That's largely owed to SA1 being cobbled together at the same time as the Dreamcast hardware was being cobbled together, whereas SA2 was one of the final major releases for the console. The game looks and runs much better than SA1, and it's much easier to see and feel the jump from 30fps to 60fps once you're playing on a VGA box. I feel like the only place where SA2 unquestionably outshines its predecessor is in the technical aspect. In SA2, Sonic's gameplay is given a reduced portion of the total playtime and Tails is stuffed into a lackluster mech game. In SA1, Sonic's story was roughly 3x the length of any other character, and Tails' gameplay was largely based off of his. This might be the only game in the franchise where the "Sonic's shitty friends" meme actually carries weight. And in the first two game styles, the stages in SA2 feel extremely linear compared to their SA1 counterparts. ![]() The mech stages are extremely slow and plodding compared to Gamma's playthrough. Sonic is clunky compared to SA1 the spin dash has been heavily nerfed here. Gameplay wise, every style present here suffers. ![]() The Biolizard is a lame left-turn of a final boss, in direct contrast to Chaos, who was properly built up throughout the events of SA1. Knuckles is back to being kind of shoehorned into the main events here had to find an excuse to get him hunting emerald shards all over again. It was never really clear to me if Gerald Robotnik was orchestrating the ARK's destruction from beyond the grave or not (and if so, how). He is acutely dated to the year 2001, the perfect crossroads between late '90s xtreme and early '00s edgelord. There's no real explanation for what "ultimate lifeform" is even supposed to mean, and between that and his whole revenge motivation based off of a lame amnesia subplot with an implied human love interest makes him literally feel like a fanfic character. SA2's dramatic/character elements, on the other hand, just feel weird in comparison, largely owing to how jarring Shadow is as a character. I can even appreciate Big, the walking joke of the game as far as gameplay is concerned, for his place in the story as "ordinary comic relief guy unrelated to the main ensemble who just gets swept up by the game's events in the worst day of his life." (In Triple Trouble he's inexplicably an antagonist working for Eggman again, and he was awkwardly shoehorned into Chaotix as the apparent team lead despite the events of that game having no relation to his stated role as guardian of the emerald of Angel Island.) Gamma's story is probably the most inspired piece of narrative work in the entire franchise, taking the original silly premise of "Robotnik stuffs animals into robots" and properly exploring that concept for how fucked up it actually is. Knuckles actually has a good reason to be directly involved in the overarching plot for once, which is worth underscoring here because even in the '90s Sega wasn't very consistent in how they handled him as a character. ![]() Tails and Amy both get to step out of their sidekick roles and get big moments to prove themselves. Every character in SA1 is handled well narratively. SA1's backstory regarding Chaos, Tikal, and the Echidna tribe felt like a natural evolution of storytelling for the franchise, raising the stakes and the drama in a way that felt like it still fit into Sonic's world. Overall I thought SA1 largely held up and was better than I expected it to be, while I felt the opposite toward SA2. I dusted off the Dreamcast earlier this year and played around with SA1 and SA2 a bit. I've more or less landed on the same opinion for this game as you did. I came in to this game from the opposite end, being a huge Sonic fan starting in 1991 with SA2:B being the last major game in the series that I bought for quite some time.
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