SONIC ADVENTURE 2: The Icon Reborn | GEEK CRITIQUE

[Music] June 19th 2001 only a few days shy of the 10th anniversary of the series that had taken Sega to the top of the industry but all of that was so long ago though it was dearly beloved the dream was already dead and so is a celebration of everything he had been everything he had meant and everything he had done Sonic the Hedgehog would appear on Sega hardware for the very last time it was the end of an era [Music] wre 11th 2002 for the first time Sonic appeared on a console of which he was not the mascot on the home system with a very company that he was specifically created to rival and yet this game would be the origin of a new generation of Sonic fans their first impression would shape the future of this series for years to come it was the beginning of a new era this is Sonic Adventure 2 over the past few years there's been a bit of a misconception brewing around this game lately every time I've seen somebody criticized Sonic Adventure 2 it's not with this idea that jaded gamers are only hating on it now in retrospect and they're being unfair to it because back in the day everybody thought it was this amazing wonderful game it was really the best Sonic game ever and just know where are people getting this this narrative just does not describe Sonic Adventure two's reception not among the gaming press and especially not within sonic fandom right through the word go this was a strikingly divisive game that made the flame wars of the 90s look like minor little squabbles in comparison there had just never been such a love it or hate it Sonic game and seeing people respond to it this way was perplexing because here I thought we were all on the same page I thought we were all hyped for Sonic Adventure 2 from the day of the first screenshots came out around III 2000 I had never stopped trying to find war I had never stopped following every lead I could digging through page after page of message board speculation and spending hours on end very slowly downloading real player videos that had all the clarity and resolution of a postage stamp still I would squint my eyes and just get blown away by how spectacular this all looked how much more detailed the characters were the fact that we were gonna get to play as Eggman the way that truck with sim cards flying in real time and then at the very end this single shot of this mysterious black hedgehog man that was a long tough year to be a Sega fan as the Sun started to set on the Dreamcast and on the Sega of old the mere idea of Sonic Adventure 2 came to mean so much to me I knew it wasn't gonna happen but I used to daydream about the game coming out and being so revolutionary that it somehow saved the Dreamcast for all intents and purposes this would be Sega's swan song it would be the capstone of an era saying sayonara to these innovative Daredevils that had made me a gamer so with so much on the line I just knew that Sonic Team would not let us down Sonic Adventure 2 you either loved it are you hated it and me I loved it I absolutely loved it I seriously thought it was the most awesome game I had ever played so yeah when I got online and saw people complaining about it it didn't make any sense how can anyone not love this it made such a stellar impression right from the very first level right from the very first cutscene a military helicopter makes its way through a bright blue sky we never see the soldiers but we hear their radio chatter as they suddenly panic and report that ahead drugs escaped and taken out everybody aboard but even though a fugitive is knocking out soldiers the mood doesn't seem sinister because a playful guitar riff builds up throughout the scene right as it kicks into this terrifically carefree remix of sonic steam from the last game true-blue himself blasts out onto the wing flips up and throws out one of his signature braggadocious quakes talk about low-budget flights no voter movies I'm out of here he propels himself down to the city below the camera hanging there within just long enough from the smirk directly into it from there we brake dynamically in the gameplay into a stage that's every bit as iconic as Green Hill was a decade before you probably know what's about to happen but what may be a little harder to get your head around is why it was something special let me put this one in context ten years earlier sonic one started out in the naturalistic yet stylistically surreal Green Hill Zone the stages that followed had a variety of archetypes that each zone always had this stylistic through-line that was for lack of a better term very 90s as Sonic made his way deeper into the game the zones progressively showcased more and more signs of structure and urbanization and it all culminated in the heart of Robotnik's empire a factory the size of the city spewing untold waste and pollution into the environment the series going forward would iterate on this of course but it would never totally break from it even in Sonic Adventure 1 the zones for the most part still feel like traditional Sonic levels and really seeing them in 3d only makes them seem even more surreal so all of this this is what Sonic was now show me City escape the reason this stage is so iconic the reason everyone remembers it is because of how relentlessly and immediately it hits you with all these distinct elements that are not just excellent on their own but completely different from what had come before this time the game is starting in a city beginning where it used to end but there's nothing twisted or evil about it despite retaining familiar elements like sloping walls and loops the environmental design is a lot more detailed and realistic than it f it could have been in the previous decade sonic team had mastered the Dreamcast Hardware by this point and so this was one of the first 3d games that I ever saw hit 60 frames per second I didn't even know that term at the time but I could feel the difference and it made this the smoothest most phenomenal looking game I had ever seen but the visuals are only half the story the other half of what gives city escape such a strong thematic identity is that theme song you have just enough time to appreciate the aesthetic you're about to hit that first hairpin turn and then this happened [Music] music and sauna games to this point had been all about enhancing and complementing the zone the themes were varied catchy melodies driven and just awesome video game music but this wasn't even trying to sound like video game music as inseparable as this song is from the stage it's not trying to sell or enhance the environment no this song is selling you on the character of sonic the industry was going through something of an awkward adolescence the surreal isn't necessitated by pixel arts was by this point seen as it fee and outdated the ever increasing power of 3d hardware MIT gamers demand that more realistic cohesive worlds after all we didn't want to be playing with cartoony toys for children even if the game did happen a star anthropomorphic talking animals the point is just as this was meant to be the epitome of cutting-edge cool in the early 90s this is pure unfiltered 2001 in video game form calm serious you say summer of 2001 and this is exactly what I pictured right down to the soap juice the previous game may have introduced this to sign but Sonic Adventure 2 is where modern Sonic really came into focus even the jump sound effect is this realistic well instead of a goofy thing this game breaks the mold the series was in for so long casting away of 16-bit conceits and reinventing it as something more contemporary the Sega of old may be gone but with the Dreamcast's dying breath sonic team has made its mascot new again so as of right now it's June 