Death Chamber

Death Chamber is the 12th stage in the Hero story on Sonic Adventure 2. Knuckles is used to play this stage.

Speed Tips

Mission 1

This is a treasure-hunting stage. The general hunting tips apply. The best locations are:

Key 3: "Bugs on patrol" In the starting room, look to the wall surrounding the lower alcove at the top. The correct key location moves back and forth across that wall, on a 10-second cycle. It's very difficult to get quickly, but what you want to do is jump and glide forward-right from start. Land on the right sloped edge of the ledge in front of you, then immediately spin the control stick for a Spiral Upper. That move can reach out to grab nearby objects (this is in fact true for both systems; Dreamcast gets a system-exclusive reach radius that extends much wider, but only for the first frame of the attack, and that doesn't come into play here). If you did it right, you'll shoot up just as the key passes overhead, and the reaching power from the very top is just enough to grab the key, even though it looks like you're not touching it. When you get it (probably in close to 2 seconds), you can breathe a sigh of relief and move on.

Key 2: "Roasted keys" This key is at the top of the fire pit, just behind start. To get it quickly, you'll do a Spiral Upper immediately upon starting, then glide at the peak of the move and you can go straight back through the key. You need to take a straight line to get the key instead of hitting fire, and the camera tends to shift on you; you can counteract this by holding L+R the whole time.

Key 1: "Three container brothers" The radar starts out green for this one. Head forward to the hallway, and to the somewhat wider room ahead. There are three boxes just to the right of that doorway; stand next to the stack of boxes and do a Spiral Upper to get it without breaking them, again thanks to reaching power.

Record video: 0:08.67 by SadisticMystic

Mission 2

TODO

Record video: 0:54.34 by yoshifan

Mission 3

If you're taking the traditional path here, forget almost everything you know about this mission. That path can only get you down to about 1:03 or 1:04, or down to 0:53 if you use the underwater glide technique. Another technique exists that can get under 35 seconds, but there are two routes that can shave a further 10 off of that. They'll be labeled the "easy" path and the "hard" path, with the hard one estimated to be faster by about 1 second when done optimally.

Easy path

Jump forward and hit the hourglass, but then don't continue ahead. Go left instead, punching out the boxes and continuing through the door. Hug the inside of the curved room, avoiding the E-1000. Right as you pass through the doorway, hold A and left.

This room has a flame in the near left corner. If you can hold yourself directly into the corner and jump at its underside, you'll be pushed through the wall in grab pose. Double-tap A to get out of wall grab, and now you're gliding through open space. The camera is difficult here, but I've found that if you guide yourself barely around the next room (you have to go around it, not through it or else you're stuck back in bounds) the camera will break out as well and follow behind you for a better view. When you can safely do so without reentering walls, you'll want to steer yourself right a total of about 110 degrees.

Keep going, and eventually you'll see the walls of the large circular room. After you pass the hallway that leads from the center room to the green room, which you don't want to shoot up into, try to get as close as you can to the wall without going through it (which would confine you within the walls again), and sometimes you'll be considered underwater. Press A when this happens to go up to the surface, and keep going roughly straight. You should see the underwater hallway below you. You want to stay directly above it, following the path to the Chao room but staying above the surface of the water (since gliding is faster than swimming).

When you see a Chao mural in front of you, keep going forward to pass through it. Now you're back within the level bounds. Go past the "proper" opening below you that takes the form of a small pool, and climb one of the pillars into the lowest alcove. Run behind it, then jump toward the screen in such a way that you bounce off the top of the hourglass. This takes you through the roof of the alcove. At this point you're considered out of bounds once again, but you're not going to stay that way for long. Glide toward the screen and you'll pass through the wall of the next alcove up and tag the Chao right away.

Best video using this method: 0:23:25 by SadisticMystic

Hard path

For this method, after hitting the hourglass, you do want to continue straight ahead, as though you were taking the traditional path. Continue through the first two hourglass doors, then navigate the double step up. You can either jump into the enemy and gain some upward momentum upon destroying it, giving you enough height to clear both steps in a single jump, or you can make two not-quite-full jumps in rapid succession while running at full speed. The latter is faster by a very small amount.

