Complimenting Sonic Adventure 2

I never played SA2 as a kid since at the time I didn't have a system I could play it on. So I didn't actually play it until I got a PS3 in 2013, I think. But even then I found the game to be great fun. I really enjoyed the high speed and platforming of the Sonic/Shadow stages and the mech stages were cool as well. I found the treasure hunting stages to be annoying at first but they quickly stopped bothering me once I said screw it and decided to use the monitors all the time.

I also quite enjoyed the story. There's a lot of talk of what Sonic should be and if you ask ten different people, they will most likely give you a different answer. That said, to me personally, this is what a perfect Sonic story looks like. I love this stuff, I am not kidding when I say this and Devil May Cry 3 are my two favorite video game scripts, even with the less than favorable translation.
I specifically like the part when Eggman traps Sonic with the fake Emerald. Assuming you play through the entire Hero story first and then go into the Dark story, at first that part is a big "oh crap" moment when Tails asks how'd know Eggman it's fake. But then in the Dark story it's revealed Eggman knew about the fake all along and just wanted to screw with Tails. I like that because it makes Eggman seem like a more nuanced character than what he's often portrayed as.

I do think that the Vegeta comparison is kind of basic. Well, I think that trying to assign any of the characters' Dragonball roles is only surface-level thinking, but with Shadow and Vegeta specifically, I think the comparison is mostly wrong. Vegeta isn't even a "darker" version of Gokū. They're opposites of each other, yes, but when you think about it, they don't actually have that much in common. Not as much as Sonic and Shadow, at least. There are probably other shonen rivals that would serve as a better point of comparison.

Yes, very much. As the Dragonball series and brand progressed past the original manga, Vegeta became a deuteragonist. Shadow did so too, in a way, but unlike Vegeta, he doesn't hold that title anymore. He's not there with Sonic for every story told. Hell, also unlike Vegeta, Shadow doesn't really show up standing alongside the protagonist in promo art etc. nowadays.

 

This art is crazy beautiful.

 

In regards to Frostav:

Mana already pointed out on a different thread Frostie isn't worth replying to because he'll either ignore us or give us an even worse post as an answer.

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In regards to chao gardens of any kind:

Yes, chao gardens are great for people who love it, and its a nice game concept overall, and I did what I needed to get their related emblems and there was something nice in doing so (plus I remember a comment from The GHZ site saying there was something manly in raising a speed demon for the chao races, but that's not my approach), BUT it's a different game shoehorned there which is not the kind of thing you're thinking of when buying a Sonic game or a platformer in general. People complain about Big in SA1, and I get why, but Big is at least playable and moves around regular levels. Chao are handled by the AI of the game and you can't explore the places where they run through. In this regard, I enjoyed raising chocobos in FFVII a lot more, and that's also a shoehorned minigame.

In other words: make Sonic games and chao games separately as some sort of spinoff of the main thing instead of forcing me to play it to 100% the game (same goes for sky chase levels in SA1 and kart races in SA2, except you don't need to make games out of those, just don't add them).

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In regards to the real topic:

* I like SA2 more than SA1. I hate a lot of things in SA2, but, as a different approach to Sonic, it was great and I was well aware it was what tech and trends of that time would produce, pretty clear we weren't going back to classic. My big letdown was the next game was Sonic Heroes, and my relief and curse was Shadow's game came back to this formula, but it did so much worse so I lost any hope on getting a game that improved the format of SA2.

* While the mechs were heavy, I think part of the issue with those was the camera placement for those bigger "characters" and not that much their jump height or distance. Aside from that, I liked the three playstyles and most levels of this game. Of course, just Sonic gameplay with every character like in the old days would have been better.

* SA2 gave us these brilliant moments where the cringe was the right thing to do:

- "I found you, faker!" moments are so stupid in both this game and Sonic Heroes I almost adopted it as a catchphrase when playing.

- "Behold! The ultimate power!". Now repeat it with flower, shower, tower, and Tails' surname imitating Shadow's voice when the occasion asks for any of them.

- That cutscene, that cutscene! In order to become super, not only need Sonic and Shadow to activate the chaos emeralds at the same time, but also look at each other and move their hands THAT WAY. Don't tell me you don't see it, they're obviously sharing their true inner power.

