A Trendy Bashing Session Of Sonic Adventure 2

Sonic Adventure 2 is still the gold standard for a lot of people. Whenever an argument breaks out about what direction Sega should steer the Sonic Franchise into, there's a healthy subsect of supporters that want a return to the adventure style games, and while the exact definition of what even is a Sonic Adventure game is murky, people really badly want another one.

Released in 2001 and developed by Sonic Team USA, it was released to favourable reviews and it sold well enough. I was like, 5, at the time of release so I can't give you any first hand experience about what it was like to play it at the time. I didn't own a Dreamcast or a Gamecube, so I can safely put Sonic Adventure 2 into the the category of games I missed. I did get to experience the PC release of Sonic Adventure DX and I enjoyed the time I spent with it as a child, so when I'd finally looked up the sequel online and everyone kept saying how much better it was, a part of me got a little hyped up to play Sonic Adventure 2.

So many years later, the PSN version dropped and I finally got my first taste of Sonic Adventure 2 and well...

The game is a mess.

Look, I get it. It's trendy to bash on Sonic Adventure 2 now, and I get that Sonic Adventure 2 fans probably don't want anyone to barge in and just step all over their sand castle. Measuring a game's objectively quality is an impossible task, and you can't account for taste, especially in this fanbase. And I really wanted to like this game. I wanted to be part of the crowd who held it up as the peak of 3D Sonic.

But I don't like it. It's a game that on my first playthrough made me very, very angry. The fact of the matter is that Sonic Adventure 2 is weighed down by poor design choices that make it a title that I actually don't want to see any more of. As much as the game is a proof of concept for how Sonic could work in 3D, it also didn't alleviate the almost universal hatred for playing as Sonic's friends. I'll note that for this review, I'm playing the PC version of Sonic Adventure 2.

Without further adieu, let me start another trendy bashing session of Sonic Adventure 2, because I'm all about the low-hanging fruit, if nothing else.

The story of Sonic Adventure 2 is just meh, in general. As a kid I was a lot more invested in Shadow's personal loss of Maria, although I had first contact with the story through the Shadow The Hedgehog PS2 game. Suffice to say, very little of Sonic Adventure 2's narrative is interesting or fun to me now. The dialogue is stilted and the deliveries of the voice actors is even worse, although given the material they have to work with, one problem might just be caused by the other.

For a summary, Eggman uncovers Shadow in a military base, and then the two escape for some evil-doing. Eggman starts by destroying the master Emerald, for no other reason than to give Knuckles something to do. Rouge is also there because she likes treasure, or something. Rouge is also a double agent working for the military, although that has very little relevance. Sonic starts getting mistaken for Shadow because humans are apparently colourblind and is eventually captured. He escapes, finds The President, promises to stop Eggman, and the gang heads off to Eggman's base in Egypt to stop him. A battle ensues, but to no avail since Eggman escapes, so Sonic and crew board a shuttle and follow him to the space colony ARK. Once there, Tails reveals a fake chaos emerald he's been hiding up his ass for most of the game and  so everyone chips in to try stop Eggman.

They don't, Eggman nabs all the chaos emeralds, powers up the Eclipse Canon, things go wrong and everyone teams up to save the day from a space lizard made by Eggman's grandfather.

It's alright and gives us reasons to run through a bunch of colourful and diverse levels, but considering how many of Sonic's friends I'd rather not have here for this one, it's hard not to hate everyone involved at least a little bit. There's almost literally no point in analyzing the story here but I'll just say that at this point in my life, I'll skip the cutscenes. They aren't even bad enough to be ironically enjoyable, and that's probably the worst part about them, they're awful but not so awful that I might end up actually having fun.

But a forgettable story is par for the course here, how well does Sonic Adventure 2 play?

That's a question with a different answer depending on exactly who you're in control of, where you are in the game, and how much tolerance you have for excessive bullshit. And boy, does this game have bullshit in excess.

Sonic Adventure 2 sees you controlling one of six characters who all traverse stages in one of three loosely related game modes; Action stages, in which you take control of Sonic or Shadow, the Treasure Hunting stages where you take control of Knuckles or Rouge and the Mech Shooting Galleries where you take control of Eggman or Tails. I'd be repeating complaints if I spoke about Shadow, Rouge or Eggman's stages, so double up any complaints in the hero campaign for their dark campaign counterparts.

Not to be one to dwell entirely on the negative, I'll say this, at least most of Sonic's levels are fun.

