Failing to Love Sonic Adventure 2 - A Retrospective

so recently i learned to love sonic adventure a game that i had never really cared for simply by going through it again with a truly fresh pair of eyes putting aside all my previous experiences with the game and playing it as if i was back in the year 1999 leaving the modern expectations that we all have when we hear the name sonic naturally the very first thing that happened when i released that video was that i got a bunch of requests to look at sonic adventure 2 next you folks sure do work fast frankly i did kind of owe this game a fresh replay though where i never jived with sonic adventure 1 that much whenever i gave it a shot in the past i actively disliked adventure 2. if i was able to discover the magic of the first game and if i could start to put together the often unfair reasons for why its reputation has cratered over time surely i could find that same shine in adventure 2. right well no i hate to open on a downer here but i think i might just like sonic adventure 2 less overall now after a deeper look than i did in the past despite going out of my way to give it the same chance in the spotlight under which essay 1 thrived i find adventure 2 to be an uneven messy game don't get me wrong adventure 1 had its fair share of dumb moments and issues but it was a game made during the wild west transition to 3d camera controls it came out in japan only a month after zelda while many parts of it may struggle to hold up today its mistakes felt more innocent the consequence of an ambitious development team in an early era this game though came out in 2001 only a few years but somehow an entire era later and bafflingly it's a flat out regression its controls feel slipperier and far less trustworthy its camera more often ends up getting in your way despite far more linear level design and alongside a story that frankly feels like it throws darts at an idea board and somehow misses the board i stopped feeling that same sense of adventure i found myself frequently leaving my 2001 isolation chamber pausing my jlo and matchbox 20 cds and looking around in the current year thinking what in the hell caused this how could destiny's child just break up and leave us like i mean how could such a promising ambitious and sometimes admittedly clunky start to the next frontier of sonic gameplay fall off so immediately and also still be so beloved to so many it's such a weird situation surrounding an equally weird game but after just a bit of research i understood immediately and as critical as i very much still am of sonic adventure 2 now i can at least say i get why it's so messy simply put life comes at you fast [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] to properly tell the story of sonic adventure 2 we've first got to bounce back to the year 1998. with the successful japanese launch of the dreamcast in november and sonic adventure 1 shortly thereafter came at least three major changes to what we know as sonic team change number one sega's chairman isau okawa tasked the team with developing an online focused title now that adventure was done sonic team did not want to do this but every other sega team already had a game on its plate that it was developing and since this was coming from the very top of the company from a man who was so certain that online gaming would be the future that he later paid millions of dollars of his own money towards this project sonic team had no choice this project would become fantasy star online although a portion of sonic team would first end up developing choo choo rocket on the side as a way to test out many of the dreamcast's online features this brings us to change number two right after sonic adventure 1 released in japan 11 members of the game's 50 50-plus person production staff were relocated across the pacific to san francisco to translate and localize sonic adventure for the dreamcast's worldwide launch in september 1999. this offshoot known as sonic team usa also further polished the game taking care of many of the bugs and issues that were left in the original japanese release simply due to a lack of time at the end of the production crunch and during sonic adventure's localization process came change number three when a handful of the sonic team staff back in japan including sonic's original designer naoto oshima left sega to found their own independent studio artune that studio fun fact would later create blinks the time sweeper just throwing that out there now you might be wondering if sonic adventures developers all either left the country to localize the game left sega entirely or were working on two other totally different projects who made sonic adventure 2 that would be sonic team usa those 11 people that moved to the united states to fix up adventure 1. the first sonic adventure featured over 60 members in its day-to-day production staff the sequel was produced with about 20 percent of that so that explains everything right there you can stop the video now but please don't because i need to eat every criticism i have of sonic adventure 2 makes sense when you cut back from five dozen developers to one but wait wait it gets better than that because once sonic adventure's international version was ready for release at least a few of these 11 brave souls immediately jumped to work helping to do quality assurance on chuchu rocket presumably because sonic team japan was spread so thin across its multiple tasks having lost a third of its workforce in the last year that it needed a hand getting over the finish line the rest of sonic team usa you know all like eight of them likely began doing proper work on what would become sonic adventure 2 around november 99 aiming for a release date in spring 2001 perhaps surprisingly then despite the leaner staff the director of both adventure games takashi azuka doesn't recall many hurdles that came up during essay 2's production compared to the first game apparently it was pretty smooth sailing now that's likely because he was used to working in this sort of smaller scope team and also because sonic adventure was being developed alongside the console that didn't even have its finalized specs yet or maybe there was just less of a burden on his shoulders knowing that the future of sega itself wasn't at stake with sonic adventure 2 like it kinda was with one i don't think folks quite recognized today just how dire things that sega truly were back in this era like we all know it was bad but i'm a nerd and even i didn't grasp the full scope until starting work on this video following the sega saturn's death on arrival in the united states the main region by the way keeping sega's hardware dreams afloat among rapidly falling global profits company chairman okawa had actively pushed to abandon the money pit of even making consoles and to instead lean into sega's strong software catalog as a third party developer clearly he lost that fight because you know dreamcast but okawa still did his damnedest to make the system a success despite his objections investing millions of his own dollars into the dreamcast production and later on paying millions more to bundle in one year of free internet with every system sold in japan back during the era of absurdly expensive pay by the minute dial up with the playstation 2 looming sega was forced to spend heaps of money that the company just did not have in order to market the dreamcast aggressively in the west and that money quickly ran dry after launch sega lost nearly 400 million dollars in 1998 and 99 and even more in 2000 despite the dreamcast initially performing better than expected in the west it puts those three big sonic team changes into a bit of a different light now huh well you'd better get ready for a few more changes because all the while that sonic team usa's dirty dozen are apparently having a blast chipping away at sonic adventure 2 the company is just on fire all around them in just the first few months of 2000 as the first images and teaser clips for sonic adventure 2 began surfacing online sega underwent a major corporate restructure as chairman okawa replaced the company's former president the dreamcast's u.s sales suddenly collapsed after a strong first few months sega began offering rebates of up to 150 on sales of the 200 dreamcast consoles they were already selling at a loss just to try to get the system into more people's houses and build up a buffer against the ps2 sega's chairman chief investor and now remember also president okawa began suffering from heart failure and marvel vs capcom 2 released wait why is that in my notes despite okawa's failing health the man never gave up trying to push sega to success this guy needs a documentary all his own at some point he quietly met with top microsoft executives a number of times including bill gates himself to try and work out some form of dreamcast backwards compatibility and an upgrade path for the soon to be xbox at one point he even tried to sell the company to microsoft outright and keep it afloat okawa may have gone as far to leak false rumors of a sale to nintendo so that microsoft might get antsy and buy in none of this obviously ever came to pass in september 2000 a month before the ps2's american release sega posted yet another massive financial loss instead of their previously projected profits and with sales continuing to struggle despite effectively selling the dreamcast for less than the price of one single video game sega of america's executives took a trip to japan to