sonic adventure 2 - 4/10
live and learn how to completely fuck up what worked before
please note: this is a game i have reviewed multiple times! the prior versions of this review will be included below. enjoy!
jesus, man.
after my last time with this game (see below), i was really sour on it, as reflected in my thoughts on it. however, the same was arguably true on many of the sonic playthroughs i did around that time, and something has assuredly snapped in me to make my mental shift on a fair few of them - for one, the classics have went from something that i was kinda mixed on to thinking that they genuinely may be some of my favorite games ever made after a couple extra playthroughs done this year. so i booted this game, thinking that it shouldn't be an exception to that rule! the replays of the prior games helped me see things i previously perceived as flaws to be infinitely more digestible after i had returned and was able to meet the games on their own terms and engage with their systems and intentions fully, which strengthened the bond that i already have had since i can remember to this series. i got a sonic sweater for christmas, and so down i sat to boot sonic adventure 2, ready to experience something magical for the first time since i played it as a kid.
yeah, no, it was the same story again, this game is overhyped shite.
seriously, the action stages are completely at odds with just about everything that made sonic adventure's sonic stages so compelling to me! the freedom, the openness, the dedication to you more often than not having complete buttery smooth control of sonic - janky sometimes, yes, but not janky in an unmanageable way. this game, though? it's sink or fucking swim, truly; either you get it or you don't. truly the marmite of the sonic series. i do not like how the spindash has went from being instant to now requiring an awkward pause, which is something that i thought was a great step in bringing it into a 3d environment and making it more active in the speed of adventure, i don't like how the stages are now more or less entirely straight shots with more concern about being showcases of spectacle rather than having branching routes or even the ability to use your abilities to get to different parts of the level quicker or anything of the sort. not even any emerald coast "run along the bridge and spindash jump to the loop" tier baby shit, just fucking nothing. that alone, to me, completely shoots this game in the foot. one of the most fun aspects of sonic adventure to me is that it is a rock solid campaign (in my opinion, at the very least) which you can then go back through and be able to spot bits of the level that you can do your own tricks and skips from with the power of the humble spindash jump... yeah, you'll be lucky if there's like, a mildly large chasm you can apply that logic to, here. by and large, it's just watered-down and more... "streamlined", i suppose, sonic stages. don't get me wrong, they can be fun, it's just that they're nowhere near as fun as adventure for me.
conversely, wanna know something that's just outright bad? the other 66% of the game! the mech and treasure hunting stages in this game are abominable. the mech stages are nothing short of torturous, every single last one of them is a slow slogging chore, coupled with arguably the most precise platforming the game has to offer... paired with the worst hitboxes the game has to offer by far, often making for an unneeded frustrating experience. there is no purpose to just how utterly slow and banal these stages are.
but the treasure hunting stages... my baby. poor knuckles, man. i kinda love the treasure hunting stages of adventure, for them being even more open versions of the already sprawling sonic stages for you to get lost in, soak in the atmosphere and comb over for the emeralds - notably it tells you where MULTIPLE of the fuckers ARE if you're CLOSE TO THEM. seriously, whoever thought that the single-emerald radar change was in any way a good idea needs their head checked and their payslip revoked. i cannot fathom why the hell you would ever do something that egregiously restricting to a gameplay style that most people already did not enjoy - but, because i did enjoy those original knuckles stages, i do find myself enjoying some of these nearly as much as the action stages at points; i love pumpkin hill and dry lagoon especially, they're a really lovely time. but fuck, all of the rest of them suffer from some tedious mechanic or other, from timers to gravity to timers to TIMERS. i understand the narrative reason, but like... putting pressure on me for no reason when i'm already grappling with the style in the first place is not conducive to me enjoying it any further.