 

I would argue that applies to the shooting and treasure hunting stages as well. Who buys a Sonic game thinking "I wanna pilot a mech with guns!"?

 

Who else got a Gamecube because of this game? I want to compliment it for making me want a Gamecube to go with our PS2 and launching my interest in console Nintendo when I was 8.

 

This was me as a kid. The Dreamcast was already a dead console at the time, but I wanted the sonic adventure games. One year for christmas I got Sonic Adventure DX, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, and Sonic Mega Collection, those 3 being my only games. Kind of funny to think I got a Nintendo console and only had sonic games for it.

 

I've been finding lately that I actually really like the shooting stages. Despite the overall lower speed, I feel that the walkers can still move through the stages quickly and fluidly. I was playing Hidden Base, and noticed a decent sense of flow hovering over gaps and jumping from pulley to pulley. Most importantly, the combo system is seriously fun. Extending a chain by locking on to one group and dashing to the next one to lock on to them before the time runs out (and without getting hit) is exciting, and I find the strategy of trying to connect as many enemy groups as possible very engaging. Not to mention that all four of the Tails stages have what I consider to be some of Jun Senoue's finest work, especially Mission Street.

It's not really Sonic, but I think it's cool anyway, and it would be cool to see this "Walking Panzer Dragoon" idea developed further in its' own full-fledged game.

 

I'm just going to throw some fuel on the Chao fire here...

I joined the online Sonic community when I was around the age of 10/11 in the early 2000s, so this not long after Heroes was announced. So this is when Sonic had not long since gone third-party and a whole new generation of fans were introduced to the series with SA2B and then SADX on the GCN. Chao were at the height of their popularity then, but the praise wasn't universal at all. Critics loathed the inclusion of Chao alongside all of the other playable as yet another feature in the game that took the spotlight off Sonic and the speedy gameplay the series is known for. Several members of Sonic Cult and S2B back then were in agreement that the Chao simply didn't belong in a Sonic game, and particularly lamented the fact they were mandatory for 100% completion.

The Chao Gardens, love them or loath them, were largely idle games that we're more familiar with on mobiles these days; you grinded out materials by repeating the same tasks repeatedly and waited hours for the Chao to grow up. Even the races and karate were pretty much hands-off experiences. You could cheer the Chao on a bit, but the results of any matches were mostly pre-determined based on stats before they even began.

I remember all of this so vividly because I loved Chao as a child and couldn't understand the hate they got. I grew up with S1, S2, S3KC, 3D and R. When I joined the online communities, I didn't have any way to play these amazing 3D games until SADX and Heroes eventually got PC ports, and then SA2B when I finally got a GCN some time later. The Chao always looked so amazing to me. When I finally was able to,I spent hours raising them and consuming every bit of information on Chao Island. It was so exciting to finally raise a fully evolved Shadow Chao, or trying to hunt down a copy of Phantasy Star Online just so that I could get one of those elusive Tails Chao (and sadly I never did get one...)

But eventually... I understood why they got such a bad rep amongst the older fans and critics. They player did nothing at all. All you could do was wait and wait and wait. The entire process was so slow. There was nothing to do in the gardens except wait. Feeding your Chao animals/drives and fruits took all of 3 seconds, and to get more you had to replay the same levels over and over in a meticulous manner to get rings or the animals/drives of the right colours. I'm willing to bet that most players would abuse the infinite animal/drive glitch to get the Chao stats up and then left the game to run idle in the background when they went to school during the day or to bed at night. That's certainly what I ended up doing. Anything else simply wasn't fun.

Maybe the Chao Gardens are fun to to a lot of people. I won't argue that. Millions of people adore Animal Crossing, which isn't dissimilar to the Chao Gardens on some levels, and I personally cannot stand or see the appeal in that absolute snooze-fest either. But you know... opinions, subjectivity and all that jazz. The problem with the Chao Gardens is that they don't mesh with the Sonic gameplay at all. If anything, they actively detract from it. I'll praise SA2 for having this gameplay type that people love, but I have to criticise it for clashing so hard with the main game and making no efforts to integrate the main game with the Chao. If the Chao were totally optional, I'd wonder why so much time was spent developing a huge A-life gameplay system that was essentially an entirely separately game.