explain to the development teams in no uncertain terms that it was over the heads of sega's now for some reason kind of autonomous studios stormed out of the meeting in protest sonic adventure 2's first playable demo was packed in with copies of fantasy star online in december a year after essay 2 started production 4 months before it was originally due to release and 9 months after fantasy star had been delayed to try and get as many features into the game as possible on january 23 2001 the same day that american players first got their hands on fantasy star online on the future of online gaming and of course on that sonic adventure 2 demo reports began surfacing that sega might indeed abandon the future of online gaming by leaving the console market following these rumors sega's stock jumped 60 by the end of the week and shortly thereafter at the end of the month the official announcement was made that yes in fact the dreamcast was being discontinued hope you're enjoying fantasy star online by the way six weeks later isau okawa chairman and ceo of sega died with his passing he forgave the several hundred million dollars that he had loaned to sega personally in recent years to fund the consul that he didn't want them to make and he donated all of his stock estimated at almost 700 million dollars back to sega so that it could avoid surefire bankruptcy and have a chance at weathering the storm up ahead as spring 2001 approached as sonic team usa again still only a dozen people mind you hunkered down to finish up work on sonic adventure 2 hundreds of sega employees all around them left or lost their jobs sonic adventure 2 a game that started production at the peak of the dreamcast as the sequel to the system's most successful game hit store shelves in june 2001 on a dead console that was already being thrown in the bargain bin at those very same stores just in time for the series 10th anniversary happy birthday sonic oh and then since the dreamcast was discontinued months before the game was even released sonic team usa immediately had to get to work porting the game to the gamecube over the next four to five months so that sonic adventure 2 battle could be released by december given all of this turmoil surrounding the game's production a ring of fire threatening to smoke this small team out alongside the entire company i totally understand all of the game's hiccups shortcomings even its most baffling weak points i mean jeez the fact that the team seems to have had a genuine blast working on it and didn't apparently struggle whatsoever is a marvel but although with this context in mind i will give essay 2 a bit of a pass that doesn't make the game itself any less of an oddity to me nor does it mean that adventure 2 is any less of a mess of a game the first order of business for sonic team usa when essay 2 began production was to take stock in what had worked with the first adventure game and figure out how to strip that back and polish the strongest aspects that had been successful the team barely had time with 60 employees to make six unique gameplay styles work in adventure 1 considering that most of them last an hour so the first major decision that was made was to cut back to the three most promising of these gameplay approaches the fast-paced sonic platform and goodness of course knuckles open field treasure hunting and the lock on shooter gameplay introduced by the now dead e102 gamma to reiterate though gamma's dead and sonic team would never dare revive a character that they killed off so they implemented a recurring suggestion that they'd received from fans over the years a playable dr eggman as a way to show the other side of the adventure story from this point the development story gets a bit fuzzy surprisingly given the sonic fandom's dedication to finding out every nook and cranny about all of these games so i'm gonna give you my interpretation of what happened from this point on eager to build on the narrative structure of the first game it was decided early on that adventure 2 would be split into two stories a hero side for sonic tails and knuckles and a dark side featuring eggman and two new adversaries shadow the hedgehog and rouge the bat because tails wasn't actually shown off until shortly before release and with producer sonic's dad yujinaka giving different answers measuring from maybe to no whenever he was asked if tales would actually be in the game it's commonly speculated that he was a late addition i don't think that holds too much water however given that he has as many levels as shadow the first new character designed for this game and since the hero half essentially works as a primer for the more challenging dark side gameplay that you would be expected to play later on alongside these changes came an effort to tell an even more involved story than the first sonic adventure had early on they even considered branching narrative paths based on your actions in the levels before deciding against that due to a lack of time thank god they never brought that one back right even after they cut the branching stories though this story is still very bad and i kind of love it for that sonic adventure 2 opens up with arguably the most iconic level in the franchise's history besides green hill zone as we're thrown right into the chaos as sonic escapes from military custody freeze what do you think you're doing get that hedgehog talk about low budget flights no food or movies i'm out of here i like running better [Music] [Music] [Applause] you know sonic ripping off part of that military helicopter almost definitely threw the chopper's balance off so those guys they're they're totally dead they are 100 dead now if you're wondering why the feds are chasing him besides you know murder now after causing millions of dollars in property damage while fleeing from the feds down the public streets sonic encounters the mysterious shadow of the hedgehog for the very first time and our hero puts two and two together now i know what's going on the military has mistaken me for the likes of you so where do you think you're going with that emerald after this fake hedgehog uses the power of a chaos emerald to teleport somehow sonic is taken back into federal custody and suddenly knuckles yeah so i'll get this out of the way now where sonic adventure 1 did a remarkable job of connecting these six asynchronous stories through the characters crossing paths and more notably through overworld events adventure 2 has no such overworld to shoulder some of the burdens so its story often feels disjointed and jumpy as you randomly swap between the three characters per side it tries to use little timestamps to keep you clued in on when events are happening relative to one another but you don't get any indicator of what day you're in across the i think three day story maybe four i don't really know and i was trying to pay a lot of attention up until i decided to stop giving a because it's funnier that way so so i i don't know a lot of the time things are just kind of gonna happen whatever the case while sonic gets waterboarded or something we jump over to knuckles in the egyptian desert which in this universe is conveniently located right off the 280 expressway i i really like this game we're sort of just abruptly thrown into a tense conversation between knuckles and the new character rouge the latter of whom feels entitled to the master emerald that knuckles just keeps in his pocket now that's honestly probably a safe spot for it dr eggman shows up during the shouting match to try and steal the emerald for himself but this time knuckles has finally wisened up so he breaks the master emerald himself so that eggman can't take it away it's a bit redundant to have the master emerald break two games in a row but don't again don't think about it too much it's better that way just just trust me so while knuckles starts retrieving all the pieces of the master emerald we jump ahead a day and take control of tails who's searching for his captured hedgehog buddy on the fittingly named prison island here he fights eggman and saves amy from the doctor's grasp because amy somehow also chased sonic to a secret military base i guess amy then rescues sonic in a cutscene because amy is not playable in the story and that's played as a joke a few times honestly it's a pretty funny joke and then sonic rides a rocket and launches into space jumps off lands in the jungle fights shadow who happens to be here and then finds out the entire island is going to explode in the next 8 minutes after sonic tails and amy barely escape that blast suddenly knuckles is doing his own thing again and right after that eggman blows up the moon [Music] ah [Music] look half of the moon is gone let's let's just let's let's just put a pin in that for now because there's a lot to unpack in this first hour of the game this is gonna be the gist for both sides of the story really a lot of things just genuinely happen with no real explanation that makes any actual goddamn sense and then these moments aren't given a second to breathe before you jump into the next character's mission adventure 2 is simply put a spot fest and for the most part i find it hilarious i don't try to think too much about any of it because it only gets unintentionally funnier when you start to take this game remotely seriously with that said i don't fault anybody that does unironically love this story because those of you that might likely grew up with this second adventure game first it's important to remember that