sayonara, shadow the edgehog
i 100%'d sonic adventure 2 and i wanna yap about it.
this game has been a part of me for two entire decades. which is fucking insane to think about. i had watched sonic satAM as a baby, but i was too young to really remember much, other than i thought that the funny blue hedgehog was cool. fast forward some years when i was probably about 7 years old, i was at Toys R Us with my dad. we were on our way to the checkout when my eye caught a glimpse of a familiar blue character on a case for a gamecube game. curiosity got the better of me, i stepped back to take a closer look, and i.. was entranced by what i saw. the cover art for Sonic Adventure 2: Battle right in front of my eyes. my stupid little pea brain was blown apart like never before. i remembered the cartoons, but it had been a while since i heard anything about the franchise, i was surprised to see that funny blue hedgehog again! i thought the cover art for this game was the coolest shit and i'm 100% certain it altered my brain chemistry forever. i grabbed my dad and begged him to buy it for me, and he kindly obliged. what neither of us knew was that this game would change my life.
tell me this isn't the coolest shit you've ever seen in your goddamn life
i became obsessed with it. i was a creative kid and was drawing a LOT before i even found this game, but this had sparked something in me that caused me to start taking art more seriously. i vividly remember sitting in my room, at my little desk, looking at the box art and trying to draw it on a piece of paper. i drew sonic and the gang a lot, i'm pretty sure i had my first sonic OC by the end of 2002. but enough about art, i loved this game. my favorites were (and still are) the speed stages with sonic & shadow, but the whole game is such a fun time, and in trademark sonic fashion, has a banger ass soundtrack that i still find myself rocking out to every now and then.
about a week ago, i had a thought. on june 23rd 2001, sonic adventure 2 was released worldwide on the dreamcast. june 23rd 2025 was sonic adventure 2's 24th anniversary. this is a game that is so near and dear to me, and means so much, that i decided it was finally time to 100% the game for the first time in my life. this is actually the second time i've revisited a childhood title to play it through to completion, i didn't do my first 120-star run of super mario 64 until a couple years ago. what i anticipated is that this challenge might not be too bad, but it would take a handful of hours to complete. what i didn't anticipate is reliving and once again being knee-deep in the jankest fucking physics of this game and remembering why Sonic Adventure 2 Sucks, Actually.
day 1
a majority of the 180 total emblems in this game come from A-ranking all mission stages, so that's where i got started. i didn't tackle them in any particular order, opting to simply work my way across the mission chart. i made myself intimately familiar with a guide on GameFAQs outlining all mission stages and the requirements to A-rank them, whether it was score total, time limit, or a combination. most of the missions on the left side of the chart weren't too bad, but that was nothing compared to some of the shit i went through on the latter half.
first offender was tails' mission street. i was never a huge fan of the mech stages to begin with, but oh, my god. dude. this stage throws so much stupid shit at you. admittedly this could partially be considered a "skill issue" as it's just a matter of memorizing where certain enemies appear and where bombs are dropped by the jets flying overhead. i got pretty good at it eventually, but when you're trying to A-rank something, and if you're a perfectionist like me, you're going to want to try to do it without 1. dying (as it completely resets your score and ring count, even if you start from a checkpoint halfway through), and 2. losing all your rings. i learned to keep an eye on my score to get a good idea if a particular playthrough would be "the run", and if it didn't feel satisfactory, i'd restart on the spot.
all that's fine and whatever, but nothing prepares you for the shit you go through on the final mission of any stage: hard mode. this might be the irreparable harm this game has done to my brain but i feel like "putting enemies in bullshit spots" and "Oops! All Chaos" isn't a good way to create a hard mode. i hate the chaos enemies. oh my god. keep your gay little tentacles away from me.
eat shit and die
of all the missions in this game, i think the least offensive (and kinda fun) were the hunting stages with knuckles and rouge. i found a spreadsheet used by speedrunners that listed every hint for all stages and used that to my advantage. if i wasn't able to secure an A-rank, it was always close, and i knew it was just a matter of collecting more rings or killing some dudes along the way while i ran my little errands. something worth mentioning is that i was running the steam version of SA2 through a mod loader. my mods list mainly consist of graphical and some physics fixes, nothing that wildly affects gameplay. one of the mods i had installed allowed my hunter's shard/emerald detection to light up if there were more than one in the same vicinity. usually they only light up in order, but if i flew somewhere and my third indicator was pinging, i could quickly divert to find it and get a perfect or near-perfect score, bettering my chances at an A-rank. the hard modes for these stages really weren't that bad either, as the shards/emeralds are always in fixed, albeit sometimes unconventional places. the most challenging missions for the hunters were usually the 100 ring ones, as they're typically spread across the map. thankfully, people have made guides for these as well, and it usually took 1-3 tries to get them within the A-rank time limit.