on the gameplay front, i think there's one major thing that i don't quite know how to articulate, but here goes: there is replayability in the stages, but it's not in the way that i appreciate it. let me try to explain; so, the appeal of the classic games, inherently, is that i can replay that game, front to back, in a comfortable afternoon, and i can theoretically engage with different routes, different characters and therefore have a rather different experience at a whim. notable, there, is that i mention it being the whole game, and that i have a desire to do that. with sonic adventure, the same is also true to some extent; a lot of the replayability of that game, for me, comes from being able to find new routing options through a level. conversely, adventure 2 goes for this odd, not-quite metroidvania-esque approach? for example, there's this stack of four metal crates in city escape in a floor. now, to get beneath those, you need two different power-ups - the flame ring, and the bounce bracelet. you don't get those until quite significantly further into the game, and there isn't any sort of a new game+ feature, so... what gives? well, that's where the level select comes in. in sonic adventure, the hub worlds are how you get around, being not only a diegetic and immersive way to get from stage to stage in the context of the story, but also being a fun playground to traverse, and then allowing you passage to past stages so that you can revisit them with your old abilities as a fun bonus if you'd like to do so, with the stages by and large being predominantly built around the abilities that you were expected to have at that moment in time. conversely, in sonic adventure 2, oh, here's some random bullshit that you have zero way of interfacing with on your initial playthrough. okay. that's confusing. 75% of the game passes, and then you can go back and check what was there if you'd like if you remember that the level select exists and aren't just engaging with the game as a campaign of continuous levels. that itself brings something into question for me; at what point does that approach begin to harm a game? i mean, of course, sonic adventure itself had a mission select, but it was in no way to the detriment of the game because you could easily blast through sonic's campaign (or any of the others, for that matter) in about an hour or two of fun times. sonic adventure 2 more-or-less has to have the level select in lieu of navigable hubs, and additionally due to the fact that the whole multiple characters integrated into one story thing wouldn't really work out in the hub worlds in the first place, which kinda sucks ass. it's actively taking away from my immersion because instead of me knowing that i gotta go take a train to go back to ice cap and have fun getting there, i have to sigh and go through the boring, far less sauced method of just... clicking on, say, metal harbor in a menu, because i missed that fucking ludicrous timing for the alternate rocket path that you need for the a rank. this might seem like small potatoes, but it is genuinely one of the biggest flaws here to me. there is this hollow reliance on you going back through old stages to get the most out of them and making them seem like they have depth by placing four crates that you can't destroy when you are in that stage, presumably as some illusion of depth, when the things that gave the game depth from the prior game are entirely sapped away. why have expansive landscapes with a great many options that make you feel like you're running from place to place in a realized world when you could have selected a place in a level select for the boxes, bro?
esoteric rant about minutiae over, i will say again that, just like last time, i did enjoy the story all over again. this is strong sonic writing to me, frankly; rather incredibly corny, but with plenty of hype to go around, with some of the best characterization some of these... uhm, characters have seen to date. of course, need it even be said, but shadow steals the fucking show here, man, no wonder people wanted him back so bad for heroes. he's effortlessly the sole reason that i can thank this game for existing, that and his associated story elements such as the ark, gerald and maria, gun and etc. controversially, i will say that they would go on to be bettered in shadow the hedgehog, but that's a story for another day, methinks.
overall, sonic adventure 2 is a game that, going forward, may well be experienced solely through the windii gaylord translations so i can just get the part of this game that i enjoy; the story. i can't say with a clean conscience that i will ever be compelled to revisit this game unless the same curiosity that got me here in the first place ever strikes up again. god, and this is my thoughts on the game without going for any a-ranks this time; i would have shot myself in the fucking face if i even had to think about jumping through all of these hurdles just to play green hill!
this game does not hold up as well as i believed it to. i was horrified by that revelation creeping it's way up and down my brain paths as i played level after level of boring, overly difficult monotonous bullshit just to feel something again when i got to an action stage.
and to keep it brief; basically everything in this game, sans story, in my opinion, is a straight downgrade from sonic adventure 1.
to open with my praise, i must forever pay my gratitude to this game for giving us shadow, and his associated elements such as the ark, maria, gerald, gun and so on. i'm not gonna lie, his existence is doing a lot of the heavy lifting that's stopping me from rating this game any lower.
i liked the other campaigns in sonic adventure 1, but i could see how it needed trimming down somewhat. so, surely, they focus in on the gameplay style that was unanimously agreed on to be good, right, the sonic stages? maybe every so often, you'll have a race like tails' story? ooh, or even a chase stage like in amy's, that'd be cool?
nah, how about we give you a drip-feed of a sonic stage every so often, and we make just objectively worse versions of the gamma shooting stages and the knuckles treasure hunting stages, make them five times as big and obnoxious to navigate, and call it a day? oh, and remove the cute hub worlds, just for good measure.
