The game starts out with Sonic in a police helicopter, having been arrested for various crimes. After Sonic escapes and fights a police robot (don't ask how they got them, your guess is as good as mine) he runs into a new character: Shadow, who the police had mistaken for Sonic. Shadow teleports away, and Sonic is quickly arrested and put in prison.
Meanwhile, Knuckles is fighting a bat treasure hunter named Rouge, who is trying to steal the master emerald. While they were fighting, Eggman (Yes, that's his name now. "Dr. Robotnik" was simply a creation on Sega of America, and in Japan his name was always Eggman. In the English dub of Sonic Adventure 1, Eggman is called Dr. Robotnik and Eggman is an insult/nickname made up by sonic. After SA1, Eggman took liking to the name and made that his name from now on.) comes along and tries to steal the master emerald, which knuckles breaks as a safety maneuver. Knuckles now needs to search for the emerald pieces once again.
Eggman needs a power source for a super weapon known as the Space Station ARC, which he was told about by Shadow. Shadow was found by Eggman accidentally in a military base. Shadow was a top-secret military experiment that Eggman's grandfather and role-model, Dr. Gerald Robotnik, was working on for the military.
His daughter Maria had a deadly virus and was quarantined up in space so it wouldn't spread. The military offered a cure if Gerald worked on a bio weapon for the military called "Shadow." Shadow could use chaos energy, was immortal, could regenerate, and was immune to all viruses. Shadow befriended Maria, as he was the only one who could be by her as he couldn't catch Maria's illness.
However, the military was unpleased with Shadow, as he had emotions and that could be a problem. They forced Gerald to destroy his first creation and make a more powerful "ultimate life-form" called "The Biolizard." He did create the Biolizard, but refused to destroy Shadow. The military in response staged a raid on ARC to kill shadow, capture Dr. Gerald, and retrieve the Biolizard. Maria sacrificed herself for Shadow, and sent him down to earth in an escape pod. Shadow decided to seal himself away in an old factory, and slept for 60 years until Dr. Eggman released him.
Tails and Amy arrived at Prison Island were Sonic was being kept, and they release him and together the escape to the forest nearby. Meanwhile, Eggman and Shadow search for the Chaos Emeralds and Rouge is revealed to be working for Eggman. However, her real loyalties lie in the military branch known as GUN and is working as a spy and double agent.
Sonic and Shadow meet again in the jungle and fight, while Eggman and Rouge collect more chaos emeralds. Eggman then goes to his base in the desert so he can take a rocket ship to ARC, but Sonic and friends latch on and they all head to ARC. Eggman nearly kills tails, and uses him as bait to lure sonic so he can give Eggman the last chaos emerald he needs. Eggman gets the last chaos emerald and seemingly kills Sonic, but Sonic was able to teleport out of there at the last moment due to his latent chaos powers.
Eggman activates the weapon on the ARC and uses it to destroy the moon, while Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles try to destroy the cannon. Knuckles befriends Rouge after she is discovered as a spy and together they combine the shards they found to rebuild the master emerald, reversing the power of the other 7 emeralds. However, the cannon has just enough power for one blast, and is aimed straight at station square.
Sonic ruses to the cannon, but is stopped by Shadow, and they fight. After Sonic defeats Shadow, sonic destroys the cannon. While this seems like a good thing, this activates Gerald's secret backup. After he lost both Maria and Shadow, he went insane and built a mechanism that if the cannon is destroyed the Arc will head towards the earth and destroy it.
This also released the all-powerful Biolizard, who must be defeated to stop the Arc. Sonic and Shadow team up to defeat the Biolizard, but before they can finish it the Biolizard takes control of the ARC to head it to the planet faster. Sonic and Shadow go Super Saiyan and together the destroy the Biolizard and with Shadow's sacrifice they teleport the ARC back into orbit. Thus the world is saved, and Sonic and friends reminisce about Shadow and Gerald while the credits roll.
If you get A rank on all levels and complete the extra stage Green Hill you unlock a secret cutscene where Amy gives Rouge Gamma's core chip who Rouge puts into a stronger robot body, E-05 Omega, a unfinished fighting robot made by Dr. Gerald.