Sonic and Shadow get the expansive obstacle courses with fun set pieces in which the core appeal of Sonic Adventure 2 lies. City Escape is one of the most beloved levels in the franchise for a reason. Snowboarding down a city based loosely on San Francisco to some upbeat pop punk that dovetails into a casual set of platforming challenges and then ends on an explosive and in-your-face chase sequence. It's a strong opening, and one that's hard to really be very mad at. If this was all there was to the game, it might easily have been my favourite Sonic experience, or at least a close second to Generations. Speaking of, City Escape was iconic enough to get included in Sonic Generations and while I think I prefer that version, there's a little bit of that Adventure magic here that I don't think the Generations engine could capture. However, if you're playing the re-release, there's a bug that transports a rail cart just above the camera, which clips in and out of view. Since City Escape is the moneyshot level. it's hard to believe that they'd leave something so utterly broken in the game. Thanks to some dedicated users, the steam version has a fix but I had to deal with this my first time around, so to say that I was more than mildly annoyed would be an understatement.



After that, it's an easy boss fight that shoves the camera way far up Sonic's ass but it's not unplayable, just tedious.

For the most part, It's downhill but the levels very slowly degrade in quality and never become awful, just a little more tedious. Sonic's moveset grows as you collect items, and some are more useful than others. The magic hands are worthless, but the Light Speed Dash and Bounce Bracelet are worthwhile additions.

On a side note, I will say that the Bounce Bracelet just isn't as useful as the Stomp from later games. I like that the Bounce Bracelet actually is contextual and the slope of the environment can affect your bounce trajectory, but that never really comes into play with Sonic Adventure. The Flame Ring is functionally useful, as it lets you break metal crates, but its attached to the somersault, the most useless move in Sonic's arsenal. In later games, hell, Sonic Advance was released in Japan in the same year, and the slide appears in that game and does the same thing, except much better. Unleashed and Generations would later perfect the way that the slide move works, and I can't fault the game for not being better than a sequel released more than half a decade later.

I can fault the game for mapping the Spindash, somersault and Light Speed Dash all to the same button.

That's just sloppy button mapping. It's an oversight that I wish the re-releases would at least have addressed, but no. Can't have everything, I guess. Most of the complaints I've had were petty, so I guess it's finally time to get into the larger detractors of the overall experience. In short;

The real spot where Sega shit the carpet was the Knuckles stages.

It's hard to put into words how inexplicably awful these stages are. It's a simple concept, there are three crystals hidden in a stage placed at random, and you have a radar to suss out their locations. There's no time limit but the quicker you are, the higher your score. There are monitors scattered around that provide hints, but using them automatically deducts from your rank.

I'm just going to make a numbered list of all the reasons these stages suck, that way we can continue one without spending too much time here;

1. Knuckles accelerates way too quickly
2. The radar only scouts out one emerald piece at a time. This wasn't a problem in SADX so I don't understand why this change was made. It artificially extends an already tedious task.
3. The emerald shards are randomly placed
4. The levels are obtusely designed, which means that in addition to the random placement of emerald shards, there are times when you know you're close to an emerald shard, but there's so much level geometry in the way that you then have to follow an obscure pathway and pray to all gods known that you end up in the right spot.
5. Even when you're on top of an emerald shard, the game is finicky about exactly where it is within a small circle that the shard actually is, and you could spend minutes just digging around in one spot to find that damned piece of emerald
6. The camera can only turn horizontally, which is a problem with the entirety of the game, but it's made more egregious by how often Knuckles gets locked in a poor camera angle due to level geometry. And even when you do have control, it's often yanked away to focus off on something that would be much better focused on if there was just a wider shot, which there's often more than enough room for. There's also plenty of places where it will jitter or outright clip the geometry and that's never fun. Don't even get me started on the swimming controls in water.
7. They can easily take up to 15 minutes. As great as the music is, on a 15 minute loop, these songs start to grate as your frustration grows.
8. When you let go of the glide button, you can't instantly start gliding again. There's a small delay between letting go Since most stages are closed off corridors, this isn't too much of a problem but the delay irked me a lot while playing Pumpkin Hill, and can I just say, thank goodness that the stage isn't one giant pit
9. Everything about combat. The three hit combo feels awful to use and this has always been a problem with Knuckles in 3D. It's slippery, the final hit is this weird uppercut that is entirely unnecessary.
10. The hint boxes are sometimes flat-out unhelpful. One actually told me that an emerald shard was located "between the moon and the stars" as if that was a helpful thing in outer space.
11. Swimming controls.
12. Mario Galaxy like planetoid gravity, except it's awful.

And Tails isn't much better.

