Sonic Adventure 2

General Advice

Always interact with the Omochao robot by touching him (NOT grabbing him), although a lot of times he gives superfluous explanations, there are moments where he will give extremely important information (especially in Knuckles/Rouge stages) so always interact at least once when you see one.

The game's content is heavily tied to score ranking and replayability, even if you're not into 100%ing games, it is highly recommended that you at least try to replay the 1st Mission of the stages while going for A-Rank to make the most of the game. In general, always try going for the highest rank even while playing through the story.

The game is always switching between playstyles and characters during the story, so to enjoy the game to its fullest you have to properly know important aspects of each playstyle.

Crouch while grinding on rails so you gain more speed, but you will have to balance correctly by tapping the analog stick on the opposite direction your character is overbalancing. For example, if Sonic looks like it is falling towards the left, keep tapping the analog stick to the right, keep maintaining Sonic aligned towards the center. Emphasis on tapping, do NOT hold the stick.

To do a normal jump from a rail you must NOT move the analog stick to the sides or else the character will try to rail switch, make sure your stick is in neutral position before jumping.

Rail switching is not reliable, sometimes your character will miss the parallel rail and fall off, since rail switching is not obligatory to progress, avoid doing it.

When doing the Homing Attack, make sure that the enemy is in the same or lower height than the character and move the analog stick towards it, you have to get used to the general distance the Homing Attack works, new players tend to think that it's just about mashing the Jump button but you have to aim correctly at the right direction, distance and height.

This playstyle suffers from lots of actions being mapped to the same button, so to safely do the Light Dash action (after obtaining the upgrade for it), just do a Homing Attack first and then while you are airborne you can mash the Action Button as much as you want without any other action interfering.

Most stages are composed of linear paths where you can just ignore everything and keep holding forward, but to get an A-Rank you have to collect goodies, destroy enemies and do technique points to increase your score.

This is by far the most difficult playstyle to get used since it is exploration-based and the game does not make a good job explaining it, it is important to know the following info.

There are three hunting sections where you have to find the designated emerald, the stage is completed when you collect the emerald of each of those three sections.

For each hunting section you can grab up to three hints from the hint monitors scattered through all stages, do not even bother in refraining yourself from collecting all of the three, as a first-time player you will have no idea how the stages are laid out so you will be heavily at the mercy of randomness if you don't use them, which will make every stage last way too long.

Each hint you get will give a type of information, generally the first one will be vague or very specific, the second one will tell a major area that can be quite easily identified from afar, and the third one will explain in detail the position of the emerald in relation to the environment, the latter one helps a lot when digging.

Most players tend to focus too much on the radar when it starts to blink, but you should also NOT forget about the hints, always keep searching the thing or area they mention, do not wander around purely playing hot and cold with the radar.

PAUSE and use L/R to cycle through the hints you have already collected, you can also hold L+R to stop the auto cycling of the hints.

There is a misconception that you should not grab hints to get an A-Rank, which is not true, although you indeed get your technique points decreased, you can still complete all stages while using a good number of hints, even about half of them can be A-Ranked while using all nine hints.

You'll notice that their walkers lose speed when doing sharp turns, try as much as possible to not lose speed by making smooth turns with your analog stick.

Jump if you need to do a sharp turn, when you jump you can move at any direction in the air without losing all your speed, if you are playing on a keyboard or using an imprecise analog stick with too much deadzone, this will be your main method to maintain speed.

This game style is the most heavily tied to the ranking system, although you can just mash the Action Button and don't do any lock-on chain to beat every stage, it is highly recommended to do those chains and aim for the highest rank to enjoy the game to its fullest.

There will be a stage called "Mad Space" in Dark Story where all the hints are saying opposite things, there is a major localization mistake where some of the 3rd section's emerald pieces have all three hints written in reverse (siht ekil), if you come across one of these pieces, die so it changes the location, these pieces' hints are giving wrong information that doesn't lead to the correct place. If you are playing the PC version and are willing to install mods, the mod "Retranslated Hints" fixes this and a number of other issues that occurred when the game was being localized from the original Japanese script.

In the Kart Race minigame, tap the A button twice to enter drift mode, that way you will be able to properly do sharp turns.

If you plan on collecting all 180 emblems, make sure to always go to the Chao Garden between stages, do not make the mistake of starting to raise Chao and doing Chao Races at the last minute after you have already completed every mission, or else you will end up continuously grinding for hours.