Before playing this game, the only 3D Sonic I ever played was Sonic Colors. And even then, a good chunk of that game was in 2D. So Adventure was my first fully 3D Sonic game ever. For years, I'd hear people say this game was broken beyond belief or just simple a "guilty pleasure" game that they enjoy despite being shit. While I did not love it like some people do, I can personally say I did not think the games were either of those things.

The game is broken up into 6 (technically 7 if you complete all other routes) character routes. You can play as Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Big the cat and Gamma respectively. Each of these characters play differently from each other, whether it's for better or worse, and even tho each playthrough varies in quality, I can at least commend how ambitious this is. Because in each character's playthrough, you get different cutscenes and also context for certain scenes that may not be explained in earlier playthroughs. As my friend Lemonstrade said, it's sort of similar to what Drakennier does which again is super cool conceptually, especially for a 1998 game.

But back to the actual characters, Sonic is the clear best one here. He has his spin dash, is of course the fastest in the game and also has a super fun aerial dash. I've heard people say the controls are bad in this game and I simply don't get that at all. Sonic, at least, feels simply perfect to control. The levels on the other hand, I can see people having issues with. I disagreed with the fact this game is broken beyond belief, but it definitely can be a bit broken if you're unlucky. I only glitched through the stage like 2 or 3 times, but the first time it happened was on the very first stage. That made me think the entire game would be broken, but it wasn't. Unless I got lucky, those claims, while still credible sometimes...are massively overblown. Besides that though, Sonic's stages while still fun, can feel incredibly janky just because of how fast he goes. It's hard to explain but if you've played the game you'd know, a lot of times the animations and your movement through levels can feel very unwieldly. It can be really hard to control sonic sometimes, and it often looks super awkward when looking back at it. Like I said it's hard to explain, and while I still had a ton of fun with his levels (just because he feels so good to controls) I can't help but think thee levels feel off. Again, this is mostly when you're at full speed going through loop de loops and shit. When it's slower sections you're going through, it's not an issue.

As for the other characters, they all have significantly less stages than Sonic. Tails has you racing against sonic, and with him being able to glide, you can take some seriously crazy shortcuts. The game itself even encourages this which I thought was pretty neat. Knuckles has you searching for three master emerald shards. It's basically a treasure hunt, with the emerald icons turning different colors depending on how close you are to them. These were alright, but story-wise I wasn't really a fan. Honestly thought his story would be more different from Sonic's than it was, not to mention the final Chaos fight was barely different from Sonic's (and Tails had a unique fight for his ending). Amy was probably my least favorite character to use. Her levels consisted of getting to the end like Sonic, while running away from one of Robotnik's robots. Problem is, while her hammer bounce is kinda cool, her moveset isn't nearly as fun as Sonic's yet her levels are still long like Sonic's (which isn't much of an issue with Tails and Knuckles). That plus, besides the one Gamma scene, her cutscenes were lame. Big the cat is the most contentious character by far, and honestly I didn't hate him. Yeah his cutscenes are super dumb and don't add much to the story. However his campaign is by far the shortest, and the fishing is actually really easy (and kinda fun) once you get the hang of it. Gamma is by far the best character next to Sonic. Not only are his stages fast paced, with you having to kill enemies quickly to get more time to your total. His story is actually significantly different compared to the others, and quite touching at that. If I had to rank each character's campaigns, I'd say Sonic>Gamma>Tails>Big>Knuckles>Amy.

To go to each actual level, you have to navigate the hubworld. For a 1998 game, it's not bad but it can feel somewhat empty I felt. Though, there are things to get that aren't just apart of the main story. There are some optional collectables and even some minigames you can play. There's also the chao garden which, I tried to get to work but since I was emulating the game, I suspected there was an add on I needed or something idk. But from the little I've heard, it does sound fun.

The story in general, does have its high points, like the aforementioned Gamma campaign and the ending is really nice. It's simple but effective. However, the actual voice acting is horribly stilted a lot of the time. It's not even a so bad it's good situation, it was just mediocre a lot of the time. That is, except for Robotnik who is super over the top but hilarious. Even despite the fact they reuse fight dialogue in actual scenes (which is jarring for sure) his dialogue is super duper memorable and easily the highlight. Something else that was memorable were some of the face animations, goddamn are they awful sometimes.

I didn't like LOVE the soundtrack like some people do, but it is quite nice overall. Very experimental which I appreciate a ton. My favorite songs were probably Red Skull Mountain, Welcome to Station Square and Egg Carrier: A Song That Keeps Us on the Move.

Once you complete all 6 character routes, you unlock the 7th and final one..Super Sonic. This is essentially just the final boss and some closure on the story, but it's definitely satisfying. You become Super Sonic, defeat Chaos's final form at supersonic speed, and in turn this cleanses Chaos of his evil as we find out he wasn't ever bad from the start. The closure on the whole Chao's and the past cutscenes was really nice. That along with Gamma's scenes ofc, easily the highlights of the story.

