I had a lot of mods to fix some of the botched porting. I think its a more consistently good game compared to Sonic Adventure 1, but the Sonic levels in that game far surpass every level here. Story is fun though. I like Shadow and Rouge.
I like all the gameplay styles. I think Tails and Eggman's levels are the worst of the 3 styles though. They're better than Gamma's stages though. Knuckles and Rouges stages are much better in this game compared to Knuckles in Adventure 1. For both of these styles its mainly because I have to actually think and the levels present an actual challenge.
I don't like Sonic and Shadow's stages as much as in Adventure 1 since the game's levels are built more like hallways instead of like open spaces. The summersault move is dumb and feels pointless and just makes spindashing less satisfying since now there's a delay to the activation. The light speed dash and bounce are fun though. However, I wish the bounce had a sound effect. The homing attack is much worse though, it has a lower range and has a set distance it'll go before Sonic and Shadow uncurl, plus it doesn't have nearly as much range as it does in Sonic adventure. Rail grinding is cool though. I like crouching and balancing myself on them to gain speed. Switching can be a pain though.
Enemies pop out of nowhere a lot. Parts of stages are re-used a bunch. Sonic and Shadow's stages have a lot of repeated parts that just kind of play themselves, sure you can skip a lot of them, but it happens a fair amount.
The ranking system is pretty cool. I like it a lot. Live and Learn and the final scene is really good. Having everything on the B button sucks, but a mod can fix that. I want to like this game, but it frustrates me a lot. If I didn't play Adventure 1 before this, I probably would like it a lot more.

Pros:
- Amazing soundtrack
- Final boss and ending
- One of the best first levels in gaming
- Great characters
- Enjoyable story
- Most Sonic/Shadow and Knuckles/Rouge levels
Cons:
- Final level before the final boss
- Mediocre to bad level design for 60% of the game
- Janky controls
- Tails/Eggman levels

fuck the treasure hunting missions i hate them i want to go fast not dig into walls for 10 minutes. great story and characters gameplay was ok but you really need the decreased spindash delay to actually play the game, besides knuckles and rouges levels, all of them are great, escpeccialy radical highway, the two jungle levels and city escape ofc. the music is great but you already knew that and while the voice acting is passable and music is great, this game is WAY to fucking loud like i played it a 5% volume and i could still here shit. its a shame the series peaked here, but like what can top eggman scratching his ass?

In terms of story, lore importance and soundtrack, Sonic Adventure 2 is one of the best Sonic games ever made.

But in terms of gameplay... it is lacking.
The Treasure Hunters and Mecha levels really slow down the game and sometimes makes it a chore to play through.
I LOVE Shadow, Rouge, the Chao Garden and the fact that Eggman is playable, but to me, SA1 is a better game in every other aspect (even the clunkiness).

Oh look it's the greatest game of all time

I love this game, the gameplay is amazing, a bit janky by today's standards sure but the speed levels are top notch, fast and rewarding gameplay, the mech levels are good, getting high scores locking onto everything will never get boring, and the treasure hunting levels are well done too, exploring these creative locations is very immersive and fun. The bosses are well designed too, the rival battles may be jank but I love how the game keeps you engaged by having the cutscenes directly cut to the action, The main bosses are really fun, the definition of simple and effective.

There's also just a lot of good content, Boss rush, 2player, missions, the ranking system and the chao garden, the chao garden alone is like a completely different game, but it ties into the main game incredibly well.

The story is one of my favourites, high stakes, but doesn't take itself super seriously, it strikes a good balance. Tons of iconic quoteable moments, from the start of the game right to the end, the story is simply a work of art.

The music is the best in the series, mainly rock but there's also jazz, techno, rap, etc. The main themes of the characters are great too, Live and learn is basically the main theme of the series at this point.

What I really admire about the game is just how well it's designed, how it encourages replaying it over and over for high scores and unlockables, it all just loops over so well, it's designed to be played for hours on end, for years to come, you may struggle at first, but once you get good, the game becomes super enjoyable.

Anything I can say bad? Uh... mad space mission 4 A rank, nuff said.

Overall, sa2 is my favourite game of all time, doesn't matter which version you play, it all comes down to what I look for in a video game, just a fun time I can sit down and get immersed in, it doesn't have to be the most complex story driven cinematic masterpiece you've ever played, just as long as it's fun, that's all that matters.

I am deeply, deeply infatuated with this game and have been for about 21 years. So deep is my love for it that it actually exposes my biggest flaw as a reviewer:

I am preternaturally dogshit at writing about games I truly adore, compared to games I loathe. I scrapped a shorter review of this earlier in the week because it just fell kinda flat, meanwhile there's a Baldur's Gate 3 re-review in my google docs folder that's hit 8k words without even touching on the story. Really, you can tell I like a game when my review is just me dictating parts of it to you like someone ordering McDonald's.

