When I was in elementary school, I had one friend, and his name was Cordon. We met in 4th grade when we had the same classroom, and him, being a gangly awkward mormon boy and me, being a mentally challenged jewish girl, didn't really have many options when it came to friends, so we very quickly latched onto one another. We shared a lot of similar interests, be they books or video games, but one thing in particular really got us to connect, and that was Sonic the Hedgehog. This isn't surprising, looking back, though.

For as long as I can remember, Sonic has been a part of my life in one manner or another. I can recall, before my mother remarried and I was in 2nd grade, I was at a different school and had another friend, a boy named David, who also loved Sonic. We bonded over the comics we had, and played Sonic 3D Blast on his PC after school. Seemed like Sonic was just kind of a tool I managed to use to make other nerds think I was also interesting enough to talk to, so I did.

Cordon and I both owned one of the major game consoles of the time, that being the Nintendo Gamecube, and with that came Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, a beefier, slightly more enhanced version of the original Sonic Adventure 2 for Dreamcast (which I also had). On weekends, I would always go to his house - he was never allowed to go to friends houses, so it was always on me to travel - and sit in front of the small television tucked away into a little corner nook in a room near the backyard and race one another in Sonic Adventure 2. For as much as we did other things, played other games - traded Pokemon via link cables, in case you needed to know just how old I am - somehow the racing in Sonic Adventure 2 was our go to time waster. It was the one thing that kept us entertained for hours on end.

It's funny, really, that a lot of the overarching themes of Sonic is overcoming the odds, specifically with the help of your friends. Because my life couldn't be further from those facts. For someone so emotionally indebted to an imaginary hedgehog, I would never once manage to achieve the same kind of bravery and success, especially not with the help of others. If anything, others often brought me down further.

But perhaps moreso than that, I spent a ton of my time in Sonic Adventure 2 alone, specifically in the Chao Garden, like most people my age who played it will fondly recall. And when I say I spent a ton of time there, I mean literally hours a day. It was all I would do. And I wouldn't even focus on racing them, or doing the other activities they had. I would simply nurture them. Take them to the kindergarten. Buy them treats from the black market that operated within said kindergarten, which, let's be real, has to be a serious point of contention at parent/teacher conferences for these Chao. I would teach them to swim. I would get them food. I would simply pick them up and hold them, pet them. Because...I was giving the Chao all the things I never got. Encouragement. Physical affection. The love of a parent. Things I so desperately wanted. Things I cried myself to sleep every night wishing I could have. Things I still cry myself to sleep every night wanting.

So for as much as I loved Sonic Adventure 2, its soundtrack, its superb levels (hell, I got an A rank across the board on every stage for every character), the thing I spent the most time doing in it was the Chao Garden, but likely not for the same reasons as most people. And it feels like Sonic, as a franchise, has constantly been an escape of sorts for me from the pain of my life.

For example, I was 22 when Sonic Generations came out. I was living with my mother, trapped in a bedroom in a beachside tourist town with no prospects and only a long distance girlfriend to keep me company. By this point in time, I was being so abused psychologically and emotionally by my mother that I had begun outright regressing to the few things from my childhood that made me feel safe, one of those being Sonic. Sonic Generations, being a sort of retrospective game, featured levels from Sonic Adventure 2, and unsurprisingly those were the ones I played the most. Playing a newer, more refined, better looking version of City Escape made me want to cry.

I have bought Sonic Adventure 2 on the Dreamcast, the Gamecube, the Xbox 360 Arcade store and Steam, and played through each one multiple times. It stands as a holy grail of my youth, towering high over all the others that have since fallen (easy to do, considering Sonic as a franchise seems it'll never die, thankfully) and for that, I remain appreciative. Nothing hurts more than losing something that was somewhat of a guiding light in your toughest times in life.

Overall, Sonic as a whole and Sonic Adventure 2 in particular has long been a looming presence, often bringing me back out from my darkest places. Kinda weird how helpful a fictional blue hedgehog can be, right?

My name is Mae. I write & make art for a living. If you like this review, you might also like my newest novel here, reading my media blog here and you can tip me for my work at Ko-Fi.