Note: This is NOT a speed run attempt. It is a normal A-rank attempt. The description is long, but do read it before you comment with questions.
Time for a little Sonic Advenutre 2: Battle. SA2/SA2:B holds one of the hardest challenges in a game for its time. That challenge is getting all 180 Emblems. You might think it's something like Super Mario 64. 120 stars? Easy. But 180 Emblems? Absolute nightmare. Insane requirements, I tell you. The most difficult part of getting all of the Emblems is that you must get an A-rank on EVERY SINGLE mission. There are 5 missions per stage. I don't know how many stages there are off the top of my head, but it's more than 20. So that's over 100 missions you have to A-rank yourself on. Most are actually rather easy to A-rank, while others will have you ripping all your hair out.
Anyway, your reward (and ONLY reward) for getting ALL 180 Emblems is a remake of Green Hill Zone level from the original Sonic game. Yes, that's right, a 3D version of Green Hill Zone. It even has the same enemies, music, sound effects, etc. They tried to make it as close as possible to the original 2D level, minus the 3D. If you want my input on it, I think it's an okay remake of the level. But it's as if they didn't spend much time on it. The camera angles are horrible, and it's hard to tell when you come to a part where you HAVE to take a turn else you'll go into water, unless you memorize the level. The fact that it's as close to the original as possible means there's a lack of enemies compared to the normal levels, and being a 3D enviroment now it makes it easier to get past enemies.
Also you might notice you get ranked for this level. Despite being the ultimate secret level, the requirement for getting an A-rank on this level is pretty lienent. 13,000 score is required. If you're having trouble doing this, just take the path I did and kill everything in your way and get to the goal within two minutes and you should A-rank it. What do you get for doing that? NOTHING. The level is marked with a "?" on the Stage Select screen, and doesn't have any missions or rank status. So if you CAN'T get an A-rank on it, don't worry about it. People would probably only want to do it to feel better about it.
Speaking of A-ranks, let me rant some more about those. DID I MENTION IT'S HELL? I can't tell you how insane Sega was for thinking casual gamers could ever complete something like that. You have to be PERFECT in your runs through the levels. Most of the time you can't die, you can't miss the Golden Bot, you have to pull off every point combo you can find. There's just too much to name. The fact that there's a HUGE lack of supporting FAQs for A-ranking doesn't help either. The only FAQ on Gamefaqs for A-ranking only states the score/time requirements. Nothing on methods to getting A-ranks. The videos on Youtube are horrible too, most levels don't have videos or if they do they are done on webcam and you can't see what's going on anyway. To top it off, over half of the videos play the Dreamcast version of this game (which allows you to go through walls, and is for lamers), which you can't do in the Gamecube version. This does support the fact that the GC version is even harder. Sega also decided to make it more hell by raising the Score requirement for Cosmic Wall's Hard Mode mission to 100,000 points from the Dreamcast version's 50,000 points. I was lucky I happened to get that on the 4th try. Anymore tries and I'd have stopped playing. 8 MINUTE LEVELS FTL.
But I have to look on the bright side. After having the game for years, I finally finished it 100%. At around 110 gaming hours put into it too. And the fact that not many others can actually say they've done this insane challenge sort of makes me feel proud for pulling it off. But no, I definitely do not ever want to go through all that again. It rivals the difficulty of beating all Oxide's times in Crash Team Racing.
If curious, I changed the voices to Japanese (You can do that in the Options menu if you don't know). Only because the English voices eventually get annoying.
And last but not least, I want to be fair. So any other people who are struggling to get all the Emblems because of A-ranks, I wrote a small guide on tips for getting A-ranks from personal experience in doing it. And I MAY take some level requests for people who are struggling on some of the more difficult A-ranks. I would show a run on how to get the A-rank. But before you make the request try to make sure there already isn't a good quality version of it on Youtube. If it was done on Webcam or something, that's fine. ANYWAY:
http://bizkit047.blogspot.com/2011/10...
Or just go to http://www.bizkit.me for more information!
