How Matt-Dave Writes started out as a 30 day blog challenge but it's now sort of become a place for me to rant and rave about the things I notice in the world. So while you're here, read a few pieces, leave me a comment or two, share it with your friends if you deem me worthy!
You can also find me on Wattpad! https://www.wattpad.com/user/mdstevens0612
Hey, my name is Matt-Dave Stevens. My goal is to make people laugh and maybe teach them a thing or two through my writing.
Anyway, I genuinely hope you have a good time here and feel free to engage with me in the comments and to share!
Full About Here:
https://howmattdavewrites.blogspot.co.za/p/about.html
Bet you didn't think that was how this was going to start out.
But yeah, Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a show that first aired two decades ago and somewhere in 2017 is where I finished watching it. It's aged as all things do, but after the credits rolled on the final episode, it was like this click. Like, man, I've actually seen this show before. But it was called The Vampire Diaries when I watched it.
Okay, you got me, I'm just being snarky. Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries are two different shows made far apart from one another with different demographics, themes and center-points but they're also two shows that have a lot in common. The Vampire Diaries treads a lot of the same ground but it's wearing a different pair of boots. Yes, there's a healthy amount of teen romance, both show the protagonist going from highschool to graduation as the audience matures with the show, both have a good guy/bad boy dichotomy in their love interests, both get remarkably better after the first season and both shows even had darker and more adult spin-offs starring a lovable cast member. There are articles detailing the similarities far more comprehensively than I have time for but I will say that Julie Plec is definitely a Buffy fan.
The most interesting difference to me is this; Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a show drenched in allegory. Some being more on the nose than others, but the monster of the week often represents something, whether it's fratboy culture, overwhelming grief, the patriarchy and so on. Buffy's friends are allegorical of her spirit, heart and mind (Willow, Xander and Giles respectively). Often story arcs are set up specifically with the intent of paralleling some aspect of society and to use the situation to make a statement. The TL;DR of it is that Buffy The Vampire Slayer often creates stories in favour of the specific allegory.
And The Vampire Diaries is almost the exact anti-thesis to that. Tolkien himself said it better than I'm able to so here's how that goes; "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history - whether true or feighned - with its variable applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but one resides in the freedom of the reader and the other in the domination of the author."
I'm not saying that there isn't coding, symbolism or applicability in The Vampire Diaries. I'm saying that The Vampire Diaries has its story first, and the allegory serve the narrative. It often tackles the themes it wants to tackle directly. A younger sibling with a drug problem isn't a hamfisted metaphor about using too much magic, the younger sibling is seen on screen, taking the drug, and the real consequences thereof. You could argue that the main metaphor comes in the "humanity switch" but it is also directly called "the humanity switch". Vampires have the literal ability to turn off their humanity, which is a scathing critique of what it's like when you choose total apathy and indifference over empathy and dealing with negative emotions. But you could also argue that it's a plot device and a metaphor so thin that blowing air would tear a hole in it. Obfuscating meaning for a clever delivery is not the goal here.
The meaning is in the moments.
A while back a friend criticized me for my attempts in aggressively seeking out the real world parallels in the text. I couldn't come up with much of a definitive answer other than saying that we compare anything we watch or read to everything else we've watched and read. We form connections between these experience. You're going to get the most out of anything if you understand the hidden meaning.
But I guess now I understand that there isn't always a hidden meaning to unearth. There is a joke I remember floating around a while back about how an english teacher might interpret blue curtains as symbolism for depression and grief, while the author may have just liked the colour. Interpreting text is a wonderful and necessary practice, and as someone who enjoyed their highschool AP english class more than they're willing to admit, you can and should try what the author is trying to say.
But I think it's equally valid to search for when the story is written in service to the allegory, and to recognize when the allegory is in service to the story. It's okay to just tune out, because escapism isn't wrong. And I think while some enjoy the act of analyzing and pondering, it's important to recognize that analysis isn't the only method of enjoying storytelling.
