Sonic's 30th anniversary: Sonic Adventure 2

A cursed game, but not in the way you might think.

On June 23, 2021, Sonic the Hedgehog turned 30 years old. I’ve spent the week looking back at some of Sonic’s finest outings across those 30 years, one from each era of the anthropomorphic hedgehog’s existence. First up was the original Sonic the Hedgehog, then the last Sonic game to appear on a Sega console, Sonic Adventure 2, and last, the best Sonic Game since his heyday, Sonic Colors.

Sonic Adventure 2, the blue hedgehog’s finest hour on the Dreamcast, released after Sega had already officially left the console business behind. On January 31, 2001, Sega announced that they would be transitioning to become a third-party publisher, focused on multi-platform development, and just two months later, production of the Dreamcast stopped. Price drops become a frequent occurrence to move the remaining stock of that little gem of a console that deserved a better fate than it got, and then, it was all over.

Sonic Adventure 2, though, had yet to be released. It wouldn’t come out until June 18 in North America, and June 23 in Japan and PAL regions — a funny date selection, that, considering Sonic Adventure 2 was meant to celebrate Sonic’s 10-year anniversary, but North America got it five days before that date, and the rest of the world got it on the date of the North American anniversary, well before Sonic’s original adventure had released worldwide. We can forgive Sega the timeline distortions, considering their entire business model, the one Sonic helped build in the first place with the success of his debut title, was crashing down around them at the time.

The impact of Sonic on the console wars of the day cannot be understated: Sonic the Hedgehog gave Sega the mascot they needed to tackle Nintendo’s Mario in the public eye, and in the realm of development, showing off what the Genesis could do with their in-house creation emboldened more developers and publishers to release their games on Sega’s platform instead of locking themselves in to an exclusivity contract with Nintendo, as had been the practice since the days of the NES and Famicom. Sega was actually beating Nintendo at the start of 1992, as 65 percent of all 16-bit consoles sold were Genesis/Mega Drive systems: that was, according to January 2002’s Game Informer, the first time Nintendo was not in the lead in that category since 1985.

The problem was what came after. If you imagine Sega’s handling of their console business to be like Sonic running through a level at top speed without any concern for the dangers in his path, repeatedly crashing into enemies and obstacles while losing all of his carefully collected rings in the process, you wouldn’t be too far off from reality. Sega had a tendency to release as much as possible, be it games or hardware, and it would eventually devalue their brand in the eyes of everyone they couldn’t afford to lose the support of, be it gamers or developers or even retailers. There was just one mainline Mario game on the Super Nintendo, with a “sequel” that was more of a spinoff and the launch of a new franchise than anything: Super Mario World, and Yoshi’s Island. The Genesis featured Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic the Hedgehog CD, and Sonic 3D Blast, which were, for the most part, well-regarded releases. The Game Gear, well, that was flooded with Sonic and Sonic-adjacent titles, and they are generally much less beloved than their console counterparts, though, there is certainly an exception or two in there.

It was too much Sonic all at once, with Sega releasing 11 — eleven! — Sonic and Friends platformers between 1991 and 1996, never mind Sonic-branded spinoffs in other genres: Nintendo’s decision to begin releasing one or two major games in a franchise per console generation can be frustrating, sure, but at least you can argue it leads to far better, more focused experiences in the end. And they managed to avoid the fatigue issue Sega ran into, as well. Plus, you could play all of the Mario games from the fourth generation on just two platforms: the SNES, and the Game Boy, which is much easier on the wallet than the alternative. With Sega, you needed a Genesis and a Game Gear, but they also released the Sega CD attachment, as well as the 32x. Now, in theory, I love the idea of attachments that extend the life of a console. I’m not a fan of the current “Pro” model that has you buying a brand new system that works better and is more powerful but is also the same exact thing as the one you already have otherwise, but add-ons that ensured that you would get new experiences and be able to continue to play old ones? That’s pretty great, and I wish it had worked out for the better.

The attachments require support, or else “in theory” is all they’ve got. The Sega CD add-on cost $300 in North America: the Genesis itself launched at $189 in 1989. Such an expensive addition to the console kept people from buying it, especially since their Genesis continued to work just fine and see consistent new releases. While there are certainly some great Sega CD games, the volume just wasn’t there to convince people to acquire one, and so, development for the add-on never took off like it needed to. Nearly 31 million people bought a Genesis, but just 2.24 million of those folks also bought a Sega CD. Sega released a semi-portable combo of the Genesis system and its CD add-on that featured some pack-in games and a small screen, but, at $399, it cost $100 more than if you just bought the two separately and decided against needing the screen. Plus, that combo released the same year as Sega’s 32X, which was internally competing against their actual 32-bit next-gen console, the Saturn, which in turn was competing against the arrival of Sony in the console market with the Playstation. The 32X add-on cost $160 at launch: it would end up featuring just 40 games total, over three years, with price drops eventually bringing the add-on down to $19.95. That’s how they ended up with 800,000 units sold, because they certainly weren’t moving at the original cost.

