Sonic Adventure 2 was already an amazing game, but this GameCube port is even better than the original.
So the story goes that Eggman releases Shadow, the ultimate life form, from a prison base. He explains that Eggman can destroy the planet from Space Colony ARK with an incredibly deadly weapon; the Eclipse Cannon. But the weapon needs Chaos Emeralds to power up. Sonic and his pals won't allow Eggman to accomplish such evil and so the race to save Earth begins.
Game play wise there are two stories to play through, Hero and Dark. They both have three different types of Game play. The three types are speed action stages, shooter stages and treasure hunting stages. The hero team consists of the characters of our primary coloured friends; Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. Whereas the Dark team consists of Eggman, Shadow and new comer bat girl Rouge.
The speed stages, for Sonic and Shadow, consist of high speed action, rather like Sonic's stages from the original Adventure game. In fact these stages probably are funner than the SA1 ones, but overall SA1's variety makes me prefer it to this game overall. These stages are a real blast. You grind down rails, homing attack enemies to cross large pits, zip along rings with light speed dash, fling off poles and leap from ramps to perform deadly tricks. This is just plain awesome. There is some variety to help levels feel unique, for example in City Escape there is a section where you board down hills, Sky Rail consists largely of rails and Crazy Gadget will require you to play on the stage's ceiling at times.
The shooter stages will make you take control of Tails and Eggman. Yes... Tails is in a robot... But the stages are pretty fun. They play rather like E102's stages from the original. You run around making lock on combos on foes around you and hover over platform sections.
Knuckles and Rouge have the treasure hunting game play. There is a radar at the bottom of the screen which will blink green, yellow or red depending on how close you are to a piece of treasure. You goal is to find three pieces of the Master Emerald (again) Though sometimes items other than Emerald Fragments will need to be found. These stages are okay, they don't degrade the game's score, but they could have done with being more exciting to be honest.
When you complete a stage, you can access it from the stage select menu and find that you can now attempt another mission on that level if you wish. These include getting 100 rings, finding a lost Chao, finishing within a certain time limit and completing a harder version of the stage. This adds more to the game's lifespan.
Bosses in this game are well... Some are fun such as the final boss of both stories where you are running along a long strip trying to hit your foe. But others are just irritating such as Egg Golem with Sonic. The controls feel so... twitchy in this part. You seem to homing attack by accident preventing you from going where you are trying to go.
Aside from the main story there is a Kart Racing mini game. With no power-ups and cars that handle badly, this is not very fun. The Chao have been greatly improved here. Now you can have either a neutral, hero or dark chao. YAY You can also give animals and chaos drives found in stages to your Chao to increase their stats and maybe turn them into a differant type (e.g. swim) You can purchase new chao eggs in the market down at the kindergarten. You don't have to worry about putting chao onto a DreamCast memory card to get the most out of it in this GameCube port. Though having said that, you can link this up to Sonic Advance on the GBA. I'm not sure what that does to be honest.
So what else can you do to chao besides raise them? Enter them in races, and new to the GameCube port. Katate! You don't really do much. You can give your chao a speed boost during races by pushing the A button, however this drains their stamina. In karate, all you need to do is watch and mash the A button if your chao gets distracted. Overall in this port, the chao are very fun to look after. I must have spent at least 50 hours looking after them.
As for 2 player mode (moving away from chao now) You can play through almost any stage in the game. With some differant characters. Speed stages are a race to the finish and the player characters are Sonic, Shadow, Amy Rose and Metal Sonic. The shooter stages will require you to reduce your oponent's health bar to zero. Characters are Tails, Eggman, a chao walker and a dark chao walker. The treasure hunting stages are a best two out of three game, where whoever gets two out of the three emeralds wins. Your characters are Knuckles, Rouge, Tikal and Chaos Zero. This new two player mode is a HUGE improvement over the original DreamCast two player mode, which didn't have the other characters and only had three stages per game play type. The frame rate was also a bit skippy in that version too.
Graphically, it looks more or less untouched, but the models and environments do look nice. Musically, this has one of the best sound tracks of any game ever. Search for the sound track on YouTube, it's had plenty of uploads.
So Sonic Adventure 2 was already a great game. But the Chao and multiplayer upgrades in this port really improve it from the DreamCast version. Though it isn't as good as Adventure 1 however, SA2 is hard not recommend to anyone. The game really is a blast to play. Definitely get it if you can.