all of the mech stages are slow, clunky garbage. they play like i am eternally trapped in molasses, and even when i believe i have speed, i still don't, as even the most rudimentary of jumps become effectively impossible without the jet booster upgrade for your respective character, and even with that, you still frequently fall flat. your weight is very apparent - all the more so when you swear on the bible that you made a jump only for you to be phasing through something for the third time seemingly down to random chance. yet, at the same time, when you do pick up speed, you feel overly slippery and light if you press ahead, whilst if you try to turn in any direction too far, you immediately snap around and lose everything. gamma specifically had a mode change into a running form to prevent these exact control issues and to keep a high-paced gun-and-run action game vibe. and speaking of gamma's gameplay, they also stripped the unique and fun time attack mechanic - no, shooting combos just gives you more points now. not only is that nowhere near as interesting, but unless i'm going to really commit to getting all a ranks in this game, then it's wholly pointless to me. i'm down to speedrun the level, but not score farm as this game demands of you, but i'll get to that soon enough.
speaking of a ranks, though, tell you where i'll never get one in my life! yes, the treasure hunting stages are back, and frequently take upwards of five times the time to complete. in a complete lack of judgment, sonic team decided that the best solution to people's complaints about the knuckles treasure-hunting sections in the original was to make them infinitely more time-consuming, and also we removed the radar detecting multiple emeralds at once because fuck you. i truly cannot conceive of any reality in which this was a good idea. this is quite possibly the exact worst way to "flesh out" this concept; simply make it bigger, whilst also making an adjustment that actively hinders the player the bigger the stage gets. and good god do they ever get big. i cannot name a single treasure hunting stage in this game where i genuinely felt as though i intuitively knew where i was going to look for the emeralds, nor did i feel like i personally did anything of value in the stages. i simply glided around for a bit, sporching through the level design countless times until the bloody things revealed themselves to me, painfully, one-by-one, which results in stages that last at least five full minutes. if that was five minutes of running and action and sonic-y goodness, that'd be grand! but no, i'm being forced to go through at least five minutes of find the needle in the eight cubic miles of hay before i get to even dream of the next time i get to run fast.
and on that topic, even though the action stages are by far the best, they're still not a patch on sonic adventure's best of sonic. in each stage of adventure 1, i know that i can have different paths depending on what i want to do, whether integrated into the level design or inventing my own with the lovely lovely spindash jump. well, fuck both of those, because you'll be lucky to see an alternate path that isn't literally just a literal chute to fall down at some point of the stage that'll funnel you back to where you are supposed to be anyway, and the spindash... oh, sweet summer child. the spindash now has this fucking god-awful delay on it to accommodate for the new somersault move, and it shoots any desire i have to spindash jump in the ass. this more strict adherence to these almost corridor-based level designs makes the game feel so much more restrictive than its predecessor by default, only to place further restrictions on what little could be garnered from the quite frankly frequently amateurish design. shadow's action stages are stronger as a result of there being far less of a focus on the abilities; he gets the air shoes to be able to light-speed dash, but there are far less instances than in sonic's examples where it is a requirement to progress.
that brings me to another issue i take with this game; ostensibly, the hub worlds were surely removed to streamline gameplay in order to make it more conducive to going faster for longer periods of time, right? so why keep the upgrades system? why make it so i frequently have to comb back through the level to find an arbitrary pad that allows me to progress? let's take the light-speed dash in metal harbor as an example. you are faced with a trail of rings leading to the next section, with a tower to your immediate left leading upwards to the upgrade. that's great and all for tutorialising the mechanic, but why do we have to cut our pace within an action stage for the sole purpose of diverting to be able to progress? that seems inherently counter-intuitive to me.
the upgrades existing within the hub worlds of adventure 1 was more logical. you were already exploring those hubs, those living, breathing worlds, so you were more encouraged to naturally happen upon these things. for comparison, the light speed dash in that game is found in a sewer, also featuring an apt tutorial, and is then used to gain access to casinopolis, and it is promptly treated as a background tool for you to use should you want to as sonic with very scant exceptions (lost world, i believe?).
