Ein Trip in die Kindheit. Eines der besseren 3D Sonic Games, die es auf dem Markt gibt, aber auch eines der schwereren. Ich war schon lange nicht mehr so nah dran mein Controller an die Wand zu werfen. Das Spiel hat viele Probleme, die mich heute mehr stören als damals. Kamera, Sprungverhalten, Leveldesign, Gegnerarten uvm haben echt gestört. Bosskämpfe waren eher Pain in the Ass als wirklich spaßig. Story ist tatsächlich interessant, wenn auch nichts besonderes. Ich mag, dass man die Helden und die Schurken-Seite spielt und die Level nicht nur recycled waren. Ich beschwere mich hier echt viel, weil für heutige Verhältnisse, das Spiel zu viele Probleme hat, aber wenn man bedenkt, dass das Spiel vor Ewigkeiten erschien, kann man nochmal ein Auge zudrücken. Bei meinem Durchgang habe ich komplett die Chao Welt außer Acht gelassen. Darauf hatte ich letztendlich auch keine Lust. Chao sind eigentlich nur kleine Haustiere, die man aufwerten kann und in kleine Minispiele verwenden kann. Ein weitere Aspekt, weshalb ich das Spiel auf der GameCube mochte war der Multiplayer Part. Auch den habe ich gar nicht berücksichtigt.
Allen in allem muss ich sagen, dass Sonic Adventure 2 ein gutes Spiel ist, dass im Vergleich zu heutigen Spielen nicht gut gealtert ist. Für den kleinen Nostalgie Trip lohnt sich das Spiel jedoch.
BTW War Shadow schon immer so edgy? xD

I've completed three or four randomizers of this game. I've lost count. Every time, there are two specific moments which I audibly say "oh fuck this game" out loud - it's either getting lost in Aquatic Mine (conveniently available as a first stage at least 2-3 times now), or it's when I have Shadow dramatically ramp off the first jump in Sky Rail, off the stage, into the kill plane, while the Chao Kindergarten music is playing, as Omochao starts talking about mating rituals, and Shadow reaches mach 5 to his death. Somewhere in the middle of this journey, my objections melt away as I figure out why the supposed boundaries of the game don't matter - I accidentally clip through a wall and realize I can use this knowledge to skip the Flame Ring. (Outer Wilds?? eat your fucking heart out???) A bunch of Chao drown themselves across a pond to the climatic Live and Learn, like their life depends on it. It does. By the end I'm on the verge of tears as Sonic says his heartfelt goodbye to Shadow: "NEED MORE MEMORY, BUD!"

What I'm saying is - even if you take this anxious mess of emblematic (ha!) 00's angst, cut it into scissors, smear a glue stick against a wall, chuck the pieces at it, then shoot an entire bottle of ketchup across it while blasting Jamiroquai, DMX, Pendulum, Streetlight Manifesto, and Foo Fighters all at the same time inside a moving car, it never crashes! You come out of it with a pending arrest warrant, but I swear it still ends up worth it and ready to go again. I don't know why! There's just something here, man. Something special.

The level design is so slapshot. Have you ever stopped running in the middle of the speed levels and looked at a broad view of what they... do? They're linear, and there are these big dash pads that they tell you to go this way, and the second you walk around one you look around and tell yourself "what the FUCK were they thinking?" Then the game suddenly jets Sonic in some direction because you happened upon the middle of some half-scripted segment, and the game asks you, "what the FUCK were you thinking?" But they probably realized people were doing this, so they made it non-linear by putting STUFF right in those sections. Instead of just moving along, eventually you're constantly looking for the places it fucks up! Guess what? There's SHIT there! Every time. There's a life! There's a lost Chao!! There's a fucking upgrade!!! There's a pipe in outer space and you whistle at it and a skunk pops out. God dammit. Brilliant.

This game is a pile of confetti ideas, and it's best every time you throw it up in the air and ignore the complete mess it makes. Suddenly you forget how the walker missions aren't designed around anything, and the emerald stages are horribly winding messes by choice, and the speed missions are designed around psychically predicting you'll be holding the analog stick in a particular direction even though the camera has no vestibular system, and that this jank is all desperately held together by tamogachis and kart racing. The aesthetic does a Weekend at Bernie's on the gameplay. The misplaced mix of edge and "what if we all just got along........." optimism shoots it through the fuckin door and into the horizon. It's incredible. I think about how much this game sucks every time I play it. By the end I'm laughing or crying. I can't tell which. I never care.

No one makes five different functional video games in one with umpteen different music directions starring an edgy antihero against jarring heavily-contrasted rainbow palettes. Why? Because it's stupid. And I love this stupid, stupid game so much.

Sonic Adventure 2 is one of those games you can truly enjoy only as a kid.

I prefer to start by talking about the good points, and Sonic Adventure 2 has some great ones. You can play two different stories: one from the hero side, where you play as Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails, and one from the dark side, where you play as Eggman, Shadow, and Rouge. The mechanics of both sides are the same. Sonic and Shadow, Knuckles and Rouge, and Tails and Eggman share similar gameplay styles. This includes the type of missions they play; for example, Knuckles mission objectives are the same as Rouge. So, if you enjoy one character, you will find more content that fits your preferences.

I talked about the characters, but they wouldn't be the same without the great soundtrack this game has. You will enjoy Sonic's movements a lot more with the aesthetic the music provides because, you know, Sonic with a great rock sound is really fitting, or Knuckles with his weird hip-hop.