Tails takes over from where Gamma did in Sonic Adventure. Which is weird since I can't think of anyone who liked Gamma for his levels. In Sonic Adventure, Gamma was this sweet side story of a robotized Flicky that overcame its programming and eventually freed all his friends from their mechanical prisons. It was a charming little story that didn't require much other than repeatedly hitting the X button, but it was a decent enough time waster. Most importantly, it was optional. Sure, you had to beat each campaign in order to unlock the final ending, but if you only wanted to play Sonic's levels, you weren't forced to sit through everyone else's.

And now, for a numbered list of everything wrong with Tails' stages;

1. Platforming. His mech is heavy, it doesn't control well, and platforming is just a nightmare
2. Shooting. The only real control you have over the aiming is the vague direction you point the analogue stick in, and you also move with that analogue stick. Unlike most competent mech shooters where the camera is locked behind the character at all times, since the Dreamcast didn't have a second analogue stick, the freeform movement is actually detrimental to the experience
3. The flat-lining sound it makes when holding down the shoot button to lock on. 
4. Colliding with walls mid glide causes you to drop like a rock
5. Tiny robots hurt you when you touch them. This is just a videogame thing, I get that, but I should be destroying robot monkeys under my giant mechanical feet, not crying out in pain and dropping rings because of their ugly orange exteriors gently caressing mine
6. The camera. I know, I already complained about it in the Knuckles stages, but for some reason,  any time you try take control of it here, the game wrestles the camera back into the nonsensical place it wants you to look at, even if you can get an objectively better angle by yourself. The game thinks it knows better even if the camera is pointed the wrong way. You also can't change the angle and move simultaneously. Add to that, the camera constantly dips below Tails, which makes platforming even harder since you have no depth perception so you can't accurately time your jumps.

Character battles are also a joke. The only worthwhile one is between Shadow and Sonic near the end of the hero campaign, where they're both running and trying to damage each other with their unique personal abilities. Doing the light dash along a trail of rings to damage Shadow is a fun time and I can honestly praise how well designed the fight is.

The Chao Garden is fun, but I also think it's suffered a couple downgrades. You can't just enter at any point any more, you have to collect a Chao Garden Key in a stage and then finish the stage with the key to enter. Sonic Adventure did fine by just having it in this room you'd easily discover just by wandering around for a bit. I mean, sure, at least you always enter the Garden with a couple capsules to feed your Chao, but sometimes you just wanna go and pet them and feed them food. It's perfectly functional, and I really wish that the Chao would make a comeback because they're just so damn adorable, but I also hoped that the garden would at least expand a little more.

If you want an example of some extremely poor design, the ranking system is also a mess.

I actually like the idea of a ranking system, depending on how it's used. See, Sonic Generations has one based on score, however, the best way to get a high score is to cut down your level time, since the faster you beat the level, the higher your Time Bonus. Get an optimal time without dying, and you S-Rank the stage.

Sonic Adventure 2's ranking system works largely on the same basis, except the Time Bonus isn't the largest factor. You have to defeat as many enemies as possible, with as many rings as possible, interacting with as many stage gimmicks as possible in the smallest amount of time possible.

Do you understand how those objectives conflict with each other?

Sonic Generations tried to condition players to speedrun levels, and the way to play better was to go faster. Since Sonic is a character known for his speed and impatience, your goal suddenly aligns with the character your playing as. Unlike say, Mario, whose goal it is to save the princess, the player's goal isn't to eat Peach's cakes. You don't get to eat cake, Mario does. You get to be told that the princess is in another castle.

Sonic's goal is to go fast. To reach the end point as fast as possible. By incentivizing speed through the ranking system, Sonic Generations effectively aligns your goals with Sonic's.

The nonsensical goal of just doing everything you can but really fast doesn't even showcase the level, as it adds tedium. I appreciate that there are different goals for different missions within each stage, but your initial run to get a higher score is an exercise in frustration.

Hbomberguy has a great video about play conditioning in Dark Souls and I highly recommend you check that video out. My eventual point with this bit is to just say that Sonic Adventure 2 has conditioned a generation of gamers to play Sonic very differently. So much so that until some people discovered the insane tricks you can pull off to speedrun Sonic Forces, no one realised that there were alternate routes that existed because of the moveset Sonic has built into him. 

Airboosting or using the Drill Wisp-On actually creates alternate routes.

But you wouldn't know that if your gold standard, in relation to the Sonic series, doesn't really understand how it wants you to play. If you've never tried a 100% run of Sonic Adventure 2, you might never even realize that there is another way to play the game, other than just touching every object in the level. Now, I'm not saying that Forces doesn't have its own problems, and that those problems aren't numerous, but at the very least, it knows how it wants you to play.

