Let's be real here: Sonic Adventure 2 is an awful game, and if this game was released today, it would be trashed to kingdom come. This isn't just because of things that have aged badly either. As painful as this is for me to say, Sonic Adventure 2 was never a good game.
* The gameplay
For starters, only 1/3 of the game is actually fun, the treasure hunting sections are abysmallyLet's be real here: Sonic Adventure 2 is an awful game, and if this game was released today, it would be trashed to kingdom come. This isn't just because of things that have aged badly either. As painful as this is for me to say, Sonic Adventure 2 was never a good game.
* The gameplay
For starters, only 1/3 of the game is actually fun, the treasure hunting sections are abysmally clunky and have awful level design. Why they felt the need to make the emerald tracker only show you the location of one of the emeralds at a time, instead of any of the three emeralds, like in the first Sonic Adventure, is something that still boggles my mind, all these years later. The mech levels with Tails & Eggman are less clunky and well programmed, but are incredibly dull, and involves some extremely overly simplistic lock-onto-enemies gameplay. As for the only truly fun sections, the speed sections, even these sections are far from perfect. They're glitched to kingdom come, and honestly, playing through them in 2020 really demonstrates to me just how badly this game has aged.
* The story
The plot is fine as far as the actual story is concerned. However, the bizarre mismatched tone to the rest of the Sonic franchise makes the entire thing feel, at best, awkward, and at worst, downright awful. On the one hand, it's interesting to see them deal with more mature themes, but on the one hand...did we really need a sonic storyline involving a government conspiracy, a "sexy" government agent bat, and the shooting of someone's granddaughter? I'm sorry, but the story is cringe-worthy in the context of the Sonic universe.
* The voice acting
For the most part, the voice acting leaves a lot to be desired. Although I won't say it's "bad", per say, it sure as heck isn't good. Far too many lines fall flat, and sound like they were being read off a script. I don't blame the voice actors for this though, because it seems more like it was a problem with directing. It's honestly the type of voice acting I'd expect to get if you hired a robot who doesn't understand human emotions as the voice director.
* The sound mixing
Sweet jumping jacksticks is the sound mixing ABYSMAL. As in, objectively incompetently broken. This isn't an aspect of the game that's just "aged". This is not something they couldn't have gotten right at the time of the game's release. This is just bad, plain and simple. There is no excuse for how awful the sound mixing of this game is. Characters talk over each other, the music is often WAY too loud and drowns out the voices...it's just a total mess in places. I don't know if this was some problem with the voice dubbing from Japanese into English, or if there was some other kind of problem, but there is NO excuse for it being this atrocious.
* The new characters
Shadow, as "brooding", as he is, is an interesting character. And while he gets worse after this game, turning into a dumb proxy for "cool edgy 12 year olds", this isn't the fault of Sonic Adventure 2, so overall, I have no issues with Shadow's role here. Rouge, on the other hand, is a character that I find silly. Who on Earth thought it was a good idea to put a archetypal sex-appeal character into a game for children...who happens to be a bat, at that. Did the Sonic series really need a sexy bat? Rouge definitely isn't a bad character, far from it, but that she even exists as a concept just boggles my mind. The Sonic series tends to ignore the entire sex-appeal side of Rogue's character through her appearances, which makes sense, but it just begs the question of why they made her that way in the first place. I want to empathise here, this isn't some type of complaint about female sexualization. I simply don't think Rouge's character ever fit with the Sonic series. With her "sex-appeal" aspect never being used or even brought up in-universe, all it is is an out-of-universe gimmick for the players who like the idea of a sexy bat...in which case, yeah, that's just a little bit weird. Never got it, but again, like I say, she's not a BAD character. Over all, the new characters are all utilised as well as they could be in their debut, and aid to the Sonic cast's diverse range. Not necessarily in a good way following SA2, though, as future releases unfortunately demonstrate.
And the conclusion:
Playing Sonic Adventure 2 in 2020 is like watching that one video your parents took of you as a child singing "Who Let the Dogs Out" at your school talent show. You may have the memory of singing like an angel and leaving everyone a gasp, but the video is recorded proof that your singing was awful and everyone was laughing at you. As unfortunate as it is to say, in my opinion, it's about time that people take their nostalgia goggles off and admit that this game is not, and was never, as good as they remember it being.… Expand
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