I think what I really do love about SA2 though is that it's sort of just... Incredibly self-indulgent, in a way that I can't help but admire. Doubly so since it feels the franchise has been trying to 'make amends' for this game since 2001. It has three entirely fleshed out gameplay modes, vocal tracks as stage things, a straightforward example of 'Dark Sonic', goofy product placement, corny one liners, Rouge the Bat's tits, hilariously bad audio mixing, a story that veers off the rails and gets super dark at the last minute.

It's insane. I love it. That it feels great to play and has a great gameplay loop perpetuated by the Chao Garden is only a plus. Despite the jank (which is, imo, overblown even by people who like the game), to me this will always be the most cohesive and consistently enjoyable mainline Sonic game besides Shadow. Especially considering that its followups all have a billion asterisks attached or just some absolute dealbreakers, like Heroes feeling like a representation of what it must be like to do a marathon in a world made of expired handwash.

I always come back to this over the other games because it's one of the few Sonic games that isn't either awful to play, or prostrating itself to the fans who want a Sonic game that makes them feel as warm as they did before their parents divorced. Or whatever the flying fuck Frontiers is supposed to be. I would play Shadow, but the True End is a ballache to get, and I don't ever feel like pulling my 3DS out to play Rush.

There's an interview for Frontiers I always go back to, where an interviewer asks the producer "What do Sonic fans want the most?" and he answers "Chao Garden". The interviwer then asks "Will Frontiers have Chao Garden?" and he says "No" with a grim, knowing look on his face. As if he realizes that Sonic was supplanted as Sega's mascot by Kiryu Kazuma years ago, and that 'Sonic is for kids!' doesn't appease investors who're wondering why their games review like shit. "Maybe Chao Garden will be in the next game" is Sonic Team's "I promise I'll quit drinking, honey".

Sorry for this goofy pun, but: It's both sad and funny that the game which introduced Shadow to the series also cast a shadow over the entire IP for about 22 years and counting.

P.S Mad Space is great!

Por muito tempo quis experimentar esse, mas consoles eram difíceis para mim conseguir, então só quando esse rapaz veio pra PC que eu pude jogar pela primeira vez. Até joguei uma vez quando criança numa locadora, mas a memória é vaga, e lembro só que fui até a barreira no city escape antes do caminhão, e NINGUÉM naquele lugar sabia mostrar pra criança que tinha que passar usando rasteira!

Diferente do primeiro jogo que era um personagem de cada vez, esse foca em times hero e dark, e cada fase é feita com um personagem diferente.

Agora o problema: enquanto adventure 1 tinha 6 tipos diferentes de jogos e só um era ruim, adventure 2 tem apenas 3 tipos e 2 são ruins. Passar as fases correndo com Sonic e Shadow é lindo e tudo que você quer mesmo de um jogo do Sonic.
Tails e Eggman ficam montados em robôs lentos e frágeis que quebram se sofrerem muitos danos, mesmo com anéis, as fases são um BEEP incessante do laser da arma deles e robôs se jogam pra cima de você mais vezes do que precisava.
E Knuckles e Rouge tem um controle maravilhoso, eu real amo como eles controlam, é muito fluido, mas tudo se torna irrelevante por causa do radar de esmeralda ridículo deles, que acha só uma esmeralda de cada vez. Pra que isso?? Ficou horrível, você tem que rodar fases enormes 3 vezes praticamente, passando pelos mesmos lugares pra ver se o radar reage, é realmente uma pena essa decisão que tomaram, senão iria adorar as fases deles também, eu gosto muito no Adventure 1

O jogo tenta ter uma história séria, mas personagens aparecendo em locais sem explicação e alguns pontos não fazerem sentido, me parece um tanto feita às pressas. Isso sem falar do movimento quebrado dos personagens nas cutscenes graças ao lindo motion capture que usaram em atores, e o mixing de áudio horrível em que alguns momentos você não sabe o que estão falando se não fosse pela legenda.

É um jogo que marcou história e eu respeito muito isso, ainda tenho como referência para mostrar a pessoas que nunca jogaram Sonic, apenas na hora de jogar, tenha muita paciência com algumas fases.

Ah, e o Chao Garden, meh, nunca me dei ao trabalho, descobri recente que tem outros dois gardens de céu e inferno, nunca iria me dedicar pra ter essa surpresa sozinho, foi mal km

Heeeeey I didn’t like it very much!!

I feel like everything, even the good parts, are a step down from the first game. Sonic and Shadow just don’t feel as good as Sonic did in 1. They go a lot faster but they feel a lot loose to control.

Tails and Eggman are E-102 Gamma if he was slow and clunky and not fun to control.

The Knuckles and Rouge levels, holy hell, how did they mess these up so bad? Only one specific emerald shard at a time in levels three times as big as before, get all up on outta here with those apples

Music is super good at least. I mean I dunno, am I saying anything that hasn’t been said before?