This game is definitely flawed in some ways, and Adventure 2 might improve on everything in this game idk. But I can officially say, this game is overall good and that Sonic had a good transition to 3D. Not everything works in this game, but I can acknowledge this game is full of heart.

May drop it down to a 6 cuz I was feeling like that for a good while but for now it's a 7.

The NieR of Sonic games...? What?

I never played a Sonic game before, but after reading Phantasm's review and having heard Wheatie advocate for this game for quite some while now, I decided to finally check out the series with Sonic Adventure - and I'm glad I did!

To make sense of the weird opening one-liner, Sonic Adventure is a game told through the eyes of six different characters - which means you need to play through the story six different times to fully understand what's going on. Each character comes with an unique gimmick and win condition, ranging from collecting Emerald Shards as Knuckles to catching a pet frog as Big the Cat. The narrative itself is nothing groundbreaking, it's fairly standard fare with Eggman trying to use an ancient evil named Chaos to destroy the local Station Square and rebuild it under his management. Chaos is an interesting villain though, since he functions basically the same as Resident Evil's Nemesis and you fight him several times with different characters in different power levels, as he grows in power each time he consumes a Chaos Emerald (you see, the name is as straightforward as it gets). As for the individual character stories themselves, you're free to approach them in any order you'd like, as long as you met the character in Sonic's story and the game will notify you when a new story is available. Only after completing all six story modes, you'll gain access to an epilogue and be able to fight the true final boss.

The levels themselves have some interesting mechanics, and they especially get to shine in Sonic's levels (as he's not a gimmicky character), I'll take the Lost World level as an example. While Knuckles can just crawl up the walls here with his moveset, Sonic has to rely on switches that allow him to walk on certain anti-gravity tiles on the wall or use mirrors to shine light on mirrors to illuminate a dark path. But it doesn't always have to be so complex, sometimes snowboarding down a giant mountain with an avalanche in the background is all you need. Even if I had a fun time with most of the levels, one of my biggest complaints is still the rebellious auto camera, which especially hates Sonic zooming through the zones at lightning speed and then jumps to some nonsensical angles, causing you to have no clue what's going on and miss your inputs. I'm not particularly mad at those camera shenanigans (would be lying if I told you it wasn't funny), but there are times where the jank goes from charming to annoying territory. Another thing I'd like to address is the strange progression sometimes outside of levels in the hub worlds. Thankfully there are red hint orbs in the game telling you where to go when you're feeling lost, but even then, sometimes the hints are so vague that I still found myself resorting to GameFAQs guides in order to locate where to head next. This would hardly be an issue on replays, but I couldn't find the raft for the life of me the first time I had to use it.

Sonic Adventure is a very ambitious game for the time it released and it's not only reflected in the level design, but also in the soundtrack, which covers a variety of musical genres and also uses higher quality instruments as opposed to a MIDI soundfont, which was possible thanks to the Dreamcast's advanced audio hardware. My favorite song is Amy's theme, My Sweet Passion, but I'm also particularly fond of Tikal's Theme and Mechanical Resonance. The Egg Carrier Theme needs a shoutout for itself, just for how catchy it is.

In the end, Sonic Adventure was a nice little departure from all the JRPGs I've played recently and I'm now eager to try the acclaimed Adventure 2 and other Sonic games in general - this includes the Steam version of Sonic Adventure DX, where I'm hoping to go for 100% when I get to it :D

I was born too late for the SEGA Dreamcast, but I was born just in time for the Nintendo GameCube, and one of my favorite games growing up was Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut. I loved this game immensely growing up, and I played and replayed it over and over again, to the point where the disc wore out and stopped working. As the years went by, and I got older and came to play a wider variety of games, I eventually stopped enjoying Sonic games as much as I used to when I was little, to the point where nowadays I view the franchise with nostalgic indifference. It’s something that I definitely used to love and I might check in on occasionally, but it rarely occupies a space in my brain these days. Recently, those feelings of nostalgia took hold of me when I learned about how the DX version of Sonic Adventure was apparently a lot worse in comparison to the original. I read that it introduced new bugs and glitches, and it changed the game’s overall visual style for the worse. So, out of curiosity, and because I wanted to be reminded of old times, I decided to emulate the original Sonic Adventure to see how much better it actually was in comparison to the allegedly maligned DX version, and in all honesty, I don’t really think that DX is as much of a downgrade as I was led to believe. The game itself wasn’t as much of a fun nostalgia ride as I’d hoped it’d be, either.

Dr. Eggman has returned with a new plan for world domination, and this time he’s in command of a creature known as Chaos, a liquid monster who grows more powerful and changes shape after being fed the legendary Chaos Emeralds. Sonic and company all get involved with Eggman’s plot in some fashion, as they attempt to stop him from feeding Chaos all seven emeralds and wrecking untold havoc upon the world. You play as Sonic and five other characters, each with their own style of gameplay and personal narratives that occasionally crossover with one another.

