It's simple; if you see a robot, destroy it. A lot of your points will come from destroying robots. An individual robot may not give a lot of points, but they can add up very quickly. Dangerous enemies, like the blob robots in the space levels, shield robots, the E-102 Gamma clones in the Egyptian levels, and bomb robots, will give more points than a bog-standard floating Beetle or Hunter.


This picture has 600 points worth of enemies. That's a decent amount for a Sonic level.

However, don't backtrack half of the stage to bust open a bot. If it's a short trek, its fine, but don't put yourself in significant danger or waste half a minute to destroy a single floating Beetle. It's pointless.

This ties into the previous point. If you see a group of robots, hit each one after the other with a Homing Attack without touching the ground. At the end of the chain, you'll get a point bonus in addition to the points from the enemies you destroyed. The more enemies you hit, the higher your bonus is.

Every level has a few enemies set up for you to do a combo. Some are required to progress, while others are there just for points. Keep your eye out for the ones that aren't needed to progress because they're a big help to get an A.

Here's an example of this:

Every stage has a Gold Robot hidden in it. Destroying him will give you 1000 points. This is a huge point boost, so hunt the little bastard down. Beware that he'll disappear a few seconds after he appears, so you'll have to be quick when he pops up.

In Sonic and Shadow's stages, you can get bonus points by doing things such as jumping off the end of a rail or a ramp to perform a trick jump. Some tricks will give you up to 1,000 points, which is very, very handy. Even small bonuses, such as 100 or 200 points, will help. Some tricks are as simple as grinding, while others will require you to jump

A less known type of trick is doing a series of “cool” actions, like using a Homing Attack on a robot, then using a Light Dash on the ring line behind him before you hit the ground. When you finish the combo, you'll get some extra points. You can get a good amount of points if you can figure these out. Once you figure out what the game considers point-worthy action combos, you should be able to find and perform other combos with ease.


An example of a trick. Homing attack the robot to the right of the rail. Then, when you're in the air, move to the rail and grind up it. Right before the rail ends, jump off of the rail and homing attack the robot near the end of it. You'll get a 800 point bonus.

Some levels, such as Final Rush, will require you to do tricks to get an A. Get some practice in levels like City Escape or Sky Rail to get a feel for the timing the game wants for tricks.

Unlike later games, simply going fast will not give you an automatic A rank. You need to to destroy enemies and perform tricks to get most points you need to get an A rank. Therefore, you'll have to find a way to balance both speed and destroying robots to get an A. In most cases, it's okay to sacrifice some time bonus points to get some extra points by doing a Homing Attack combo on robots. The 800 points from destroying the enemies will more than compensate for the 400 or so points lost by spending 40 or so seconds taking the robots out.

Note that Metal Harbor is the only level that really requires you to haul ass to get an A rank.

Item capsules will give you points when you blow them open. This can be pretty handy for getting points. Any item capsule will give you points, but the 10 and 20 ring plus 1-Up capsules are the best because they'll give you a decent amount of points (100 for the 10 ring and 200 for the 20 ring and 1-Up) and are fairly common.

In Missions 2 and 3 for each level, your rank depends only on how long it took you to complete the mission. Therefore, it's a-okay to do things like bypass enemies to get some rings or get closer to the Chao. Basically, you should only destroy enemies if they're in your way or can easily hurt you.

The Lost Chao missions will let you use checkpoints without any penalties. Take advantage of this. For example, if you overshoot a jump and end up too far from the ruin you need to find the Chao, suicide. You'll end up back at the checkpoint and have the time you had when you touched it. This'll let you try again without having to restart.