Review: Shadow The Hedgehog (2005)

Remember when you were a kid and you had a lot of angst and you went through this edgy period that you now cringe at as an adult?

Shadow The Hedgehog is the ill-conceived pseudo sequel to Sonic Heroes and Adventure 2, as well as one of the last games Yuji Naka worked on before leaving Sonic Team and Sega.

Before we go any further, I’d like to posit that by ill-conceived I don’t mean that it was a bad idea to make the game, just that the concept was under-developed, much like Shadow’s character. A spin-off game based off a then-popular character could have been a booster shot that sparked new life and interest in the franchise. And Shadow was the ideal candidate. But alas, instead, we now live in the timeline where Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic ’06 were released just one year apart.

To start at the top, progression through the narrative of the game is needlessly complex for how simple it really is. Shadow, who still doesn’t have his memories back, sees an invasion attempt happening and from there he goes on a quest to learn about his own past. After some soul searching, Shadow comes to a conclusion about who he is and what he feels his role in the world is.

And to the game’s credit, I actually like the mechanical structuring of morality. Rather than being a text prompt, you have to actively help people to be good, serve Black Doom in order to be evil or kind of just run past everything. The actual act of being good or bad usually boils down to annoying quests where you have to collect or destroy X amount of things for Y character, but I like the idea more than the implementation.

And yeah, you are going to have the most fun running past everything because the core issue that lies in the heart of Shadow The Hedgehog is that it’s kind of just a mediocre Sonic game with little pieces of Devil May Cry combat attached. Shadow has the Venom problem where he exists not as a character foil to the hero, but as a shadow-self, a dark doppelganger, a personified version of the path not taken. In gameplay, that amounts to Shadow being a texture swap with a bad attitude. Whereas a game based on Tails might include more flight based platforming puzzles and a game based on Knuckles would deal more with gliding, Shadow kind of boils down to being more of an aesthetic choice. But unlike in Adventure 2, Shadow’s moveset here is so weak. Hand to hand combat is so tacked on that if you tug on it too hard, it will fall off. The spindash is an actual joke. The homing attack at least works alright, but it’s not quite the powerhouse that some weapons are.

Shadow’s chaos powers are woefully under-utilized. Filling either the hero or dark bar gives you the ability to either use Chaos Control or Chaos Blast, but neither are more useful than just the passive bonus of having unlimited ammo with your currently equipped weapon. Furthermore, Chaos Control, which you build up doing “heroic” things actually fundamentally clashes with the collectathon structure of Hero missions, as you whiz by all of the objectives. Chaos Blast is kind of just a screen nuke, but it doesn’t do as much damage as the flashy visuals would suggest. Like, Sonic Heroes managed to make the ability halfway useful, here it just feels like a gimped version of the team attack.

The music is… Actually enjoyable, in a cheesy Nu Metal kind of way. Almost Dead is actually a banger, in a way that only try-hard 2000s Rob Zombie sound-alikes can be. The music probably gets closer to that Devil May Cry aesthetic the game is trying to chase.

And what’s kind of baffling is that there already is a version of this game that works; It’s called Ratchet and Clank. And although Ratchet and Clank is a lot slower, it executes the hybrid of third person shooting and platforming much more eloquently. This was the game Shadow The Hedgehog should probably have tried to imitate.

Final thoughts; this is not a game one plays with a completionist mindset, unless you really like Westopolis, because getting all the endings means playing Westopolis 10 times. The game is also trying way too hard, I mean, just listen to these menu sound effects. I remember having some fun with the multiplayer, but it’s entirely skippable.

And my last point is this; The middle of the road ending which you get from going off and doing your own thing while the plot happens at you is perhaps the only ending that has any real narrative stakes to it. You get to the end and Shadow concludes that he is an android, built to replace the Shadow that died in Adventure 2. He doesn’t remember anything because he physically never experienced those things. And this would have been kind of a great move to pull and I kind of wish this was the canon ending. See, as an Android, there’s a lot more room for Shadow and Omega to do some buddy cop stuff if they were both Eggman’s creations who kind of hate their creator. There’d be room for Shadow to have a narrative arc in future games where he tries to find his place in the world as the lookalike of the martyred Shadow in Adventure 2. Shadow would actually have a reason to explore intense rage as a being not really programmed with a lot of empathy, while trying to live up to the legacy of the original Shadow could be a motivation for Shadow to actually develop that empathy. And the on and off again rivalry between Shadow and Sonic would have extra dramatic stakes as Shadow now not only wants to prove that he’s better than Sonic, but it’s also a battle to prove that he isn’t just a shadow of Shadow the hedgehog.

The canon ending has Shadow discover he’s part alien and re-learning the lessons he already learned in Heroes and Adventure 2, and if that part alien thing comes out of left field and seems tacked on and pointless, don’t worry, because Sega all but forgets it ever happened.

All Hail Shadow, indeed.

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A Hot Take On That Godawful Sonic Movie Poster

Yeah, no. This silhouette is horrifying. Delete this and fire whoever greenlit this character design.

Conventional wisdom says to not judge a book by it's cover but if you've been a long time Sonic fan you can recognize the signs of a bad product, and this film released a poster with a large sign that says that the people behind this don't really seem to know what they're doing.

We can argue aesthetics all day and you can hate me for whining about Sonic not wearing his signature shoes and gloves (it'd be like shaving Mario's mustache, what are you doing?), or how weird those blue arms look, or how horrifying the eyes might be based on a couple brightened edits of the poster but we've been here before. We've been here before so many times it's frustrating to see how no one seems to learn their lessons when it comes to messing with Sonic's design.

And this time, it's so bad that Sonic Boom is now one of the more faithful interpretations of the blue blur.

If you've been involved in the Sonic discourse for any length of time you might remember a video by Youtuber Good Blood.

You don't have to read the comments. It was not well received.

I don't begrudge the guy, he recognized that there was a certain staleness and that something was holding Sonic back but like so many others, he just overcorrected. In fact, he did a goddamn U-turn when all we needed was a slight nudge.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to fans because people who don't understand Sonic keep getting put in charge of his major releases.

There are hundreds of Good Bloods out there, and one of them is apparently named Tim Miller and he's helming the first major cinematic release.

If you'd asked us what we wanted, we could tell you without missing a beat that we want a feature-length version of the Sonic Unleashed intro cutscene. Tim Miller's insistence towards not making Sonic look "too Pixar" is tonedeaf because that's all this fanbase wants.

But it's not all bad. Sega was smart enough to have Tyson Hesse storyboard and helm the Sonic Mania Adventures webseries and if you're a Sonic fan, hell, if you just like great animation, you owe it to yourself to watch it. 

On the bright side, once this film inevitably fails, there will be a treasure trove of fresh memes. Because as fun as it is, we've been riding Sonic '06 for 12 years now, it's about time this franchise coughed up a new hairball for us to play with.

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Review: Sonic Forces

So I finally got my hands on Sonic Forces and I've been trying to reconcile my love for the boost formula with the eventual end quality of the product in my hands.

And the end quality isn't unplayable but there's a lot of the soul of Sonic missing here.

Classic Sonic was a mistake. There's no two ways about it, this team might be capable of a semi-passable recreation of the physics but there's a fundamental lack of understanding of the flow behind a Sonic level here and it shows. The approximation of the physics also stands out due in no small part to Sonic Team having already done this branch correctly in a 3D space in Sonic Generations.

