18 September 2009

Sonic Adventure 2

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Features for The Top 7… Best Dreamcast games of all time | Features for All Platforms, A posthumous salute to the greatest titles for Sega’s doomed console The first Sonic Adventure was a fantastic launch title, but it doesn’t hold up so well today. Chalk it up to scattershot gameplay, poor pacing or a weirdly dull presentation, but mostly it’s because Adventure delivers too few moments like this:
Nearly two years later – after the Dreamcast’s plug had officially been pulled – Sonic Adventure 2 came roaring in to send the system off with a bang. If the first Adventure was about Sega going nuts trying out new things on the Dreamcast, then Adventure 2 was about the company showing off what it had learned since then; the gameplay was faster and more focused, the story was divided into two good-and-evil plotlines instead of six, and the cartoony presentation was more in line with the series’ character.


Features for The Top 7… Best Dreamcast games of all time | Features for All Platforms, A posthumous salute to the greatest titles for Sega’s doomed console

Additionally, Adventure 2 was the first Sonic game to give players a chance to see the story from Eggman/Dr. Robotnik’s point of view, even if he was just stomping around in a robot walker that was nearly identical to the one Tails used in the good-guy storyline. And in the name of symmetry, it also introduced Sonic’s black-furred nemesis Shadow, who – despite later being held up as an example of everything wrong with the Sonic franchise – was a pretty cool addition to the cast. Or at least, he was better than all the other additions the Adventure series made.

Features for The Top 7… Best Dreamcast games of all time | Features for All Platforms, A posthumous salute to the greatest titles for Sega’s doomed console

What made it the best: A few other Dreamcast platformers might be remembered with a little more fondness than Sonic Adventure 2, but none of them delivered quite as much as it did. Each of the game’s six characters played identically to their good/evil counterparts, but their segments – which included shooting as Tails/Robotnik and hunting for emerald shards as Knuckles/Rouge the Bat – were actually fun to play, instead of just being filler between the faster Sonic levels. It also saw the return of the first Adventure’s virtual pets, the angelic Chao, who – aside from being able to absorb the appearances of adorable baby animals and level up on the Dreamcast’s VMU memory cards/handheld consoles – were entirely optional.


Features for The Top 7… Best Dreamcast games of all time | Features for All Platforms, A posthumous salute to the greatest titles for Sega’s doomed console

 Best moment: The game’s first level as Sonic, a breakneck run down the hilly streets of San Francisco that began with Sonic leaping out of a plane, continued with him demolishing traffic on a snowboard (on asphalt, yes) and concluded with him being chased by a runaway 18-wheeler. Granted, it was never quite that awesome again, but we couldn’t have asked for a more explosive opening.


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