22nd 2001 and after three solid days with Sonic Adventure 2 I have never been more excited or optimistic for the future of this franchise because by all indications the best is yet to come oh wait something's wrong here I mean there's kind of a lot I'm leaving out right I mean yeah I've played it for three days straight but I haven't even finished it yet because I just can't tear myself away from the speed stages is is it really that incredible I'm sorry but I've got to be more than just nostalgic this time to be clear there is absolutely nothing wrong with nostalgia but here's the thing I was doing a video on the Dreamcast all I really needed to do was tell you what it was like at the time this games a little different marah's Arthur idli no shortage of people who can tell you way better than I can what it was like to play Sonic Adventure 2 as a kid although let's be real most of them remember this title screen a little differently because early in 2002 the game was ported to the Nintendo GameCube as Sonic Adventure 2 battle the response in the online community was sort of a collective yeah we had spent six months squabbling over it and all there really was left to do was make jokes like oh wow the game is so much better now that Sonic has around her ears truly the power of the Gamecube knows no bounds but me I was so firmly on the side of loving it that I couldn't wait for the port that extra word in the title referred to a massive upgrade to the multiplayer mode now that was a big part of why the Dreamcast release had kept me coming back and the Gamecube port added tons of new stages and features now yeah it also got rid of a very critical playable character and didn't include any of the DLC costumes but the prospect of finally being able to destroy Kalin and City escape made this a justifiable loss single-player was fairly changed but I was ready to play it again anyway the Gamecube release received pretty harsh scores from critics of the day perhaps an early sign that the series would face an uphill battle outside of the old Sega stronghold but with hindsight I think we can say that neither the critical response or the online fandoms apathy really made a difference here Sonic Adventure 2 battle became the best-selling non Nintendo game on the Gamecube selling over two and a half million copies if this was your first Sonic game if statistically very unlikely that you played it on the Dreamcast that means it was essentially the first Sonic game for two demographics for the Gamecube dominated the hardcore Nintendo faithful and a new generation of young gamers that means that Sonic Adventure 2 battle broke the fan base between an old-school crew to grow but Sega and the our contingent who had little to no memory of Sega as a console maker and it broke that base hard because it itself was such a break from what the series have been before essay 2 did away with the first game's adventure fields and moved progression back to his own his own track there was also a lot of whining when early material only showed three playable characters whereas the first game had six defending these changes it was the first of many many many many times that Sonic team claims they were trimming the fat and bringing Sonic back to his roots which is funny because this game is anything but a nostalgic throwback but I digress sonic adventures overly ambitious design was the result of the insane pressure that Sonic team was under to deliver this all-encompassing killer app for the Dreamcast the expectations of the late 90s demanded more playable characters more modes and features and what 3d platformer would be complete without a hub worlds or run around in it's no surprise that a lot of those elements were long in the tooth even just a few years after release so sonic team was right to streamline the sequel although technically at Victor 2 actually does have just as many characters first game only with half as many gameplay styles the story mode is split into a hero path and a dark path and the whole game is defined by this dichotomy so let's briefly get into the story and if you know me probably isn't a surprise that this is the first time since 2001 that I've really paid much attention to it and if you are like me then you probably really hate when a game doesn't let you skip the story so if you're more interested in hearing me breakdown the games mechanics go ahead and skip to the timecode on screen wait 23:58 I said I was gonna briefly get out of the story fifty years ago Robotnik's grandfather was commissioned by the government to work on a top-secret weapon but the project ended in a mysterious catastrophe our modern-day Eggman finds out about it from his grandpa's diary following the clues to discover that Stan is not what he seems and his grandfather's ultimate weapon is still held under guard in a military base the bad doctor infiltrates the base and what he finds doesn't seem to be a weapon at all no it's a dark hedgehog named shadow who declares himself the ultimate life-form yeah he's basically gonna take knuckles little spot is the Vegeta to Sonics Goku from here on shadow directs Eggman to an abandoned space colony the ark where he reveals that egg is grandpappy really did make an ultimate weapon the Eclipse cannon by harnessing the power of the Chaos Emeralds it can destroy entire planets and that sure sounds familiar I guess the egg doesn't fall too far from the chicken hmm so team dark wants to use this weapon to threaten the world to bend to egg man's will and it's up to team sonic to stop that from happening one thing I remember being really impressed about was how much better animated and expressive the characters were especially compared to si one where characters gesticulated their eyebrows in different directions now I'm not saying for a second this stuff holds up to modern scrutiny characters mouth flaps still don't always match what they're saying no I couldn't really see that on a CRT take my word for it in 2001 this game was gorgeous and it helps that everybody just feels so much more in character sonic never stands still even when he gets captured he can't stop moving his 3d model was a much better match for his new modern artwork and honestly seeing it like this finally made it work for me he just looks awesome the game captures his personality well too he's sure-footed and cocky but he doesn't think before he acts the crux of the story really revolves around shadow the mystery of where he came from and this internal struggle to come to terms with what happened 50 years ago I'm actually not gonna get too much into that in this video there will probably be a better opportunity for all that later for now let's just say that I think of this cool how Shadow was this dark counterpart to our hero who takes himself very seriously as he escapes around on edgy rollerblades you laugh because I'm different I laugh because you are all the same knuckles got a new voice actor and I if then he's supposed to be stoic but sometimes he's just so wooden yeah we'll see about that Batgirl it's weird right the animation doesn't match the line reading compare this to the first game no time for games Sonic give me the emeralds you have right now their knuckles voice actor captured his characters are well-intentioned loner who's just a bit of a dope the new voice actor eventually starts having fun with the role a little more take this but it's pretty inconsistent Bobby here's a plus this game is the last time for a very long time that knuckles is I Cleavon going to be acknowledged as the Guardian for the Master Emerald rouge the bat makes her debut and well you know this character design didn't have quite the repercussions in 2001 that it would today like with a lot of quote-unquote sexy anthropomorphic