adventure 2 was for potentially about 2 million people their first proper experience with sonic the hedgehog thanks to its gamecube release in late 2001 sonic adventure 2 battle is the highest selling non-nintendo game on that system and it was released a full 18 months before sonic adventure 1 got its buggier and overall inferior dx port on gamecube if you want to take an educated guess as to why any given person prefers adventure 1 or adventure 2 a couple years of difference in their age likely makes all the difference here there are countless kids that grew up on essay 2 battle and then played adventure dx and wondered why it handled and looked so much worse on the flip side i'm playing this game from the perspective of somebody who went out of my way to play the better dreamcast version of adventure 1 a version whose smoother controls i actually got accustomed to and now really enjoy after hating the gamecube version's controls for years although compared to sa1 there are far fewer differences between adventure 2 and adventure 2 battle i'm still playing this game as closely as i can to the dreamcast original to follow up on that energy as a fan of adventure 1 first which is funny since i also did play essay 2 first on gamecube before i ever played essay 1 and from my few brief times even back then i still didn't like it at least now though i can fully say why see part of what grew on me with adventure 1 was the game's literal interpretation of the adventure in that title although i used to feel the overworld was messy and confusing and in fact it is and although i felt the game didn't intuitively guide you on where to go many times and in fact it doesn't it was in service of encouraging you to explore at your leisure the game wanted you sometimes for better sometimes for worse to talk to all of the npcs to figure out the path forward and in the process you would realize that these characters text boxes were changing all the time with every event that took place in the game it pushed you to start putting together the overall timeline based on the landmark events that take place across all six of adventure stories such as the train workers strike and this sense of adventure carried through into the gameplay with levels that felt more classically designed under the surface than i'd ever appreciated prior with things like the more challenging skill-based upper paths and sonic's levels that would reward you for learning the level design and mastering the game's controls those alternate paths were usually right in plain sight daring you to get good enough to see what was up there and in turn when going back to these levels for another go you would discover the second and third missions for each and every level that dared you to adventure and learn even more in order to finish the level while holding onto a certain number of rings meaning hey you gotta learn how to not take damage or telling you to beat the level in under a certain time trial goal telling you to hey again get good sonic adventure 2 brings these missions back and actually adds a fourth and fifth tier of mission plus one outright fantastic bonus challenge which i'll touch on a little bit later but in contrast to the first game weaving together exploration storytelling and the high speed gameplay that comes as a reward for that adventuring this game's interpretation of adventure focuses on taking you on a crazy high-octane action-focused adventure in the story without being able to hold to that standard mechanically again only an hour into this game we've already escaped from military custody twice wrote a rocket that was flying into space watched an entire island slash military base explode did some knuckles things and watched eggman blow up half of the moon and almost certainly doom the entirety of humanity and earth in general it's ridiculous and i kind of love that it just starts balls to the wall but the problem is in just the first 30 to 40 minutes of sonic adventure 2 the game already blew through half of sonic's six levels with the second half of the hero story disproportionately focused on the other two gameplay styles which are both massive regressions from adventure 1's versions of the very same gameplay tails's mech missions for example function much the same as gamma shooting galleries at the surface level with the crucial difference that they don't take just 30 seconds to finish anymore in order to stretch out this style of gameplay to make it worthwhile both to develop and to play sonic team took out any semblance of momentum and they made the levels physically longer without adding anything new to expand on the very basic idea of a shooting gallery gameplay style because gamma had healeys on you could sort of build up speed by continuing to move in adventure 2 you sort of only build a tiny bit of speed if you're moving exactly forward relative to the mech if you tilt the stick enough to force the model to turn in any direction whatsoever that momentum is lost and you're back to moving slow now given how often the game likes to cheap shot you with enemies dropping down from above you without warning or with enemy bullets firing from off screen or through walls the slower movement itself isn't necessarily the chief problem here thankfully as well the mechs have their own health bars rather than tails or eggman relying solely on rings and once you learn the level layouts all of these mech stages minus one of them will run you about four minutes or less until you learn those layouts prepare for some relatively frequent cheap shots they won't kill you they'll just annoy you at best the mech gameplay doesn't do anything worthwhile to earn that extra time there's no substantial new idea to truly justify this being brought back i was fine with gamma's gameplay because it was just simple enough that a couple minutes speeding through a level while holding the b button locking onto enemies and blasting was all this was good for adventure 2 takes this slows it down by placing you in a slower mech inside more linear levels with more frequent dynamic camera angles that do you more harm than good and for good measure it throws a bunch of empty boxes right in your pathway to slow you down even more you might be lucky to find a hidden path behind these boxes sometimes but the secret upgrades hidden in each level are either required for progression so they're not hidden they allow you to break other types of boxes which is just fantastic or they give you some slightly stronger weapons or armor which you don't really need because dying or killing wasn't the problem here and don't even get me started about the ear grating beeping noise when you lock onto enemies because man it sucks and more infamously then there's knuckles when it comes to our favorite echidna it's worse than just being the same thing except slower and cheaper in fact knuckles is pretty much just the same speed and has the exact same skill set as in adventure 1. the problems here run much much deeper see sonic adventure 1's treasure hunting gameplay tossed you mostly into open hubs and tasks you with finding three master emerald shards in any order you liked with hints available throughout the level to guide you if you did get stuck it was a fun and logical leap forward for knuckles abilities based on sonic 3. you get to glide through some vertical levels climb some walls and dig for treasure when it comes to sonic adventure 2 the biggest complaint folks have tends to be that you're only able to find one emerald at a time even if another one would have been easily obtainable along the way i actually don't find this to be the big issue here it's problematic certainly but the hint system is a bit more robust than in sonic adventure 1 and the hints themselves can sometimes make it more of an actual treasure hunt rather than you just stumbling around the map oh hey look there's an emerald nearby let me play hot and cold until i find it yay i got it throughout each map now you'll even find little omochao robots to tell you the name of some of the landmarks nearby which sort of does play into the learn explore and adventure mentality that the first game had nailed the names are given simple and obvious but hey it's something and this game is in fact meant for kids so you know simple and obvious kind of makes sense my larger problem comes with the very bad level design most of these levels are either gimmicky way too sprawling and open and possibly vertical or their messy interconnected hallways at worst there's rarely any sort of in-between you are either running through a claustrophobic corridor that yet again doesn't play nicely with the camera what a surprise and opens you up to cheap damage from enemies that you can't quite see or that are shooting you through walls again what a surprise or you're flying aimlessly through a gigantic level and being able to grab only one of the three treasure pieces at any given time means that you're going to have to run back and forth on this goose chase frequently in both of these cases if you get a bad gem location or you're stuck for more than a couple minutes you may as well just pause take a life and restart just to reset the placements don't get me wrong there were a couple levels in adventure 1's knuckles campaign that were on the larger side but they usually still amounted to a single medium-sized hub or a couple rooms even the biggest essay 1 knuckles level dwarfs in comparison to something like pumpkin hill's sprawling empty meaningless level design or meteor