I will reiterate that Adventure 2 isn't all bad though. For the one third of the game I actually enjoy, there's a lot of good to be said about it. Using the light speed dash, when it actually goddamn works, is so enjoyable that I genuinely think the game would have been miles better if there were more alternate routes that required rigorous use of the light speed dash.

Now, I want to talk about the game's presentation.

Sonic Adventure 2 is a very "Dreamcast-looking" game. If you look at each consoles life cycle, there's a certain aesthetic that's bred from the way the hardware renders graphics and the techniques that were popular for the era. It's hard to describe, but you can easily tell the difference between an N64 game, a Dreamcast game and a PS1 game just from any set of gameplay footage.

I bring this up because I don't much care for graphical fidelity. I understand that this is a seventeen year old game and there's not much you can do to fix the issues inherent to that fact. The best you can do is small facelifts in texture quality, resolution, anti-aliasing and such. Maybe an ENB preset to better the lighting, and maybe add a little bloom.

What I can judge is how the designers at the time used the tools they were given, and what the end result of it is, compared to everything else that was released around the same time.

So let me start with animation.

Why is Sonic's run cycle so jittery? Sure, there was some jitter in his Sonic Adventure run cycle but for the most part, it was perfectly fine. In fact, everyone has jittery animation. One thing I can say that I do like is how everyone who isn't trapped in a mech actually leans in when turning a corner. It's a natural extension of their moveset and I like the small detail in animation. But Sega giveth, and Sega can just as easily taketh away. Like, why does Sonic's victory pose look so derpy? It was fine in Adventure 1, if a bit too fast. Another thing I really don't like is the pose Sonic ends up in after a successful homing attack. It's this unnatural spread-eagles skydiving pose. Little things like this pile up to make a very unappealing looking game. And a lot of these problems didn't exist in the previous title, antiquating the game even further.

The model quality is also off.

For starters, Sonic's soap shoes just look bad. It's odd, because in promotional artwork, his shoes look just fine, but then you get in game and they're these clunky moonboots I can't imagine anyone who's ever walked would ever considered wearing. Sonic's arms also aren't like, connected to his body.

It's a subtle detail but I mean, his arm literally disconnects from his body during certain animations. Once you see it, it's a little hard to unsee, man.

Also, everything about the upgrades.

I hate how these things muddy up character designs. They don't look futuristic, they don't look cool, they look like Sonic's discovered a treasure trove of happy meal toy tie-ins and decided to unironically wear them. Luckily there's a mod for the PC version to turn them off and I installed that ish the first chance I could.

Stage aesthetics are the one thing I can actually really give the game props for, there's lots of vibrant colours and decent aesthetic choices. There's a couple places where the texture quality isn't up to scratch, but it's a Dreamcast port so I'm not going to hold too much against it.

Next up on the low hanging fruit is the audio, and by gosh... There's so much going wrong. There's a trick that I myself have used, where when I have a sound in a game that's repeated very frequently, I randomize the pitch in a small range.

I really wish they did that for the crappy stock jumping sound they used for Sonic.

Other issues include dialogue being drowned out by music in cutscenes, or voice clips running over each other. The worst offender is the Knuckles bossfight with King Boom Boo, everything about the sound design of that boss fight can die from anal prolapse. Character barks during gameplay can also be a little weird. When you dig as Knuckles, he repeatedly shouts "ora ora ora", and maybe that's just a cultural thing but it now it just makes me think of JoJo.

At least the music is good. Sega, make sure you never let go of Jun Senuoe. While there are a lot of forgettable tracks, there's nothing explicitly bad, there are no clunkers.

So the story is barely functional, the sound design is a mess, the music's alright even if it can drown out everything else, the dialogue and voice-overs are bad, the gameplay is only good for about a third of the levels and the presentation seems like it should never have passed any QA tests. But at least the Chao Garden is fun.

I've always wondered how this game is so beloved by fans. For me, it's one of those games you should immediately recognize as having aged poorly. There are better looking games on the Dreamcast, and in 2018 you can't tell me we haven't had a better Sonic game than Sonic Adventure 2, and we can't pretend that following this template is going to save the franchise.

I'll give Sonic Adventure 2 this, in those brief peaks where the gameplay does come together, yeah, it can be fun. It has a couple ideas that are worth revisiting in a future game and I certainly don't mind salvaging the best parts for a future installment.

But with the excessive bullshit, poor production value and overall sloppiness of the final product, it's time I think we just put this one to bed and maybe try accepting that some parts of our childhood favourites don't hold up as well as we'd like.