I distinctly remember being stuck on Rouge's final level for at least an hour on my first playthrough. When I finished the game, I never, ever went back to the tresure hunting levels. They are so, so boring. Massive, bland levels which take far too long to complete.
Just commented on twitter that the one saving grace of those treasure stages is that each emerald is guaranteed to be within a certain region of the stage. The only reason I liked them in SA1 was because they took places in sub-stages that I was already familiar with as Sonic due to having run through them as him (or vice-versa in a couple cases), so I had a good idea of how to maneuver through them efficiently. Knuckles' stages in SA2 have a tendency to be both much larger and far more closed off (I would argue that there is no way that the layout of pyramid cave is justifiable), meaning the two things that made to stages interesting in SA1 were removed from them. To me the big problem is that in making the Sonic stages so linear, most of what I found fun about SADX's levels (specifically, that Sonic was vastly overpowered compared to their structure and a number of especially cheat-y shortcuts exist in each stage) was removed. Trying to speedrun the game by hand (I.e., not a TAS) is pretty dull because there really isn't a lot you can do at any one point, especially due to how forcefully the physics engine tosses you around.
I like the speed levels, and hunting levels to an extent. But I absolutely hate what they did to the shooting stages. The mechs control like utter ass, can't stand to play these at all.
I still can't believe I 100%'d this with all A's on the original DC. God, how much more time I had to waste as a preteen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te7xxbVSQEc&feature=em-uploademail&ab_channel=ChristopherNiosi Kirbopher (voice actor, animator, creator of Brawl Taunts and NiN10Doh!) has a small podcast of sorts that updates twice a week, and today's episode was recorded with Edward Bosco (another voice actor and animator) and Xander Mobus (yes, the Smash Bros. 4 announcer voice) about Sonic Adventure 1 vs. Sonic Adventure 2. It's nothing new, but they're pretty entertaining if you've got 40 minutes to kill. I figured I'd put it here considering the topic (as a matter of fact Kirb mentions the ProJared video in here).
Never played SA2, but I intend to soon, and I would love to actually develop an opinion on it after all of the different views I've heard on it. All over I hear so many people say that this is the best 3D Sonic or just an okay 3D Sonic or deserves to be on par with games like 06 and Secret Rings (Which I so hope isn't true). Projared is a pretty cool guy, though. He's definitely one of the big game reviewers out there who tries to be as unbiased as possible.
*Spits out coffee* WHaaa?? How is this possible??? Seriously though, I think the game is pretty sweet and well worth a play. I've never played '06, but it seems a lot more broken in the videos I see. While certainly not perfect, SA2 manages to be a very competent 3D platformer, which is a feat for 3D Sonic games. Some of the levels are a blast to play even, like the Forest level, I could play that one over and over.
