Replaying Sonic Adventure 2

 So after my pushing through and reliving the joys of Sonic Adventure DX on my PS3, I discovered there is a version of Adventure 2 on the PS3 as well.  Blow me down says I, might as well try and get a bit of that action.

With some messing about, I did eventually have it ready for play.  So, how did it go?

Well while the conversion was a lot better than SA1, the flaws of the game in general were still there.  I have SA2 for the Dreamcast and did most definitely play it a lot back in the day, I will freely admit that I don't like SA2 as much as I like SA1.  It was OK, but a few things like the animation style they went for, and other stylistic choices didn't grab me all that much.

I did like the Tails and Eggman sections, a lot of the Sonic/Shadow sections and tolerated the Knuckles/Rouge sections.  

Now though, lets focus on the PS3 version.

It feels super close to the DC, and there appears to be no major graphical foobars like in SA1.  So no complaints there.  Sadly time hasn't softened my view on the voice acting, it's still frikking annoying (well the English one for sure), I've also always hated the way they used motion capture for the characters; Sonic's big head/hands/feet just don't blend well with skinny limbs and human movements.

My complaints stem from the gameplay itself.  While at the time it was pretty good, I feel that I just couldn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to.  More often than not, I found myself getting irritated at little things here and there.

SA2 brought in the quick light ring dash which you should be able to use to run straight into a line of rings and dash across.  It's mapped to some ground/roll flip things and if you mis time it, Sonic will drop all speed and do a little flip thing.  Guess what I managed to do most of the time...  Could it be due to bad skills?  Possibly, but I do remember disliking that at the time as well.

Sonic has the grinding skill introduced here and it has a bit of interaction that I never liked either, having to lean left and right, as well as crouching for speed.  I could never bother getting the hang of that option and so also found that useless and would avoid grinding because of that.

Added to that is for some reason, I just found the Sonic levels not all that enjoyable.

Then I found the Eggman and tails levels all right, but the camera was a pain in the arse.

Then the Knuckles & Rouge levels, oh man.  They were so frustrating... The camera was juts complete balls, running around the maps with the camera getting stuck on things, banging into enemies that were off screen, and generally just searching for the thing of the level just wasn't all that fun.

I pushed through a few levels, thinking, if I keep pushing, it'll get good, but every level following on from that was also one that I found annoying and a hard push.

The final straw for me was the Knuckles Boss fight in the Pyramid.  Knuckles fights a huge ghost and it just was not fun whatsoever.  I do remember this part annoying me on the Dreamcast, so it isn't particular to the conversion as such.

And so, I decided to drop the game.

The thing is though, the game felt very similar to the DC game.  That got me thinking, was I just more forgiving back then?  The game style was pretty new back then, but I also remember being annoyed by the camera issues then too.

One thing I think it could've done with for this version, was allowing better camera control with the right stick.  You could rotate the camera using the right analogue stick, but couldn't make it go up/down.  I think that if there were a remastered version of the Adventure games I would probably grab them, but they'd have to have some extensive QOL enhancements done to them.

Once again though, it has been very interesting revisiting a game that I did enjoy and probably spent a LOT of time on as a younger me.  At the time on the DC, I definitely thought it was a fun game, I've never thought it as good as Sonic Adventure 1 though.

The old discussion of games aging or not ends up being all from a point of perspective, the games are all products of their era in a way and using my knowledge and experiences of now to judge a game from 22 years ago (oh god, has it really been that long???) seems a tad unfair, but I can't deny the fact that I didn't really enjoy my time with SA2 in this session and couldn't be bothered finishing it on this round.

Music is pretty good still and I do really like the power ups for the characters.  Knux' glasses on his head are the best!