Sometimes, it's perfectly acceptable for the curtains to just be blue. The meaning is perhaps what one does behind those curtains.
Famous quotes about failure include how failure is the first step towards success, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and he who has not failed has not tried.
They're vague abstracts so divorced from reality that I think I grind my teeth when I hear them.
From a professional failure and someone who has internalized failure, here's the thing; Failure can often be a waste of time. Failure can weaken you. He who has tried can fail repeatedly and may never succeed.
That's just life.
The truth of the matter is that you often don't have unlimited attempts. You have a finite life and you can actually die after 60+ years of throwing yourself at a brick wall in the hopes that it caves. Now, I'm not saying anything you'll do in this life will take 60+ years but the attempt isn't always worth it. Sometimes you have failed.
And I don't mean just mean failed.
I mean irreparably, remarkably, permanently failed.
Imagine you're a kid, and you're tasked with one job; make sure the construction doesn't knock over the urn with grandpa's ashes off the counter. You sit there, diligently watching, but then you get distracted, just for a moment. It's not long, but in that one instance, you took your attention away and then when you look back, the ashes are now on the floor, the urn is broken into a hundred pieces and you cannot separate your grandpa's remains from the dust on the floor.
You have irrevocably fucked up.
You then have to deal with the aftermath of it. The permanent consequences. You chose wrong, and you will never get another chance at that task. You can't bring that urn back, you can't even tell if what you have in your hands is your grandfather's remains and now you're in trouble and you have no made life objectively worse for someone else.
Failure.
There's a sort of beauty in the finality of it, isn't there?
But here's the thing.
You're going to get a new urn to watch. You're going to get a five-year maximum with three attempts per subject to finish a college degree or you get kicked out. You're going to get a relationship where if you get into the wrong argument at the wrong time, you're going to mess it up forever. You have one body and you have to take really good care of it, because if you don't, you shorten your lifespan. You're going to have financial responsibility and if you're careless and mess up, you might not be able to make rent this month and get kicked out and be homeless. If you don't make a project succeed, you might get 30 people laid off.
That's unimaginable pressure to put on a singular being. No wonder we're such anxious fucking messes, entire destinies hinge upon our actions, much less our own. And if you're anything like me, you might drop that fucking urn repeatedly and never learn anything.
That's okay though.
Sometimes the urn has to drop to make room on the shelf for something better. Sure, it sucked and you ruined everyone's day, but now there's room for something better. And then you put something better there and it turns out alright in the end. Or maybe it's something slightly worse. It's not the same, but you don't have to watch it for so long. Maybe it can survive multiple falls. So you drop it once, but you dust it off and you put it back, and look at that! Instead of having this nightmarish responsibility, the stress thereof being something that very well might kill you, you instead have a much more manageable centerpiece that while it may not be as good as the thing you wanted there, might actually be better for you to have.
If you fail at reaching for a goal, or dream, or aspiration, that's okay. But that doesn't mean you'll fail at everything.
One day, you won't drop the urn.
Maybe it will mean a little. Maybe it will mean a lot. Maybe it will make no difference. Maybe it'll make a huge difference. But the important thing is that one failure, one irrevocable failure, doesn't mean the end of everything. Don't mistake permanent and life-changing consequences with dire and unendingly awful consequences.
You have to hold onto the hope that things will get better, because they do. And you have to hld onto the hope that you will do better next time, and if you don't, then the time after that, and if you fail again, the time after that until you succeed or die. And you're statistically more likely to succceed at least once before you die, so don't lose out hope just yet.
People say not to internalise and make failure a part of your identity and I guess I have failed at even that. I can't tell you the path to success and sometimes I don't think anyone really knows. I think some people rolled the dice and the ones who got lucky are really vocal about it, and the people who drew short never tell you their cautionary tales. There aren't any famous failures. You don't want to hear about people who did it wrong, you already know. You want to know about the people who did it right. You want to learn from them and understand how they did it and replicate their success but you might just never do that.
