It's a good game, but I recommend that you play it with a controller.

Chao garden is just too good

Sonic Adventure 2 while having some great and iconic moments is an experience I can only look on negatively. Some of this may be due to high expectations thanks to the communities extremely positive view on this game however I do have MANY complaints that would apply to any game whether I had high or low expectations for. To start, the steam port has TONS of bugs and lack of some pretty basic features to a pc port its absurd how this is sold on this platform atall. If you want to play this game with a controller be ready to look up something on the internet as at base the game does not allow you to use a controller. Somehow my controllers button inputs got flipped thanks to this game and I cannot find a fix for this so that's neat. I also ran into many gameplay hindering bugs such as crashing and constant freezing. The physics issues were somehow worse than in Sonic Adventure DX which I did not expect for a sequel to the original game. Getting to actual game critism rather than port issues, many levels in SA2 are pretty terribly designed. More specifically nearly every level that you play with a character other than Sonic or Shadow are a complete slog and make you want to bash your skull in with a hammer. Knuckles (and Rouge by being a Knuckles clone) has much worse levels than in SA1, the shard finder also doesn't work anywhere near as well as in the original. Tails has a much worse problem. All of his sections are complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ now. Rather than flying around Sonic stages as a race which I found pretty fun, you now are forced into the worst mech sections in gaming history. These stages are so awful I wish I had downloaded some sort of mod to skip them they bring absolutely nothing to the game. Cannon's Core is a extremely poorly designed level. If you missed the OPTIONAL Knuckle's upgrade in an earlier stage and don't know it exist PREPARE TO DROWN as it is nearly impossible to get through Knuckle's section of Cannon's Core without that upgrade. Cannon's Core also makes Game Over-ing insanely painful as you have to spend another like 15 minutes of your life if you gameover in Sonic's section which is rather easy as what does and does not kill you isn't immediately obvious all the time in a game about going fast. Every boss fight in this game is either super boring and easy or so fast you could blink and miss it. The only bossfight I struggled on was the Biolizard fight as the camera and buggy homing attack kept throwing me off the intended way of beating it. Chao mechanics are a marginal upgrade from Sonic Adventure and I honestly liked the chao garden more than the base game. Getting A ranks on stages I despised was not in my bucketlist so I decided I would do it on like Radical Highway and be done. I did get like 3 while playing the game normally however I also received many E ranks (which I understand for the stages that I took over 30 minutes to beat but not the ones that took like 5.) Other than having a majority of the stages be a complete waste of time and having a completely abysmal time on the final level, the game also commits the cardinal sin of having completely worthless EXTRA MISSIONS to do on these stages! Now not only can I have a bad time the first go-round, I can do that FIVE WHOLE TIMES NOW. If I was actually going for 100% I would shoot myself in the head so thankfully I did not do that. As for affecting the future of the franchise Sonic Adventure 2 does do some good things. I like Shadow and Rouge and think the dynamic they have with Omega is pretty fun in later games. Everything else in the story never really matters again other than Shadow like kind of dying or whatever. The story on its own is OK??? The Eclipse Cannon is built up as this huge threat and then suddenly the final boss is some lizard you meet right at the end so like thats there idk. Eggmans grandpa is a fun character in the genocidal freak category type of way iykwim and Maria getting shot is like kind of funny. Overall I had a very negative experience with this game and would definitely not recommend people buy this game on Steam.