herd's absurd verticality and meteor herd also by the way has the added benefit of having meteors randomly crashing into parts of the map and you without warning hope you don't like rings there champ all of this amounts to the treasure hunting gameplay being and i'll say it again a massive regression from the first game just like with the shooting galleries i mean this with all due respect to a very small development squad they simply did not seem to learn what actually worked or needed improvements with either of these gameplay approaches and instead made changes to purely extend the play time out for longer per style fans and critics pointing out that five of sonic adventure's six campaigns were only about an hour long does not equal we want these to be slower or more annoying for them to last longer it means that they needed more substance these are just random spitballs here but what if the mechs picked up a couple new weapon or ammo types that affected different enemies and obstacles in unique ways even though this game released in 2001 sonic teams seemed for some reason insistent on making it a simple two button game so there are two face buttons that effectively go unused that could have let you i don't know swap weapons out or for the treasure hunting and this is just a shot in the dark here maybe the ability to look up or down would have been nice if you're gonna make levels stretch a mile into the air or even into space i would like to be able to look up you know that thing that i could do in the genesis sonic games happy 10th birthday sonic i'm sorry if i hurt you i mean not that looking up or down would have been a massive help here since again by 2001 i need to remind you this game came out in 2001 the team hadn't yet fully implemented distance fog to mask the poor draw distance so you need to get pretty close to some enemies objects or platforms so they can pop in these sorts of graphical issues given were present in the first sonic adventure but i could more easily understand them because of just how early a 3d platformer that sa1 truly was and i could even let them slide a bit more as they didn't become actual significant gameplay issues on smaller levels that were just designed better less is more when i think back to the games that were released from april 1997 when sonic adventure started development to mid to late 98 when the game was functionally finished there aren't really a ton of platformers that sonic team could have learned from as far as how to deal with render distance they were working in the dark it was pretty much just crash mario 64 i guess friggin croc banjo didn't release in japan until much later and it was never popular in japan to begin with so that'd be an easy one to miss everybody was faking it at that point in time this game different story this is a very different era we're talking about here this game's main year of production was 2 000. they had an extra few months when they delayed the game till june just to hit the 10th anniversary and to polish the game up i i get that it's a smaller team and i give that team a pass for not exactly being able to innovate much given its production environment but for god's sake they lived and commuted in san francisco you can't tell me they weren't seeing fog on a daily basis some of the eggman levels inside prison island even have a layer of fog so why do these larger treasure hunting hubs end up being so bush league i know that distance fog isn't the most elegant solution to that problem i mean spyro 1 and 2 were already out in japan one to two years before sonic adventure 2 doing it better than sonic team did on a weaker platform with the same amount of developers on staff but i've got to see at least some sign of progress in a sequel and even something as bad as distance fog would have been a sign of progress here i can only hope that it was due to the circumstances surrounding the game that adventure 2 often feels like it's coasting and mechanically it finds a way to not only not advance it actively steps back due to a core misunderstanding of what fans were looking for with another sonic adventure but that can all be washed away if the main gameplay is great after all sa1 had a bunch of problems and fans still loved it in part mainly because of the sonic gameplay and in essay 2 sonic's gameplay is great right well no because no matter how insistent the game's director may be that they had a blast while making the game that didn't translate to making the game a blast i'm only going to make a few more comparisons to adventure 1 i promise this video isn't intended to be putting this game down because i liked that one more it's more of a case study i learned to love sonic adventure just by taking my time with each stage and character and slow rolling that adventure it quickly began to feel like a classic sonic game like the three-dimensional reinterpretation that they were aiming for the dreamcast's catch-all game that could with decent success appeal to any potential buyer and give sega its moonshot at staying in the console game plus big the cat is just your dad that's a fact and you cannot disprove me i loved adventure 1 so much that ciao notwithstanding i effectively 100 completed it and i began to get excited to play this one next a game that i knew i didn't like to make this video next to maybe finally be able to see what so many people love about this one after all this is adventure 2 a sequel poised to deliver a more streamlined experience following the same framework but targeting the first game's biggest hiccups for improvement sure there would probably be some pros and cons between each game but it should still end up with me loving this one as well and it did not not because the mech or the knuckles gameplay ended up being a step back at a pure mechanical level i can live with that but more importantly because even the sonic gameplay ended up feeling like a step back and there's less of it there are exactly 10 levels split between sonic and shadow the same number as sonic's part of sa1 but these levels just like the other two styles are filled with enough padding that they feel less substantive and shorter overall they're more diluted thanks to the modified story structure they're more linear often gimmicky and feature significantly buggier gameplay that leaves me less comfortable on the sticks the issue of linearity should be fine and it shouldn't really be an issue way back when the booster sonic games were some of the first ones that i properly sat down to play in the first that i really enjoyed but that pesky camera causes issues more often again like with the other characters funnily enough it acts up the most when you try to explore if you ever try to look behind you maybe for a secret pathway or some extra rings the game will let you but the moment you actually try to move against the grain of the level the camera whips back around to where it wants you to go you'll need a good 30 yards of traversible ground behind you before the camera will actually realize what you're doing and shift back to letting you run backwards it's not a huge breaking point for the base game but it goes against the spirit of what i was playing adventure for and it's not a good look when the second and third of this game's five missions per level are focused on exploring and when that third one loves to hide its hidden objective in an obtuse area that you'll have to scour for it just feels like the camera tries to push back on you the more you try to actually adventure at your own pace instead needling you towards taking this much more automated keep looking forward don't think about it gameplay approach those of you that have played adventure 2 will know that that checks out because these levels are full of straight up automated moments take sonic's third level green forest for example it's probably my second or third favorite speed level in the game behind actually now that i think about it the first two right before it this game goes downhill fast wow green forest is the essence of sonic adventure 2 a roller coaster ride that runs you through a series of incredibly narrow pipes that sonic's movement can't quite handle followed by a big set piece or two that each repeats somewhere from two to six times throughout the stage in this level's case the set pieces are these finds that automatically swing sonic around the trunk of a giant tree showcasing the really cool camera work before flinging him to the next part of the stage as well as the trademark giant loop-de-loop that's clearly cut and pasted a few times to stretch the level out on their own i really do enjoy these spots but the problem is that the speed stages by and large take control away from you what feels like every 30 seconds to do something that looks cool in green forest's case it was closer to every 15 to 20 seconds on my first playthrough of the level i went back and i checked you get this tiny little fishbowl to explore in between the big swinging vines or the string of bounce pads you just sit there and watch or the gargantuan loop-de-loops that lead into or out of either of those first two things but you never truly feel in control because the game doesn't trust you or its own level designs enough to let you find that flow state yourself if i wanted my cutscenes to be playable i would play until dawn green forest has an 8 minute countdown timer to pressure you into speeding through it so that you don't notice that the level's so automated and to its credit those automated sections