Summer of Sonic (5): Sonic Adventure 2

I'm unwilling to spend too much time in the middle era of Sonic da Hedgehog, but there's not that many middle era games in the bundle anyway. For my purposes, I'm labeling "middle era" as everything after the Genesis/CD/32x games but before Sonic Unleashed, though there's probably some mobile games or something that don't sort evenly. The division here is that, from what I've read, Sonic Unleashed is where they actually "got" 3D even though it also has a werehog for some blighted reason.

Think of the middle age as the awkward teenage years of Sonic and you'll probably be able to visualize where it begins and ends. I would actually not mind giving Sonic Heroes a try, since it sounds bizarre, but that game isn't on Steam even though it apparently had a PC release? And no, I am not going to pay money to buy a physical media of a PC port of Sonic Heroes. Especially since I'm out of devices that I can install CDs or DVDs onto.

You ever looked at the number of Dreamcasts sold? It is pretty grim. I mean, it sold a little less than where the Xbox One is at now. Less than the Xbox One! Funny thing is a friend of mine owned a Dreamcast, but I never wanted to play a Sonic on it. Early console 3D just made me sick. That early console 3D game people gush over? Yeah? I hate it.

I don't care which. I probably hated it. On the other hand, the Dreamcast is always well remembered by those who played it. Excellent arcade ports, Crazy Taxi and Power-stone and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It's interesting how a well-liked console managed to barely sell.

Anyway, Sonic Adventure 2 was more interesting than 1 to play because it introduces Shadow. Also, it introduces Rouge the Bat, who is like... Knuckles frenemy love interest? Or something? Both of these characters are beautifully terrible. Shadow is the ultimate edgelord, while Rouge is like campy 60s sex appeal except they put a bat head on her. I could totally see her facing off as an Adam West era Batman villain, if she wasn't a bat. If they didn't put a bat head on her. Yeesh.

It's just batty. This is Summer of Sonic review number five of nine; the previous review (which is early era) is here while the next (bonus) review for the middle era Sonic is here and the next review into the modern era will be here.


So, as I said, I don't like early console 3D, and this is no exception... But it's not so much the 3D that makes the game irritating. It's the camera. I'm not sure what is up with the camera in this game. I mean that is early 3d in a nutshell, but it is also visually "early 3d" as well. The game divides into three character "classes" and you can play a "good guy" path or a "bad guy" path.

I didn't really want to listen to Eggman (who will always be Robotnik in my heart, given that's a vastly superior name and... I'll rant on that later...) talk or Shadow and I really could do with less Rouge in my life. So I played as the hero side, and I'm not doing any more of this game than... However much I did.

Just to be clear here - Shadow is 'the ultimate life form', constructed or bio-engineered or who knows by another Eggman / Robotnik fifty years ago. His uncle, or something. He lived on a space station with Maria Robotnik, the scientist's daughter, who was dying of "NIDS" which looks a lot like someone said "you can't seriously put AIDS in a children's game" but only vaguely scratched the A. The one cutscene I watched essentially involved Maria getting gunned down by the government agents of ... I kid you not ... G.U.N. and... uhhh yeah Shadow didn't take it too well, but she put him in a stasis pod because... My brain just threw up.

it even looks bad

The voice acting, man, how is the voice acting so bad? Didn't they have voice acting in cartoons for like a hundred years or something by the time this game came out? Sonic's VA is fine, and Knuckles is ... Okay, maybe good at times... But Tails is atrocious and everyone else seems like the director either had no idea what they were doing or didn't exist. Most of the VAs rates as emotional as the google voice lady. Which is a robot.

The game divides between Sonic is fast and does speed sections, Knuckles does horrible garbage 3d exploration levels and Tails pilots a mech and has terrible, terrible voice acting that makes me want to punch Tails and that's upsetting. The Sonic game play is a very, very early prototype of game play I will eventually come to like in Generations, but here it is very rough stuff. The controls and camera and level design are all extremely weak, but like I've said, this stuff is hard.

The biggest problem with the Sonic sections is simply that you don't get enough chances to nail down the mechanics. They're all very short, and honestly, I'm not really certain why. Yes, he goes fast, but he mostly goes over blank spaces or repetitive terrain with the same repeating textures. Most of these mechanics are repeated in later games and done better so I kinda question why I'm bothering to play this...

The Knuckles stuff is just boring and irritating. And terrible. You hunt for three of whatever, and Knuckles' moveset of climbing and gliding is put to use. This would be good, but the level design is insanely obnoxious, it's not so much an open area to explore as weird closets or wide open nothing. It starts throwing you curveballs immediately, and the tracking is way undersensitive. It starts beeping rooms over, and often, just didn't seem to work. I was stuck on the one level until I googled the tip and realized it wanted me to do some KoF fighting move on the controller which would cause Knuckles to do some huge dragon punch into the air. How was I supposed to know that? Did it teach me? Was it ever relevant? I have no idea, but here's an idea: Don't play this game.