As it currently, yeah sorry but I don't like the Chao at all and completely ignore them whenever I got back to either of the Adventure games. I know why some people like them and yet personally I side with those that dislike them. There's scope to fix the Chao Gardens, sure, but that's another discussion. People dislike Chao for very good reasons. There's so much vocal support for them now because they've been gone for so long and only one side of the conversation will speak up in their absence. If a new Sonic game was to come out tomorrow with an SA1/2 style Chao system, you can guarantee it would be subject to just as much criticism as back in the day.

 

I personally never went that far and even though I played the shit out of it (or at least it felt like it) and got several Chao to be “reborn”, I didn’t manage to get my oldest Chao to get a second “rebirth” (which iirc was necessary in order to get a Chaos Chao).

But, two of my childhood friends got Chaos Chao, and they achieved it by doing exactly what you said: they left their GC on overnight. One of them said he used a GBA cart to cover the GC’s power light so his parents wouldn’t notice lmao

On a different note, I’ve expressed this sentiment before and I’ll say it again: I definitely think that Chao Garden could become a very successful mobile game should they ever attempt it. Ideally there would be a few tweaks, such as halving the amount of time it takes for Chao to reach their evolutions/rebirths.

 

I feel a great deal of the positives of the Chao garden are being overlooked when it comes to how it allowed SA2 to be more accessible, especially on a platform and in an environment where game design sensibilities like that of Sonic are becoming more and more uncommon. However, to go into detail as to why i feel this way, I'm kind of going to have to go on a tangent.

One thing I feel Sonic fans, regardless of prefered game or gameplay style tend to all share as an issue is we all have a tendency to take gameplay sensibilities we have adopted as a result of playing these games for granted. The reality is, especially as time goes on, less and less people actually understand the design quirks and conventions that are typical of Sonic games in general. This is a fault I see even between different "factions" of the Sonic community as well. Things like understanding the physics of the genesis games or rolling to gain momentum are weird and strange even moreso today in a world where most platformers are built on the fundamental principles of games such as Super Mario Bros or Super Metroid as opposed to Sonic, and this especially for a series so intrinsically tied to replayability is a massive issue.
There are tons of people that simply give up on Sonic games simply because it doesn't immediately click, and this is because Sonic games are practically their own language in many respects, and the problem is that it isn't reasonable to just tell people "play the game until you get good at it" and expect to be taken seriously. Especially in the modern day where competition for people's' attention has only exponentially gotten stiffer thanks to things such as the Internet, mobile devices, etc.
To me then, the presence of the Chao garden plays an integral role in getting a lot of players not only accustomed to the design sensibilities of the game, but getting them to appreciate it via its incentivisation of replayability.
Even if you aren't even the best at the game, there is something for players to do and chill out even if they get stuck at a point in the game, and this is important because it greatly mitigated frustration as well as allowing for more break points in the game to allow the player to cool off and stick with the game, and then give it another go as opposed to just rage quitting and dropping it, and because maximization of drops for your Chao is tied to both performance as well as knowledge of the ins and outs of the level, the player is developing their skills and their understanding of the game language indirectly as a result.

While it is by no means the thing i like about the game most, let alone something i myself even bother with much at all on the occasion I even boot the game up, I am a strong believer that it played an integral role in selling the appeal of Sonic games to new players, even ones that might not have even been initially sold on the core gameplay and I have a great deal of respect for it as a result.


Now, I could compliment the rest of the game, but I think I'll bother with that some other time.
I'll simply leave it off with noting that I hold the controversial opinion that it is a superior translation of Sonic in 3D than SA1. Its..uh..getting late where I am and I have work in the morning.