characters this stuff just kind of makes me uneasy yeah no she wasn't nearly that bad what was though I think she's a little tacked on knuckles and Rouge both kind of suffer from this because there's a lot of times when they're kind of off doing their own thing but I think Rouge gets it worse she likes jewels she's skilled at espionage she's some kind of double agent for the military but even that has little bearing on the plot and if memory serves it never comes up again but hey at least the game series finally got a second playable lady so I guess I'll take it tails is back and the story does a really nice job following up on his character art from the last game in other words tails does believe in himself and this self-confidence makes an agency that he didn't have before he's not solely reliant on Sonic anymore and his intellect and abilities let him play a critical role in coming up with plans for the hero side narrative Lee he's a great contrast to dr. Eggman in terms of gameplay though let's put a pin in that Robotnik himself has embraced the Eggman name since Sonic Adventure 1 and there was a ton of novelty of playing as the series villain the late Dean Bristow did a phenomenal job capture how threatening cunning and ridiculous Eggman is it's cool how this plot is driven more by character motivations and relationships instead of just Eggman stumbling upon some ancient prophecy I remember really loving this overarching narrative at the time and you know what I think I still do but here's the problem while the plot holds up on paper the individual story beats in presentation well that's where I've got some issues let me give you an example at one point team dark wants to steal Chaos Emeralds from a military facility then trigger the island that facility is on to explode so they can cover their tracks the heist is going well until Rouge is captured by military agents and walked in a vault she radios to shadow panic image he's stuck in there with the emeralds but the emeralds are not what shadow is concerned with instead he remembers a girl named Maria who was his friend fifty years ago he still seems to feel guilt and remorse over what happened to her and he won't with the same fate befall Rouge with newfound determination shadow cuts through the forest and warps route out just in time narrative Lee speaking this is the first clue that shadow may be more of a hero than he appears this all looks good on paper but in actual execution we never even see Rouge get captured in one scene you play as her to defeat a boss in the very next moment she's trapped and while shadows character moment plays well in subtext the way that actually plays is as well [Music] [Music] the moment is laminated to a ridiculously cheesy degree and into a shadow cutting off his own line and spouting nonsense and this is not an isolated incident a while later Rouge radios in to report her findings on project shadow oh that's intriguing is she a double agent maybe she has her own ulterior motives for wanting to team up with Eggman but who cares about any of that let's cut with no explanation to Rouge driving a car themed after herself down a ridiculous sky highway awkward non sequiturs like this are all over the game Oh yep sonic and Shadow do look alike don't they it'd be hard not to get them confused I mean Amy is the biggest Sonic fan girl there isn't even she can't tell them apart oh no Rouge slipped in this falling but Knuckles caches are just in time Oh too bad she doesn't have wings this certainly is an important and well-rounded character who is totally not just here to muddled up the plot and justify a driving section what are you even the president of Oh shadow finds out Rouge as a government spy and accuses her of being and that agent rouge the bat but wait if she's that well-known how could he have not made the connection before oh yeah Amy and Knuckles totally saw Eggman go into the pyramid I mean we the audience didn't see it happen but let's just take their word for it Sonic you are right there we didn't see how you got there but you have everything you need to sabotage the Eclipse cannon right now but no he's just gonna stand there while I play another stage completely ignore the weapon that is threatening the planet and then go off to save Amy Sonic Adventure to stuff scenes all soapy for some dire sounding bizarre to up 600 interrupting ovaries no choice actors weren't corrected to match their economies to Japanese dub but in other cases the script itself is sloppy gato has the signature move called chaos control where he uses an emerald to well sometimes it freezes time sometimes it makes me sure teleports and sometimes it's a projectile the game is not really clear on it anyway there's a scene where this enormous monster called the bio lizard uses chaos control which doesn't indicate them that it might be related to shadow somehow so when he sees this shadow is supposed to react with surprise was that chaos control but no instead the line was translated as is that what chaos control is yet despite not always being timed or translated well the English voice cast was seemingly directed to sound exactly like their Japanese counterparts in certain situations Yosh Yosh Yosh I guess the sounded natural in Japanese but it's pretty off-kilter in English and near the end even the core of the plot falls apart shadows turned to the good side is predicated not on his own sense of morality but on a me of all people jogging his memory reminding him that 50 years ago Maria didn't ask him to take revenge on the people of Earth no she wanted him to give them a chance to be happy this means that everything shadow does good and bad is based on what he thinks someone else wants instead of his character being resolved by who he is also the story doesn't really capitalize on its potential as well as I could whittling the number of stories down to two was the right move yeah at least you no longer have to watch some of the same story events play out six times but there were a lot of cool things that could have been done by seeing the same story from two sides and hit the game only really tries this one time and by the way when I saw that section for the first time I was playing the dark story and being 13 I genuinely kind of thought that because I done that story first the game had killed off its title character farewell Sonic forever but actually in the end it turns out its shadow that dies you know despite how fast this turn was this antihero sacrificing himself having fulfilled his promise actually was our really poignant moments and a fitting end for the character except of course it wasn't the end and by the way what even killed him and whatever it was why didn't sonic also die he and Shadow were in identical circumstances and seriously this is always bugged me anyway it's easy to criticize this stuff now but the truth is the presentation issues didn't really take much away in 2001 on the contrary the internet had made me enough of a wannabe otaku that a game that sounded so obviously so fortuitously translated from Japanese was just a really cool I saw the plot as a darker more mature more sophisticated story that was a to appropriate for a real gamer like me I mean I I was a man now and Sonic had grown up with me this time around I enjoyed the story for being campy charming taking itself way too seriously and generally being the overall narrative does hold up and in fact this may still be the best quote-unquote serious story the game series has ever done but that's saying much but it does prove that it's possible for a Sonic game to present a more epic traumatic plot without losing sight of who its characters are no matter how high the stakes get Sonic is still Sonic and what you see is what