Sonic Adventure 2 Review

The past week or two some friends and I have been getting pretty into Sonic the Hedgehog. Not like, marathoning every game or anything, but we’ve been talking about some memories with the games, listening to the music again, etc. One thing that would come up a lot was Sonic Adventure vs. Sonic Adventure 2. The comparisons were…really strange, but we eventually came to the conclusion they both had some advantages and disadvantages over the other. I was in support of SA2 completely. While I had loved SA as a kid, SA2 I had loved even more.

You see, I never had any Sega consoles as a kid, so my first experience with Sonic was Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, which I looooved as a kid. I got SADX shortly afterward, and loved it as well. So in 2010 when Sonic Adventure was rereleased and got abysmal reviews, I was shocked. What had happened?! I remember that game being awesome! Was it just because it was an older game? But even then, when games like Banjo Kazooie and HD Collections of other 3D platformers from that era were released, they were praised to the moon and back and sales were terrific. How was SA any different than those other 3D platformers from the time? And when SA2 was rereleased late last year, people gave it bad reviews too. But how?!

Well, I was curious, so I purchased the HD version of SA2 on 360. And…well…yeah, it’s bad. I don’t know about 3/10, but the game’s teeeerrible by today’s standards. And judging a 12 year old 3D platformer by the same standards of every other game out today isn’t exactly fair, but even compared to other platformers from the late 90′s and early 2000′s, it’s literally painful to play. Why did I like SA2 as a kid? Well…because I was a kid. It’s absolutely perfect for a kid’s game, but nothing more. How? Well, it’s got everything. Giant trucks, rock music, huge robots, and characters that try so hard to be cool it’s hilarious.

Playing through the game again being older and arguably smarter than I was as a little kid, there were a lot of parts I really couldn’t stand. But before that, there were also a lot of parts I liked. The Sonic/Shadow levels are a really good time when they work properly, running and blasting your way through hordes of robots is awesome. Some people say they prefer SA1′s Sonic levels since they’re less linear and have more to explore, but I think I like linearity better for this kind of game. I get a lot more fun out of running fast than I do searching around for something that’s mostly meaningless anyway. The soundtrack is absolutely awesome. As much as I want to make fun of the cheesy rock songs like City Escape and Live and Learn, I honestly can’t get enough of them. While the story is ridiculous, it’s actually surprisingly fun to keep up with and can keep you playing. There’s a lot of diversity in the levels, from cities, to space, to jungles, to pyramids, you end up going just about everywhere, which is always a good thing.

But beyond that…wow. The Sonic/Shadow stages are awesome when they work, but again…only when they work. Grinding is really annoying, because rails are reaaaally tiny. If you’re an inch off, you’ll more than likely fall to your death. While it isn’t always a big deal, in a level like Sky Rail where the entire point is grinding through the sky with nothing below you, it gets really noticeable. The homing attack is fun to kill enemies with, but you have to be pretty darn close to make sure you actually land the thing. Sometimes you’ll be just a hair too far away from the next enemy you’re meant to attack, and end up flinging yourself to your own death instead.

Dr. Eggman in one of his earlier levels.

 The Tails/Eggman levels are, to my surprise, horrible. I’m not joking about the whole surprise thing either, I remembered them being awesome. For some reason, they gave them platforming segments. Once you get your hover powerup its not usually a huge issue, but before that, levels like Sand Ocean are torture. Whose idea was giving the huge slow mechs sections that require strict 3D platforming, seriously? And even when you get the hover ability it still has its annoyances. For example, if you hover into a wall, you immediately go to the ground. It’s kinda hard to explain, but like, in Mario 64, when you barely miss a platform, you grab on the ledge and pull yourself up, right? Well in SA2, if you barely miss a platform, you immediately plummet to the ground instead. I know these stages aren’t meant to be based on platforming, but in that case, WHY GIVE THEM PLATFORMING SEGMENTS? The part that isn’t platforming is just walking around and shooting stuff. It isn’t super slow or anything, but you mostly go through long, boring halls doing nothing but lock-on attacks, so it’s not very fun either. These levels end up just being slow and repetitive.