 

I explained it on the same post you only partially quoted. To add to what I said then, most of the added gameplay modes through other characters at least still feature speed or exploration, plus, as Blue Blood has explained, Chao is a game mode where you wait instead of play. Knuckles/Rouge gameplay covers the exploration side of Sonic we had in classic games when hunting for special stage rings and other hidden goodies, something the rest of SA1 and SA2 only feature to some extent, if any. For shooting gameplay, the criticism is more understandable but, if you've bothered playing for A-Ranks, you've probably noticed how fast it can go when you know what you have to do. Personally, there was a point I never stopped unless it was mandatory through level architecture, and the speed of these characters may have been slower, but I wouldn't say I felt that gameplay was slow when I mastered it.

Sorry, but you're not being nice. There's a reason you yourself have explained for that behaviour:

Fellow #1: "Hey! What is this Chao thing? Has nothing to do with what I played on the Mega Drive."
Fellow #2: "Chill out, dude, we're in 3D now, games are bigger!"
Fellow #1: "Ok, but, why this? It has nothing to do with what Sonic has been until now!"
Fellow #2: "Sonic Team is really into A-life, they had it already in Nights."
Fellow #1: "So, we're having here a game mode from a different title that plays totally differently?"
Fellow #2: "I suppose so, they don't plan to make a sequel for that other game, but they wanted to do more regarding A-life."
Fellow #1: "I'll ignore it then, seems plain boring."
Fellow #2: "You won't. It gives emblems. By the way, do you like airplane shoot'em ups and fishing games?"

Years later...
Fellow #3: "I can get why those older people complain about their series having totally different stuff from what they wanted or have played in previous games."

Come on, guy, no one's telling you that gameplay shouldn't exist, they're expecting the new features to be coherent with what was previously offered. I like Gamma/Mechs gameplay, but I find reasonable to ask for it to be out of the bundle.

 

So, you say the same we do about Chao gardens? Of course, once the features are added, there's no going back, especially of they click on newer fans, but our anger goes to developers (or should go). If your point is how far some people go with this opinion when it's too late or against the wrong people, then ok, I agree. I've already said earlier I accepted Sonic had changed forever by the time I played SA2, and that's probably what Sonic is for other people who never played a 2D title. I'm fine with that, but don't be so surprised if criticism from older fans gets harsher when the offered products are not only different in content, but also in quality or even concept; we were first here to check out what Sonic is.

 

hahahah this is super odd to me. The Chao Gardens are optional to get through the story. The shooting/fishing/treasure hunting are not.

You can literally ignore them if you're not going for all emblems, and you can't do the same for the other gameplay styles, which are 100% required to actually finish the game in both SA and SA2, so it makes sense that people still think of them fondly. (it also helps that they're cute and customizable)

I'd also like to add too that only going for Chaos Chao, which aren't required for emblems at all, is really time-consuming - playing through the levels to get good animals gives the chao good enough stats to clear Karate and Races without having to min-max and reincarnate repeatedly (I got the emblems on first-generation adult Chao). This is different from treasure hunting that can be really lengthy if you don't have the locations memorized (not helped by SA2's radar intentionally limiting it to one item to ping), or extremely lengthy and slow mecha sections with stiff platforming - legitimately, it takes maybe five minutes between each level at most to give the animals you want, feed the chao, and go. Meanwhile, Meteor Herd is like 15 minutes and Mission Street is an eternity...

 

I can understand why people like the Chao Garden, but I don't see the appeal for putting obsessive amounts of time into it. Like, when I played SA2 as a kid, I like having a Chao and messing around in the Chao Garden, but I never really cared about raising it and managing it. Now days I might feed a Chao some animals and drives, but I don't really get how the novelty of the game mode can take people in so much that they spend hours and hours raising their Chao. I do hope they return in a future game though.

 

I'm well aware how flawed Sonic Adventure 2 Is. It's just that a lot of people went on this hate train against it in recent years. Now it's not as bad as it was back in 2015, but we still have people just completely attack the game, and blow it's flaws up to such a high degree. I remember someone actually compared it to Sonic Boom Rise Of Lyric, and that it has the same flaws as that game.

 

It's like this for any simulation game, pet-based or otherwise (Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, the Sims.) You don't usually get immediate payoff for your actions, which makes the work you put into it feel like it was worth it. Should there be more to do if they bring Chao back? Yes. Should they cut down the time it takes to do things? I personally don't think so.