You do have control over the camera most of the time, but it circles around so slowly that it’s effectively useless unless you’re standing still. This is certainly the case in Sonic Adventure 2, especially in the Sonic and Shadow levels where you’re running as fast as you can and the camera will occasionally swing around for dramatic angles that may look cool, but can make navigation impossible. It seems a little unfair to criticize a more than 10-year-old 3D platformer for having a bad camera, and to point out how many years after the still-excellent Super Mario 64 it originally came out (five, for the record), but when you’re more likely to die from not being able to see where you’re going than from being attacked, it is, and will always be, a major problem. I ran around several of them for upwards of 15 minutes without finding anything (and without being able to access the hint-giving computer screens either) before giving up and restarting. It’s shockingly hard to find a treasure that does not exist. These levels are the most time-consuming as it is, since they rely on a fair amount of aimless searching and vague clue deciphering, but they become substantially more so when the items don’t actually appear like they’re supposed to. The most maddening one involved the jewels/keys you’re supposed to find in the Knuckles and Rouge treasure hunt missions not spawning correctly. While nothing that serious happened again, a few other issues did pop up. It has less of a focus on wacky gimmicks, and it’s not trying to recapture the glory days (like in Sonic Generations) it’s conceptually simple without feeling boring or stupid.Īnecdotally, my Xbox completely crashed 10 minutes in when I was fighting the first boss. Those ideas do not make sense and do not feel like natural additions to the Sonic formula, so it’s nice to go back to Sonic Adventure 2 when Sega was (for the most part) still trying to perfect a more pure 3D Sonic game. If you’re wondering why “making sense” is worthy of praise, you might not remember 2009’s Sonic and The Black Knight or 2008’s Sonic Unleashed, which respectively featured sword fighting and turning into a monster called “The Werehog” (it’s like a werewolf, but … a hog, I guess?). Most of the time you’re doing things that feel appropriate to the series … aside from some of the robot shooting, but that works well enough to not feel like a meaningless addition. The thing is, it still makes sense even when you’re not Sonic. These sequences aren’t the most fun, and obviously nobody comes to a Sonic title hoping to play as Rouge the Bat, but they are functional palate cleansers in-between the high-speed Sonic and Shadow stages. As Knuckles and newcomer Rouge the Bat, you explore levels and hunt for specific pieces of treasure. Eggman, you walk around in robot pants and shoot enemies with rockets and lasers. Not that it’s necessarily well-explained or interesting or believable, but it’s presented in a way that feels more clever than it has any right to be.įor most of the levels in Sonic Adventure 2, you don’t control Sonic (or Shadow, who plays the same). It turns out that some of the bad guys aren’t all that bad, and when a “Hero” side cutscene will simply show Sonic vowing to stop whatever they’re planning, its “Dark” equivalent will touch on the motivation that is driving the ostensibly evil character to do whatever it is they’re doing. The “Dark” story, however, flips it and tells the exact same plot from the perspective of those villains, revealing a bit of actual nuance along the way. The “Hero” story is very straightforward (and pretty generic), showing each level from the perspective of Sonic or one of his friends as they stop the villains from doing something villainous. This in itself is nothing unique, but the way Sonic Adventure 2 handles it is by having both campaigns cover the same ground. Even after watching the surprisingly long cutscenes, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.īut it’s not all so silly. The story mode is divided in two halves, the “Hero” side and the “Dark” side, allowing you to play through with either the good guys or bad guys. Along the way, Sonic gets arrested (apparently people think all hedgehogs look the same), you have to chase after the President’s limo on a wacky Go-Kart track, and everyone finds their way to a long-abandoned space colony. Eggman (née Robotnik) wants to destroy/take over the world with the help of a mysterious black hedgehog named Shadow, and Sonic and his friends have to stop them. Please note that under no stretch of the imagination am I saying that the story itself is anything but nonsense.
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