Blog:TyrantRex's thoughts on Sonic Adventure 2

Note: This isn't a proper review, but rather my thoughts and opinions on the game!

Background
The Sonic franchise is one I had never been all that interested in. I love platformer games, so why not check Sonic? Simple answer, it completely slipped under my radar. I grew up glued to a PS1 and Game Boy Color so I wasn't even aware Sonic existed.

When I started looking at the series, all I saw was how the franchise has seen brighter days before, to put it nicely. I'm getting Sonic Forces for Christmas for some reason, people say the Adventure games are some of the better 3D Sonic games, so I decided to look at Sonic Adventure 2 out of morbid curiosity.

...there was just one little detail, the game never got a PS2 port and my Wii is dead so the GameCube port isn't a choice either, so I reluctantly got the PC version and... at the risk of sounding like a PC hater, BIG MISTAKE doing that. For one thing, it took over 7 hours just to download the game because my internet sucks. Worse, it took three days to get Dualshock 4 to work with it. THREE days! I played the first part of the game with the keyboard, BIGGER mistake! Keyboards are NOT controllers, I'll leave it at that.

The Game
Putting aside the massive headache it took to get the game to work properly, this game is... I'll get to it later, first the presentation... Umm, the graphics and character animation are... barely above an average Nintendo 64 game to be honest, only maybe cleaner. I know the common argument is that it's a relatively early 3D game, but Jak and Daxter came out on the same year and that game is frigging beautiful and has excellent cartoony animation so, yeah. Not a big fan of the soundtracks with lyrics but overall the soundtrack is good.

The big thing about this game is that there's two campaigns, Hero and Evil, but given that both sides play the same I'll just talk about each of the three main playstyles. However I will say that I found the evil campaign to be the weaker one. Shadow only gets four stages.

First off, the Speed stages. They're quite good really. It's quite different from a typical platformer, the levels are designed so that if you're good, you can consistently keep the fast pace going and rarely ever stop, if you suck you'll be taking longer paths with more road bumps and obstacles. I don't quite get the thrill of going super fast but I do like the sense of crossing the level stopping as little as possible, honestly it kind of reminded me of the Music levels in Rayman Legends, those levels are very fast paced and you never stop moving due to the flow of the level design keeping you from ever stopping if you're good at them. I'm NOT all that good especially when using the keyboards, but once I got the controller to work they got much, much better.

I do have some problems with Speed levels. For one thing, the Homing attack desperately needs a lock on reticle (which Sega also realized because later games do), often the thing fails to hit the target and throws me into a bottomless pit. Ring dashing can also be unresponsive, I hated when you have to ring dash over a bottomless pit and it fails to work causing a cheap death. But other than those two problems, the speed stages surely are the best part of the game.

The treasure stages are tedious but tolerable. The levels are big areas where you need to find 3 randomly hidden items using a radar to locate them, the closer you are to an item the stronger the radar pings. Problem? The radar only tracks one item at the time. I'm sure everyone has already pointed out why this was a terrible design choice, but to put it simply these levels boil down to fumbling around in circles until the radar decides to start pinging and you'll do a lot of back tracking. The camera in these levels is also terrible, but to be fair I can tolerate bad cameras in early 3D games so I didn't complain too much but still.

The shooting stages pueden irse a abrazar un cactus! 'THESE.STAGES.SUUUCK!! 'By far the worst part of the game, the mechs don't control all that well, the lock on is unreliable, the Beeping sound when you hold the Lock button makes my ears bleed, the enemy placement can be really bad at times and I noticed several begginer traps. The worst offender, the Tails level in space is full of bombs that if you shoot they open an insta-kill trap without any warning. Yes, the shooting stage punishes you for shooting! Unless you knew beforehand, you WILL get killed by begginer traps like that. I just didn't like these levels, not a single one.

So... yeah, the speed stages are good and well designed, the treasure stages are decen at best, and the shooting stages can rot and... ugh. I'll be blunt, I didn't like this game. The speed stages are good and I as soon as I got the controller to work I went back and replayed them and quite enjoyed them, but those aren't even half of the game. If less than 33% of the game is good while the rest is meh to frustrating, that's not a good thing.

There is a Chao garden mode but I didn't even figure out how to unlock it and probably wouldn't check it out anyways.

I've seen countless "We need more Sonic Adventure games!" videos, but I have a gut feeling that the people making those videos are only talking about the speed stages. But "Adventure" is the whole package not just the Speed levels. And while I haven't played Adventure 1, that one has SIX playstyles, not a good sign. If they were to make another Adventure game with only Speed sages and cut off all the other filler stuff, I'd check it out sure. But as it is, SA2 didn't really convince me.