are in fact thrilling before you notice the small man behind the curtain at least the level itself is really only 3 minutes though my first run was about 2 45 and it comes right off the heels of metal harbor sonic's second stage which itself is sub 2 minutes long and is genuinely just a single line full of boost pads guided bounce pads and most frequently chains of rings for you to light speed dash through the reason most of sonic and shadow stages reuse the big loops or the level specific gimmicks like the vines is because without them these missions would only be a minute or two long like metal harbor oh yeah by the way the light speed dash is still tied to the same button as every other move besides jump because again these folks insisted that sonic still had to be a simple two button game that everyone could comprehend while in the same breath telling the most chaotic fill in the blank byzantine story this side of kingdom hearts i don't get it you tell me the only gameplay mod i installed was the one that gives the lightspeed dash its own dedicated button i could swallow the treasure hunting changes even if i didn't love them so i didn't install any mods that let you collect all the gems at any given point or anything like that but i just am not going to play around with a contextual b button that i need to trust to guide me across a bottomless pit when i know from experience in the past that it very often likes to pick the wrong context and have sonic or shadow do a momentum killing somersault that may just heave me into the abyss anyway and this is sonic adventure 2's global problem i would argue it insists that you should trust it and yet it takes control away from you because the team very well knew that it hadn't created a trustworthy game environment adventure 2 is the first game in the series to ask you frequently to chain homing attacks across strings of enemies above bottomless pits and yet the homing attack is worse than in sonic adventure 1. the homing itself is just weaker and sometimes sonic or shadows start to uncurl from their ball right as they're about to hit the next enemy in the chain so say goodbye to your shield or all your rings at best and a life if you're over a pit this right here is one of the first moments you truly have full control in green forest and the stage throws a chain of enemies at you as if to say hey get ready to feel awesome but unless you wait a moment in the air before initiating the next homing attack it's a crap shoot whether you'll actually get to hit the next enemy this is in a game by the way designed to have an intentionally less bouncy jump arc to move away from adventure and the 2d game's style and yet you won't know you have to let sonic hang in the air until near the peak of his bounce arc as if it was adventure 1 to perform this chain consistently especially since in other levels like in metal harbor right before this that timing is different and faster it's never reliable to stick with green forest for one more example because this is actually a good solution that i really like for a problem that just shouldn't exist sonic team added these grind rails to act almost as bowling bumper guards so that you don't just fling off into the void when sonic inevitably collides with a part of this curve that just doesn't jive well and he bumps into the air making you panic because you thought you could trust the game and possibly leading to you over correcting hell i was going to say this for later but you know what let's go there in shadow's version of this same level white jungle the team did that thing it really loves to do where your character drops in from the sky at the very beginning of the stage but they forgot to lock your controls until you land like they do in many of the other levels in this very same game so if you hold forward like you're usually doing without even thinking when you start a level you'll clip through the tree in the background and fall to your death sonic adventure 2 is the reason i have trust issues this isn't some one-off glitch this is consistent and it's another consistent problem that sa2 has you can never be fully certain what your controls are relative to the camera sometimes it's relative to your character's forward despite the camera being at an angle sometimes it's relative to what forward would be to the camera sometimes it just makes no god damn sense at all white jungle total aside since we're going there is even more packed with moments that take control away from the player thanks to these fine pulley things that are used probably a dozen times sonic's pyramid cave level later in the game brings back the tube idea used briefly in adventure 1's lost world and where in that game it was the final eureka moment at which i realized oh oh yeah i feel comfortable with sonic's controls now here i just cannot for the life of me keep sonic on the walls without him hitting some little edge in the curve and falling back to the ground look before anybody gets mad at me i'll fully admit i suck at this part here i'm just for whatever reason i'm dumb and i can't figure out this stupid loop but i'll also say in my defense the game actively sets up a new player for failure to some extent by this point and i'm not even a new player this level is halfway into the hero story well over half an hour after the previous sonic level with five knuckles and tails levels in between and by this point you've had 10 minutes at the absolute most of sonic gameplay in the first hour plus of this game seasoned players i'm gonna need you to put away that seasoning for just a second and hear me out try to think back to your earliest memories of the actual gameplay because even coming in as somebody who just did everything in sonic adventure 1 there's no way for me to learn to trust adventure 2's new controls in the speed stages at least not until i'm replaying them doing the other missions from the stage select maybe doing some grinding to build my chow stats adventure one story structure encouraged you to master one character at a time at the cost of a less centralized story but this more centralized story comes at the cost of allowing you to get comfortable with the game's supposed main gameplay style and even if you are a seasoned player you have to admit that some just does not work adventure 2 introduces grind rails but you'd better be ready to die the moment you have to jump from one rail to another because it's a straight up crap shoot whether you'll instantly lock onto the other rail or just fall to your death the moment you press a to jump not even a jump you'll just fall oh and by the way the final two of shadow's four total stages in this game are rail based and the team clearly knew that the first of these was just a bad level because they throw you more extra life pickups here than i think i saw in the entire rest of the game even better there are some pieces of rails or other terrain throughout sonic adventure 2 that you'll just clip through bolstered by the homing attack always feeling 50 50 especially on the secret or more advanced paths so you'll end up being punished for trying to explore you can straight up tell where the game's play testers ran into trouble because there's an omachao hint placed right next to the problematic sections but it's next to the hazard not a warning that comes up before the hazard and since you're in the flow of the game you're not really gonna notice until it's too late and you've already gotten hit why not show the player that there's a falling platform up ahead by i don't know zooming out that dynamic camera you love showing off so much oh yeah that's right because this game was too fun to make some set pieces such as this light speed dash into a pulley over a bottomless pit they don't work they just don't work at all unless you're either coming into the rings at the exact right angle or speed i can't tell you which but i had to stop and try again and again and again just to admire how straight-up awful this is there are dozens upon dozens upon dozens of moments of cheap level design that you quickly learn how to avoid by performing the most unintuitive jumps and or jerks of the control stick it's the kind of stuff that you don't even realize you're doing if you've been playing the game for most of your life that muscle memory of how to avoid jank that you've since forgot existed due to operational blindness when was the last time you truly thought about this gun robot that drops down on you from behind a wall without warning that you can't see coming in the very first level of the game this sort of thing certainly happened in sonic adventure 1. don't get me wrong but it is a constant in adventure too to the point that until you're replaying these levels again and again and again and again and again and again and again from the stage select and you know exactly where every piece of is you're going to hesitate to go full speed because you can't trust that the game won't hit you or drop you into a pit which makes it all the better when shadow's final level later in the game on top of being full of more grind rails have some fun rewards you for running forward and not overthinking these weird gravity well columns if you stop here you're probably gonna die because you'll hesitate at the weird controls and they'll get the better of you but if you keep running the game has automated it well enough that you'll succeed this constant stop and start is not fun neither within each character's levels nor when i zoom out and look at this