The Knuckles/Rouge levels are also pretty bad, but not as bad as I remember them. As a kid, I absolutely dreaded these levels, because they were super slow and confusing. I understand them now and how they were made, but it’s still not very good. Basically, the premise is that you’re going around a large, open world searching for emerald shards. How do you find them? An emerald radar at the bottom that flashes green, yellow, and red as you get closer, and flying TV screens in the levels that give you hints (that vary from being either completely useless or beyond obvious.) The emerald radar only lets you see the location of one emerald at a time, making it even more slow and obnoxious finding them all. Again, when you know what you’re doing they aren’t huge wastes of time and can actually be fun to explore and mess around in, because Knuckles and Rouge actually control better than the other characters in the game, moving very quickly but also having very precise controls. However, the huge size of the levels is often more frustrating than fun, especially on gimmicky levels like Mad Space where you have to go between huge planets with crappy controls and Security Hall where you’re on a 5 minute time limit. Overall, these levels sometimes have potential, but it’s often completely thrown away as a result of obnoxious level design and a radar that barely helps at all.

Knuckles in an exciting battle with King Boom Boo!

One thing that I also feel is worth mentioning is the boss battles. They come in two forms; huge enemies and character fights. The character fights, well, suck. You basically fight your character’s rival (Sonic vs. Shadow, Tails vs. Eggman, Knuckles vs. Rouge) until one of you dies. This could’ve been really fun, but it comes down to pressing buttons and usually lasts no more than 15 seconds because your enemy’s AI is beyond stupid. The huge enemies however, are some of the most memorable bossfights I can think of. The GUN robots Sonic and Shadow fight in the beginning are pretty lame, but the music and atmosphere are cool and make for a memorable fight. The Egg Golem and King Boom Boo are both reaaaally cool fights, and the Final Hazard (the Super Sonic/Shadow boss) is one of the coolest video game moments ever. The only really bad one that comes to mind is the fight with Biolizard (seriously, whoever decided adding a random water slide in the middle of the arena was a good idea is a horrible human being.)

But there’s also a lot to do besides just the main stories. The chao garden is an awesome, very deep pet simulator that comes with a few cool minigames like chao karate and chao racing, there’s multiplayer that can actually be pretty funny if you aren’t taking it too seriously, and there’s even a kart racing minigame (that’s…well, pretty much useless.) You can go back and select individual levels to play, and they actually all have 5 missions you can go do, so if you really like the game there’s lots of replay value.

Rolling around at the speed of sound…

In the end, it’s…a really, REALLY weird game to look at. The Sonic/Shadow stages are awesome when everything works with them, the Knuckles/Rouge levels feel like they could’ve been ok but end up being frustrating, and the Tails/Eggman levels feel almost completely like wastes of time. The music is awesome, the graphics are alright, there’s a lot of bonus features like the chao garden and kart racing, but a lot of it feels useless when a big chunk of the game is either boring or super glitchy. This game came out after Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, and came out the same year as Jak and Daxter. How did those games live on for years to come, while SA2 gets nothing but backlash when it’s brought back? I…I honestly don’t know. I had fun revisiting it, but if I hadn’t played it a lot as a kid I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed much of it at all besides parts of the Sonic/Shadow levels.

Everyone should play this game. Not because it’s amazing, not because it’s terrible, it’s just a really, really interesting game to look at. There are some parts that are absolutely unforgettably fun, and others that make you seriously want to just stop playing. As much fun as the Sonic levels are, trudging through the emerald hunting and shooting levels to get to them is a real pain. The game has a load of charm to it and a surprisingly good atmosphere, but do those really do much for it when there are so many bugs? Putting it as simply as “Sonic levels are good, the others suck, so only 1/3rd of the game is good” isn’t really fair, because some of the treasure hunting levels can be a lot of fun actually, and even the shooting occasionally has its highlights, not to mention bonuses like the chao garden. If you’re going into something like game design, this game can really teach you a lot, I think. It shows what happens when you try to bring a handful of different genres together, throw them into one game, and put way more focus on some parts of the game than others. What the game does right it definitely does right, but what it does wrong can sometimes be REALLY annoying.

It’s hard to give a score to a game like this, but I think a 5/10 is fair.