And that's okay.
"I don't know how much value I have in this universe. But I do know that I made a few people happier than they would have been without me. As long as I know that, I'm as rich as I need to be." A line said by Robin Williams in the show Mork and Mindy
You're not as bad as you think you are. I'm not as bad as I think I am. I'm trying. I hope you continue to try. I'm a klutz and I will likely drop more urns. But I usually clean up, and drop more urns and sometimes I put something nice in the place of the thing I lost. I hope you can too. I hope I can continue to. I hope I have a shelf full of nice things, even if I have a floor full of urns.
I'll give Overwatch some props, you know you're doing something right if your character is so gay that their tie-in comic gets banned in Russia. Please, please, tell me that there's going to be Prohibition-era style shebeens where illegal gay Overwatch art is traded while sexy jazz plays.
But that got me thinking, where are all the queer videogame icons? You can probably name more queer film and TV characters than Avengers, and queer music icons tend to be just all round important music icons (think David Bowie and Freddie Mercury).
But the more I think about it, the more I struggle to name queer videogame characters. And I think that's because for all the gaming industry's progress, it's still struggling to find spaces to put queer bodies in. Which is strange because those are just regular places. Like offices or schools or parks, where regular people hang out, because it turns out the LGBTQ folk like to do pretty normal things when we get off the unicorns and finish drinking soy milk by the truck. Initially we were delegated to roles as villains, and queer coded characters were often antagonists. But it's gotten better, right?
In my research I've found couple queer characters and it actually surprised me how many there were, notably Max and Chloe from Life Is Strange, a game I've actually covered on the blog before. But then again, the queer identities of the characters in that game are overshadowed in my mind by the sheer piss taking that was the fucking bottle hunt mission. I got stuck there for like two hours searching for the last one. Demote whoever the level designer was, please.
But then the other memory of that game poked up, the one of actively being a queer person. I remember when the "kiss Chloe" prompt showed up and it blew the little socks right off my little feet and I was like, oh holy shitniblits, we're going 100% turbo boosted gay right here. I'm going to click that prompt so hard that the pressure will turn it into fuel to be used by future generations eons from now.
And that was a great experience.
The other one was, funny enough, romancing every member of my crew in Saints Row IV (except Keith Davis, the prude). I get that it was supposed to parody Mass Effect but the fact that I could just engage and acknowledge the sexuality of my version of The President was always just a really compelling feature. The superpowers that let me roam around the city while listening to In Flames more so, but the romance too. The issue is that in those kinds of "choose your own adventure" games, people might never even experience the queer side of the game. I know not everyone is a fan of having the sexuality of their character pre-destined but welcome to the world of every queer person being forced to play straight characters in videogames ever.
The other issue is that we often bury the lead with our queer characters. The original NieR for PS3 and Xbox 360 comes to mind, as Yoko Taro deliberately decided not to explicitly address the intersex and gay characters he wrote (although he did address more of it in the sequel, NieR Automata). JK Rowling recently caught fire because director David Yates decided not to explicitly address Dumbledore's sexuality in the upcoming Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them sequel. And don't give me that second movie of five load of wank, it's been seven books, nine movies, one stage play, seven mainline videogames as well as a quidditch spinoff game later. You're telling me that in all that not once in all that, not even a singular time, no one thought to bring up that Dumbledore is actually into the Dumbledick? You're better than that, Jo.
So we live in a world where representation could be used as justification for banning in foreign markets, China and Russia specifically, but on the other hand, queer media is so hard to come by and the enormous amount of good you do by being part of the history of representation in media can't be overstated. And in videogames specifically, we don't actually have a lot of queer experiences, at least, not a lot of mainstream ones. The political climate is so precarious that it's hard to know if it'll ever happen, but hopefully some devs step up to bat for the other team.