Classic Sonic is not the only character where the physics and responsiveness feel off. I always felt like I was overshooting platforms or that a homing attack wasn't coming out when I needed it to. Also, guys, come on, d-pad controls. Yes, I know I can remap them in the options menu but the slog of remapping it every time I finish a Classic Sonic stage is just sloppy design.

There was however a lot of joy to be found in the character customization aspect of the game. While the options may seems scarce at the start, the customization ends up having a broad variety of options with a few free DLC packs to round off the collection. I do wish that the ability to change species was unlocked from the start so that there was more room for experimentation and freedom but I found myself still enjoying the acquisition of new little bits and bobs to dress my character in. If there's anything to sell the game on, it's the satisfaction of the childhood need to insert yourself alongside the hero and stand as their equal, and Sonic Forces definitely is more of a game about rising up alongside Sonic than being Sonic and having to rise above adversity.

Negatives come back in when I think about the difficulty. Sonic Forces ranges from insulting to cheap. Certain sections don't even have a failure state while having windows for input so generous you could make a sandwich before you miss your opportunity and others where you're put into unfair cycles that are impossible to predict or just showcase the imperfect physics in the most frustrating way. There's a particularly obnoxious area in Death Egg involving a moving platform and two guns with limited move to maneuver that nearly made me snap my controller in half. However, I'll give an appreciative nod to the fact that lives are no longer a factor to concern myself with, even if it takes away some of the functionality of the rings.

From a narrative perspective, I found a lot of the writing to be cheesy and some lines are just badly written end of story. But it's a Sonic game, I'm not coming here for the intricate structure of the plot and subtle but insightful allegory, although it's not hard to ask at least one person on staff to try, is it? The best thing I can say is that the voice cast does a lot with a little here, Liam O'Brien is carrying a lot with his performance. But there were a couple familiar faces I found myself enjoying seeing, even Charmy, as crazy as he drove me in Heroes.

The music direction in the game was for the most part enjoyable. While some tracks suffer from grating synths, mainly the Classic Sonic stage themes, there's a lot of Drum And Bass tracks which play well with Sonic's brand as well as give stages an appropriate sense of excitement.

The recurring theme of the game is that Sonic Team has already demonstrated that they're capable of producing a quality product of this nature but either the new engine or hardware showcased that they've regressed a generation. A lot of fans, including myself, wanted to like Sonic Forces. And I don't hate it but to say I was more often frustrated than immersed is an understatement.

A soft recommendation for the custom character gameplay and one or two stand-out Modern Sonic levels but you should rather be playing Sonic Generations.

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Review: Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is often touted as the best game in the Sonic Franchise. While I can respect the opinions of other people and I know taste is subjective, I can’t say this is my favourite. Actually, for the longest time I kind of hated this game.

But I guess after playing it again and again over the years, I’ve warmed up to it. So being the masochist I am, I’ve decided to do a deep dive, and really see what makes this game tick.

Disclaimer, I’m not going to throw around the phrase “speed, platforming and exploration”. I think people need to remember that Shaymay is one guy who has one interpretation and I take issue with calling it the core elements of Sonic. Sonic was actually born from the experience Yuji Naka had speedrunning world 1-1 in Super Mario as he had to get to the warp pipes as fast as possible in order to catch up to the last place he progressed. If I had to break that down into a set of buzzwords, I could say the core elements are flow, multi-layered staging and tight mechanics that are conducive to finding the fastest route from start to end.

But it’s reductionist to boil the design of an entire game to three vague interlinking concepts. And whether you agree more with my interpretation or Shaymay’s comes down to personal choice and what you look out for in a Sonic game. I’m always looking for a fun level to try get a better time in. Which is why the classic trilogy doesn’t always appeal to my sensibilities. But don’t take this as me badmouthing Shaymay or anything, I actually think he’s done one of the best and most in-depth analyses on Sonic to date, and his Sonic Spitball series is an important landmark for the discussion of all things Sonic.

I just think he’s a little biased, is all.

Anyway, while I respect playing a game faithful to its release state, I’m also not a masochist. I’ll be using the Sonic 3 Complete Edition hack to illustrate most of my points, and I’ll be playing it through Fusion; Unfortunately Sega’s Unity Launcher causes immense slow-down and the simple launcher doesn’t accommodate for workshop content.

Onto the critique.

For those who aren’t in the know, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a physics based action platformer which rewards skilful play with a higher score and a faster completion time. Gather the  game’s seven collectables and you unlock a super form which can shave even more time off a run, although only after collecting 50 rings. There are three characters to play as, each with their own abilities which can make traversal or enemy encounters easier. Levels are  grouped into stages, which are divided by acts. Mini-bosses occur at the end of each act whilst boss encounters with the antagonist occur at the end of each stage.

It’s a solid game. However, here are the mechanics which, in my opinion, hold it back.

When you reach 9:59, you get a time over, which immediately subtracts a life. While this isn’t any real inconvenience in most stages, a lot of the later ones are designed to waste your time. A time over is a frustrating punishment for careful play, which is a crucial process for new players or players unfamiliar with the design of any given level. The game is basically saying, sorry, not fast enough, fuck you, try again, while also making stages so large and winding that they can genuinely take a full ten minutes to traverse. It’s archaic artificial difficulty. The timer also counts upwards instead of down, so unless you already know about the 9:59 rule, it’s going to hit you out of nowhere when it happens. Later games would remove this entirely, and I’m thankful. This brings me to the lack of conveyance to the player of certain game mechanics. The rules of blue sphere come to mind, but there’s also the old ceiling run that’s a beginner’s trap; To go right when Sonic is running on the ceiling, you must hold left. Which might sound obvious to you watching footage now, but it’s super unintuitive. This probably won’t bother you since you instinctively keep holding the direction you were pressing if you’re running up a slope, it does mean in those rare moments where you don’t hold any direction or hold the  wrong direction, you might not know why you’re losing speed.

The window between when Sonic can collect rings after taking a hit can really mess you up. For about half of Sonic’s invincibility frames, he’s actually not allowed to collect any rings. This is to prevent you from instantly recovering rings by falling into them, but often it’s just led to me standing around waiting for the game to decide, okay, cool, you’re allowed to get hitpoints back. Some places, the rings won’t even collide with the floor. The final boss is one case where your one ring will just fall into the abyss. I wish the rules for this were kept more consistent.

Finally, the insta-shield. For the longest time I didn’t even know what it did, but for the sake of thoroughness, the insta-shield is a mid-air ability for Sonic that extends the radius of his spinjump, gives him a frame or two of invincibility, however, the ability to bounce small projectiles away from him was only added in the rom hack, which is why I could never get as much use out of it before. Why the insta shield couldn’t reflect projectiles in the the original release is beyond me. Without that ability, it is objectively worse than flight or gliding. It’s not that I don’t like the Insta-Shield, I just never got the same mileage as I did with the ability to fly or glide. I’d trade it in for a Drop Dash in a heartbeat. I also appreciate the inclusion of the Super Peel Out in the hack, but considering it uses the same control scheme as the combination for flying with Sonic and Tails, I can understand why it was excluded. Still, if I’m playing as Sonic by himself, there’s no reason to not have the Super Peel Out, and it’s not like it’s any harder to program than a Spindash.

Angel Island Zone;

With all that out of the way, I’ll start at the start. Angel Island Zone.

Angel Island Zone is a pretty little stage, but overall it’s not even close to my favourite opening level. The main gimmicks here are the crumbling floors, the zip lines, the water hazards and there’s this tree Sonic runs up about a third of the way through that looks really awkward since the facing part of the tree is made transparent. It looks more like he’s caught in a whirlwind than as if he’s scaling the tree .