game's inconsistent character swapping and pacing i think adventure 2 if you have the desire to replay the stages and get over some of this broken design can be molded into a game where you stop seeing those rough edges but the magic of adventure 1 was that so many facets of its design built you towards mastering the mechanics by the time you were done with say sonic story sonic team understandably nerfed the spin dash even further in sa2 since the spin dash jump combo in the first game could really help you break the levels in your favor but i would rather break the game myself to my benefit as my risk reward then deal with a game that breaks constantly and stops me in my tracks with nothing for me to do about it it's a travesty because for as sustained as that whole rant was just now essay 2 does do a lot right it impresses me in so many ways often with its production values i didn't expect to hear the walkie-talkie banter between sonic and tails in the middle of a stage as maligned as the voice acting sometimes is i think it's a huge improvement over adventure 1 and the characters feel like they've hit their stride because of that as funny as it may look now they seem to have done some proper motion capture work for the cutscenes and although this couldn't be fixed for any of the localized versions it's pretty remarkably lip synced if you prefer to play with your game subbed instead of dubbed i can't begin to say anything new about the mostly stellar soundtrack but i can say that hearing this game's score so lovingly remastered for sonic's 30th anniversary symphony is the direct reason for me giving both adventure games another shot i mean come on you can't tell me that you didn't get emotional at the end of that concert when they whipped out the incredible orchestral remix of death chamber [Music] i love that sa2 introduces three child crates in each and every level so that if you're doing stack grinding or whatever you can jump right from that level into the chow garden just by finding the key that's a massive leap forward from sa1's version and it's the sort of exploration reward that i was hoping to see more of throughout the game i mean it would have been nice if the game just kept all the little animals and chow stat boosters in an inventory of some sort instead of letting you keep only the last 10 things you grabbed but hey you can't win them all and of course best of all adventure 2 was the first sonic game to introduce the now standard ranking system challenging you to get an a rank in all five missions per stage by learning the perfect route mastering the jank and getting the highest score possible adventure 1 had introduced the different missions but this was where they really found their wings by the numbers it's a far more replayable game than adventure 1 but i would rather replay the first one though simply because the levels are better laid out they're less repetitive it feels to me that by and large there are more unique paths to take on them and because i don't feel like i should expect to take damage to some that's out of my control at least once every couple levels sonic adventure 2 is the gift that keeps on taking away i could probably go on for another half hour with more granular level by level critiques for example they took away big look look what they took from us i think i've more than made my point and i want to have fun again so let's talk about how dumb this story is in the immediate aftermath of eggman blowing up half the moon oh holy that's right that was man this game's a tr he gives the country 24 hours to surrender or else and then sonic and tails have one smart moment followed immediately by one very dumb one the chaos emeralds are like magnets they have the power to attract each other i can use that to find where eggman is since the feds are still after our heroes sonic runs interference while tails tries to find out where eggman's taken the remaining chaos emeralds only to realize after 15 hours of looking that they're probably in space you know space the same space where they saw that giant laser destroy the moon this kid can hack government computers trace satellite calls and as we'll shortly find out create fake chaos emeralds that are functionally identical to the real ones don't think about it too much but it took him more than half of the very short 24 hour window that humanity has left to realize that the space laser that needed the emerald's power would probably need to be located in space maybe this game's audio mixing is intentionally bad so that you spend all your time trying to hear it rather than listen and pay attention it would cover up a lot of this you know what i don't even care because after this is the best cutscene in sonic history and i will accept no debate on this knuckles apparently having taken a wrong turn in the underwater mine pops out of the sewer tails hacks into the government files and starts tracking the president's location he suggests that the gang commit treason by hunting down the president in his limo and using his conversation with eggman to find the latter's location and knuckles and amy i guess just sit there a few hours later they're in egypt breaking into eggman's ancient pyramid base knuckles fights a giant ghost and the gang rides eggman's convenient rocket ship into space oh no don't touch that lever this is where i'm gonna jump back and bring about the dark side story because the hero side as you can probably tell leaves a lot of holes for you to discover by playing the other half of the game it also leaves a bunch of other holes but that's just because this game has writing issues sonic adventure 2's plot is brought about when dr eggman infiltrates prison island looking for the mysterious ultimate life form that his grandfather professor gerald robotnik had created 50 years prior that ultimate life form eggman discovers is shadow the hedgehog who tells the doctor to find the chaos emeralds and bring them to the space colony arc shadow then steals one of the emeralds himself and escapes from the military who appeared to confuse him for sonic which brings us to the two hedgehogs meeting for the first time as we saw earlier along the way shadow has a flashback to his early days aboard that space colony with gerald's granddaughter maria eggman having a cousin implies the existence of an aunt or uncle eggman just just want to throw that out there the they these folks they they reproduce go ahead imagine it i promise you revenge also throughout all of this rouge is doing rouge things which are kind of like knuckles things but slightly different things like riding turtles or infiltrating eggman's egyptian base because she's secretly a government spy working for the president to figure out what the ultimate life form actually is so you know mostly knuckles things she interrupts eggman and shadow's meeting inside the space colony because oh by the way eggman also had a teleporter inside that pyramid that can somehow link up with the space station that i don't think he knew about until now but she waits until shadow explains the ark's true purpose first the ark was the first space colony created by mankind not many people know that the ark contained a top secret research facility where weapons of mass destruction were being created oh that's why bush never found them he was looking in the desert area but they were in space all along idi as a part of rouge's government approved galaxy brain double agent plan she gives eggman a chaos emerald and offers to help find the rest in order to power up this space station's secret death laser again government approved plan here so the dark side trio go back to the government's top secret prison island you know the one named prison island to steal three more emeralds and they blow up the whole island for good measure i guess again government approved rouge gets trapped but shadow saves her after another flashback to his step cousin maria and they all go back to egypt to teleport to space where eggman blows up the moon as a part of this government-approved plan with six emeralds in hand eggman discovers that tails had made a fake emerald and rouge informs them that tails was the last person known to have received the real seventh chaos emerald because the government gave it to him as a thanks for saving station square in sonic adventure 1. and of course in between all of this riveting lore is a bunch of new levels which often act as a sort of harder spin on the three gameplay styles outlined in the hero side eggman's gameplay is essentially identical to taleses but with more enemies and hazards rouges is the same as knuckles but with levels that feel more gimmicky in the best scenarios levels that are far more poorly designed by and large and shadow has like one and a half good levels with several of rouge and eggman's levels in between each and every one so that again you don't really have time to get used to how the supposed main gameplay style actually plays the best i can really say is that most of eggman's levels are harmless at least he's got a fun level where the goal is to just blow up all the military robots near prison island he's got some cool light dark gameplay and a little call back to the dark rooms from adventure 1's lost world there are some harmless low gravity gameplay sections which is far better than any of the game's other uses of gravity gameplay and an on-rails roller coaster section it's all fun stuff that's a decent spin on the still very bare bones tails gamma eggman gameplay but even