Sonic Adventure 2 plays just like the first game, where as Sonic (or Shadow) you run, jump, spin dash, and homing dash in 10 different levels. However, the game is split between two campaigns: Hero Story and Dark Story. They both happen at the same time canonically but certain story cutscenes only play on one or the other so multiple playthoughs is encouraged. Also, beating both stories unlocks "Final Story" which contains the last few cutscenes and the Biolizard and Biolizard ARC final boss fights.
The only thing that contradicts in the two stories is the final battle of the dark story, which is the same Sonic VS Shadow boss fight except you play as Shadow instead of Sonic and beating it unlocks a non-canon "Dark Ending" where the world is destroyed.
Finally, in the dark story, instead of playing as the trio of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles you play as Shadow, Dr. Eggman, and Rouge. They play identically to their good-guy counterparts so they are all but clones.
Now, for the meat of the game, the characters. SA2 has less characters than SA1, with only 3 instead of 7. (unless you count the clones, which still is less than SA1) You might think this is a good thing, as SA1 was a little rough around the edges, especially in a certain character, (You all know who he is.) but SA2 surprisingly only has one good character: Sonic. Yep, both Tails/Eggman and Knuckles/Rouge play like crap. Here's why.
First Tails/Eggman. Instead of playing like a 3D version of how tails plays in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, both Tails and Eggman pilot a slow, clunky mech with tons of weapons. Their gameplay mainly consists of walking forward and shooting. Also, they contain one of the worst bosses in Sonic history: Tails VS Eggman. It's bad as either character, as the other one spams their ultimate moves non-stop which you cannot do even though he CAN! Also, the arena has no rings, and Eggman constantly spams his lines of "How about this!" It's absolutely awful.
Knuckles/Rouge's stages aren't much better. Knuckles stages were already tedious in SA1, but here it's even worse as the already gimmicky radar is even more useless. Also, unlike SA1, the emeralds spawn in completely random spots meaning that Speedrunning this section and/or trying to get A rank is nearly impossible without luck on your side. At least they have awesome rap music playing in the background.
Another thing to note about the gameplay is that there is no longer a overworld. I personally appreciate this feature being cut, as I'm not a big fan of station square since I spent 75% of my SA1 playtime getting lost in there, especially on my first playthough.
The cutscene graphics are much better than SA1, with more realistic mouth movements and expressions. However, the English dub in this game is AWFUL, and most people cite it as the reason they think the game sucks. People are entitled to their own opinion, but I personally think it detracts little from the games quality and you should blame the dubbers at 4Kids, not SEGA or SEGA of America. Basically what happened is that 4Kids was lazy with the SA2 dubbing so they simply spliced in the unedited English dub and got rid of the Japanese dub. Unknowingly, this caused side effects that have become infamous among the Sonic fanbase and gamers in general. The audio is constantly too loud or too quiet, characters interrupt each other way to often, character lips don't connect up with the audio, etc.
But no one can mention SA2 without using at least a paragraph to explain it's most addicting feature: the Chao Garden. The Chao Garden is basically a simulation mini game within the game that allowing to create, breed, pet, care for, feed, battle, and race Chao, magical spirits who are the source of chaos energy and brood of the god of chaos, order and water Chaos, the main antagonist of SA1. The Chao Garden existed in SA1, but it was heavily expanded upon in SA2 and is the main reason people keep coming back to this 17 year old game.
While the Dreamcast version failed, the game was ported to the Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2 as Sonic Adventure 2: Battle and became a must-own title on both consoles. Sonic Adventure 1 also received an updated port called Sonic Adventure: Directors Cut which included bugfixes and new content.
Overall, I say that SA2 is both a step up and down from SA1. While it has better cutscenes (way better in the original version) Sonic feeling fluid, better story, and better new characters, it suffers from an awful dub, lack of (good) characters compared to SA1, Overall, I'll rate Sonic Adventure 2 at 7.8/10.
7.8/10
Pros
- Good story
- Better graphics than SA1
- Sonic/Shadow is fun to play
- Chao Garden
Cons
- Awful dub
- Tails/Eggman and Knuckles/Rouge play like crap.
