Sonic & Knuckles Walkthrough

2. General hints and tips

SAVE SAVE SAVE as often as you can. This is the best tip I can offer.

Here's an explanation of the chaos emerald levels in this game:

You don't need 50 rings to get to a special stage in this game. Instead, the giant rings are found in secret places, behind fake walls, and once you grab them, you'll teleport to a special stage. The special stages are filled with blue, red, and yellow spheres, as well as silver (casino-level type) bumper spheres and rings. The object of the special stages is to either touch all the blue spheres or make them turn into rings (thus, getting rid of them). If you touch a red sphere, the stage ends and you won't get your emerald. Yellow spheres work just like the springs in the game, and bounce you quite a distance in whatever direction you were running when you made contact with them. The bumper spheres make you walk backwards, to which you either have to rotate the camera so you face the direction you're moving, or you change direction from "backwards" after making contact with a bumper. If you collect enough rings in a special stage, you get a continue (similar to how you get an extra life in the main game). Blue spheres are usually grouped into collectives of "squares", meaning you usually have a certain amount of spheres going horizontally, and vertically, and then spheres filling out the length & width. If you have a collective of 4 going across, and 4 going up, best believe that collective will consist of 16 spheres. When you touch a blue sphere, it changes to a red sphere. This is very important to remember if you touch a blue sphere before touching a bumper, as you're about to make contact with a newly-turned red sphere, and exit the level prematurely. The reason they're usually arranged in square collectives is because if a group of blue spheres is encircled by a group of red spheres, all involved spheres will then become rings. What that means is, if you originally have an arrangement of blue spheres, like the following example:

B B B B

B B B B

B B B B

B B B B (where "B" = blue sphere)

And you start touching the outside spheres only, as highlighted below:

R R R R

R B B R

R B B R

B R R R (where "R" = red spheres, if you're touching the blue outer ones thus turning them red)

When you touch that last outer blue sphere (the lower left "B"), all sixteen of those spheres then become:

O O O O

O O O O

O O O O

O O O O ("O" = rings!)

It's not necessary to always make them rings, but with less red spheres around the level, the chances of you succeeding improve greatly.

One final note about special stages: The speed in which your character runs within the stage increases as time goes by, so you could get pretty dizzy if you play within a stage long enough. Try to learn the stages as you go through them, as they're laid out in patterns. We've provided videos up ahead of all the special stages, so don't worry!

Here are some Boss Runs if you get stuck with these bosses.

Sonic

credit: SonicAmyMixed

Knuckles

credit: ShaoKanDestroer