those like the rest of the dark stages end up feeling longer and more bloated than they ever needed to be shadow's only particularly good level is his first one but even that pales in comparison to sonic stages in this same game which themselves i again just don't love that much to begin with the dark stages throw so much at the wall in the name of being different or harder than the hero side stuff but it ends up feeling like there's too much flung at that wall and it's not actually more challenging it's just full of cheaper enemy placements and level design i truly don't have much to say about any of it that's all that kind so i'm just gonna default to what i outlined earlier and say yeah that but worse i've gotta reiterate this game is a spot fest very little feels earned when things just kinda happen in the story with zero room to breathe and nothing feels earned mechanically when there's a wacky underexplored new gameplay wrinkle that just shows up for exactly one level in a game that otherwise steps back in most every way from the solid but flawed framework its predecessor had set up some of the subtext like the parallels between sonic and shadow each being shot out of the space colony in an escape pod by a robotnik one to be saved and the other to be destroyed it's pretty powerful it's well done but it's betrayed by the rest of the game finding a way to dull your senses to all of it before you even get here and then that gets resolved in a cop-out anyway again it's such a weird case almost as if the team was constantly getting ahead of itself during all phases of production trying to slim down from adventure 1 but getting excitedly caught up in such new ideas the whole way through sonic adventure 2 is a game that could and should have been great but it's full of so many missed opportunities and outright weak decisions that chip away at that greatness i mean just on writing alone the japanese strategy guide that may or may not have come out until 100 days after the game itself did does a better job of explaining many of the key story beats than the game itself does that's why i take adventure 2 in such an ironic light because i can enjoy it more as a dumb game full of so many holes glitches poor design all of it the moment i try to take it seriously or think about any of it for more than a second i have less fun i don't know how so many of you manage it and i don't really want to sit here in my incredibly comfy chair to tear down this game for those of you that do love it because i know that's been done before that's why i'm presenting it and what many of you might end up feeling is an insultingly sardonic light i would rather more people give the game a shot for themselves even if they listen to my advice to not think much about it if they have to take it as schlock to do so to get the idea for themselves of what this game is truly like in the context of the rest of the series and in the context of the era in which it released so much of the well that is sonic adventure 2 has been poisoned over the years by folks that argue against it in bad faith because they ignored the context surrounding the game's production that certainly led to it being a good bit messy but at the same time some of those die hard fans have poisoned that well too by so vehemently arguing that it's some deep masterpiece that only true fans get by slamming genuine sonic fans that dare critique the game and by filling in the game's gaping holes instead of just admitting yeah no it's kind of bad here and there but i love it anyway so now nobody knows what to believe anymore and i'm not even talking about the swiss cheesiest parts of this game's story yet we're now right around the point where the two sides collide in their endings and then in the last story or as the game calls it the end everything unlocked once both stories are completed first sonic is stopped right before executing the hero's plan of placing the fake chaos emerald with the six real ones to cause an explosion and damage the death laser because eggman captured amy and was planning to execute her hostage style i will say this scene might actually be my second favorite in sonic adventure 2 behind of course knuckles hey guys because eggman feels sinister and unhinged here a cornered animal squirming and ready to lash out sonic gives in to eggman's demands and is shot out of the station in an escape pod and then shot by a missile for good measure [Music] while tails is fighting eggman's payback sonic is asking me for the first time to do something for him wait hold on tails what the sonic asks you to do several things in just this game alone whatever anyway while tails is fighting eggman shadow despite i think being in stasis for the last five decades reveals that he somehow knows rouge is a government spy while roosh tries to steal the emeralds back for the president rouge then tells shadow that he might be a clone of the true ultimate life form he's not he's not and then shadow goes to fight sonic who somehow learned to use shadow's chaos control move by osmosis to escape that explosion we saw a moment ago despite that being a thing that's built into shadow's dna despite sonic only seeing it happen once and despite sonic trying it with a fake chaos emerald well whatever don't think about it they fight in a really bad boss fight in both sides of the story which looks cool but essentially expects you to die a bunch of times so that a voice clip plays telling you how to actually damage the other hedgehog instead of designing the fight to be i don't know intuitive then sonic stops the death laser by going out into space and throwing the fake emerald into its firing chamber eggman then takes the last real emerald and sneaks over to load it into the weapon anyway and thus commences the last story the end everything where we find out that surprise eggman loading that last emerald activated his grandpa's dead man switch so now the whole space station is going to crash into earth and blow up both remember how i mentioned in the adventure 1 retrospective that i would have liked a final chapter that integrated all of our character's gameplay together in one awesome sequence yeah that was a setup for this game answering that wish all of you that hit me with a well actually need to be more patient next time since eggman either didn't want to actually blow up the planet and he was bluffing or he's now in self-preservation mode he works together with our heroes to figure out how to stop the space colony's impending collision our heroes learn from professor gerald's diary that while building the ultimate life form the government staged a coup and a cover-up out of a fear that this project was going too far awry in the process killing everybody on the ark to ensure silence including gerald's beloved granddaughter maria and blaming gerald for the fake accident that they said took place instead yes this is in fact a sonic game driven mad by his innocent granddaughter's murder he reprogrammed the ark remotely from captivity on prison island so that it would crash if anybody ever brought all the chaos emeralds to the station he may have then brainwashed shadow into thinking that maria's dying words begged him to kill humanity as payback and he wrote in this very diary that shadow would bring about the destruction of mankind as bait bait that his grandson our eggman naturally took so everybody teams up working one by one to access the core of the ark's cannon most notably knuckles swims in water that's almost certainly being used to cool radioactive waste yum hope you grab this hidden upgrade back in the sewer mine level that allows you to breathe underwater because if not you're probably gonna drown good luck once they reach the cannon's core sonic and knuckles find a shrine identical to the master emerald shrines seen in sonic adventure 1 which they can use with the now fixed master emerald to regain control of the chaos emeralds and stop the crash why is this shrine here well lucky for you the game never explains it and as far as i've seen no piece of supplemental lore has ever explained it either even luckier for you if you're one of the folks that started with adventure 2 on the gamecube you'd have zero idea whatsoever what the hell this shrine is even supposed to mean since adventure 1 was a dreamcast only game for another year and a half luckiest for all of us a giant lizard shows up this is apparently the prototype of the ultimate lifeform shadow's beta build if you will what are you doing step bro thankfully just before this amy had finally broken through to shadow who was happily letting the station crash since that's what maria wanted except of course it wasn't amy's begging triggers the real memory that either he repressed or was brainwashed to forget our now woke friend shadow goes to fight this bio lizard thing for an excruciatingly boring four minutes at minimum all while sonic and knuckles i guess walk slowly up that set of like 50 stairs fastest thing alive seriously this fight just absolutely sucks between the sonic adventure 2 staple of not designing very intuitive bosses followed by omachow lecturing you like an idiot after you die the gaps in the ground where you can fall into some biolizard piss and instantly get sucked to your death without warning the camera angle that forces you to stop and start constantly while running away from the biolizard because you're now afraid of shadow getting sucked away by the piss and making you restart this slow pathetic fight or the only challenging