you get well so much for being brief you know maybe that says something though a lot of times when I'm approaching a game to make a video about it I ended up noticing and kind of appreciating things that I might ignore if I was just playing it for myself I'm not typically a story gamer and I didn't think I'd have much to say about the plot but the fact that there's so much more of it to sink your teeth into is no doubt something that a lot of the people who love this game love about it but all that being said let's get back to what I really loved about it the speed stages I wasn't kidding earlier I really do think that this was the first time they made Sonic really work in three but what I didn't see in 2001 was that in order to make that happen sonic team had to change the serious core gameplay compared to the last game movement in general is a lot tighter and more controllable the Spin Dash has been nerved in essay 1 you could spam it indefinitely but an essay 2 you have to specifically hold down the button to rev up if you just tap it instead all you'll get is this momentum killer of a somersault it's inoffensive enough but it's probably the one aspect of the moveset that I don't care for but hey at least Sonic misty flips out of it that's cool sonic can still run our roll straight off the side of ledges same as he always could but when he hits the ledge over a Death Zone he automatically puts the brakes on instead of just careening off of it this is even programmed so that if a platform should move beneath him he'll be able to walk off of it again it's really clever how they appropriated something the series is always done to make the game more forgiving in 3d most famously of course this was the first and only game where sonic sports those totally phat soap shoes and yes these were real shoes you could buy with real money and they're dumb and dangerous but I didn't care I spent my early teens desperately wanting a pair although if I'd gotten the mind may not be here to tell the tale but even though Sonic lost the shoes rail grinding is stuck around and it's a great fit for the series what wasn't such a great fit was the upgrade system which returns here from sa one with pulsing bracelets neon green shoe soles and freakin sunglasses but into the game the clean designs of the character models are more ruin than ever before I guess I can give it credit for being a little bit Metroid II the way you can take upgrades in the previous levels and use them to find even more abilities but seriously some of these are pretty freaking superfluous look at me I can turn enemies into little balls and at least you can mob a pc version to hide the models but you know I'll still take the upgrades here because a fully decked out head jug really is something special the bounce bracelet might seem like a pretty OneNote ability that just lets you jump higher but it ends up raising the skill ceiling once you learn how to apply it it snaps you down with a ton of momentum so it's useful for regaining speed up her jump and for rocketing into grind rails at max speed the Lightspeed dodge has been upgraded from a start and stop charge move to a single button blast and the humming attack has a teeny tiny cooldown that makes so much more satisfying all of Sonic's abilities flow together through the stage design creating an unprecedented sense of speed driven by a player controlled tempo when the GameCube version was released a lot of apartment stores had a playable demo of City escape by this point I knew to stage like the back of my hand and whenever I played it in these public places it would actually attract a crowd of people that speaks volumes about how hard sound convince your to grab your attention how impressive it looked and more importantly how impressive it felt to play it well in 2001 Sonic Adventure 2 booked me immediately and it was all because of these stages it didn't really matter what the rest of the game was about kind of put up with anything to unlock more of them in fact by the time I had finished the story I remember I had already replayed said he escaped more than 50 times it was addictive it was awarding it was a reinvention of Sonic to the modern era it was like nothing else I never played it but it most definitely wasn't anything like this and in the long run I think that's why the game has been so divisive it draws such a hard line separating classic from modern I think it's safe to say that I am good at Sonic games but the way that I'm good at Sonic 3 feels like a completely different skill set from the way I'm good at Sonic Adventure 2 in essay 2 I know the golden path through every stage I'm not saying I'm perfect at it but I know what I need to try to do jump Lightspeed somersault Spin Dash it's a lot of muscle memory and my usual response to making a mistake is to restart the replayability comes from learning each and every beat of a level and it is positively joyous when you fall asleep you all of it and yet the classics even though they're the part of a series that I played the most don't feel like that what I know here is not a rote memorization of the level design but the nuances of the physics engine that defines it I understand the flow of a game I understand how to thread the needle that is my character up and down and all around every peak Valley and obstacle and by the way that applied even my first time through Sonic mania in stages where I had no familiarity with the layout I couldn't know what was ahead but I could anticipate it and react to it in a way that felt like second nature to this point in the series going fast was just one approach a player could take they might also be trying to horde rings to get into a special stage or exploring for alternate paths and secrets or carefully taking their time to an unfamiliar zone just trying to get to the end but no matter what approach you took whether you were trying to or not over time your skill would sharpen and you gain the ability to tear through zones that used to give you trouble being more open to approach is one reason the classic sonic still enjoy some more widespread appeal than even the best of the 3d series and early in development Sonic Adventure was pretty clearly trying to translate that same formula into 3d a couple of test stages and early concepts have been found over the years and within them we see a vision of Sonic Adventure without speed boosters automation where the character can make it do loops just by the grace of the physics engine the problem the developers ran into was little well no we can't at least not consistently Sonic Adventure is a game that's built on this buggy unpredictable imprecise engine and held together with a lot of duct tape yeah it'll still let you pull off some pretty crazy things but you're gonna have to learn how not to break it before you can get there and that's probably why in Sonic Adventure 2 the focus of the gameplay is not on physics it's not on earning speed Sonic Adventure 2 is what the marketing always aspired to it puts more emphasis than ever on how fast how skillfully how spectacularly you made it to a stage to the point that it even ranks you for it in contrast to everything that came before Sonic Adventure 2 is a game about growing fast but unlike a lot of my fellow old Bartz who grew up with the tennessee's I actually believe that this was the right thing to do after all the complex physics that have made the classics what they were couldn't be replicated the hardware of this era and even if they could there's just so much more that can go wrong in 3d so on the flip side a high-speed spectacle platformer was a natural fit in this perspective where the sense of momentum is so much greater and the player can see so much further ahead Sonic Adventure 