elsewhere: on one part of radical highway, there is a section where you do a trick off a ramp and into either a spring or a highway sign railing to flip off of and reach a higher platform. i overshot both and fell to my death twice. this game is not very good at capping speed when it's an essential part of the level design.
you could hear something in me starting to crack
routes 101 and 280 are the easiest shit and very funny when you're wiggling at mach-5 speeds.
day 2
the second day, i tackled a majority of the missions in the middle, from pumpkin hill to sand ocean. nothing too notable happened here, honestly. the thing about A-ranking this game is that there isn't much that you could consider too noteworthy. it provides a challenge, sure, but nothing that isn't impossible with a few attempts. they all have their own flavor of bullshit that you learn to anticipate as you go along.
actually, i lied. sky rail was stupid. the grinding physics leave much to be desired. i hate that when you go to jump off a rail, you don't do an actual jump. it's some pussy-ass little "hop" that you can't recover from and thus lead to MANY resets during this level. the leaning sensitivity that lets grinds come to a screeching halt if you so much as think about touching the thumbstick is actually a bug, and i found a mod that fixes it, but only after i completed this run. i could've suffered so much less. but it's okay. we'll call it "character building." i feel very normal no im not coping why do you ask
let's talk about metal harbor instead. for the first time in my life, i actually learned how to reach the top-most handle on the rocket. throughout the missions on this stage i found myself taking occasional shortcuts, like jumping off a loop onto the adjacent platform to save some time. it's honestly a cool stage. it also hits different with the music turned off and your favorite flavor of drum & bass in the background.
pictured: not metal harbor, immaculate vibes
day 3
sand. sand everywhere. also space. this day i completed the latter half of the chart.
pyramid cave, i had some trouble with, mainly when going for score-based thresholds. the little jumping hoops in the longer running sections help a bit, but when you're dealing with janky physics and can't quite run straight, you end up resetting. a lot. not even running gay could help me here and it was just pride month.
i had VERY similar issues earlier on in green forest and white jungle too, since those maps also have you running on angled terrain. speaking of white jungle, why did the developers think using the same button for 5 different actions was a good idea. there's a part in hard mode where your only way forward is a light ring trail. sometimes, instead, all you want to do is a silly little somersault. because it's very cool and fun. you know what else is cool and fun? going for a mid-air light ring trail as sonic and bouncing down into the abyss instead.
there are two more levels i'd like to highlight in this part of the chart. i'm gonna start with the bad and end with the good.
final chase hard mode had me in a chokehold for a good while, and i attribute this to having played literally all day, from about 11am onwards. it was probably 8-10pm when i got here, and i seemed to have slammed into a wall. shit kept going wrong, from the grinding, to the magnetic columns, to homing attack targeting, to some other shit i can't remember, probably because my mind has suppressed it by now. i undoubtedly lost the most lives to this mission, but i pressed on. the score threshold was really tight, and i wanted to aim for a good enough time to get the time bonus that would bring me into A-rank.
there were a few different times like this with other hard modes, where i had to remind myself to slow down, that i'm not necessarily under a time crunch on this mission. those other levels, i made it out with maybe a scratch or two, i could meet the score threshold and not have to worry about the time bonus. in final chase, there just wasn't much to work with, where i could slay out during half of the level and take my time doing the rest. score and time were important here. after a little time and keeping at it, i allowed myself to slow down as much as i needed, and eventually, i got that A-rank that had been beating me to a pulp prior.
now for the good: cosmic wall. when i initially returned to this game, before starting this challenge, i struggled a lot here. this is the base mission that's part of the story, and i wasn't going for any score or time in particular. when i decided to do this challenge, i was dreading this level. there's a lot of shit that can trip you up if you don't know what to expect, but, after putting on my big boy pants, and trudging through the former half of the chart, i treated it just like any other level and begrudgingly launched it.
and it was piss easy.
