I got my Dreamcast the Christmas it came out, and I loved Sonic Adventure with every fiber of my pint-sized heart. I grew up with Sonic the Hedgehog. I watched the cartoons. I played every Genesis game to death. I must have beat S3&K 50 times. I waited for a real Sonic game on the Saturn with heavy anticipation, vowing to buy one the day Sonic came out on it. The Dreamcast blew my mind. Sonic Adventure blew my mind. Two years later with SA2 I enjoyed the game heartily, but it wasn't as magical. I beat in on the Dreamcast. A bit later, my neighbor bought it on Gamecube and wanted to race chaos, so I bought it on Gamecube too which meant beating it a second time. Something was missing. I did beat it, but it was more work than play. From that point forward, no 3D Sonic game has ever given me joy again. I tried replaying SA on both Dreamcast and Gamecube but got bored by level 4. I couldn't even touch SA2. They just seem so... hollow. So... bad. Nothing about them has stood the test of time for me. Everything about them seems mediocre, and not just in a dated way. Without the anticipation and excitement built up around Sonic, they aren't...good. I'd compare them to the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. When they were on back in the eighties everyone was just happy Trek was on again. Now, they are appallingly bad. Just awful. And later failures in both of the franchises - like Voyager and Shadow - make the earlier failures look even worse since its a pattern. Watching classic Trek from the 60s had a timeless quality, like the Genesis games do, but the first two NextGen seasons are barely watchable now. Of course, Trek had later NextGen and DS9, both which kicked ass.
I find the Sonic/Shadow stages to be somewhat fun, although I've played them to death and the problems with them are more evident today than they were in 2001. But the remaining 2/3 of the game is really a pain to play. SA had its issues, and that was apparent even when it released. The bizarre thing about SA2 is that while it did fix a couple things, the remaining issues were made worse. The emerald radar was broken, making the Knuckles/Rouge stages far more irritating than they should have been, the Tails/Eggman stages were dumbed down (the need to combo enemies with E-102 was what made his stages fun), and the fairly simple, lighthearted plot of SA was replaced with that embarrassment of a story in SA2. Yet my nostalgia for this game is still such that I want to start it over, one day, and go for all A ranks.
I've just gotten into Sonic Adventure 2 recently and I'm loving it so far. Sure, there are some points that irritate me, such as the terrible camera in the treasure hunting levels which gives me a headache within five minutes(I get motion sickness VERY easily.), but there's very little for me to complain about. I find the overall gameplay, music, and story to be great. The graphics may not be smooth, but I love how exaggerated their expressions could get, which in my opinion, is worth more than characters who look smooth but expressionless. The Sonic / Shadow levels are fantastic, and the others are pretty fun. It seems like it's aged rather well in my opinion. Whether or not as well as SA1, I haven't decided yet.