2 no longer even attempts to be 2d sonic in 3d and this comes with a lot of upside you don't really have to learn your way around the physics of this game and that alone helps it make a better first impression even now you always see players unfamiliar with the series get stuck in places like this this just isn't something that would happen with adventure two's design philosophy but I think over the years some downsides have been revealed to the games in this series that use spectacle as the incentive instead of spectacle as the reward don't ages gracefully something like this was an amazing set piece in 2001 but in 1991 so is this even though this doesn't impress anymore it's over in a second and more importantly it still has the underlying gameplay to fall back on but with Sonic Adventure 2 on my billionth time through these stages I noticed I'm spending a lot of time just kind of holding forward while what used to be cool stuff happens even as early a city escape you can feel a little bit railroaded I didn't admit this earlier but the first time I ever played the game right I was feeling I was in the zone and racing along and oh yeah here comes another one of those hairpin turns and oh okay well that's a bit of an emergent breaker streamlining and simplifying the layouts makes the game more consistent that it means there's not as much to see off the beaten path aside from a handful of upgrades and all-too-brief alternate routes and look that's okay that makes sense the main focus now is just a blast through a stage and make it awesome so the design doesn't really need to be as complex but the trade-off is just that it's the sole focus and there's only one right way to play it but this sort of specialization was a real easy sell to me because my favorite thing to do in the classics was to try to just speed through everything as fast as I could anyway and this is not at all to say that Sonic Adventure 2 whacks certain more recent titles of me the mistake of streamlining to the point of automation but that's definitely not a fair criticism here it leans harder on spectacle sure but between all the set pieces there is still a ton of skill mastery to sink your teeth into but as much as it gelled with me at the time I definitely think this more speed focused approach has been done better since and I get why this isn't what everybody would want their sonic game to be especially because Sonic Adventure 2 is infamously only actually trying to be a Sonic game 1/3 of the time what I've talked about up till now is only one of the three gameplay styles and it is very fortunate the speed stay just stick the landing because well nothing else does Sonic Adventure 1 had way too many characters for its own good but the core trio of Sonic Tails and Knuckles had a certain resonance they could all still curl up and let momentum take over they visited a lot of the same levels they fought a lot of the same bosses and they paid as iterations on the same core gameplay in Sonic Adventure 2 each piece of gameplay trifecta is much more specialized and each character plays through their own unique stages this sounds good on paper and I bet it was a lot easier on the stage designers when they weren't trying to cram multiple character paths into one zone but in practice it comes with some consequences and the most obvious of those is what they've done to tails yes it's finally time to unpin you box-boy tails is the hero side parallel to Eggman and he spins the whole game confined to a mech this was always such a glaring conceit now yes tails is also the brilliant inventor type so I guess if anybody is going to convert a biplane into a bipedal tank it's either him or this guy but it is so countered to why you'd want to play as tails and make no mistake all the way back when we laid eyes on that first trailer we absolutely did want to play as tails remember this fandom was a lot younger back then and there were scores of angry poorly written message board threads not to mention emails directed at Sega screaming at them for even thinking about making a Sonic game without tails well get out your tinfoil hats cuz I've got a theory the revealed trailer makes a point to highlight sonic knuckles Eggman nobody else so it's always seemed to me that the game might have been meant to feature only these three as playable characters but during development sonic team decided to or was forced to change direction that same trailer shows sonic running around in the stage that would ultimately be assigned a shadow and by the way even in the final game sky whales music still matches Sonic's motif and not shadows here is a pretty enormous piece of evidence and thanks to main memory for this one the internal data structure freaks gameplay style groups objects into three categories one named for Sonic 1 for knuckles and one that's specifically just called egg Walker more than anything of course if this is true it explains why tails would need to be shoehorned into that egg Walker Sonic Team didn't have enough time to do it right but they needed tails to be a playable character so this is what we got the story makes no attempt whatsoever to justified why tails is in this mech the characters never remark on it and he even appears without it in a ton of critical story scenes actually this would go a long way to making an explanation for all the story inconsistencies and then presentation problems considering how hard it would be to cram twice the playable characters into the plot but hey that's just a theory regardless of how they got there both Eggman and Tails plotted these ridiculous bipedal mechs I always thought it was pretty goofy that something this big could nonchalantly bounce around their size means the mechs are a bit clunky to control but it's so well tuned appropriate sort of consciousness that doesn't get in the way it might look a bit strange but the actual controls are fine what holds them back is the level design shooting stages tend to have a ton of enemies on screen at once but that leads to a lot of little projectiles that you can't really dodge because of the next size and instead of relying on the tried-and-true ring system tails and Eggman both have a health bar I think this was done with purpose the health bar means you have to take your time and be a little more precise and strategic and taking down enemies because if you just ignore them and try to bleep force your way through you'll get overwhelmed but this invites a comparison began ah you cannot brute force your way through those stages either because they had a timer that went up when you combo groups of enemies reward for doing well is leniency and the consequence if you don't is that you run out of time but an sa-2 of the reward for doing well is just points which is a lot more nebulous if I were ranking adventurer ones for raid of place Isles I would say gamble was the best of the rest Gama stages were better designed to flow in mind whereas si tube just features way too much punky platforming and even whole sections for you're locked into an elevator ride it leads to a lot of sages that just overstay their welcome now there are some well executed exceptions like cosmic wall or Mission Street but even if they're worse the tuning stages are never broken or even necessarily bad they're just kind of dull and that is not something this series should ever be so yeah in conclusion they somehow took this and made it even less like a sonic game but bringing back emerald hunting now that made a lot more sense while the rest of Adventure one was this over-ambitious mess of a game Knuckles place out was something 3d games had already figured out and excelled at it was open world exploration through the unique lens of a Sonic game the controls have once again