But here's to hoping for more Tracers, Gay Tonys, Ellie, Max-es, Kanji Tatsumis, and Poisons. Here's to hoping for more Dream Daddies and Strange Flesh-es. We can do better. So let's not bury the lead anymore. Let's not keep our characters closeted for the sake of subtlety.
Over the years I've undergone numerous phases in where I buy my games. As with everyone who grew up in the early 2000s, there was just something scary about the idea of buying things online, so brick and mortar stores were the way to go. Add to the fact that download speeds weren't as fast and hard drive space was limited, it was an extra pain in the ass to switch to digital only gaming. Not to mention that consoles like the PS2 didn't have a digital storefront, and as ahead of its time as Steam was, it used to be a goddamn nightmare to work with, sometimes requiring a full restart just so you could open it up.
As I gradually moved from console to PC and finally got the ability to use my debit card for purchasing games online, I made the reluctant move to steam. A couple friends in Uni actually got me into it, because there were just really great multiplayer experiences like Don't Starve (at least multiplayer with people I actually knew) that I wasn't going to get on console. I'm a sucker for a good LAN play, four people screaming at each other in a room all wired up to a router while the most powerful computer hosts is an experience I hope everyone in the world gets to have. And after my first Steam sale, oh boy. I didn't think I could ever go back.
Time goes by, and between humble, freebie giveaways, Steam sales, Bundlestars/Fanatical and G2A, and here I am sitting with a gigantic library and I now know the true meaning of hundreds of games but nothing to play. As crazy as it is, there comes a point where you have to heartbreakingly choose between which games you keep installed and which you leave in the cloud, and the first time a game went from light grey to dark grey was like a coming of age. A right of passage that meant I was now playing with the big boys, even if our tastes were all different.
But something that hadn't occurred to me was the cycle I had now fallen back into. See, while I was now entirely aboard the Steam train and my money was somehow moving from my wallet into Valve's, I still wasn't aboard other services. GOG, UPlay, Origin, Itch.io, etc. all mean installing another client which meant another thing to boot at startup and another program to keep running in the background. All for the 3 or 4 games I couldn't get on Steam. Plus, PSN remains inexcusably expensive without sales half as frequently as Steam. Digital Games should cost less since bandwidth is cheaper than mass producing disks, plus retro games are somehow more expensive than more ambitious indie titles. Symphony Of The Night is turning 21 this year and it sells for R120 or $10 on the PSN. That's the same price as The Last Of Us.
So I ended up putting all my chips into Steam. Sure, I did begrudgingly buy the occasional PSN title or nab a GOG/Uplay freebie, but it's not like they had much staying power. But in hindsight, that was the wrong move. Because you're not going to get the most bang for your buck by giving Valve the monopoly. Noticing the GOG sale and how many titles I want there makes me realize that I've been missing out. I don't have the best rig but my laptop often surprises me with the number of titles it can play. Which means the most mileage I'm going to get is by having the widest selection of games available to me. Which, begrudgingly, means installing those two or three extra game clients, but I'll caveat that with not setting them to open on boot and not having them constantly in the background. And multiplayer games I'll leave to Steam for the time being because there isn't enough widespread adoption, at least in my friend circle, to justify buying them elsewhere, although ones like Don't Starve that don't rely on a friend list from Steam are fair game.
And with that I end my loyalty to Steam. I'm not saying that I won't be buying from Steam anymore but I am saying that I will no longer be buying for and from Steam exclusively. Because while I may be slow, I also realize that this is one of the only ways to stay ahead as a consumer. While any money I might save will probably go right back into games, at least that means I have more games for less money which means more free time I can fill up with new experiences.
And I guess I urge you to do the same. If pre-order culture and brand loyalty are poor consumer practices, then storefront loyalty is a different flavour of the same problem. They're making money off your loyalty, money you don't need to spend. Competition also means that each service has to improve itself in order for you to maintain your patronage. And as much as I like having all my games in one central hub, I also like having games. And unlike a streaming service subscription, installing and making accounts with these are free. Plus you eventually wreck your own recommendations so it's always nice to have a clean slate to see what it is that one algorithm is burying under the titles it thinks you're interested in.