Aesthetically it has a lot of bright greens, cool blues, and earthy browns, and then the level changes into sickly yellows and aggressive oranges. The parallax scrolling has a ton of layers which makes the stage feel really alive.

The music is a fun little island jam that makes liberal use of marimbas and flutes, with a bouncy bass line on top of a Caribbean beat. Seriously, I just want to round up my friends and form a drum circle on the beach while this song plays. There’s a little bit of tonal dissonance when everything is on fire and there’s this lively jam playing but I’ll forgive it because this song is so, freaking, good.

As for the layout, the stage is mostly here to give you a quick tutorial on how to use elemental shields. Angel Island pretty tough as far as openers go, and while it’s not exactly controller snapping difficulty, Angel Island certainly won’t baby you. Maybe Green Hill or Emerald Hill would be more lenient but Angel Island isn’t going to fuck around, there’s water, there’s spikes, there’s spike ball shooting flowers, there’s rhino shaped goombas, spiked logs, platforms crumble and there’s a mini-boss after the first act. Luckily there aren’t any bottomless pits but the bar is set, and it only gets tougher from here. The big rings aren’t hidden too obscurely and with the barest amount of exploration you’re likely to nab at least one.

And as much as I like how active the platforming is, it’s kind of a shame the level never really has a  moment to take you for a ride. As overused as Green Hill is, it nails having this super fun tunnel that launches you into the air into a mess of rings, which culminates in this mini-challenge to stay in the air by bouncing off badniks. There’s really no equivalent in Angel Island because of how methodic it is about getting you from point A to B. You can’t underestimate the value of spectacle in a Sonic game, after all, part of why Sonic is so damn cool is because he doesn’t just run and jump, he’s running faster and jumping higher than any of his contemporaries.

Act 2 ends on a running segment where you gotta hold right to not die, and for all the shit people give Sonic Adventure, it surprises me that no one ever calls out this moment in Sonic 3. So this is me, calling it out. At least it’s brief but it definitely lacks the spectacle of later automated sections. After that we enter a bossfight bookended by two bottomless pits that is pretty much a waiting game if you don’t have the fire or lightning shield. And there’s going to be a reccuring theme of bosses who turn into a real pain when you don’t have the corresponding elemental shield. But Pop, bam, done, and with that we’re off to Hydrocity.

Hydrocity:

Hydrocity is a fan favourite level that I like the music and aesthetics of, but because of Sonic’s particular brand of underwater physics, this level always ends up being more of a nightmare than it has any right to be.

The background is layered with dark and foreboding blues that pan downwards into these gigantic pillars, but travel further up and you’ll see the purple brickwork of a coliseum. You know, I’ve never really figured out like what Hydrocity is supposed to be. Like, is it a flooded ancient city? A water treatment plant? An aqueduct? I don’t know but I like it. The music here is also all about the funk. The bass line is dominant, grabbing your attention with slaps and pops. The  keys open with an in your face slide before chiming in with a secondary line. The drums sound like they come right off a mid 90s MC Hammer track. I like to imagine a bustling night out in the city to Hydrocity’s theme, and were it set to a casino themed level, the song actually wouldn’t sound out of place. But the playful and trepidatious  tune fits the stage and bringing just the right amount of levity to what is otherwise a fucking nightmare for a hedgehog who can’t swim and is very easily impaled on spikes.

The layout is of made up of a top layer filled generously with loops and ramps. There are genuinely fun moments where Sonic reaches the speed necessary to run on water.  Contrasting that, the bottom half is water logged and just much slower. And, oh boy, do I mean much slower. Sonic feels like he’s walking through tar underwater, and his jump becomes floatier but with no extra gain in height. As far as water levels  go, Hydrocity is actually one of the better ones, and luckily the water sections don’t last too long if you know what you’re doing.

Still, the drowning alarm gives me nightmares. Those few repeating notes trigger a deep anxiety within my soul.

Act 1 houses most of the water segments but is generous enough with bubble shield capsules to make you feel like you aren’t in too much of a jam. The further you go, the more you’re funnelled to the top, until you’re dropped back down for an easy mini-boss. The Insta-shield is pretty useful for a lot of bosses designed with these projectile barriers but man, if they don’t get stale fast. Like, there are a lot of bosses that boil down to some metal thing with projectiles floating around in a circle. Is… Is that what you like? Is that what you want? Is this what makes Sonic 3 & Knuckles the gift from the gods on high?

Act 2 starts underwater and then gives you a precarious climb as a wall ominously closes in. This section gave me a lot of trouble as a kid, and if you have the original Sonic 3 layout, the level designer wanted to give you  an extra special “fuck you” in the form of this inconveniently placed spring. This section involves a lot of stopping and starting and I’m sad there isn’t an equivalent in Mania, because climbing this tower with the Drop Dash would probably make this section a helluva lot more fun.

After that it’s fans, spinny barrels and water slides. It’s a fun time, no doubt. While Angel Island isn’t my favourite opener, Hydrocity might just be my favourite sophomore level. It doesn’t have pipes of chemical plant nor does it have too many instances of bullshit crushing deaths.

The act 2 boss is Eggman dropping bombs and using a whirlpool to turn you into Sonic niblits, although the bombs might just induct you into the NASA space program first. You can stand on the  column of water for a platform, which is some videogame logic if I’ve ever seen it.

But with that, we’re at Marble Garden.

Marble Garden Zone:

Marble Garden Zone is a particular brand of fresh hell. Sharp slopes, spikes, enemies that are disguised as spikes, fuck-off big spike balls on chains, more fucking spikes, the most inconsequential mini-boss of all time. Also crushing blocks.

The background is a multi-layered landscape of purple mountains, blue skies and fresh green trees. Look closely and you can also see a couple pillars poking from the trees. The Aztec ruins vibe this stage gives of is really fun, but that’s about the most fun thing about it. The foreground houses what I assume are peach trees, and the patchy brickwork of pale grey, earthy orange and muted purple really drive home that South American feel the level has.

The music sounds little like the theme of every 90s sitcom ever, and but the keys eventually devolve into what sounds like a harmonic minor scale, bringing an interesting little twist. Although the keys also get a little cheeky with this descending slide that’s the musical equivalent of a wink. The bass line is what’s driving the song here though, and I kind of just wanna loiter on some street corner with a backwards cap and a boom box.

Act 1 is mostly consists of sharp slopes, the spinning windmill platforms that usually hover atop mud, spikes, crumbling floors and the introduction to the spin top. I actually don’t mind this little guy but I do wish changing direction felt a bit more natural. It’s fun to land it and let the level just take you for a ride and I appreciate that you don’t lose any rings when you’re hit while using it. Also I hope you don’t get sick of this tower section because it’s repeated like four times. You end on the first form of this little drill bot and I honestly forget about him until Lava Reef Zone. Poor guy just wants to impress Eggman Senpai.

Act 2 is more of the same but now with these grasshopper enemies that can show up out of nowhere. They aren’t much of a threat unless you’re going super slow but they’re there. You also raise platforms by revving up these… Uh… Blue cranky things? Like, what are these? They’re just sort of laying around, like, who besides Sonic is raising platforms like this? Either way, they’re fun and if you stand on top of one and spin dash it launches you up into the air. There’s also these face status which spit arrows at you, and in true Zelda fashion, if you smash their glowing weak point the game  lets you progress. The end is a race against the sinking ceilings and pillars, and then Tails assists you in shoving your spiny ass right into Eggman’s cockpit.