been refined for the sequel they feel more precise and it's more clear when you disengage from a wall speaking of knuckles and Rouge can now dig into walls and really the best change is that digging is no longer such a momentum breaker before you had to come to a complete stop and hit two buttons to dig now you can just jump up into the air and strike like a meteor and on a weak pathetic earth unfortunately the same unnecessary setbacks that made some of the shooting stages such a chore have also infected the treasure hunting to such a degree that I think they might actually be worse in essay 1 the radar would pain for any of the three stars in your vicinity but an essay to it'll only ring for one at a time there's just no excuse for nerfing the radar like this except I guess to make the game last longer if you happen to find a piece the radar is not being for there's nothing that stops you from picking it up and it's not like these stages are linear on the contrary too often hunting levels artistic over-designed take security hall for example the levels split into two sections the lower path is filled three layers of both the roots can dig into to open and a top path has switches each one of these three switches enables you to open one of the three default layers but only one switch at a time could be activated when I played security Hall I could tell the first emerald was in a blue ball trying to climb up turn on those vaults head back down and open it a roll number two was getting hits right up here near the ceiling of the first floor so I knew I had to be on the second level as fate would have it it was hidden right next to the switch I had hit earlier but thanks to the radar nurse I had no way of knowing that so now for emerald number three I had to go back down figure out what color vault I needed to open climb back up for the third time hit the switch and oh no and this is why the radar nerf hurts so bad if it still worked like it used to the more ambitious level design one of the felt so convoluted on the other hand if the stages were still as compact and focused as they were in Sonic Adventure 1 the radar nerf wouldn't have been as big a deal but these two issues together almost ruined treasure hunting I say almost because of a smattering of really awesome zones like pumpkin Hill with its wide open design and so bad it's perfect to music it works for the same reason Red Mountain worked but a lot of hunting stages leaned toward the other end of the spectrum and the worst of them are just a series of repetitive runes linked together by boring hallways so let's recap sonic team has taken 2 gameplay styles that worked well in Sonic Adventure but instead of building on them they've subtracted from them they're both worse off than they were before but they're not let down by the controls of the physics they're let down by the stage design both of these styles have a handful of polished well-thought-out zones where it all comes together but as a whole they're impacted hard by a problem that sonic has never faced before a signature of the franchise to this point was the way that every single zone was so distinct from the rest unique in terms of graphics set-pieces music and gimmicks a lot of other platformers had more levels but they got there by reusing assets even among the myriad of Green Hill mock offs it'd be hard to mistake one for another Sonic 3 stepped it up to another level by making act 2 remix of act 1 and while Sonic Adventure dropped the designation it took the concept even further Sonic might start out in a mountainous valley only to be ripped up by a rampaging tornado he navigates up and out of it and a sky-high wreckage is all that remains once the storm passes each quote-unquote act even has its own music the levels of Sonic Adventure might not have been as believable as City escape but they were a wonderfully varied set of video game levels with an extremely strong sense of internal progression this relentless city that never sleeps crescendo down way down into a surprisingly laid-back sunrise and a still eerie calm of ice cap makes its wild groovy climax even more of a rush but Sonic Adventure 2 does not do this most of its zones are static and unchanging for the most part where you start is where you'll finish stages don't really iterate on their theme oh yeah themes that's another issue the level music in essay 2 is defined by which character you're playing as first and the environment that you're in second so every sonic stage has this guitar driven but rock and I love it every knuckles level has cheesy rap music and I love it shadow is associated with this angsty industrial sound with lyrics they're a mixed play too low to make out and root as [Music] uh whatever this is supposed to be I couldn't finish her stages fast enough to stop hearing this seriously I do love plenty of these songs but it means the soundtrack has nowhere near the scope or variety of its predecessor if I can invoke my tails theory one more time this unusual reuse of assets and the obvious contrast between well-polished stages like this and awful concepts like this could just be another result of Sonic Team stretching their game from three characters to six and if you don't buy into that theory maybe it was just because they had a crunch to get it out for the 10th anniversary wanna be the last time something like that happened either way I always thought it was strange that for as important as he is to the story shadow only actually has four levels whatever the issue it led to something the series never ever had before filler it gets especially noticeable when the story hits the third act and the whole cast has brought into space honestly though for me personally I love that aesthetic say just like cosmic wall and final Rush are some of my favorites and the gravity gimmick that a lot of these sages have is a lot of fun but the point stands this many stages that all follow the same theme leaves they just don't stand out as much oh yeah and then the game tries to do this whole planetary gravity thing Super Mario Galaxy little mouth but that was still six years away huh unfettered ambition years before it's technically feasible mr. Lee is a Sega game Mike with everything else there are cases where the potential of this approach is realized ideally each hero side stage would have a strikingly dark counterpart which would be automatically perfect replacement for the multi act structure a great example of this is Sonic's green forest contrasted with shadows white jumbo or City Escape compared to radical highway these levels are like two sides of the same coin but there's no mistaking one for the other the emblem system from the last game has seen a substantial improvement every stage now has five mixes to complete instead of just three and each mission now ranks the player as long as the stages fun the missions are - they might introduce a time limit or even rework the layout and replacement to be more challenging on the other hand the mission to collect 100 rings is a bit arbitrary and the one where you have to find a loss of showers and well it's not exactly conducive to the speed stages in particular the scour and entire stage for this weird little object which opens up a new path when you play a magic light flute at it oh and before you can even do that you also have to find the appropriate upgrade for every character individually but hey maybe if you like 3d exploration for its own sake more than I do you'll get more out of it giving the player more optional stuff to do and ranking how well they did it was definitely a great addition anything that improves replayability as a win in my book let's talk about the hint system essay one had these light balls representing the soul of Tikal