If nothing else, give GOG and Itch.io a try. GOG's games are DRM free and Itch.io has plenty of indie titles you might never see hit the Steam storefront because they're either too niche or in a market too saturated.
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.
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;
Knuckles accelerates way too quickly
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.
The emerald shards are randomly placed
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Swimming controls.
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;
Platforming. His mech is heavy, it doesn't control well, and platforming is just a nightmare
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
The flat-lining sound it makes when holding down the shoot button to lock on.
Colliding with walls mid glide causes you to drop like a rock
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
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.
Sonic Mania did to the Genesis Trilogy & CD what Sonic 2 immediately did to Sonic 1 with the addition of the Spindash, and what Sonic 3 & Knuckles immediately did to the games before it with a save function. And fair warning, I am going to gush about the game and maybe spoil things that I really hope you get to see without me spoiling it. Considering the time since release, I'm pretty sure most folks have gotten to play it, and considering the ridiculously low price of entry versus how much you get, Sonic Mania is a steal.
The Sonic classic games are a fantastic example of progression throughout sequels and Mania, despite having an entirely different team behind it, makes strides in the right direction. The extra frames of animation, the crisp opening cutscene, the fantastic level design, the new engine, special stages that are actually fun to play god dammit... It's a fan's dream come true.
But mostly, the drop dash.
The drop dash, as I've told anyone who will listen, is a goddamn r e v e l a t i o n. A spindash that can be charged mid-air to keep the momentum going is godsent, and of all Mania's improvements, the drop dash is the one I hope sticks. It's so good that it's dated every classic game before it. The Sonic Hacking Contest 2017 was filled to the brim with hacks that add the Drop Dash and they're always on the front of the Steam Workshop for the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive Classics.
And I think that's what I didn't expect going into Sonic Mania. How iconic, modern, and playable the game would feel right off the bat. It's a game that feels like it belongs in 2017, barring one or two shortcomings.
Criticism is hard for me to dish out. Just to see a work like this published is just a wonderful and fantastic thing, but that a game created under these circumstances is worth serious criticism speaks volumes about the quality of Sonic Mania.
But let me kill my darling, if only because it's so close to perfection that it'd be a shame to let this be the peak. And oh, does it hurt me to do this, but also, I'm genuinely glad that I have so few major criticisms.
First to of all, you can either have long acts, or a game overs that send you to the beginning of a zone, but not both. This isn't an issue in the early zones, but I lost nine lives on a stupid pit in act 2 of Flying Battery Zone. And you know what I wasn't in the mood for right after a game over? Playing the entirety of Flying Battery Zone from the start. This kind of thing wouldn't bother me in other classics because I can save scum the hell out of unfair or tough design to remove tedium.
Time overs are also antiquated and I don't find their inclusion welcome. Even in the remakes on Android and iOS, the time over isn't a big deal because the levels just don't last that long. You either die or run out of lives long before the timer reaches 9:59. But it happened in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and it was annoying then because the game automatically removes a life and not even save scumming will help there. Sure, in Mania lives are plentiful and I rarely hit 9:59 on any stage.
Doesn't mean it was any less annoying.
Sonic's design, at least in his 2D space, needs to progress. I understand where Sega was coming from, as the king of the arcades in the 1990s. But games have grown up. Sonic can still grow. And considering what the blue blur's survived, I think he should be allowed to thrive further.
I also wish there was a more active way to enter special stages. Once or twice I was hit by an enemy right next to a checkpoint, and the knockback caused me to enter the Blue Sphere special stage, which is a total waste of time and broke the flow of the stage. It's minor, but still. It happened often enough and was egregious enough to merit mention.