In all honesty I don’t actually think it’s that awful a stage but Marble Garden Zone is definitely one of the less enjoyable ones. Maybe it’s just the curse of a stage made of Marble. There are also a few instances of less than subtle signposting but hey, I didn’t get lost so they had one job, and they did it.

What good little boys.

Carnival Night Zone:

But ugh. Carnival Night Zone. Man, how bare bones is this carnival music? Sure, it has a sample from Michael Jackson’s Jam, but other than that piece of trivia, Carnival Night Zone is the least interesting stage in the game, and it’s not helped by some annoying stage gimmicks. Luckily I live in a post-dial-up world so I know how to deal with the barrels. Sorry, 80s babies, I guess I can’t sympathise with the frustration this stage must have brought you, but I can hate it for other reasons, right?

Carnival Night Zone is the obligatory “fun” zone of the game. Each Sonic Game has one, and while the quality of these levels don’t say much about their respective games, Carnival Night Zone just sucks when compared to its contemporaries. Springyard Zone might not have conveyed the pinball and slots fusion as well as Casino Night Zone, but the music in both are much more interesting. Carnival Night Zone has one of those songs that try really, really to hide how much they’re just another iteration of Entry of the Gladiators by Czech composer Julius Fucik. Also Madagascar has now got me saying Afro Circus every time this song plays and which makes me loath this stage just that extra bit. There’s a monotonous wub of a baseline repeating the same note ad naseum, and the song sounds like it’s always starting a music phrase but never relieving the tension. It’s like talking to someone who never finishes a sentence but always starts a new but anyway the music is really I don’t  enjoy it.

The backdrop is a neon pastel city beneath a dark and looming mountain range. In the foreground we have all the carnival staples, from red and white circus tent stripes to flags and neon lights, framed with a healthy amount of mustard yellow. Overall I actually don’t hate the visual design of the stage. It’s bright, it’s colourful, and the lights turning off does a lot to make the stage look more treacherous.

However, the stage layout has a couple fun gimmicks. I like the balloons. Maybe it’s just the love I have for rooftop run with the confetti and the balloons and the festivities but I freaking love these balloons that pop and give you some height mid-air. It’s so fun to just pop them like if this was all the stage was about, I wouldn’t give it so much shit. But because it’s the “fun” stage, we got bumpers. 

So, so many bumpers.

So Act 1 has you navigating Barrels bumpers, balloons and spikes. There’s the introduction of the candy cane tube as well as a throwback to Sonic 1’s final stage in these wheels. Otherwise we also have canons, and yellow platforms that cause you to float and these floating platforms that you fill with air by standing on which then ascend when you jump off, making them the world’s most unnecessary elevators. As for enemies you have these bats that couldn’t pose less of a threat if they tried and these clam enemies that double up as bounce pads. It ends with a miniboss that’s almost interesting due to the fact that you can’t hurt it and you have to expose its weak point to this spike platform thing, but that’s about all the praise I can give it.

Act 2 adds water but shows off the fun auxiliary function of balloons, which produce air when popped. I think there would have been so much more fun to be had in a stage where you pop balloons for air bubbles , but instead it’s bumpers, barrels and bullshit. Knuckles shows up halfway through and for some reason there’s an invisible wall that prevents you from cleaning his clock then and there. You know, people praise these little transition cutscenes but they have the weird effect of making Sonic look like a dopey idiot who just takes Knuckles’ bullshit. I mean, how much conflict here would be resolved if I just bopped this jackass on the head now and saved myself the trouble of doing it later? Anyway, Knuckles turns off the power which changes fuckall about the stage mechanically, and after just a minute you turn it back on so I never really got the point. Next up is a worthless Eggman bossfight, but I suppose I’d have timed over were it any longer.

But with that, we’re at the end of the zone, and off to Ice Cap.

Ice Cap Zone:

Ice cap starts off with Sonic snowboarding down a mountainside with what was originally meant to be a piece of metal ripped from Flying Battery Zone. And while the order doesn’t really matter much, for all the shit people give Adventure, Adventure 2 and ’06, those games at least let you control the snowboarding section.

The music here is a weird one. It shares a lot musical assets with Hard Times by the Jetzons, which I believe is on account of Brad Buxer producing both, although Hard Times went unreleased until 2008 so it was likely that Buxer just didn’t want to let anything go to waste. The key difference between the songs being the melody, which carried by the vocals in Hard Times is replaced by this whiny synth which I think is supposed to mimic an organ. The way the bassline gallops as this snare drum clacks every so often, combined with the constant pounding of a kick drum creates a lot of forward momentum in the song. There’s marimbas that chime in for the chorus which fill up the sound space considerably, making the verses actually feel kind of empty.

As for layout, you snowboard into Act 1, then you have to use your momentum to swing up the level. The only enemies are are penguins and orbinauts, but considering the crushing pillars and spikes, the level is already a dangerous time. Around the halfway point is your first taste of the vertical loop, and it always surprised me how seamless these are. The springs here are out to get you though, and are a real pain to navigate. Eventually you emerge from the ice caves to a mini-boss using ice shields but a bit of patience goes a long way here.

Act 2 has a lot more loops and ramps which makes the stage feel a lot more exciting than the toned down theme would suggest, and then you’re introduced to these trampolines, which are far more interesting than the usual springs if you ask me. It’s not all that long an act, but the boss here is just a pain. Blasts of cold ait come out in a random pattern and  on the seventh hit, the platform breaks off so Eggman can be an extra pain.

I don’t have much to say about the background here. It is snow, and ice. Once you’re inside there are at least these deep purple stalactites and glowing crystal balls but otherwise there’s not much more to say. The foreground  sometimes has these colourful diamonds but otherwise it’s more snow and ice. Kind of like that’s the level’s theme or something. Once you escape the cave you’re at least greeted with a body of water at night, and act 1 ends at the dawn of a new day. There are the eponymous ice caps now brightly lit and then that’s what we see all the way to Launch Base Zone.

Launch Base Zone:

Launch Base Zone is kind of meh. It’s got all these set-pieces where you aren’t in control along with some genuinely cheap enemy and spike placement. But you can grind infinite lives here, so I did just that. Oh, what’s the game gonna do, time over me and give me 98 lives instead? That’s sure gonna teach me. Many moments of exciting gameplay later, I actually started Launch Base Zone.

The music is this one minute loop of a sitcom intro bass line attached to bit-crushed samples of someone telling me to go, but not where, so you can take your patronising shit and find the door. There are elements of lounge and strings softly hum along in the background. A lot of that 90s radicality comes through and while that’s an artefact of its time, the charm has by this point worn out.

The stage has you race through a yellow brick base with the Death Egg looming in the distance. The background is a little static but it gets the message across so I’m not going to complain on about it.

Act 1  has these magnetic cylinder, boost… Things. Fire spitting chickens, alarms that spawn birds, snails, frogs and more orbinauts. I’m fucking sick of orbinauts by now man, don’t you have any new tricks up your sleeve? There are also these lasers that can go fuck themselves but they make the stage feel perilous so I won’t complain too much. There are a couple tubes that loop and redirect you and I think these are fun but otherwise I don’t really got much nice to say about this one. Another mini-boss circled by objects that eventually create an opening you exploit. I get the fun here is seeing how fast you can take them down but when there’s no penalty for just waiting a couple extra cycles then I gotta say, this is just uninteresting boss design. Like, this shit isn’t hard, it’s tedious.

Act 2 is the  same shit but now there’s water. Real original, hope that didn’t take too much time to come up with. The background at least moves a little now and there are these interesting mountains in the background, and they’re a bright and earthy orange. Otherwise this has to be the least innovative stage in the game.