This thing is a monstrosity, but I love it anyway.

Time spent on these add-ons and a progressively more split Genesis userbase was time that was not spent on the Saturn: after the flood of Sonic releases on the Genesis and Game Gear, plus Sonic CD on the Sega CD and Knuckles Chaotix on the 32X, there wasn’t a single Sonic game on the Saturn. The Saturn released in Japan in 1994, and North America in 1995: games were developed for it through the year 2000. Sonic R, a racing game, is the lone representation for Sega’s primary mascot on the system. If you can blame Nintendo not launching the GameCube with a Mario for part of its stumbling out of the gate, you can imagine what never putting a mainline Sonic game on the Saturn did to that thing. Throw in the lack of a Sonic with a horrific launch that saw the Saturn hit shelves with essentially no games to buy for it in an attempt to beat the Playstation to the market, and that it was actively competing against the 32X for multiple years, well, you start to understand why there were Sega executives considering not even putting the word “Sega” anywhere on their next console, the Dreamcast.

Sega would eventually end up with their name right there on the front of the Dreamcast, but that they even considered a total relaunch sans their identity tells you a lot about public perception at the time. The Dreamcast, to be frank, fucking ruled, but the damage done by splitting up the userbase, by the internal competition between consoles as well as the disputes between Sega’s American and Japanese offices, essentially doomed the Dreamcast before it ever released. It has a stellar library, especially considering how short of a lifespan the system had, but the Saturn had quality games, too. Sometimes, that’s not enough: this is as good a place as any to remind you that the two home consoles leading the charge in my Nintendo top 101 are two that were considered failures due to their low sales.

Just to really twist the knife for contextual purposes, the Wii U, Nintendo’s most significant console failure that had some in the industry calling for them to move to third-party status as well, sold around 33 percent more systems (13.56 million) than both the Saturn (9.26M) and the Dreamcast (9.13M). So yeah, killer games or no, Sega was right to think that the well was poisoned, and the launch of the Playstation 2 effectively trapped Sega inside of that well, to boot. Hence the 2001 announcement that they were no longer part of the console business, and would simply develop and publish games from that point on.

That Sonic Adventure 2 released on the Dreamcast at all is something of a triumph, considering. After all, the Saturn’s Sonic X-Treme was canceled so that Sonic Team could focus on Dreamcast development and the first Sonic Adventure, since the company had already thrown in the towel on that generation by that point. Sonic Adventure 2 did release on the Dreamcast, though, and it was great. It still is great, though, it is certainly of its time in a lot of ways. If you can get past the voice acting, a camera that didn’t feel great back in 2001, never mind now, and an acceptance that you aren’t just controlling Sonic the whole time, then you’re in for a treat.

That sounds like a lot of caveats, but it’s more about having the right expectations. The voice acting is bad, but 20 years later, it’s kind of charming in how bad it is. It’s atrocious, really, to the point the only reason it doesn’t feel like the most 1990s game of all-time isn’t that it released in 2001, but that the original Sonic Adventure also exists. The lip-syncing isn’t great, either, and characters often interrupt each other in a way that messes with both the subtitles and what you’re hearing from the speakers, but it’s really all whatever in the end. Chaos Emeralds, gotta stop Dr. Eggman, etc. Sonic says something that’s supposed to be full of Attitude and Coolness that mostly makes him seem like a huge dork, which is fun in its own way, that he’s now more of a “hey Han Solo isn’t cool at all, he’s just a big nerd playing otherwise like us” kind of character instead of, I don’t know, the physical manifestation of Surge and the ethos of skateboarding videos.

The camera isn’t great, but neither was Super Mario 64’s, and that doesn’t stop any of you from talking up that game. The camera works well enough in Sonic’s and Shadow’s levels, aka the ones where you are moving extremely fast and need the camera to keep up, and is only really a problem in the Knuckles and Rouge stages, where you have plenty of time to readjust, anyway, since they’re more about exploration and slow-paced. Like with the voice acting, it’s easy enough to get used to and move on from to get to what’s inside.

