This Youtube video is a follow-up to Choa’s 40 Sonic Adventure 2 Facts, which we posted about recently. Unlike the standard lists of this nature that litter the internet, most of the ones in these two videos are genuinely interesting, and paint a picture of a team trying a lot of things to make their take on the Sonic series work, while pressed for time.
For those not acquainted, Sonic Adventure had a weird structure, with free-exploration Adventure Fields, with permanent powerups to find, NPCs to talk to, and even a few subquests; and more demanding Action Stages. Each action stage had an entrance somewhere in an Adventure Field. Sonic Adventure had six playable characters, each with an entirely different style of gameplay! Sonic running, Tails racing with Sonic, Knuckles treasure hunting, Amy being chased by robots, Omega (itself one of Eggman’s robots!) blowing things up, and Big the Cat… fishing.
What a weird game. And you can tell just from playing it, the weirdness extended to its development. Characters can enter parts of courses intended for other characters. There are secret areas that seem like a holdover from early development, that sometimes can still be entered. Voice lines and animations that are very obscure, or even impossible to trigger without mods, remain in the game. Choa’s video is not a complete listing of these oddments, but it’s certainly a good introduction to them.
Yesterday’s was the appetizer; this one’s the main course. It’s from Choa again, and it’s 40 obscure facts about Sonic Adventure 2 (18 minutes). The Chao get mention in it too, don’t worry, but it’s mostly about the maxi-game, not the mini-game.
There’s some very interesting facts in there, like how the game seems like it was intended to be set in San Francisco, that getting to the end of a stage with every ring in it gives you an automatic A rank, or that you can summon Big the Cat in cutscenes by tapping the A button!
The Sonic Adventure games are artifacts of their time. Sega kept making games in their style, like Sonic Heroes for instance, or the Wii Sonic games, but they never really seemed to be headliners after the Dreamcast days.
I think now we can generally agree they’re failed experiments. There was a certain jankiness to them. You never knew if the camera was going to suddenly glitch out, and either leave you unable to see where you are, or change the control context and send the snarky rodent thingy hurling off the land to his doom, shouting “No!” as he fell. Or you might fall through a floor, or move through a wall, or whatever. The exploration-based treasure hunting stages with Knuckles or Rouge (in her first game), or the mech combat stages with Tails or Dr. Eggman (playable!) tended to glitch out less often, but it could still happen.
Despite the obvious effort put into it, it always felt like it had been rushed through without much playtesting. As I watched Choa’s video myself, a lot of memories, many of them bad, sublimated out from the depths of my brain. But I still feel a lot of fondess for the games, the jank included. They weren’t like anything else out there, and there still hasn’t been much else like them since.
One of the facts mentions a Green Hill stage. Even people who played Sonic Adventure 2 back then might not know about it. To unlock it, you had to earn every blessed emblem in the game, all 180 of them. Any objective there was to do in SA2, you had to do it. Some came from completing stages, but for some you had to get A ranks. Some of them involved having Chao win at sports. You had to get all of them in order to play a special level inspired by the iconic Green Hill Zone from Sonic 1. It was a ton of work for that nostalgia bomb, and yes, I ended up doing all of that to see it. It was okay.
My favorite fact about SA2, not covered in the video, is that the lass bosses were called the Biolizard, and then its upgraded version, the Finalhazard. Oh the questions! Why was it the Biolizard, all lizards are biological as part of their essential lizardness, did Gerald Robotnik invent other kinds of lizards? Why did it upgrade into something with the incredibly generic name Finalhazard? If had just been called the Finallizard, that’d have been silly oh yes, but actually would have made more sense.
And what else did Gerald get up to, up there on the Space Station Ark, trying to create the Ultimate Lifeform? “Behold my latest creation: the EVILWALRUS! No no wait better, the MUTANTOTTER! Oh I know, how about the POWERCHICKEN! Nah I’m fooling, the Ultimate Lifeform is really this hedgehog person over here. I know, he seems moody. Please humor him, he’s going through an emo phase. It might cheer him up if you listened to his poetry.”
The Chao Garden seems like such an odd inclusion in the Sonic Adventure games now. In fact, they seemed like an odd inclusion back then too, about 25 years ago.
It was created as the successor to the “A-Life” aspect of the Nightopians in NiGHTS into Dreams, itself not really a huge part of that game, but it encouraged repeat play to see what they would evolve into. The Chao Garden, for those unfamiliar, was a virtual pet sim included as a side game. Animals rescued in the levels of the main game could be collected, then brought to a number of small areas where they could be presented to one of a number of little blue creatures, the Chao, that they could raise and modify. The Chao didn’t eat the creatures, they instead kind of nuzzled them. Personally, I think they should have eaten them; it makes more thematic sense than whatever magical sparkly thing was going on.
Giving animals to Chao increased their stats, and could even give them new skills. Sonic and friends could then have them participate in various contests, load them up into a mini game on the Dreamcast’s “VMU” memory card, or “bred” with other Chao.
The original platform of the Sonic Adventure games was the Dreamcast, and while the Sonic Adventure servers were running, you could upload them to a babysitting service (or so I seem to remember), or visit the “black market” to obtain various items of benefit to your Chao. It was a really detailed and thought-out pointless minigame, and it came to be identified with the Sonic Adventure games, following the games of the series as it was ported to other, less-doomed platforms.
Choa’s video has more information than a non-fanatic could ever hope to fully understand, but it’s interesting to hear about. These kinds of virtual pet games aren’t made too often, and even less as part of headliners like the Sonic Adventure games were.
