Oh nice, this doesn’t suck. I think?
Sonic Adventure 2 and its predecessor are among the biggest first-party releases for the Sega Dreamcast, a console near and dear to my heart. It has a great library, cool ‘VMU’ memory cards, and makes noises only a true fan could love.
Seriously, if you grew up with one of these, you can hear this picture.
There’s a general belief that early 3D games have aged very poorly. There’s a good amount of truth to that, but I feel there are a good number of exceptions. Super Mario 64 is likely the biggest, but the Sonic Adventure series is definitely up there for me, too. While they’re not perfect by any means, they have a lot of content,
This week, though we’re focused specifically on game begins with you in control of Sonic, racing through the streets of a city based on San Francisco if every street was Lombard Street. Despite the occasional camera-related weirdness (the camera is not great overall, but not awful either), this does a decent job of setting the tone for the game and gives you the sense of speed that a Sonic game requires. Eventually you’re tasked without running a giant truck labeled GUN:
This game also introduces Shadow, a hedgehog that’s probably best described as “like Sonic, but different.” I’m sure there are a number of differences in other releases (as well as in story, as I’m sure some commenter will exhaustively explain unprompted), but in Sonic Adventure 2 they’re…very similar, and their levels play out in largely the same ways. Even his first boss fight is effectively the same as Sonic’s.
Unfortunately, not all of the levels have quite that same feel. The game’s full story mode has six playable characters – three good and three evil – though the Sonic/Shadow dichotomy applies those characters’ levels as well, and some of them are pretty rough. Knuckles and his counterpart Rouge the Bat both have levels that require finding shards of a chaos emerald by…wandering around and trying to find them. Knuckles and Rouge have cool gliding and wall-climbing abilities, but these levels aren’t particularly enthralling.
The other two characters are Tails and Eggman (who is still Dr. Robotnik to me, dammit) – they are also similar, in that they each operate big mechanical things that shoot guided missiles. I definitely like these levels, but there’s a real discrepancy in their vehicles. Robotnik’s is a pretty cool looking mech, but Tails seems to have one of those coin-operated rides from the fronts of grocery stores:
I feel I should point out that Tails can fly. That’s kinda his whole thing, and yet he’s stuck in this dumb thing. I feel super bad for him.
There’s a ton of stuff to do in this game – each level has numerous emblems that can be earned in numerous ways, which strongly encourages replaying to get faster times and find more secrets. There’s also the Chao garden, where you can…uh…frolick with animals? I’ve never understood the point of these, beyond that it’s a digital pet sort of thing. Their main purpose, I think, is to be cute – the rest is honestly secondary. It’s pretty harmless.
Overall, Sonic Adventure 2 has a lot going for it, and…wait, hang on a second…
Is that Comic Sans? You know what, forget the rest of this article, this game is garbage. That’s just inexcusable.
Jokes (and unforgivable font choices) aside, I enjoyed playing through Sonic Adventure 2 again for the first time in ages. It hasn’t aged well in some respects, and some of the levels are a slog, but the good certainly outweighs the bad – there’s a ton to do and a lot of variety, including some multiplayer modes that I didn’t even touch on for this. If you have a Dreamcast, this should be part of your library.
This has been re-released a few different times, including as downloadable content on modern platforms and as Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the GameCube, which added some new multiplayer stuff. Some have argued that this was the last good Sonic game in the series, though I’d definitely disagree with that – last year’s Sonic Mania is a truly outstanding return to the series’ roots, for instance. While I can’t speak to them specifically I’ve heard good things about some other recent entries, including Sonic Colors. If you’re like me, though, nothing beats the classics.
Next week…uh…concerns me. I really don’t know what’s going to happen with this one, everyone. You’ll want to come back and find out, I’m sure.