It's a better plan than I had! Seriously, I can not emphasize how disparate and down right unpleasant these sections are. Like yes, they're ugly, they're boring, it's a chore, it isn't fun, so on and so forth - but the level design isn't built for the way the camera works. You constantly can't see things you're supposed to and it constantly refuses to turn to let you. It's bad. The person who designed these levels was a moron.

Remember how I said the music and audio in Sonic games was excellent? Emphasis: Was. The Knuckles sections are torture. Yes, I like the Knuckles raps stuff conceptually, and they're cute to listen to, but smooth jazz becomes irritating over ten minutes and the throbbing in my ear is just... Saints! I have to take my headphones off and then after a while just MUTE THE GAME because the damn tracker noise is so insistent hearing it from around my neck starts to hurt.

I have to eat ginger just to get over the nausea of doing some of these levels. There's lots of bad things I can say about a games, but the Knuckles sections literally induce physical nausea in me. At least thirty minutes of my play time is having to stand up and chew ginger to keep from vomiting.

The Tails stuff is boring but also unforgiving. Tails dies to crappy 3d platforming. Every death. He falls off something and yelps  out a plea of "... Sonic!" every time. Which is creepy. I think I died once to health, and that's on the camera too, enemies firing from where I can't see.

So you have Sonic sections that feel rough but interesting, horrific torture chore Knuckles sections and mind-bogglingly boring Tails action sections.  Quite. The. Game.

Would you forgive me if I simply said "the story is bad" and moved from there? There's seriously a scene where a woman explains to "Mister President" that something something financial calamity and then Eggman calls him on the phone and WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO SONIC

Oh, and enemy design - top to bottom, in all categories - is just wretched in this game. Enemies are ugly, dumb but threatening simply through the virtue of the atrocious camera. You spend 60% of this game running blind and smashing right into things. There's a complaint that Sonic games have enemies jammed in the way where you're naturally going and this game, you can't even tell, since the camera is so dreadful.

I honestly don't think this is a "good" game. Actually, by modern standards, it's a bad game. "Terrible" might be the right term.  Part of the reason I dislike early console 3D is I honestly feel like too much of what I personally find fun in gaming was just lost in the spectacle of trying to create 3D gaming. Sonic Adventure 2 hits this stuff in spades, a number of the sections feel more like "Well how can we make this into 3D?" and less "what kind of fun can we have in 3D?" if that makes sense. The Knuckles sections are boring and unenjoyable, and the Tails stuff is completely sleepy until you fall off a cliff and it kicks you back to the title screen.

It's also really weird going from playing the high point of sprite era graphics to the low point of 3d design. Sonic 3 is gorgeous, filled with energy and motion. Huge parallax backgrounds, animated foreground elements, fantastic color schemes based around aesthetics not trying to be "realistic" ... And then this. This game is ugly, and it is ugly by choice, not by necessity. Photo-realism isn't necessary in a sonic game and it never was. It's also over-saturated, washed out and lifeless.

And like seriously, you put a fucking bat head on her. Yeah let's go for photorealism and not the weirdly beautiful pixel Sonic worlds and ... And then put a bat head on her. Did the people doing the levels and backgrounds actually know what they were working on? I know I'm being unfair since I find the early 3d stuff ugly, though whether or not it has to do with early gouraud shading or the actual lack of lighting, I don't know. Everything just goes from so vibrant and colorful to so freaking ugly. It's just so ugly. With bat heads.

Also, and this is probably mostly me, the camera in this game honestly makes me a outright nauseaous. It might be the FoV or it might be the camera, I'm not sure, but my stomach is rolling around at the speed of light. So it's ugly and I find it literally physically revolting. This game is a real triumph.

Of making me sick and hating Sonic.

I understand this is a classic to ... I mean, not many people, since the Dreamcast sold so poorly ... But I have to say I'm going to be surprised if anything else I play on this here summer of Sonic is worse. I'd be surprised, actually, if I force myself to play anything worse than this game for a long time. The Sonic sections are alright, but the Knuckles sections are a chore and so are the Tails sections. This game is such a hard pass it isn't even funny. I was hoping to force myself to finish the Hero side of the story, but it's such a mess I'm not going to bother. I'm not going to get this set of games done if I have to play something akin to pulling teeth, and this just is.

This is without a doubt a bad game. I'm sure there's people with nostalgia who thought it good or think it good... Don't care. Camera is terrible, visuals are terrible, design is janky and unfun, the "fun" of playing Sonic is 10% of a game with 90% garbage piled on top.

I honestly don't feel like most of my time with this game was centered around playing a Sonic game. Most of it was playing a Knuckles game with all the fun of cleaning my closet. I think people bought into the novelty of 3d and you can see years of design flaws pouring out from this game into later releases. I mean it reviewed well, so of course they looked at what they did and thought well of it...

And now: Sonic 4. Ugh.

Ok yes I did like Final Fantasy 7 which I guess is the most rudimentary early 3d console game. So I guess I didn't technically hate all of the things. Just most of them. Yeah that game. That one too. The one you can't believe I hate? Yes, that one too.