part really the bubbles the lizard eventually spawns in the last couple phases that you've got a homing attack one by one to work your way up to the lizard's weak point which doesn't work well at all because the homing attack is bad knuckles then recites the master emerald's prayer in another cool callback to sa1 which most players of sa2 wouldn't understand for a while sonic and shadow gamble for a bid to charge up their super forms and we fight shadow's weird step row in space in an equally kinda weird sonic and super shadow final boss i it's i don't know about this one but hey live and learn is playing so i'll shut up and take it the duo kills the almost unkillable immortal lizard uses chaos control to teleport the station back into a safe orbit yay we've just saved the day but shadow's dead and is never coming back and eggman just sits there chatting with the heroes despite being a war criminal we all did it together seriously somebody should really try and put him behind bars right this moment because he will try and escape just like an adventure 1 and he will get away please capture him now he pissed on the moon like with most of sa2 the ending stuff is cool if you don't really think all that deeply about it i mean we wrote down a whole list of plot holes and consistencies the underexplained or unexplained and just that doesn't make sense throughout the entire game but it all pales in comparison to this right here because man no matter if you played adventure 1 or not that last few minutes comes out of nowhere it's why i kept saying don't think about it too much because enlightenment invariably comes with suffering i'd love to give sonic team usa credit and say that they may have had to shift gears late in production to remove some of the more direct sa1 references once they knew the dreamcast was dying and that adventure 2 would get a gamecube port as a standalone game before adventure dx but given how little of a time frame they would have had to make any such changes i don't think it's plausible the way i took this ending is that whenever eggman's grandfather started development on the ultimate life form he found the murals around adventure 1's lost world while looking for the master emerald shrine and at first thought that chaos represented that ultimate life-form he was desiring to make it would sort of partly explain why the lizard kind of looks like a bastardized chaos and then when that design failed maybe he went back saw the supersonic prophecy murals and designed shadow who himself kind of looks like super sonic with the the dumb spiky quills or whatever that would explain why there are enemies that look like fake versions of chaos why the little collectibles for the chow garden are called chaos drives it fills a lot of the big holes that the game itself never really tries to do but imagine being a gamecube player in 2001 or 2002 having to do the legwork of studying and researching games and lore across three different consoles to even begin to understand this game's story at more than a funny surface level or having to wait two years to buy both a compilation of the classic sonic games and sonic adventure dx before this makes any sense none of this by the way is in either the dreamcast or the gamecube manual this story is so slapdash that it made me put together my own shitty fan theories for it to make sense oh i now i now get how you folks manage it i don't like that i'm sure there are already some of you writing lengthy comments about how the adventure games intentionally didn't tie these story beats together to reward players and make them think critically about the games except even looking past the clear holes that do exist in this game story whether you want to admit it or not even if you ignore the gameplay oversights and the fact that realistically they were probably just in full steam ahead mode and not even thinking about how the story tied together even if you want to wave all of that away a significant portion of this game's storyline is negated thanks to shadows game which proves that they had no plan and were just winging it the entire time there it's revealed that shadow was not based on sonic he's actually part alien and that grandpa robotnik only agreed to work on the project to hopefully find a cure for maria's space aids no before you ask i will not i've never played it and just from exposure alone i feel like a worse human for knowing about it you cannot pay me enough to cover it there is no dollar amount i mean if you want to try patreon.com the golden bulb that's p-a-t-r-e-o retcon or otherwise it took years for this game's story to make sense in the end it's just so incredibly lost in the sauce in a way unlike most games i've ever seen that's what makes it so funny to me because if i didn't laugh i would tear my hair out it's why i continued making comparisons to adventure 1 throughout this retrospective because like it or not this game lives in the pardon the pun shadow of its predecessor even narratively and in pursuit of a more serious story it found a way for me to take it even less seriously in fairness that kind of worked to its benefit because i tackled the story with kid gloves most of the time but it makes it no less strange to me no less of a one-of-a-kind case the only reason this story probably made it through production without somebody saying hey guys you don't think this is kind of trash is because sega was burning and that's a factor that not nearly enough people consider when discussing sonic adventure 2 today we all love to dunk on the dark period of sonic games because of how lost in themselves they got and they really only fell into that hole in the first place because sega was on the brink for essentially the entirety of both this game's production and the two games after it when you start hearing stories about the developers losing 20 plus pounds due to production crunch and just not leaving the office for days on end you start to empathize a bit more with what these games we're dealing with behind the scenes it doesn't make them any better or worse but it's important context to truly appreciate sonic adventure 2 for what it is it cannot be separated from its production and yet that's often ignored for the sake of internet points i'm disappointed genuinely that i couldn't learn to love this game like i did with adventure 1 and it sucks that i definitely like it a bit less now in light of that first game successes to me but you can be damn sure i appreciate more than ever the struggle that those 11 developers went through to produce this game even if it resulted in a wildly weird game and i can appreciate even more now that there are millions of players that came up as kids with this game in its own bubble as their first sonic game kids that looked at the dumb saturday morning cartoon schlock and saw it as the essence of cool i get it now even if i am more inclined to just laugh along at all the ridiculous crap it's why i won't knock anybody's nostalgia of this sort of game being awesome even if in that same breath i'll maybe say that it's best not to go back to let those memories live on untouched at least now after this if you do run back to sonic adventure 2 you'll hopefully gain that newer appreciation i did considering its insurmountable development hurdles even if that means your love of the game might end up with a bit of an asterisk oh yeah and there's multiplayer too which is pretty cool i should probably look at that wait he's he's back dad thank you so much for sharing some of your time with me today if you made it this far i think i can say you probably enjoyed the video so let me blow your mind for every 10 people watching this video only about three are actually subscribed to the golden bolt and if all of you watching right now hit that button i could probably convince wikipedia to stop begging you for money every three months maybe and if you want to keep the sonic party going for just a bit longer make sure to check out my buddy mykonosfans comprehensive video covering every single sonic compilation and collection that's ever been made it's been a labor of love of his for a long while now and if you liked this video he did most of the editing so his video will 100 be right up your alley it'll be a blast trust me and last but not least i want to give a special thanks to all of my amazing patreon supporters for helping make these videos possible including goldstorm 07 a non-42 philly d360 phyrexian sleeper agent the foe3 vincent calico plus adonis alexander bahari christopher smith cooking mama eclipse 2025 even luck faisal b harry hosey ibython jay's reviews james boss justin gregoire lit links rodney 220 debris sadiq terminally nerdy the milkman and buckles chuck low thank you again and as always until the next time i see you stay golden

Channel: The Golden Bolt

Views: 155,409

Keywords: sonic adventure 2 is weird, sonic adventure is weird, sonic adventure 2 battle is weird, learning to love sonic adventure 2, the golden bolt, sonic adventure 2, sonic adventure, sonic adventure vs sonic adventure 2, sonic adventure 2 battle retrospective, sonic adventure 2 retrospective, sa2 retrospective, shadow the hedgehog, sonic adventure 2 review, sonic adventure 3, sa2 battle retrospective, sonic adventure 2 analysis, sonic adventure 2 battle, Sonic the hedgehog

Id: 8srIEYsAEEU

Length: 72min 6sec (4326 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/RavagerTrade]

Somehow I finally managed to get all A’s in every stage. Wish I could do that in school.