Once you're high enough, start a glide and hold it through to the hourglass, registering a hit on it, then power through the boxes with punches with a triple B tap (the third punch isn't for destroying boxes, but rather bringing your forward momentum back up once the way is clear). Jump once you boost forward after the boxes, and try to land on the wall with a quick climb. Climb up a short way, and ledge jump through the opening into the pyramid core.

Now that you're here, you want to turn 45 degrees left, toward the door to the green room. You can dive to save time on your trip down, as long as you cancel it with a glide before hitting ground and initiating a dig. Get up to the door, jump up into the right corner, and glide into it--with any luck, you clip the corner here, and you either go right through the door and into the green hallway (bad) or you veer right and into the open blackness (good). You need to slip through the corner on the first try in order to save any time over the easy path, and it's much less consistent to clip out of bounds here than it is at the corner light.

Now that you're out, the path is the same as the easy method, so go claim your Chao.

Record video: 0:22:05 by SadisticMystic

Mission 5

There are so many ways to slip through the boundaries here that this is basically a freeform level. The path detailed here is believed to be the fastest, obtaining all three keys in the same life. There's no longer a difference between Dreamcast and GameCube times here, as there was on previously discovered paths.

Start by running forward through the first two hourglass doors. When you reach the step up with the E-1000 guarding the ledge, jump up into it, and with the extra upward momentum that provides, turn around and glide back to the U-shaped ledge above the entrance to this room. There are two flaming mouth statues here; grab the wall to the side of, and near the top of, the right mouth relative to the camera at this point. By maneuvering with the joystick, you can get partially inside this statue, and after some effort you can trick Knuckles into thinking he can grab a ledge, and during the animation for that he conveniently forgets that there's a ceiling above...so you'll pass through the ceiling.

Now quickly gain control and glide to the right, and continue angling slightly right as the camera angle rotates. Eventually you'll see the secret room with key 1 in it (there's an inside-out beetle decoration on the wall that's used to create the "red nose" on one of the Eggman symbols inside). No, you aren't going to try to get inside this room...instead, you want to scrape the underside of it, such that you're still high enough to grab the key, ans so that you don't have to use a Spiral Upper or face a version disadvantage, and you don't have to go through the effort of quickly squeezing through the seams at the corners of the hourglass door. Be warned, there are box-shaped protrusions on the underside of the floor, and if you hit one of those you'll be stuck back in-bounds, so instead you want to squeeze in between two of these protrusions (which only leave a single box-width of space between them). If you aimed between them properly, you continued your line after passing through that gap, and you didn't dive too far down, this will get you key 1, preferably under 14 seconds. Once you have it, turn around immediately without breaking glide.

At this point you're still high enough that you can glide back into the hallway between the red room and the green room. You don't want this, so once you get the camera behind you once again, veer left o dodge it. You should pass under a curved hallway with metal grating on the floor, and for now your goal is to glide straight to the underwater room containing the final two keys. However, if you cut that sharply, even a straight line will result in a fall out before you can get there, every time. You're going to have to try a little trick: Release glide momentarily, and press A as soon as doing so will allow you to start gliding again. This allows you to cover horizontal distance without losing as much height as simple gliding would! Note that repeatedly tapping A this way isn't effective; after breaking each glide you need to wait to get back up to speed before you can get any use out of this technique again. If your aim is good, using this break-glide technique at least twice should allow you to get under the target room, and therefore underwater and naturally buoyant, before you would cross the kill plane at the bottom and die.

However, you don't just want to resurface in the main room straightaway, as that forces you into a comparatively arduous journey to get key 3. Instead, keep swimming under the floor until you get to the hourglass door where key 3 is embedded, and rise up into it! Now you could resurface to the main room, but there's a slightly faster way. Once you get key 3, you're stuck inside the hourglass door, and will remain that way as long as you don't press A or B. Take advantage of this state by heading to the back corner of the hourglass door, where you can successfully be ejected back out of bounds. Swerve around the second small alcove that's above and in front of you, and once you're past it, you can resurface, hopefully into key 2 for the victory.

Record video: 0:32.47 by SadisticMystic