I was in a bad mood in October 2020, I decided to play my GBA SP and really enjoyed revisiting the first two Sonic Advance games. I thought about how I never put the effort into getting all the chaos emeralds for Sonic Advance 2 before, so I decided to make it a goal that month to get all the chaos emeralds so I could finally play as Amy Rose in Sonic Advance 2.

When I did research about Sonic Advance 2 speedruns, I was shocked to find out there was only one run submitted for Tails in Sonic Advance 2. He was always my favorite character to play as in that game since its initial release in March 2003 when I was a 13 year old kid, so I decided to put effort into the Tails Any% speedrun category. I figured if there was a lack of interest in the category, why not try to push the speedrun meta of this game with that character? Overtime, I found a lot of valuable information from various YouTube channels. In particular, Truesonic53's IL runs for Tails showcased that character's potential, which gave me a lot of incentive to see what can be done with Tails in a full game speedrun.

I'm thrilled that interest in this game has increased. I always viewed Sonic Advance 2 as an extremely underrated game and I hope the increase in speedrunners will help to give it more attention. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but since this game is so fast paced and focused on speed, I could see it eventually becoming one of the more popular speedrun games in the series. There are no auto-scroll sections, so from a viewer standpoint, there is never really a dull moment in a world record paced Sonic Advance 2 speedrun. I look forward to seeing this game have its meta pushed overtime, especially since I find it to be a very fun game to play and watch.

It's also worth mentioning that Sonic Advance 2 has one of my favorite art directions in a game. I used to make sprite comics in 2003 using sprites from Sonic Advance 1 and 2, so creating silly thumbnails for my speedruns has been a bit of a throwback to that era of my life. I'm a very nostalgic person, probably to a fault, but I enjoy revisiting interests I had when I was younger. When I found a CD last year that had a lot of my old graphics from 2003 and 2004, it revived my interest in a lot of graphics stuff, which is one reason why I put a lot of effort into the visual presentation of my speedruns.

Did I just discover a hidden gem of a category or am I too high?