It just stank, me no like

I wanted to enjoy this game so badly, I really, truly did. It meant the world to me that I would do so, especially after the surreal and thrilling experience that was Sonic Adventure DX.

The stage was set. Two stories featuring some of my favourite characters in all of fiction, music that I enjoy enough to get up out of my seat and dance to, well-aged visuals, a plot designed to marvel and stun, and substance coming out of the game's figurative ears.

I should've taken the game's launcher being broken for roughly a whole year as a sign to stay away.

This game confused me. I don't mean in the sense that I couldn't understand it, but rather that I couldn't believe I had gone from Sonic Adventure DX, one of my top five (six?) Sonic games of all time, to this. I found myself questioning every little thing that I saw in this game. Why did the Mech gameplay, which was essentially E-102 Gamma's gameplay copied and pasted, suddenly get reduced to a snail's pace, with gameplay that makes me more miserable than thinking about how much I got bullied in school? Why do the controls, which, as far as I'm aware, are barely tweaked versions of SADX's, feel so unbelievably, constantly janky? Why are half of the sound effects things that make me feel like tinnitus is an allergic reaction?

I don't know what it was about this game that [did the polar opposite of clicking with me] so hard, possibly the fact that it's one of the rare times in my life where I actually allowed myself to have high expectations for something, but this game managed to disappoint me at every turn - so much so that it took me nearly a year just to finish it, as opposed to a month for SADX (I got stuck a lot), and my memory was so tainted that I honestly thought it took me two years to complete.

Despite everything, I still love the majority of what this game has to offer. Its music, its visuals, even its story hardly disappoint, but the gameplay is just mortifying. Well, the gameplay and the last part of the story. Seriously, why was the Dark Story so weirdly paced? Why did Shadow have only four levels? Why was his redemption arc so last-second and rushed? Am I supposed to care about his relationship with Rouge? Because pretty much every future product with those two made me care, yet this, somehow, failed to. Otherwise though, I've very little to say against the story, I still think it deserves praise aplenty.

Honestly, it'd be incredibly easy to reduce my feelings towards this game to a "Skill Issue", and that wouldn't be entirely wrong. I did struggle a lot with this game, I am not good at it, and I've no fear in admitting that. The problem is that I suck at most video games, I struggled almost if not just as much as I did here with SADX, and I struggled like hell with Sonic Heroes, too, yet I enjoyed both of those games a lot more.

There's a factor that goes into the enjoyment of games that I don't think most people tend to take into consideration, or really think that much about in general.

Incentive to replay.

No, I don't mean replayability. How fun a game is to replay is a completely different topic. What I'm talking about here is how much the game incentivises you to replay it - or, more accurately - to improve at it. Every single time I've brought up my struggles with this game, I'm met with people telling me that I need to keep playing to get better at it and enjoy it more, but that applies to just about every game ever made - at least the ones where what you do actually matters. Of course I'm going to enjoy a game more when I'm good enough at it to not have my flow broken every few seconds, but again, I wasn't any good at SADX or Heroes either, and I would jump at the opportunity to replay those, over this. This game doesn't make me feel like I want to get better at it. I have zero desire to actually have more fun with this game. I know I could get better at it, I know I could enjoy it more, and probably repair my shattered perspective of it, but I truly, from the bottom of my heart, don't want to. This game frustrates me deeply, and I don't believe that putting myself through such a miserable experience over and over and over again has enough of a reward at the end of the tunnel to justify it. I genuinely don't believe this game is worth that, and that upsets me a lot, because I would kill to be one of the people who take one look at this game and are just filled with pure joy.

But I'm not.

I had more fun playing Sonic Lost World. Sorry.

So, Sonic Team were high as balls when they made these games, right? The first Sonic Adventure was a trip and a half and Sonic Adventure 2 is almost equally as wild. I mean, the game opens with an armed militia working for the US president attempting to arrest Sonic the Hedgehog - you know, the iconic, arrogant, blue anthropomorphic alien rodent with monstrous feet and hands the size of average human toddlers - and transport him back to their base via an attack chopper. That alone is staggering, but then Sonic escapes, somehow finds a surfboard and outsurfs a giant military truck down the streets of San Fransisco.

And the best part? None of this has ANY context until the second half of the game. No cutscene that really explains when Sonic was arrested, why the military are out in force or really who the hell these geezers with straight-up machine guns and advanced military technology are. That's just the first mission and the game's like, oh, I'm sorry. Is that too much for your little baby brain to handle? BUCKLE UP, SMALL FRY. SONIC THE HEDGEHOG DOESN'T DEAL IN COHESIVE STORYTELLING; HE DEALS IN ROCK MUSIC, SEX AND UNPAID SPEEDING TICKETS.