Game Discussion of the Week: Sonic Adventure 2

Added and stickied.

Christ, I'm kicking myself for being so late to the discussion on Sonic Adventure 2, especially since I'M the one who suggested it. I have no excuse. I need to post here more often!

Sonic Adventure 2, a game that was easily among my all-time favorites as a kid (I actually considered it one of the greatest games ever made, not even kidding) but now I see it as a flawed and extremely overrated game. It's one of those overrated late 90s Sega titles that has led me to regard the Dreamcast as an overrated console, along with others like the first Sonic Adventure and the life simulator Shenmue.

What really baffles me about Sonic Adventure 2 is that, despite being developed by then-legendary Sonic Team and featuring 500x more content than all the Genesis Sonic games combined, it still is less meaningful than the Genesis Sonic trilogy in every way. As much as I bitch about the original Sonic the Hedgehog, it still to this day has among the most captivating visual design and music of any Sega title, and the people who worked on it obviously poured their hearts into it. With the Sonic Adventure games Sega clearly was trying to redesign the series in an attempt to take it to new heights, but in the process I think they killed the series' soul. Changing just about every single aspect of the game's design from the classic 2D games was a daring choice for Sega, like a lot of their Dreamcast games, but personally I don't approve of it, and I think it divided the fanbase somewhat.

First off, let me just say that the game DOES have a lot of things about it that I like, such as some of the music and the game's impressive sense of speed; Sonic Adventure 2 is still the fastest 3D platformer I've ever played, and while I haven't played any of the post Sonic Heroes games, I imagine that Sonic Adventure 2 would still feel fast by comparison. I also generally approved of the soundtrack, especially the Knuckles and Rouge levels. Meteor Herd has one of my absolute favorite tracks in the entire series, which is very impressive considering the enormous talent that went into designing the audio for the 16 bit games, namely 1-3.

My problems with the game, however, are glaring. I'm going to list them off:

-The fucking atrocious camera, even for it's time it was just fucking awful and I've played games that didn't even feature movable cameras that were less frustrating, like Chameleon Twist for example. I speculate that part of the issue behind the crude camera controls in SA 2 are due to the streamlined Dreamcast controller, which has the dubious distinction of being the only 6th gen controller not to feature a second analogue stick, which by that point were typically used for controlling the camera in third person games (the GC controller's right stick was even named the "C-stick" for this reason). The camera in SA 2 is so bad that it almost single-handedly ruins the game for me, not even kidding. Everyone says that the camera in Sonic Adventure 1 is even worse but my memory is so fuzzy that I can't remember.

-The pre-rendered cutscenes generally look AWFUL and in fact look even worse than the in-game graphics.

-The mech stages (Tales and Eggman levels) are slow, clumsy, clunky, boring, awful and they can go fuck themselves.

However, I did feel that the game was truly enhanced when it was ported to Gamecube, since it features a better framerate and adds surprisingly fun local multiplayer that doesn't just feel tacked on. I played it once at a party with friends as a kid and we had a ball. It even let's you play as Amy and other SA 1 exclusive characters on some modes.

The game is also notable for introducing the most important character yet in the franchise, Rouge the Bat



Joking aside, I don't hate SA 2, but it's definitely an overrated game in my opinion. Unlike other overrated games like Half Life 2, which I consider overhyped for one reason or another but still well designed and polished, Sonic Adventure 2 is an overrated game in the most extreme sense of the term: it has problems. Despite this I'm still giving it a 4/5 for the massive amount of content it offers, like the Chao garden for example, as well as the impressive sense of speed and my nostalgia for the game, but I don't think it's worthy of the legacy created by its masterful predecessors, and by today's standards it feels very average and dated going back to it, unlike other platformers from the time like Rayman 2 and Mario Sunshine.

So this was the game that introduced Bat Tits.

Batman Forever was the originator of bat tits and bat asses, too.



...except on a male character, not female. Therefore not important.

I enjoyed the Rouge/Knuckles levels in SA 2, it was just the mech stages that I hated. But to each their own.

I didn't realize that SA 1 had exploration elements. That just goes to show how much I have forgotten about the game. I would like to play it again out of curiosity since I last played it in 2004 or so, but I just don't feel like paying $10-15 for a game that left me feeling so underwhelmed.

What were the Knuckles/Rouge levels like in the first SA again? I can't remember because it's been too long since I've played it.

And I already said that I was very impressed by the level of detail put into raising the chao in SA 2. It was a great addition.