Then the boss rush starts. I was worried it might get challenging but the moment I lost an elemental shield and had to use the insta-shield, the first boss went down like a chump. Knuckles shows up for a chuckle and he can go fuckle himself, and then we’re off to the last two bosses of the first half of the game. First up is Eggman having a giggle while he makes me wait for an opening and ineffectually scrolls up and down the screen. After that formality, it’s the main event, and oh boy.

Big Arms is a fucking awesome boss. 

The music is a jam, the fight is just challenging enough and I’m engaged again. It’s a shame this was cut from the final version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles and I’m glad the Rom Hack adds it back in, although it means dying makes you refight the two worthless gits before Big Arms. Couldn’t there be a checkpoint in between?  Whatever, the power of save states kind of negate s the bullshit but I wanna have my cake and eat it too dammit.

And with that, we start the Sonic & Knuckles half of the game

Mushroom Hill Zone:

Mushroom Hill starts off with Knuckles all but grabbing you by the dick and dragging you to the Master Emerald, and then the stage actually starts.

And I can’t hate this stage. It’s mushroom hill, contender for best opening stage of all time. The music is a fun time, with the bass having this fat tone that I just associate with bouncing off mushrooms. The keys are playing the harmonies, and there’s this cheeky little climb before the chorus. What I’m interpreting as a sax here carries the melody and oh boy, is it a catchy one.

The stage actually undergoes three pallet swaps here and that’s just impressively dynamic. This was the opener of Sonic and Knuckles so it had to show you all the money shots, and it delivers. The background is also a densely layered forest of trees below a clear blue sky, the foreground is filled with spore particles and lush grass and this weird dirt and brick hybrid. It’s all good stuff, I have no complaints here.

Act 1 is really interactable, with bouncy mushrooms and loops and this swing set and these vines that grab you and these vines that unfurl for a platform and this pole that launches you up and down and springs and this climby thing and this weighted see-saw. Like this level is packed and wants you to play with it. Only four enemies here, these mostly inconsequential mosquitoes, these mushroom chucking dudes, the chickens and  these dragonflies who can only be destroyed from the top or bottom. It’s a good time, with an easy, bouncy mini-boss, and it’s a decent palette cleanser after Launch Base.

Act 2 starts with Knuckles being a cheeky chucklefuck but there’s more of the same, but now the music is a little more  in your face, and then we end on something I can’t remember being done before, a running bossfight. These definitely aren’t my favourite but credit where credit is due, it’s an impressive looking bossfight by Genesis standards, hell, it still looks good today. Pop the capsule and there we go, off to Flying Battery.

Flying Battery Zone:

The best thing about Flying Battery is the music. It’s bouncy, it’s bass-y, it’s a fun time. I could just listen to this music all goddamn day. I’d give more thoughts on it than that but then you might just be tricked into thinking I know what I’m talking about. Still, this is a jam.

Aesthetically though, ehh… It’s alright. It’s a good looking level with pale greens, dark blues, oranges and greys. It’s the inside of an airship and outside there’s a clear blue sky. The platforms all have interesting designs though, like these floating balls. Like, what are these even? The walls have furnaces but what do you need all these furnaces for man? There’s no way this isn’t a fire hazard so I hope you have insurance Eggman because you’re going to get sued for reckless endangerment.

Act 1 is inoffensive. We got monkey bars, flamethrowers, moving platforms, these mice dudes, wire tubes, speed boosters, moving circle platforms, poles, mines, rockets, these rhino fuckers,  spike balls and magnet platforms and spring capsules. It’s dangerous but if you’re patient then your biggest worries are the rhino projectiles and being crushed. There are several sections outside the ship that help in making the zone feel a little more like a real airship you’re storming. Then comes a miniboss who loses a game of “why are you hitting yourself” every time.

Act 2 changes up the music a bit but adds this high pitched screech that I pretty much hate. We’re  now introduced to slow descending crusher blocks and nothing gets my engine going like waiting in a Sonic Game. There’s this pole-arm that I like and I wish we got to see more of these but, hey, this game has nothing if not feature bloat. The act ends on this laser that Eggman accidentally blows his ship up with, and then we get an escape sequence. Then Eggman comes back in this armed mech that swings around the platform, although it’s more of a nuisance than anything else.

Sandopolis Zone:

Sandopolis Zone is everything wrong with Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Block pushing, crusher blocks, slow sand streams, slow abseiling, music so uninspired it makes Sonic Boom sound like a Grammy nominee and Act 2 is an extra pain in my ass but we’ll get there in a moment.

The background is a sandy landscape at sundown, with a Pyramid thrown in just in case you couldn’t figure out you were in Egypt. Tiles are made of brickwork with hieroglyphics and the whole stage is a bright yellow. I do like the warping effect everything has to simulate  heat waves but other than that, meh. This zone sucks.

Act 1 is the stage that will make you hate Sonic’s jumping sound effect, while asking you to wait. Just… Wait. Wait for blocks, wait to finish abseiling, wait for  the sand to finish carrying you, wait for these jerk-offs to get out of your way, hell, as cool as the double loop is, eventually it’s just waiting for Sonic to stop showing off and get on with the fucking stage. It ends on a boss where you wait for him to put himself back together so you can knock his ass into the sand behind him.

Act 2 is somehow worse. Now you have to deal with these ghost jerkoffs on top of waiting for more shit. And if you don’t hate the sand rising sound effect by the end then you’re more patient than me. The looping sand slides are a pain in my ass and you know what? This stage sucks. When people call Sonic 3 & Knuckles the best Sonic game of all time, I assume they mean some fictional version where this stage just does not exist. So here’s the three nice things I have to say about it; These scorpion enemies are an enjoyable challenge, I don’t hate the rising sand escape sequence and I like that the background changes from hieroglyphic bricks to  wooden support beams.

The end boss is… Familiar.  I actually don’t hate it, but that might be more because it’s the one part of Sonic Adventure 2 I don’t hate. And at least there’s an end to this nightmare and we’re back to having fun in Lava Reef Zone.

Lave Reef Zone:

Lava Reef Zone is this beautiful cave with green caverns and warm earthy rocks, with the eponymous lava giving you an occasionally scare. There are a lot of pipes that redirect the lava flow and the colour pallet here is just a soothing reprieve from the obnoxious yellow of Sandopolis.

The music is also good. Still carrying island themes, but sounding more like an 80s power ballad.

Act 1 is a fun little stage with switches to push and these exploding rock fellas who look so freaking pumped to blow up right in your face. There are the reefer pipes and look how chill they are man. We got these elevators you spindash on to ascend or descend. The miniboss foreshadows the final boss here, along with these film reel tentacles that are really less of a threat than they seem. Also unlike the final boss, you can’t just spindash in the corner here.

Act 2 sees the lava in the stage cooling down and crystalizing. I love this man, I think the theming here is just so on point. It’s too bad that this stage just has a couple unfortunate caveats. An auto-scroller in a Sonic game? I guess even the bad parts of Forces are sourced from somewhere. But you don’t get extra points for being shit first, so take the L, classic fanboys.

The act starts off with a hazard that will knock you on your ass if you aren’t paying attention, but once you adjust the stage actually doesn’t throw too much at you. I particularly like this spinning ladder that launches you, and these sin wave spike balls. I also love this ramp here, but the elevator about 25% through can go eat a dick. Knuckles also shows up to harass you one last time but knowing how much fun I’m going to have introducing your chin to the pavement, have your last laugh you red little chucklefuck. I like the death egg looming in the background here, it’s a fun touch. Like, you saw it crash in the midway cutscene/Sonic & Knuckles intro, now you’re there, where it crashed. After autoscrolling your way down, you finally  fight Eggman, and I use the word “fight” very loosely because you really just wait. Wait for him to stop pelting his own machine with spike balls. This is also one of those fights made an extra pain in the ass by not having the corresponding elemental shield.

