CHALLENGE AGAIN! No. 1 -- Sonic Adventure 2

CHALLENGE AGAIN! is a new series of blog posts I’m starting. It gets its name from the final words of the true ending of Ghosts’n Goblins.

This blog series will cover games that I have replayed after having beaten them before. GAME CLEAR posts are strictly for my first playthrough of a game. Replaying games is not something I do often (as evidenced by this first CHALLENGE AGAIN! post coming after 111 GAME CLEAR posts), but I do occasionally get the urge. When I do, this new label will make clear to my loyal readers that the impressions they are about to enjoy are based on a return to an old favorite.

Without further ado…

Sonic Adventure 2 (2001, Dreamcast)

Developer: Sonic Team USA
Publisher: SEGA
Clear Date: 11/25/22
Clear Version: Xbox Live Arcade (2012)
Clear Platform: Xbox Series X

Good ol’ Sonic Adventure 2 is a game I hadn’t played in about 20 years. I recall it being one of my first GameCube games and maybe the first Sonic game I ever owned (I think I had played some Sonic 3 at an acquaintance’s house before that). Anyway, I was pretty young at that time, and my taste in games was far from refined. I enjoyed SA2 and thought fondly of it for many years. Somewhere down the line (maybe around the time of this re-release that I played on Xbox), I recall being surprised to see that the game was not considered so great retrospectively. I assumed this was probably right and that it had some jank I was immune to as a child and just filed it away as a probably bad game. This was especially easy to convince myself of after the intervening years of mostly-bad Sonic releases.

Anyway, after playing Sonic Frontiers, I felt the urge to revisit it. The chance to play it in HD on my Series X was a bit of novelty that pushed me past my aforementioned resistance to replaying games I’ve beaten before.

What I found was a game that was indeed pretty bad but not irredeemably so! The Sonic and Shadow stages have some downright okay platforming, but the Tails/Eggman and Rouge/Knuckles stages are, more than anything, rather boring. Boredom, of course, is antithetical to the mission of an entertainment product, so in that way SA2 is not great! But, with the exception of a couple specific segments, I did not find Sonic Adventure 2 to be the annoying jankfest I was expecting. It’s hard to recommend this game, but it’s far from an abomination. If you choose to revisit this game, you will at least not wish for death.

Oh, and Chao are still cute and fun.