However, the game is incredibly awful to play. I completed all the stages in hero mode and I won't play it again in dark mode. The mechanics are really bad. The game design is on the same level as someone who developed a game mechanic in Unity Engine for the first time and tried to make a game about that. The movement is very clunky, and it feels unfair every time you get hit or fall off the maps because the movement is poorly designed. This game forces you to not play like Sonic would because if you play fast, you will fall off the map, and you are not going to have fun repeating the same thing. The camera movement is really bad, but I don't hate it because when the game was developed, camera wasn't as advanced as it's today. Tails levels are run-and-gun moments where it is almost impossible to die unless there is a bad game design concept, which happens a lot in this game. Knuckles levels are really great, and if you have any trouble, you can talk with the flying TV, which gives you a tip for the next emerald to collect.

If you are considering playing the PC port, the game needs to run at 60fps and is forced to use V-Sync. So, if you have a monitor with a refresh rate higher than 60Hz, you will need to cap the frame rate of the program or the monitor. In my case, I used the NVIDIA Control Panel to ensure the game doesn't exceed 60fps.

(I played this with mods just as a heads up. Mostly cosmetic ones to make it a little closer to the Dreamcast version, but still one or two gameplay tweaks I got for the sake of my own sanity.)

Feels pretty satisfying to finally have finished this. This was the big one in terms of all the Sonic games I always wanted to get to, but never did. It's not perfect, it's aged and janky, sometimes even frustrating, but it's still a whole lot of fun and its the origin of my favorite character in the series (and seemingly the basis of the next movie), so even if I didn't love it I owe a lot to Adventure 2. Both the Hero and Dark side stories have their strengths and weaknesses, like I prefer Eggman's mech stages to Tails', but I like Knuckles' treasure hunting more than Rouge's (Sonic and Shadow remain solid across the boards), so the two stories kinda even out in that way. Overall though I think I prefer Dark side since the story is a little more interesting there.

The story isn't great by any means and I won't be upset when the movie doesn't adapt it 1-to-1, but I think Sonic's approach to story in this area was something cool that made it stand out from others in its genre and I think the way these games and their extended media attatched us to these characters is one of the main reasons why the Sonic franchise has remained relevant even at its lowest. We love Sonic, we love these characters and we're always willing to give them another chance.

The gameplay really isn't perfect, but it wasn't nearly as intrusive as I expected it to be. Even the non-Sonic and Shadow stuff I didn't expect to enjoy I ended up having some actual fun with. I don't really have anything deep to say about any of it, I genuinely just think this is a fun and charming game elevated by a weird-ass story and I'm just happy to have finally experienced it all for myself. I'm even more excited for that new movie now than I already was.

Oh, Sonic Adventure 2...

At first, the shift from hub worlds to linear storytelling was a change I had to get used to - the pace of doing levels back to back feels way different from walking around Station Square aimlessly to get to the next stage and I didn't like how it felt here. However, my stance changed about halfway through the HERO story (which I played first), and I began to appreciate the storytelling of the sequel over SA1, because you get the story (on your side atleast) told in chronological order without having to puzzle it together and you constantly switch characters, so it doesn't get boring. So on the HERO side you're already getting a full story about Sonic and his friends alone, but the villains are contextualized in the DARK story. Personally, I preferred the DARK story, it just felt like the more complete package overall and the cast is more interesting.

As for the gameplay, Adventure 2 brought some noticeable changes to the Treasure Hunt stages, put an extended focus on mech levels (which play similar to Gamma from SA1) and also changes the physics and controls a bit from the first game - nothing worse than no longer being able to overly rely on Sonic's spindash, as it's not overpowered anymore. You get used to it fast, but that was a death sentence in the first hours of playing! Concerning the Treasure Hunt stages... I'm not a fan of what they did to the radar, the beeping noise is even more obnoxious (and louder) than before and only having the shards show up in a set order is frustrating. However, sometime during Knuckles' final level it came to me that I've developed stockholm syndrome towards the Treasure Hunt gameplay and after reflecting and replaying the Knuckles stages again, I had a lot more fun with them than before. They're an acquired taste, a guilty pleasure.

You know what else is guilty of being TOO LOUD? The mech levels - just hold down the lock-on button and you'll get a free trial of tinnitus, all while you've got a full Michael Bay movie with thirteen different kinds of explosions going down in the background. Weapons Bed might actually be one of the loudest levels I have ever played in ANY game. It's not like the audio mixing was good to begin with, the volume of sound effects during regular gameplay is so comically overtuned and you might as well believe the conversations in cutscenes were recorded during a rave by how often the voices get drowned out by the music. But generally, the soundtrack of Adventure 2 really delivers. Favorite songs are Escape from the City, Live & Learn and E.G.G.M.A.N.

Not much more to say, except that I missed out on the Chao Garden in this playthrough entirely, just because I had no clue how to hatch the eggs. A shame, cause that's apparently a big aspect of the game - so I'll be sure to check it out sometime. What else, Shadow and Rogue are awesome and this game is a blast to play despite the issues. I'm considering bumping it up to five stars if the Chao part of the game turns out to be good. It's just chaotic and fun.

In which other game can you experience Tails using his special move of crashing the game twice after telling Eggman how powerful he is? I can't think of one.