And finally, revenge. Eat shit, Knuckles.

Sky Sanctuary Zone:

You know, it always weirded me out that they brought Sky Sanctuary back for Generations. Is this the stage you all remember from this game? I can bet there were some people who never even saw Sky Sanctuary. I thought Hydrocity was the fan favourite. Can’t complain since Generations did a fantastic job and the fact is that I do actually like Sky Sanctuary but hey, I have my nits I can pick. Anyway, Knuckles, now having some sense knocked into his thick fucking skull has a little lie down while the death egg ascends in the background. You really get a sense of how high up the stage is with all the layers of cloud behind you. Sky Sanctuary isn’t actually all that hard, but that might work in its favour. Metal Sonic greets us for a bit of a boss rush and the stage is finished after just one act. It’s a fun time and the music is pretty relaxed for a point in the game with so much stakes. Like, Eggman is throwing all he has left at you. The guy really, really wants you dead and like, here you are having a casual stroll through the clouds. So you tear Metal Sonic a new one after an actually impressive column scene we enter Death Egg Zone.

Death Egg Zone:

And fuck Death Egg zone. The music is this happy space park theme that invokes feel good sci-fi and adventure movies like Back To The Future but the stage is a goddamn nightmare. This playthrough also happens to be the first time I’ve managed to get through without a time over, but it’s not like the light bridges weren’t trying their best to waste my time. It’s a deceptively fun looking stage but between anti-gravity, tubes and these see-saw platforms I don’t think I can call this stage anything other than a miserable time. This stage actually came back in Sonic Advance 2 and I think I prefer that one, although the Advance series might get their own special episode.

Act 1 actually isn’t too terrible. One or two parts where you just gotta wait for the  platforms to do their thing, but it’s mostly inoffensive. The only real time I had a lot of frustration was this bounce chamber that can just take so much time to get through. There’s a light bridge you can skip with a well-timed jump, but that means missing a checkpoint. The miniboss is also inoffensive, but there could be better telegraphing on when I can and can’t hit him.

Act 2 is when the bullshit cranks into overdrive. Reversing gravity isn’t a clever trick in a platformer; it just makes control less intuitive. Extra fuck you to the level designer for this elevator, and also for placing no rings by this checkpoint. I lost so many lives to this, although the solution ended up being deceptively simple. I do however love the view of earth from here. The miniboss is also deceptively easy. At first you might think you can only hurt the boss by flipping gravity, but in actuality you just need to roll into the little spike tanks when they’re upside down.

And then we have the final boss. First phase isn’t too bad, bop his fingers or spindash in the corner and you’re good to go. The Big Arms theme plays here too, which makes this extra awesome. After that, well, good luck. Second phase isn’t too bad, but there’s an element or two that make it artificially difficult. The  torso has no collision box when the emerald is covered, which means if you miss the window, you’re instantly dropped into a death pit. It’s also a running boss fight, and these always end up being a pain because of how they autoscroll. The bit where you beat Eggman can also be precarious because if you collide in just the wrong way, he can knock you into the death pit. But hey, you beat him and then credits roll.

I didn’t get all the chaos emeralds on this run because I wasn’t really looking out for them. Luckily you can repeatedly play Angel Island and Mushroom Hill for the chaos and super emeralds respectively. Although try this shit without beating the game and welp, you’re going to be disappointed. This does make me wish that the game had a dedicated pause menu. Constantly soft-resetting the console is such an inconvenience. So yeah, kids, don’t take that fancy pause menu that Mania has for granted. Hell, don’t take any of the quality of life changes Mania brings for granted.

I digress though. So then you get the chaos emeralds, you run through Death Egg Zone again just in case you were having fun and then the Final Doom Zone starts.

Final Doom Zone:

Here’s the long and short of it; Super Sonic boss fights are usually bad. You’re dropped into an arena with a brand new control scheme, and differing rules from the rest of the game. This could easily be remedied with one simple change; Take away Super Sonic’s ability to fly. It doesn’t add anything, you can’t fly in normal stages and  it usually means the boss fights have to be designed around Super Sonic’s ability to fly. It leads to a final boss that doesn’t test any of the skills you have developed over the course of the game. While it might hold value narratively or as a visual spectacle, I’d argue that it hurts the overall design of the game. Final Bosses seem to be a troubling point for Sonic games.

Final Doom Zone though, it’s not great. Nothing is telegraphed to you, I remember dying like sixteen times here as a kid before I figured out what the fuck it is I’m meant to do.

So you spend some time collecting rings and pro tip, hang back here. There’s not enough screen real estate for you to see the rings coming. After that, you catch up to Eggman and redirect missiles into his face. Then you bop his Egg mech a few more times and yay, you beat Sonic 3 & Knuckles, here’s your reward. Was that worth it? Do you feel good? Is that what you like?

So before I get to my final thoughts, let me spend a minute on the bonus and special stages.

Bonus Stages:

Bonus Stages are fun little distractions you can enter for extra rings and continues. They’re mostly skippable but I highly recommend trying these as best you can, because honestly, you might really end up needing the lives. At least until you can grind lives in Launch Base Zone. After that feel free to ignore them.

The gumball machine is the least interesting of the bunch, and weirdly enough, only shows up in the Sonic & Knuckles half. I’m not sure if this is because of my settings or because they were arbitrarily exclusive to the second half but it would have been nice to break up the amount of Glowing Sphere stages I got. Speaking of, I used to hate Glowing Sphere, but because Titanic Monarch in Sonic Mania explained these so well through the level design, these ended up becoming my favourite. The slot machine is just Sonic 1’s special stage with a slot machine in the middle, and the combination of the awfulness that is the rotating stage and my shit luck means these can just get off my dick.

Blue Sphere:

Blue sphere is actually one of the better special stages, although I’d never say they’re my favourite. An unfortunate consequence of digital gaming is that you don’t often get an instruction manual, which explains a lot of Blue Sphere’s mechanics. Some of it is intuitive but some of the lesser known ones, like how you can redirect yourself after hitting a bumper by pressing forward, or that the blue spheres don’t need to be in a square shape to be turned into rings are among the ones that could probably do with some more signposting. Otherwise, turn 90 Degrees, make blue spheres red, turn clusters into rings. It’s deceptively simple.

Sometimes it feels like the game eats my input but it’s forgivable since it’s not something that happens often and Blue Sphere is a pretty twitchy with a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. I think what also softens the blow of what might be a frustrating experience is that before Blue Sphere, we had the rotating special stages and the half-pipe. Those both suck, although Half Pipe sucks much less on iOS and Android. Blue Sphere is at least inoffensive. It might not be fully rendered 3D but it was as close as the base Genesis could get.

I’ve never really found any point to perfecting these stages, sure, you can earn extra lives and continues, but they’re not worth accidentally fucking up a chance at an emerald. I especially hate that even if you have all the emeralds, once you hit the & Knuckles point of the game, you’re not allowed to turn Super Sonic. Although you’re still given access to the final zone if you only have Super Sonic, which is welcome for sure. I have to admit, I welcome Angel Island placing the first big ring so close to the entrance, and the fact that the rom hack lets me skip the opening custscene is a true blessing.

