Nice compilation, but too thinned out
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the GCN was the game that made me 'see the light' back in 2002. I became an instant fan of the Sonic series and was incredibly amazed by the soundtrack of that game, the Sonic Adventure games are one of the main reasons I developed an interest for rock music during puberty. I spent hours and hours listening to the memorable tunes in the sound test menu, just a couple of years later I began to explore the internet and found out that the soundtrack of SA 2 was actually released on two CDs in 2001.
However, the soundtrack has been out of print for about a decade and if you're trying to get your hands on a copy, you'll most likely find yourself paying a ridiculous price for a used copy or you'll end up unintentionally purchasing a bootleg version of the soundtrack.
Sorry for the lengthy intro, but that should give you an idea how I felt when SEGA announced that they would rerelease some of the older soundtracks, including Sonic Adventure 2, in order to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Sonic series (on a completely irrelevant side note, I'll turn 20 this year myself!).
To cut a long story short, I couldn't wait to get my hands on Sonic Adventure 2 Original Soundtrack 20th Anniversary Edition. First thing you'll notice when you look at the description of the soundtrack is that instead of two discs you just get a single CD, so it's more than likely that some of your favorites from the game didn't make the cut. Those 30 tracks are hand-picked by Jun Senoue, Fumie Kumatani and Kenichi Tokoi, the selection is pretty neat and includes Crush 40's smash-hit "Live & Learn" in the redone 2008 version.
Listening to this CD brings back a lot of memories, such as certain moments from the game like escaping from an island about to explode or even my first attempts to play the bassline of "Escape from the City" on an actual electric bass guitar. But I also noticed that 16 tracks were edited into shorter versions and some of them are about half as long as they used to be. Apparently those changes were neccessary to fit all the tracks on a single audio CD - but hey, we got six and a half minutes of that Chao Race theme.
The 10 page booklet contains some pretty basic art from the game's manual and the lyrics for four of the songs along with some Japanese liner notes and an interesting anecdote by Johnny Gioeli about "Live & Lean" written in English.