like what the fuck. oh my god. the whole way through. 100 ring, time limit, hard mode, whatever. it might've been the low-gravity nature of the level but i felt like i was floating through it. because there is so much shit to lock on and shoot at, you can easily slay out to meet the score threshold early on and chill out the rest of the mission. i read a tip somewhere regarding the on-rails section, where when you come across those big GUN towers that pop up and down shooting lasers at you, to just spam your fire button. there's two reasons for this:
- those towers in particular give a LOT of points when destroyed, and help tremendously in reaching the score threshold. you don't want to lock on and shoot later, because,
- lock-on targets have a distance limit. you're passing by so many enemies in that section that you can easily lock onto something, and five seconds later, lose that huge combo because you're no longer within distance of it. you want to prioritize those towers, and get off a bunch of shorter, meaty combos.
i'm not going to rephrase that last sentence. fuck you.
to end the day, on this particular save, i had completed the hero and dark stories, but still had the final story to unlock. i just got done crazy gadget, and wanted to unlock cannon's core to tackle the next day. CC is honestly a cool ass level, having all the characters come together and playing through their respective sections as part of one big mission. i got it done, i've done it a million times before, whatever, it's a task for tomorrow.
to wind down before going to bed though,
day 3.9: chao gardens
i'm gonna make this disclaimer here and now: i used a chao editor for the corresponding race and karate emblems. raising chao to be strong enough to ace the highest levels of both activities would take forever, plus, i've used a chao editor in the past during casual playthroughs, so i allowed it for myself here. i find it really fun, and it didn't diminish the accomplishment for me at all.
i created a handful of freaks for the sole purpose of destroying the competition. here's a picture of them.
look at them
it was fun getting back into chao building and remembering how stats and evolution work. the only OP thing i did was set all their traits to S rank. i found the stats of the toughest rival chao and crunched some numbers to make mine only slightly better, but still realistic.
at this point, i was tired. i created the chao i'd need and went to bed.
the final day
i'm gonna make this short and sweet, because that's how this day was.
chao karate and races: got them done. had to alter stats a bit on a select few, but a lot of it was really just waiting until my chao knocked out their opponent or won the race, whatever i was doing at the time. a nice break from the missions.
cannon's core: hard mode was bullshit, particularly in the sonic section, but other than that it wasn't a huge deal. the time limit mission gives you a LOT of overhead, especially since using the time switches also pauses the level timer. also, dying in this particular stage doesn't function like other stages, as upon checkpoint load, you keep the score and rings you had at that moment. it was a much-welcome reprieve from what i'd been used to, and let me breathe a little bit tackling this ordeal.
something else worth mentioning: finding the lost chao in this stage is actually a super cool process! after you complete tails's section and enter eggman's is when you have to start paying attention. there's an ancient ruin in eggman's section where you have to use mystic melody. after you use it, you get an item container holding a shield, which isn't much, but at the same time you've actually unlocked a new area in rouge's section. when playing as rouge, there's an ancient door that opens up, containing another ancient ruin. playing the mystic melody again spawns an item container holding a shield, but also unlocks an area in knuckles's section. and so on. enter knuckles, climb some floating platforms that aren't normally there to reach the ancient ruin, mystic melody, spawn a shield. right before the big slide in sonic's section is a new light ring trail you have to follow, up to a door guarded by a few artificial chaos, which opens to reveal the lost chao.
honestly if i wasn't already ground down to a barely-sentient paste after all i've gone through, i'd be more impressed by this. it's a cool process and i think it deserves credit.
kart racing: not much to say, knocked this shit out, wasn't nearly as bad as i thought it'd be.
boss attack: last leg of the journey, and it felt like a fun breath of fresh air. had a little trouble during some parts but everything went pretty smoothly after remembering how different battles work. knowing that this was the end of the road was bittersweet. i was grinning ear to ear fighting the biolizard, i think it's the coolest boss in the game with the coolest music.
i fought the finalhazard. everything went off without a hitch. i teared up a bit as i was two hits away from completing what i set out to do just a few days prior.
dodged those lasers, made a beeline for that final red sore.
and i had done it.
i finally paid this game that i adore the proper respect it deserves. it's a great game, one of the more popular titles of the time, and rightfully so. it's definitely not without its flaws, and even though i love it i'm still tempted to say its a dogshit ass game. because it is. it's also a good game. i love it. thank you sega. thank you sonic team.
✨
just kidding im not done
shadow should've stayed dead and i will die on this fucking hill so help me god
his death would have been so much more meaningful. he was created during the process of gerald finding a "cure" for an incurable disease his granddaughter had. maria had to stay on the ARK because the earth would make her symptoms worse and shadow was her best friend. keep it at that. but no they had to go and fucking retcon shit with the "Black Doom" in his first game also when the fuck did Emerl come into the picture like i know this plot has more holes than fucking swiss cheese but like come on you know what im not thinking about this anymore im gonna give myself a goddamn headache