Final Thoughts:

It’s a Sonic game, it feels pretty good. Sonic’s a bit too heavy for my liking, and I’ve always wished that Sonic started at a higher base speed, but otherwise I can’t complain.

I’ll admit that Tails and Knuckles still lack the polish that Sonic has, although Knuckles suffers the most. The baseball slide after gliding just feels awful, there’s no flow. He also drops like a rock when you release the jump button during a glide. While I find their moveset useful, I always feel like Knuckles and Tails both got shafted in the game feel department. Sonic is and always has been the most fun to control, and if Tails is along to give a hand on especially tricky sections, I’ve never felt the compulsion to fully complete a game as them. In fact, until Sonic Heroes I’ve always kind of been indifferent towards playing as them.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a great looking Genesis game. Colours pop, the full range of 16-bit colour depth is used and you can feel the emulated hardware just barely keeping up at times. Although I’d like each character to be a little brighter in colour, I have no complain with the overall graphical fidelity nor do I have any qualms with the overall visual aesthetic.

Character design, however, is different. I’ve never liked Sonic’s redesign in this game. Or at least, I like it less than his Sonic 2 design. Here, Sonic is really round and while he conveys his 90s attitude that American players might know him for, it looks surprisingly out of place next to the Japanese box art. Sonic just seems a lot more mature from the Japanese art, and you can only handle that 90s radicality for so long before it becomes insufferable. Tails and Knuckles are fine, even if Tails looks a little too brown for my liking.

Otherwise, the only thing that isn’t very well conveyed visually is when your invincibility is going to run out; As an experiment, turn the sound off next time you hit an invincibility monitor and then try gauge when your invincibility is going to run out. Granted, this isn’t as much an issue when you have sound on, but having the stars just become less numerous or fade to red or something would provide an adequate visual indication of when you’re going to run out of invincibility. The same for how long Sonic can hold his breath, however, this is made much less egregious by the five second count down to when you die.

The sound design in any Sonic game is never bad, badniks die with a satisfying pop, Sonic bloops when he jumps, rocks have that nice static crunch sound when the break, it’s all good stuff. I do wish the bloops could alternate in pitch, when jumping in rapid succession the same bloop starts sounding a little grating to the ears.

Nothing is quite as nerve wrecking as the drowning jingle. It’s the stuff of nightmares. Many buttholes have puckered when the anthem of death by water is played. It’s perfect. Although that’s more a compliment of Sonic 1’s sound design, I’m glad someone recognised that they didn’t need to fix what wasn’t broken.

Super Sonic playing the invincibility theme on a constant loop is hella annoying, though. Sonic games have some of the best music, and having the invincibility jingle play on loop when you turn super is so insanely annoying. I’m glad the rom hack instead changed it so the sped up version of the stage’s music for the speed shoes plays.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles does win in the replayability department, but the inherent nature of Sonic games just makes later playthroughs more fun than the first. Knowing the level design and having some skill at the game can greatly enhance the experience, so it’s never really fair to judge the game by the way you enjoyed it the first time because the first playthrough is almost never the best one. However, I complete these games every few years or so and Sonic 1 always remains the one I enjoy the most, even if I think it has the worst overall level design. Sonic 3 & Knuckles I enjoy more than Sonic 2, because I think it just has more solid levels and less entirely crap ones like Metropolis Zone. Fuck Metropolis Zone. The difficulty curve looks a little like a sin graph on account of how Sonic & Knuckles was technically released as a separate game, which means that once you get to Mushroom Hill, the game eases up considerably, but I think this actually ends up helping the game more than anything. It’s nice to have breathing room after a tough midway point.

The biggest hindrance is just the lack of a Retro Engine remake.

Do I like the game more now than I used to? I guess, but that’s a low bar since I used to hate this game. And every time I play it, I remember why. Sonic’s Weight combined with some truly awful zones along with that pudgy sprite makes this a game I guess I’d recommend playing, but it doesn’t end up in my top five. It’s a serviceable game. It’s alright. It has a lot of interesting trivia but maybe you just had to be there in 1994 with a Genesis and more tolerance for the games of the time. But I mean, I enjoy Sonic 1 & 2 even in their emulated versions so maybe it’s not even that, although I have a healthier dose of childhood nostalgia for those two. And I can’t say I wasn’t having fun at points because clearly I was. Which is what makes this so mixed. The best levels are still remarkably less quality than the best of previous titles but the worst are only slightly above Metropolis Zone. There’s just a fair amount of fucking me about involved here, and even my patience has its limits.

I mean, Generations has the sort of one and done fun I return to periodically just to blow off some steam, Mania might be stuffing all its holes with classic game dick but it also has a third arm hanging between its legs which means it has the definitive version of some of these levels, all with a shiny new coat of paint and a 60FPS lock. It’s the purity of classic Sonic without all the caveats.

I guess the person I recommend this to is the one still getting into Sonic and is still working their way through the classic games. I think you need to play this at least once to have any credibility as a Sonic fan. You’re going to be much better informed if you can understand what this game does right and what it doesn’t. But you don’t need to enjoy it. And for the love of God, don’t hold it up as some perfect specimen of a Sonic game.

And stop fucking parroting speed, platforming and exploration. Yeah, it’s a useful framework but it’s also a set of buzzwords some dude threw together in a three hour rant about a cartoon hedgehog. Reductionism is the tool of the lazy backseat designer, so to quote KingK, walk it down a peg.

But to beat a dead horse, here are other buzzword phrases that sound as important but are also as abstract and devoid of meaning divorced from the interpretation of any specific individual.

Cheese, wine and crackers. Snap, crackle and pop. Harder, better, stronger. Tom, Dick and Harry. Chris, Chris and Chris. Veni, Vidi, Vici. Strength, Courage and Wisdom. Earth, Wind and Fire. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. Hyue, Due and Louie. Sora, Donald and Goofy.Ed, Edd and Eddy.

And I don’t know about you, but I 100% want to play the Sonic game by the guy who prioritizes cheese, wine and crackers. That sounds like my kind of game.

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An Admittedly Biased review of Sonic Adventure

Sonic Adventure is a quirky little game. It doesn't look very good, it's plagued by a myriad of bugs, the presentation is sloppy, and yet it's still one of my favourite Sonic games. No, seriously, I still love this game. It's broken and kind of ugly and the cutscenes reach a level of awful you kind of have to see to believe. But I still love it. Not like, ironically. I honestly like this game just so damn much.

While there's a healthy dose of nostalgia talking here, I also think that Sonic Team might have accidentally made a couple of smart choices that futureproofed this game more than its sequel. There's debate about whether or not the DX version looks better than the original Dreamcast release and thanks to a dedicated group of modders you can pretty much see both without having to dust off the old Dreamcast. I think there are pros and cons to both, but I grew up with the first Adventure DX port on PC and I even knew back then that the game kinda sucked, but in like, the best way.

So Sonic Adventure is the 1998 (although internationally 1999) breakthrough title that marked Sonic's jump to 3D, and it also represented a significant change in the way Sonic would look. Now he had longer limbs, longer spines, green eyes, and the bottoms of his sneakers were white. This also marks sort of a retcon in the Sonic overall universe, because before Adventure, Sonic's continuity was super fractured. Each localization team sort of had to interpret the goings on of the story and since this stuff wasn't super tightly curated, each country almost had a different version of Sonic. Combine the Archie Comics, Fleetway Comics, the three different cartoons, the manga, there was just all these Sonics, with fans all over the world getting to experience him in a different way.

