Welcome back to Save State where our refrigerators fail out of nowhere. Writing can be difficult at times, you know, especially when you burnt your hand in your freezer while trying to figure out why a good portion of your food thawed and needs thrown out. Can writing technically be classified as a sport? Because if so, I guess I gotta play injured. So, what I’ve learned this week is that everyone has weaknesses, it’s just that mine take the form of common household appliances, RPGs, and card games like Magic the Gathering. Magic recently released some Sonic the Hedgehog cards through their online store, and I was lucky enough for fellow columnist Neal Sayatovich to get a spot in line to pick me up a set. I even got a rare Lotus Petal that’s skinned like a Chaos Emerald- a major find for someone who has been a big fan of Sonic since childhood.

So, while we’re on the subject of things that hurt me, let’s talk about Sonic Adventure 2, one of my favorite games from childhood that I recently revisited on PC, and it is now available on Steam. Years and years ago, I remember picking up Sonic Adventure 2 on Steam and being less than pleased with it, only playing the Hero side of the story and not doing much else. In the year of our lord 2025, however, there are plenty of mods that can provide a much more pleasant Sonic Adventure 2 experience. There are transparency, shadow, and audio volume issues plaguing the Steam port that were thankfully easily fixed with a couple mods, making the Steam port considerably closer to the Dreamcast version I 100%ed over two decades ago.

Sonic Adventure 2 starts off with you being able to select between two factions, a marked difference from Sonic Adventure where you played six unique, intersecting stories. Adventure 2 still gives you six total characters to play as, but they’ve limited the gameplay to three predominant styles: Traditional, fast 3D platforming stages for Sonic and Shadow, mech gunning stages for Tails and Eggman, and treasure hunting stages for Knuckles and Rouge the Bat. You’ll play through whichever story you pick, alternating among the characters on a respective side until you beat the game.

The story of Sonic Adventure 2 is likely why Sonic shifted to a much darker style of storytelling for years, as Shadow promises Eggman the power to make his wishes come true, which results in Eggman blowing up part of the moon and soon to be the rest of the world if the leaders across the globe don’t immediately kowtow to his demands. Rather than the more meandering tale of Sonic Adventure, this is one of the last good times Eggman functions like a villain in a Sonic story, and the late, great Deem Bristow’s voice work is a good part of the reason why this characterization works.

After clearing both stories, you, of course, get a nice final treat with the Last Story, which involves all of the characters having to work together to stop an even greater threat, with Super Sonic and Super Shadow teaming up to prevent a space colony from crash landing into the Earth, the posthumous final act of defiance from a scientist gone mad due to grief. Really, the story is absolutely insane in retrospect but thinking back to 24 years ago when this title released, Sonic Adventure 2 was really pushing the limits of storytelling for a game about a cartoon blue hedgehog stopping a mad scientist from powering robots with small woodland creatures.

I chose the Hero story to start, which seems to mostly be the default. This tale begins with Sonic getting captured by government agents and escaping from a helicopter in one of the most iconic opening levels in the sixth generation of consoles: City Escape. The combination of a hedgehog jumping out of a military helicopter, using a piece of it to ride on down the streets of what appears to be San Francisco. It’s just a great opening, letting you know that you’re in for a great time.

All of Sonic and Shadow’s stages in Sonic Adventure 2 are a highlight. This is the game that started the trick, and score focused ranking systems of modern Sonic games, and you’ll grind on rails (which was new to this entry), chain bounce on enemies, and perform tricks to reach the end of stages both quickly and stylishly. Soon after the high that is City Escape, you switch to Knuckles who just can’t keep his Master Emerald together, resulting in him competing with Rouge to find pieces of it so he can put it back together.

In Adventure 2, Knuckles has the benefit of getting his own stages this time, rather than exploring more open portions of Sonic stages like he was restricted to in the first Adventure game. The backing tracks for Knuckles’ stages is heavily centered around goofy rap lyrics, while Rouge’s treasure hunting stages have more jazzy instrumentals and soft, feminine vocalizations. Your primary goal with these characters is to run around and find the randomized locations where Master Emerald shards may be hiding using only your trusty radar and hints from various floating televisions to narrow down their locations.

If there’s one complaint with the Knuckles and Rouge stages, it’s that only the first emerald shard pops up on the radar to give you an idea where they are in this entry. So, you could be side-by-side with the third emerald piece when you first begin a stage and have no idea until you collect the first two. It just unnecessarily drags these stages out and was a design choice I always found subpar considering the faster you find the emeralds with few hints, the higher your chance of A ranking the stage is. Shoutout to Rouge’s final level which is incredibly vertical, has an annoying gravity gimmick, and the nerfed treasure radar makes this an absolute chore to play (for this stage, I recommend using a mod/cheat that returns the radar to the Adventure 1 levels where all emerald shards are trackable. Her Mad Space level is suffering otherwise).

After that, you have the mech gameplay of Tails, which function similarly to E-102 Gamma’s stages from Sonic Adventure, except now you’re a lot slower, heavier, and the chain lock-on combo system is absolutely necessary to get A on basically any mech stage. I’ve always been a fan of the Tails and Eggman mech gameplay but not necessarily Tails’ levels, which range from far too easy to the Moon Knight meme “random BS go.” All of Eggman’s levels are great, especially Cosmic Wall which comes much later in the game and gives him considerably larger jumps due to lowered gravity. That said, it could be Stockholm Syndrome due to loving E-102 Gamma so much, but I’ve always enjoyed the mech gameplay of roaming through environments and locking onto as many enemies as I can before firing to get the largest score bonus possible.

Sonic Adventure 2 was one of those titles where they really did a sequel right. Unfortunately, the port to the Gamecube and subsequently Steam has some warts, but thankfully a lot of those can be fixed with mods and changed closer to the game I enjoyed during my childhood. This is a title that used the three most successful gameplay styles of the first entry and ramped absolutely everything up to 11: the story is crazy, there’s loads of replayability since every level has 5 total missions to clear and A rank, and if you A rank everything in the title, you unlock the first time they ever fully rendered Green Hill Zone in 3D! Playing Green Hill seems rote now, since Sega’s done this at practically every opportunity for the better part of a decade or more, but back when Adventure 2 released, this was a huge deal for a 100% clear bonus.

Anyway, that’s all the time we have for this entry of Save State. I know Sonic Adventure 2 isn’t exactly a relatively unknown RPG, indie game, or some random piece of hardware I’m toying around with, but I still have had a lot of fun revisiting one of my favorite titles as a kid. It also took me back to a time when Shadow the Hedgehog had a complete story arc, didn’t yet have his own solo game where he wielded guns, and everybody still kind of liked the Dixie Chicks. Some would say that Sonic Adventure 2 wasn’t as good as other titles in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, but I very much enjoyed it.

See you in two weeks!