As for accepting that you’re playing as someone other than Sonic, that’s actually what makes Sonic Adventure 2 still work to this day. You have two different paths to play, to experience the story from differing perspectives: that of the heroes (Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles), and that of the villains (Shadow the Hedgehog, Eggman the Doctor, and Rouge the Bat). Sonic and Shadow play similarly, with an emphasis on speed, loop-de-loops, ring collection, homing attacks, etc. Tails/Eggman and Knuckles/Rouge are the other pairings that work from the same premise: six characters, three systems to learn, and you don’t actually complete the game until you’ve played both the heroes’ 16 stages and the villains’ 14, which will in turn unlock a final zone featuring all of the characters. There are also boss fights aplenty and five missions in each stage that need to be completed in order for you to receive the highest rank on said stage. There’s a lot of game here, and it’s all more focused and better balanced than its predecessor.

The Sonic levels are great: you won’t confuse them for the best Sonic levels going or anything, but they’re well-designed and bereft of the frustrations that plagued most subsequent 3D Sonic releases, especially as you power your characters with upgrades that make things like collecting all the rings in a long line easier. They don’t just play themselves, which is a significant issue for me with some of the later, more cinematic Sonic 3D titles. These Sonic Adventure 2 levels don’t feel like they’re on rails, with you just along for the ride: you have to be actively engaged the whole time, prepared for a change in environment, in your path, for enemies appearing in your way, for secrets hiding off to the side or only in your reach if you can execute a perfectly timed jump that is boosted by your considerable momentum. They feel good to play, which is not a thing I just say about any Sonic 3D experience.

The Eggman/Tails stages are the ones that do the least for me, but that’s not to say they aren’t any good. They’re a little slow early, a little too simple, especially when the vehicle is underpowered and can’t do very much besides endlessly shoot, but as the game begins to expand on the concept of a shooting, jumping, and hovering vehicle and what can be done with that while traversing a 3D space full of enemies, obstacles, and puzzles, the quality of these levels picks up. I’m partial, in particular, to Tails’ level for the pyramid zone, since it opens up the stage a bit and forces you to make decisions about what the right way to go is, and often requires you do quite a bit of exploring to figure out its secrets.

The highlight of Sonic Adventure 2 for me, though, is those Knuckles and Rouge stages. Whereas I could see the design and gimmick of the Sonic/Shadow speed-based levels wearing thin if they were the only thing the game was based on, I would still, today, play an entire game made out of the Knuckles/Rouge zones. They’re not huge stages, considering that they are part of a game released in 2001 and not 2021, but they’re entirely open. Knuckles and Rouge can both fly across the stage and grab walls, as well as climb them. You’re looking for the broken pieces of the Master Chaos Emerald in these zones, which means finding hidden caches and rooms, opening up new pathways, solving some environmental puzzles, and simply finding out how to get from Point A to Point B sometimes. While the levels for Sonic, Knuckles, and their corresponding characters on the villainous side of things are generally pretty linear, the more open nature of the Knuckles/Rouge stages shine through for their extremely differing approach.

Plus, Knuckles’ stages have a hip hop soundtrack rapping about what Knuckles is doing, is about, and where he is, which is the kind of thing that feels extremely 2001 but should not have been limited to such a specific time period for games!

Really, all of the different stage types work well, which is why I’m writing about Sonic Adventure 2 instead of a different Sonic game during this celebratory week. It has its issues, sure, but it holds up so much better, to me, than the original Sonic Adventure, and is easily the second-best 3D Sonic out there because of it. It received deserved praise when it released for the Dreamcast, although, curiously, significantly less praise six months later when it became the first Sonic game on a non-Sega console* thanks to the enhanced GameCube version of the game, Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. Much of that lack of joy for the game had to do with the fact that it was mostly the same game as before, now just better looking, since the GameCube was more powerful than the Dreamcast, but still, it’s odd that the average scores for the two releases are nearly 20 points apart, with the Dreamcast one being held up as an excellent release and the GameCube one — again, the superior version, thanks both to graphics and a controller that might even work a little better for the game in question — was scored as if it were mediocre.

*I am choosing my words carefully there: Sonic Adventure 2: Battle is the first non-Sega-console release for Sonic, but Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure released two years prior on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, a handheld system. The team at SNK that developed that game would eventually go on to form Dimps, which would end up handling portable development duties for Sonic from that point forward, with some really great releases coming in that stretch for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.

Sonic Adventure 2 is pretty easy to get these days, considering the fact it initially released on a dead console and its subsequent release came on one that was just starting its own process of losing a generation by a landslide. You don’t want to pay for a GameCube edition of the game, since it basically costs as much now as it did at launch, and you’re looking at even higher prices for the rarer Dreamcast version. If you still have a Playstation 3 still hooked up, you can purchase Sonic Adventure 2 there for a mere fraction of that cost, and the Xbox 360 digital release is also playable on your Xbox One or Series X/S. There are better Sonic games, for sure, but the vast majority of them aren’t also 3D Sonic games. If that’s more your thing than the 2D entries, then this game was, and still is, for you.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.