I’ve the same opinion you do. I loved to play SA1 and the “adventure field” vs “action stage” thing was the perfect balance between the open world you could explore and the more linear gameplay.
SA1 was a very good game, then came out SA2, a poorly executed thing that forces you straight into mini game style games, nothing to explore, no hub word to make the experience consistent. SA2 kinda feels like a 2D gameboy-style Sonic game. The way thing were tied together between the story of each character, “adventure field” and “action stage” was just very well thought out-
And there’s also another problem, the PC version of SA2 is a also a piece of crap. While Sonic Adventure DX wasn’t perfect things actually worked mostly fine out of the box however in SA2 not even gamepads work.
Btw, I’m looking for this: https://lemmy.world/post/21563379
The cached image doesn’t seem to be a scan, maybe someone got it from some source or leak. It may be of the Dreamcast version or some other release after that with the same cover. Maybe PS3 or XBOX…