si tu has hello ciao I knew you'd come but you know what he's actually not as bad as I remembered I think I might have been conflating his later appearances with this one cuz he'd eventually start chiming in whether you wanted him to or not but here he turns out to be well placed enough that you're unlikely to hit him unless you want to yeah his voice is a little grating but given that you can do this I think sonic team was in on the Joker hey it's not like he's the only much-maligned character who keeps hilariously popping up where he doesn't belong but speaking of Omochao I guess if I'm ever gonna do this this will be my last chance but Chao garden was a concept first introduced in Sonic Adventure 1 well technically it was kind of an offshoot of my Toby insisting from nights into dreams but there it was so subtle and understated that I don't think anybody knows how it works an adventure to the chao garden sees a lot of refinement there's a slew of new animals that raid stats and came to cow's appearance and gun robots dropped chaos drives which can raise stats without changing appearance fate the new system even incorporates the hero versus dark theme shower will take on different characteristics depending on the alignment of the characters that raise them there are also two new unlockable garde based around either theme I also really like the way you access the Chow garden now you can do it through the menu yeah or you can find a Chow key somewhere within each stage then when you beat the level your character automatically gets transported there so as you progress through the story or work on missions you can choose to take regular breaks to check on the chow it's a good place to relax and unwind and I'd sometimes go in here just to get a few minutes playing his tails without the mech but despite all the improvements well necklace tails was really the only reason I ever came here I think the reason I got into it for a while in the first game was because of the vmu connectivity by 2001 but novelty had worn off and all my batteries have died oh yeah and also the online component which was such a big part of the appeal in adventure one was completely left out of the sequel the GameCube version was actually the first game on that system that had GBA connectivity and that was neat and all but come on if I've got a gameboy advance right there I'm just gonna feel like I'm wasting my time doing this but you know that's just me I know a lot of players really love the Chow the mode itself is so countered of the gameplay of the series but I'll give it credit because it does definitely encourage replayability through the stages and that's the important thing still the only reason it came to be in the first place is because Adventure one needed to show off every single thing the Dreamcast could do but nowadays I prefer they just put development resources into making a better Sonic game oh yeah you did still have to winch our races to earn a few emblems I did everything else legit but I kept putting this off and my procrastination was rewarded when this legendary Chow editor program for the vmu was released that fall you better believe I put that thing to use this game had 180 and moons to collect compared to 130 in the first game when you got them all in Sonic Adventure your reward was nothing whatsoever so this is another case where Adventure 2 seizes an opportunity for improvement because when you get them all here this icon appears on the stage select nobody knew about this for a few weeks after release and even now the game keeps it a secret right up until it shows you three oh my god this was cool look nowadays green hill zone has been driven into the ground over and over and over and over again that games back then almost never played on a style like this what really brings at home of it details the musical remix is still evocative of adventure to style in this stage only sonic regains his old jump sound effect and the layout is a match for Green Hill Act one but in 3d that means it also serves as an example of why that old approach wouldn't have worked from this perspective the ramps don't really feel right you automatically get pushed through the loop and some boosts pads and launchers had to be implemented to keep things steady it's an example of how the adventure era could no longer just rely on physics nonetheless especially in this game that did so much to reinvent Sonic this was a wonderful reward for a dedicated player a fitting love letter to the Past and a perfect tribute for the 10th anniversary one of the few things that characters do sometimes share are boss fights and there are three tiers first you've got the character vs. character battles which are I'm gonna be better than they were in adventure 1 but that's not really saying much really though they're fine and given the game's hero versus dark theme it'd be weird if they weren't there later in the game they happen again but this time the AI is better and you fight in different environments these are a little more interesting knuckles and Rouge have this vertical battlefield sonic and shadow have a never-ending highway and tails and Eggman have well they fight again but with an exploding thing this time the second tier are the battles against gun military fighters these might not be anything to write home about but they're over fast and I like that you fight them as different types of characters I was always intrigued by this text scroll I couldn't make out a single word without a beat da box and it Scrolls by way too fast to read but it's another one of those flourishes those fully fleshed out details that didn't need to be there now I miss the old Sonic Team again far and away the best of the bosses though are they unique in any encounters the egg golem has a great design and a fun gimmick and I love the way the fight gets harder as it goes on after sonic damages the control units the egg golem turns on its creator and it's awesome to see the same fight through the lens of a totally different type of character shadow paisa bio lizard and this one's a little more tedious but I do appreciate the sheer size of this thing and the way it incorporates rail grinding but the best fight in the game and man one of my favorites in the whole series is Knuckles battle against King boo-boo this guy has a design and a voice that are unforgettable and the strategy it takes to beat him is really clever this boss fight incorporates all of knuckles abilities and it's another instance with the potential of the specialized gameplay pays off oh and I really want to be doing this game justice if I didn't talk about this nothing nothing was more awesome than the finale where you play this epic length stage with a really novel time-freezing gimmick that combines all three gameplay styles the whole cast reaches the core of the arc and then sonic and Shadow finally set aside their differences and team up to take down the bio lizard see if this monster that's a prototype of shadow I think right all that really mattered was at this giant lizard monster has dubbed the space colony Ark up its butt and directed it on a collision course with earth it's time for our heroes to turn it of supersonic and super shadow to save the world as a final boss gameplay wise this is no burping chaos and it's mechanics from how you damage it to its tax - especially the character swapping you're all poorly explained and repetitive but it's more than made up for by the sheer tenacity of that song and thus your tension of the aesthetic I I still love this I've always loved this the oh so cheesy way their eyes open the coolness factor of their power auras and are flying around through 3d space and oh god do I ever love that theme song the reason that live and learn