So now, everyone was united under one. No one got a different Sonic, the Sonic Adventure version was the shiny new canon one.

And for its time, it was pretty well received, even going on to be the Dreamcast's best selling game with 2.5 Million copies sold at the time.

But I can't give you an objective look at this thing. I actually did end up growing up with this game. I understand what it's like to be a kid and see it and having this be the anchored version of Sonic in your mind. I have so much nostalgia that I've bought this game thrice over, once as a kid, in highschool on the PSN, and then again on Steam. I can only give you the kind of rose-tinted look a fanboy can.

So let's start.

The game's narrative, well, it's a Sonic game. I'll say this, the story was super compelling to me as a kid. I think I even wrote a fanfic or two based on Sonic Adventure, and there are at least a couple compelling plot points in the story. The ideas are there, and I can appreciate what they tried to do here. Yeah, the presentation sucks, the voice actors are trying their best to deliver what amounts to some really awkwardly delivered lines, the concept of facial rigging was non-existent, like, everyone speaks by swapping in and out of these goofy facial expressions that look more like they were designed for Visual Novel stills than a moving cutscene. And I mean, Ocarina of Time came out the same year, so there isn't really an excuse for the narrative to be presented so badly.

Anyway, I'll go through the story beats I actually liked.

There's a point where Knuckles goes back in time and sees the long gone Echidna tribe. All those people are dead so it's kind of an emotional moment. Not that Knuckles much reacts to it, but you know, as a kid I was like, aw man, if all my family was dead and I got to see my ancestors again I'd be in tears.

Gamma's entire story is a sweet little adventure, even if you only have to hammer X to win. Since he's a Flicky bird trapped in a robot exoskeleton, he becomes self-aware and eventually decides to free his fellow Flickies. He starts off rising among the ranks of Eggman's robots, even going as far as humiliatingly defeating Beta, who then becomes his rival. There are points where you can really see his struggle to fight against Eggman's programming and it's actually kind of compelling. At the end, he faces Gamma one last time and then is shot point blank. You think it's the end, but then one last frame shows the two birds flying off, and I always wondered if Beta knew what was happening and freed Gamma on purpose, or if Beta just had such a deeply held grudge that he just wanted to drag Gamma down with him.

Sonic and Amy going into Twinkle Park was always super cute to me. These days I couldn't much care for a Sonic story with romance but as a kid, I liked to imagine the cute dates they'd go on. If you remove the awkward sexual element that some members of the furry community bring to it, it's like being a kid again and really wanting to go to an amusement park with someone you just like spending time with. It's hard not to be charmed by the puppy love aspect it has, and like, everyone was ten and everyone had childish crushes on other people, people you fantasized going to amusement parks or movies or on picnics with. Amy's story ends with her vowing to earn Sonic's respect, and while mid-twenties me wants to give her a lecture about how she don't need no man, I gotta admit that I'm a sucker for just stories about trying to impress your crush. It's silly, I know, but that's maybe the point. It's silly and childish and that's kind of what's fun about it.

But on to the gameplay.

Translating a sidescroller into a third person platformer/character action game is hard. With that shiny new Z-axis comes a whole lot of issues, and booping enemies on the head requires a lot more from the player.

So Sonic Adventure brought a bunch of changes to the formula.

Sonic has a bunch of shiny new abilities, like light speed dash and the homing attack. While every game before Unleashed all had the problem of not knowing exactly what you'll home in on, the homing attack has always been fun to use. Sure, there's a bunch of spots where enemies are arranged like stepping stones for an easy action sequence but I've never understood the criticisms levelled against it.

And I think Sonic Team just nailed the "feel" of using Sonic. He feels good to control, his spindash is fun to use, he runs up hills and on an open plane, and when the level design opens up, Sonic Adventure is a fun time. Also, just gotta give a shout out to Casinopolis. It's a stage where you have to play Pinball to collect rings, to fill up a vault, and then the rings act as your platform to the chaos emerald. But like, you don't just put the rings in the vault, two giant crane hands mercilessly descend and shake the crap out of you.

While I loathe Big The Cat's inclusion and I'm entirely indifferent to all the other characters, I have to say, I like that there's a character select screen. Like, sure, maybe I only two sixths of the game, but I like how I have the freedom to only play those two sixths and ignore everything else. Sure, the rest isn't terrible, but I don't have as much fun as I do with Sonic, and the fact that I can just play as Sonic, tend to my chao and have a good time with the parts of the game I like are fun. Sure, the "true" ending is locked away, but find a 99% complete save file online and you don't need to worry about any of that. And I know the game can be a chore to get through but that's kind of the beauty of it, once you've seen all the stuff you wanted to see, you can just put it down and walk away with a satisfying experience.

There are now hub-worlds you travel between. I actually really like this, and there are really great opportunities for world building. I also like how there's a Chao Garden hidden in each area, and they're all appropriately themed. I always kept my Chao in the hotel because that's where I start raising them, and it's the easiest one to access, but I do love the beach one.

Also, the chao are adorable. I mean, how can you hate them with their fat little bodies and their big fat teardrop heads and their fat little limbs, and how the evil ones all have this goofy grin and the way they waddle when they haven't learned how to swim, and how infuriating it is when they won't eat the food you just bought them. I know, a Tamagotchi rip-off in a Sonic game seems incredibly off topic but I can't help but love how well it meshes with the game design. In other Sonic games you'd replay stages to get a better time or for mastery, but here, there's a real incentive to replay the stages so you can gather rings and animals that you can use to level up your chao. One gameplay loop feeds into the other and you end up repeatedly reinforcing the strongest parts of the game to yourself. And if the high-speed action gets a bit much, you can always just go into the garden and pet your chaos and play games with them and feed them to take a break. And I like having an incentive to grab as many rings as I can in a stage.

Also I love how Sonic straight up robs a store of its golden chao egg. Like, you can just straight up commit theft and it's like, no one cares. It's the best.

You know, I kind of hate how Sonic Team hasn't attempted a pseudo-open-world Sonic game again. Sonic Unleashed had hub worlds, and it wasn't like you flew from city o city, you basically selected the filler room you had to run through to get to the stages. I appreciated that it was even included at all in Sonic Unleashed, but Sonic Adventure just handles it better. You have to physically walk from stage to stage in a world where these things are spacially connected. I could give you directions on how to get from the beaches of Emerald coast to the windmills of Windy Valley. Just the fact that you have to do something as mundane as catch a train to go from one area to the next is awesome. There's a lot of world-building, and if you're lost, you can always ask Tikal on where to go next. It's a fun time.

The music is great. It's a Sonic game, hate everything else, but you cannot hate the Station Square them. And I like Windy Valley's theme, and both songs used in Emerald Coast, and Speed Highway's music... Oh my God, it's just all good.

Even Open Your Heart by Crush 40, it's so cheesy but I can't hate it.

Look, I get it. I'm just gushing about this game now. There's so much wrong that it'd take a long, long essay to get through all the problems this game has. But that's a boring essay. There's nothing interesting to say. And somehow, despite many people writing that essay, I still love this game. It's still fun. It's still a good time. It's a worthwhile investment of my money.

Sonic Adventure sucks. I know. We all know. But that's kind of why it's so great. It's both that it's so bad that it's good, and that it actually still has little bits that hold up really, really well.

And I think it speaks volumes that I can still care about Sonic Adventure, 20 years later. I might have been three years old when the game was released but it has such a legacy that it's hard for me to deny it's iconic nature. I can understand why there are fans so eager to see another game like it, but I also love a good chunk of the later titles.

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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.

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