When Knuckles glides, if you let go of the glide button he sort of just drops like a rock. The baseball slide he does after landing a glide also doesn't feel great. I wish I could land into a light jog and continue gliding if I let go of the jump button, it just feels like the game thinks gliding is super overpowered, when it doesn't need that extra nerf. I get that Knuckles is the "Hard Mode" of the game, but the extra mechanical clunk of his moveset could do with some trimming.
Tails has no way to descend quickly. If I could press down and jump while flying to break into a spinjump, that'd be great and really up his versatility. Also, a flight gauge of some sort would be super appreciated, trying to suss out by feeling how far he can still fly is annoying, and the fact that he slowly descends before landing when his flight gauge is empty without some way to just drop is extra annoying.
Having some of the features being locked behind no save mode is somewhat annoying. Why can't I unlock the insta-shield or spinjump on a normal save? Hell, why can't I have all three at once, a mod using Cheat Engine has proved that it's possible.
Other than that... I mean, Sonic Mania is pretty great. It's hard to notice the flaws while listening to the expertly composed soundtrack Tee Lopes brought to the mix. It's hard to notice along Simon Thomley's expert level design. It's hard to notice while gawking at the near one to one recreation of Sonic's physics, thanks to Christian Whitehead's retro engine.
And now, I will gush;
There are so many little details. As a kid who played the everloving hell out of Sonic The Fighters, seeing Bark, Bean and Fang return was pure bliss. Oh my god, it was an easter egg that I just freaked out upon seeing. Playing Puyo-Puyo against Eggman in Chemical Plant Zone Act 2 was the greatest surprise. I loved it. It's honestly my favourite part of the game. And Knuckles & Knuckles mode? I could not contain myself. The man, the legend, the meme lives on. And he ain't here to chuckle. You can set the oil in oil ocean on fire. Definitive proof that there is a God. Chibi Sonic in Metallic Madness is so adorable that I think I actually died. Press Garden. Christ, just... Press Garden. You are objectively wrong if you dislike this stage. The added low-poly 3D effects just touch me in all the right places, Sonic Mania would feel right at home on the Sega Saturn and honestly, Sega would still be king if they'd decided to put the extra power of the Saturn to good use like how Symphony Of The Night used all that power in the original PlayStation for bigger sprites and better effects. The special stages. Oh. My. God. The special stages. I think I've only ever had this much fun with the Sonic Heroes special stages and the song is so jamming, Tee Lopes can I worship at your altar for you are a god among men sir. The Drop Dash. THE DROP DASH. The insta-shield was a good addition but it never gave me the advantage flying or climbing did. But the Drop Dash? WHO AUTHORED THIS MASTERPIECE AND WHERE DO I SEND THIS PERSON MY MONEY? There's this added flow to stages that there just wasn't present before and now green hill zone goes down even faster. Time Attack is made even more fun with this godsend treasure and I really hope it becomes the default move for Classic Sonic.
Sonic Mania was here to subvert expectations and subvert my expectations it did. This is exactly what Sonic needed, and for a $16 platformer, I hope it gets the sequel it deserves. It's inexpensive, fun, replayable... Almost everything that modern triple A gaming isn't. To say that Generations, released half a decade ago, was the last game to come close to Mania in quality is a sad state of affairs, but honestly, I can't be mad because Mania was just so damn good.
In light of how Nintendo has treated Pokemon Uranium and Another Metroid 2 Remake, you have to praise Sega for seeing the good that can come out of fan-created projects. I'm not advocating for letting the fans control the entire direction of your IP, but take influence from them, work with them, look at their works and just soak in how cool it is people liked your product so much that they felt compelled to tribute it so thoroughly. I mean, is it not the dream of any creator to make something that eclipses them, that becomes so large and beloved that it transcends their interpretation?
A game made for the Mania, by the Mania. It's rare that a game is made with such love and passion and care. I genuinely hope we get to see infinitely more experience made from the same place, by independent or up-and-coming developers.