kicks your teeth down your throat so hard is the way that it's teased throughout the game you'll hear the instrumental every time you hit the title screen if you're playing battle you'll hear just a hint of it in the intro it's even foreshadowed into the escape so when you finally get here for the first time you hear that wildly passionate opening bursts and you realize just as the chorus drops that oh this is the same song I've been hearing this whole time look I confess maybe my musical taste is a bit one-dimensional it was forged by Power Rangers music with it's ridiculous lyrics and abundant rock guitars but I'm not ashamed to admit this live and learn is not just one of my favorite video game songs it is one of my favorite songs full stop I love Sonic Adventure 2 in 2001 it challenged me if redefined my perceptions of the series and it absolutely blew away my very high expectations as I saw those credits rolls the first time I felt like I had finished a true epic and a game that was destined to be one of my all-time favorites and yet it was bittersweet to think that we few Dreamcast owners would be the only ones that would ever experience it of course that's not the way it went on either count Sonic Adventure 2 became the game that made the next generation of Sonic fans and it would be loved by millions but somewhere along the way I stopped counting myself among them I mean I can't even tell you the name of every zone I could do that for all the others to this point yeah I never stopped playing the speed stages that the game as a whole was so much less than the sum of its parts and in the long run I guess it just didn't make as much of an impression but then again how could it I was no longer isn't personable this was the first game in the series that I never played during my childhood because I couldn't have yeah I was only 13 but still my freakin voice had already changed I was just barely tooled to really have that kind of all-encompassing childhood nostalgia for Sonic Adventure 2 maybe the fact that I was on that precipice this write writing this video is felt pretty disappointed there have been times where I feel like I finally got my finger on the core of everything that's wrong with Sonic Adventure 2 but then I always get pulled back and been thronged by one of the many things that I love about it the truth is even after everything I've said I still can't give you an easy summary of how I feel about this game yeah maybe that's also why it's turned out to be so long it's like I'm arguing with myself but it's also because the game itself is disjointed flip-flopping between disparate gameplay styles never really staying at a thrilling high or a frustrating low for more than a few minutes there's a lot that I love about it but I wonder sometimes if I judge it more harshly now because of how aware I am of the lessons that Sonic Team took from its success I've spent a great deal of time in this critique comparing Sonic Adventure 2 to its predecessors especially this one and you know of course I'm gonna do that for me Sonic Adventure 2 was the tenth anniversary of what had always been my favorite franchise it was the direct sequel to a game that I'd loved and I saw it as another thread in the long tapestry of the series but for that next generation Sonic Adventure 2 might as well have not even had a 2 in the title they had no frame of reference for what tails was supposed to be how different the game was the things that had been lost what had been gained for them Sonic Adventure 2 came first and people have a lot of affection for things that they see is coming first I don't hate this game but I vehement ly disagree with this notion but it was the last time the series was any good as if this was the one and only time they ever made it work in 3d and oh if only Sega made him like this again then thought it can be saved when I know I remember it being such a strikingly divisive game right from the start I can't tell you how many times I've heard somebody a little younger than me say something like dude when I was a kid I loved Sonic to battle adventure but you know the fact that these people were so young when they played it that they can't even really remember the name is just an indication of the misconception I talked about way back at the start of this episode if you played Sonic Adventure 2 battle when you were a kid I'm sure you do remember everyone you loving it back then and it's possible that some of your base gaming memories were formed with it and now here comes a bunch of curmudgeonly all dudes to try to ruin it and say no your childhood was strong and your memories are lying to you all bout a 16-bit these are the only real good sonic games Sonic has been so many things too many things each and every one of those things has grown its own subset of the fandom but unlike a lot of people I have loved at least a game or two in every era this series has been through this fandom would be a lot better off if we made more of an effort to accept that other people might enjoy aspects of the series that don't work for us and I think we should try to understand and appreciate that perspective instead of taking it personally after all there is a clunky awkward horribly aging Sonic game that I am very nostalgic for it's the last one that I did get to play when I was still a kid and year-over-year I find more affection for it and I also remind myself that for a lot of people and a lot of you Sonic Adventure 2 was your first exposure to this series it defined and shaped your expectations for what Sonic should be and it may have even been the video game you ever loved just like a certain other game with a two in the title was for me the speed focus gameplay that really chilled with me got carried forward and it took a long time that that part did eventually get done better that everything else about Sonic Adventure 2 just hasn't really been attempted for over a decade now because as refreshing well-executed and contemporary as it was in the early 2000s most of the things that defined this game would soon be driven like a stake right through the heart of the franchise this would lead directly to Sonic's darkest hour a perfect series of errors and miscalculations that would poison his reputation for generations to come and because of that the series survived only by eliminating almost everything that maybe adventure era what it was that I'm sure just makes this game even more revered so for those who yearn for a greater focus on story for a more serious take on the franchise for an epic scope with higher stakes for a very cast of playable characters for those who want nothing more than the return of the chao garden for each and every one of you still dreaming of Sonic Adventure 3 I get it I'd be interested to see how it's done and I think it could be done but next week it's time to turn down the story focus write to the cast of characters way too high and learn about the real superpower of teamwork I'll be covering sonic heroes you can see that episode and the entire rest of this season right now via my patreon thanks to all of them for the support thank you to everyone for watching and until next time you keep Deccan I'll keep critiquing [Music]

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 671,723

Rating: 4.815021 out of 5

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen, sega, sonic adventure 2, sa2, sonic adventure 2 battle, dreamcast, nintendo, gamecube, nintendo gamecube, sa2 battle, review, critique, analysis, retrospective, sonic team, sonic, shadow, shadow the hedgehog, tails, knuckles, rouge, rouge the bat

Id: s9XM-VRNaw0

Length: 60min 0sec (3600 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/haloshade]

Yes, I've been waiting so long for this!