Sonic Adventure 2 - All Cutscenes in HD & Enhanced (Japanese Voices + Retranslated Subtitles)

This is basically how this game's story was originally meant to be experienced, and the best way to experience it in my opinion. SA2 is infamously known for having embarrassingly bad cutscenes, specifically due to the English voice acting and audio mixing issues, along with a few plotholes and weird writing choices. Well, this is based on a translation that more accurately transcribes what the Japanese dialogue was originally supposed to say, and it's practically a whole new story. Also clears up a lot of inconsistencies in the process. This is all enhanced even further by the cutscene revamp mod, which fixes all of the audio mixing issues and restores the cutscenes from the Dreamcast release. While I prefer a few of the cutscenes from the Gamecube port that were enhanced for that release, the Dreamcast ones are definitely superior overall and this fixes a lot of strange transparency issues caused by the Gamecube's hardware limitations. It's all also in widescreen and I resized the CGIs to fit with it. The cutscene revamp mod for some reason, however, makes a lot of sound effects in the dark story cutscenes delayed enough to be noticeable, so I tried my hardest to cut in brief sound clips from the original Japanese cutscenes in the spots that didn't quite sound right. I did kind of rush that in so some clips may be louder than the original audio or sound somewhat jarring, and I probably missed a few, but to be fair, even if I did it's probably too minuscule for anyone to notice or care.

If you encounter someone arguing about how SA2's story and cutscenes are very poor and low-budget, just show them this.

It sucks that none of this could be dubbed, but I can't deny that the Japanese voice direction is so much more natural than the English voice direction and it vastly changes things. It feels like something out of an anime, almost. It makes the cutscenes so much more entertaining to watch as their own story. While I love the English voices to death, especially because of how well they emulate the original Japanese voices, the voice direction in the first two Adventure games was really subpar and I can't really say any of the voice actors truly shined their full potential until Heroes, which sucks because that was the last game they ever appeared in. The poor acting really takes you out of the experience a lot of the time unless you already had low standards upon playing it. SA2 is my favorite game of all time, so it means a lot to have it properly redone in such a presentable fashion. Was like falling in love with the story all over again, but this time it actually felt justified and not just like it was my childhood bias speaking. I really recommend replaying the game like this if you haven't.

Credit to the mods featured:
Retranslated: https://gamebanana.com/mods/48846
Cutscene Revamp: https://gamebanana.com/mods/48872