Sonic Adventure 2

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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.

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.

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.

 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.