the design around it in adventure 2, conversely, frequently faces you with ring trails that you have no choice but to light-speed dash over, and whilst yes, it is just one button press now as opposed to it needing to charge... well, that's just the thing. it's a single button press to immediately cover a huge distance without any skill required. whereas with a spindash jump you need to know your timing, your positioning, and the level layout to some extent, with the light-speed dash, you get speed for free, as well as obviously also collecting the rings. it's just kind of boring. which makes the fact that the light-speed dash gets rammed down your throat in the level design as a mandatory element all the more annoying. if it were useful as a level speedrunning tool, that'd likely redeem it, but the existence of ring trails outside of what are effectively able to be boiled down as 'scripted ring sections' are scant at best, and outright detrimental to your flow at worst, only made all the more offensive by the fact that if you accidentally hit x whilst you're trying to just run, you'll be sucked into a light-speed dash on some rings you didn't really care about.
i might be in a minority, but i genuinely prefer having to charge the light-speed dash with a regular spindash being immediately accessible. yes, it may sometimes break pace given that a light-speed dash is required, but you absolutely are certain that you are doing it of your own volition, and you're not accidentally pressing a button and immediately being zipped to somewhere you don't want to be, which immediately kills runs, making the already nearly unobtainable a ranks even more frustrating.
and i suppose to get to it, yes, the a ranks, and ranks in general were introduced in this game. whilst they are a key component of most 3d sonic outings now, and i owe this game some appreciation for that, since i do very much enjoy going for s ranks in later sonic games, in this game? fuck no. the action stages, sure, but everything else can piss up a rope. constant requirements to grind score, whether that be through shooting chains, or using mystic melody, or doing tricks off of shit or whatever? this game has a hard-on for making you do literally everything in the world and still do it in time for tea. which i suppose, yes, in a sense, is very true to sonic himself, but sonic just does that shit, sonic isn't fiddling on with his noodley wrists wrapped around his gamepad whilst his shoulder's hurting just needing to get to the top of that pissing rocket in metal harbor a bit faster.
this game asks far too much of the player far too frequently. sonic adventure was breezy, yes, perhaps even too much so in places. but adventure 2, when it wants to, will ramp it up to 10,923,483. there are door timers later that i swear to christ are practically frame-perfect in multiple stages, frequent enemy spam, spiked enemy spam, pits everywhere, random stop-and-go puzzle elements... the level design in this game is a cluttered mess most of the time. you get an occasional hit like city escape or final chase, but by and large you just get hit with pyramid cave and crazy gadget; levels with fiddly mechanics that do nothing but confuse you on your first go, and consume your time on every subsequent run. these elements go so well with the aforementioned overabundance of light-speed dash sections to make for gameplay that you're either not involved in by pressing a single button and watching it go, or you're having to put in too much work to be able to keep playing the actual part of the game that you came for. or perhaps something like weapons bed, where you think the a rank would be simple - just combo all of the countless displays of enemies, right? no, actually, you have to pick and choose which to hit, pray to god the lock-on actually works and does follow through and shoot them, and keep a decent speed and hope that the dogshit mech controls don't fuck you over and get you hit, or worse, killed. and as previously mentioned, if you genuinely expect somebody to sit and get a ranks on the treasure hunting stages you are huffing bath salts, i don't give a damn if you can learn the stages or read the hint monitors or whatever it might be, they are outright terrible for this degree of a challenge. speaking of challenges, i hope you didn't hate getting a ranks on the actual main story missions, because you get five missions per level now! yes, the a-b-c-d missions return from adventure 1... except instead of them being custom for each level, they're more often than not just the same stipulation applied globally across each level. and even more often than that, they feel like they're just made to be obnoxious. yet another system from adventure 1 that has been poorly imitated here and has just fallen flat.
nigh everything in this game is a more cumbersome, less fun and more frustrating version of the heights that sonic adventure presented. hell, it actively removes some stuff from adventure, like the aforementioned hub worlds! all in all, i will still every so often boot this game to play sky rail or final rush, but otherwise? i kinda fell out of love with this game this time around. it wasn't as great as i remembered it being from my childhood, nor deserving of its deified ranking amidst the greater sonic community. this game has so many trappings that are utterly inexcusable and non-superficial to where i cannot in good conscience say that i had a good time, nor that i recommend it to anybody looking to get into the franchise. it assuredly did great things for the story, as well as being an introduction point into the franchise for many due to its release as adventure 2 battle on the gamecube, but in the modern day? this does not hold up nearly as well as its older brother, and i cannot see myself replaying this in full again for quite a few years. a thorough exercise in frustration with brief chocolate chips of fun to keep you going through.