I have to admit, reviewing this game is rather difficult for me. I played DX growing up so much that I know the game like the back of my hand. I’m used to the physics, I’m used to the boss fights, I know where I’m supposed to go and when, I can quote so many voice lines… basically I can play this game almost without thinking. There may be aspects of the game that I find easy that other people might struggle with. Sonic Adventure is a bit of a finicky game, and getting acclimated to how the game feels and controls may not come as naturally to others as it comes to me. Once you get used to it though, the whole game is very much a walk in the park. Each character shares the same core controls, but they also have their own abilities which make them unique.

Sonic’s campaign is by far the most fun in the game, and clearly where the most attention was given. His stages simply take the speed focused platforming approach of the 2D games and apply it to levels made in 3D. Sonic’s stages are often long and made up of multiple sections with a variety of different environments and music tracks for each section. Sonic for the most part feels pretty good to control, especially when you manage to get him going at higher speeds. The biggest problem that I have both with Sonic’s stages and with the game in general is easily the awful camera. The camera often acts like it has a mind of its own, and when Sonic or other characters go at high speeds, it often can’t keep up with them, or it’ll get stuck on level geometry, freak out, and prevent you from seeing where you’re going. The only times I ever died during my replay of this game was when these camera issues happened, and they happen most frequently when you’re going at high speeds through tunnels like in Sky Chase or Speed Highway. Sometimes to get the camera under control, you just gotta slow down and give it a second to catch up, which can be annoying, but it’s not the worst.

As mentioned, the rest of the cast all have their unique styles of gameplay, but for the most part, they all reuse various sections of Sonic’s stages. Some characters have sections of stages unique to them, and there is one stage (Hot Shelter) that Sonic doesn’t have that other characters do, but 95% of the other characters’ stages are reused or slightly edited sections of Sonic’s stages, and their gameplay for the most part isn’t different or interesting enough to really feel substantial. Playing as the other characters can feel rather repetitive and boring as a result.

Tails is easily the best example of this. His stages involve racing an AI-controlled Sonic through chopped up sections of Sonic’s stages. Tails can’t run as fast as Sonic, but he can fly, and there are these booster rings he can fly through that allow him to take shortcuts that Sonic can’t utilize himself. It’s never a challenge to outpace Sonic, and Sonic can sometimes get stuck on level geometry and not even advance forward at all until he rubber bands and teleports right next to you in order to catch up.

Knuckles’ stages have him searching for broken pieces of the Master Emerald. His ability to glide and climb walls allows him to explore stages in a way Sonic can’t, making the stages themselves a lot more open and exploration focused. His gameplay is different enough from Sonic’s that replaying stages isn’t really that big of a deal. His stages are my next favorite after Sonic’s.

Amy’s campaign is surprisingly fun. Amy has to flee from an invincible robot called Zero, which chases her across all of her stages. Amy’s on the slower side, but she has her own special movement abilities and attacks she can perform with her Piko Piko Hammer to make up for it. She also has the most unique content compared to the other playable characters that aren’t Sonic, as she has sections of Sonic’s stages that he doesn’t get to experience himself, such as the fun house in Twinkle Park. My only complaint is that she has the least amount of stages in the game (three in total).

Then there’s Big’s campaign… Big has always been rather infamous when it comes to discussions surrounding this game. As opposed to every other character’s gameplay, which is generally focused on exciting action, or high speed setpieces, Big the Cat’s gameplay involves fishing for his pet frog named Froggy. There are pools of water in stages that are occupied by Froggy as well as other fish, and you have to catch Froggy in order to clear Big’s stages. I think it’s pretty understandable why people don’t care for Big’s campaign. His gameplay is so different from everyone else’s, and if you want to complete the story, you have no choice but to do them. The fishing itself isn’t especially fun either, and it can be confusing because the game itself doesn’t really explain how fishing works. I remember being so frustrated and angry with Big’s levels as a kid because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and didn’t realize that you needed to flick the control stick down whenever Froggy bites onto the lure in order to actually hook him onto it so that you can start reeling him in. To the game’s credit, fishing is explained in the game’s instruction booklet (both this version and DX’s), so it’s a bit hard to blame it for not telling you what you’re supposed to do. That doesn’t change the fact that the fishing itself is still not particularly engaging. At the very least, it’s not difficult at all once you figure out how it works.

Finally, there’s E-102 Gamma’s campaign. Gamma is a robot built to serve Dr. Eggman. His stages involve running and gunning, blasting enemies and obstacles and defeating a boss at the end of each stage. I don’t really know how else to describe Gamma’s stages other than braindead. That might sound a bit harsh, but I genuinely can’t think of any other way to put it. You hold down the action button to target obstacles, wait to target as many as you can, and then Gamma will fire auto-homing shots to destroy targets. It’s also hilariously easy to just stun lock all of the bosses at the end of Gamma’s stages and keep them from fighting back at all.

The story, much like the gameplay, is ambitious, and I do actually think it’s executed well enough. However, the horrible dialogue and the stilted 90’s voice acting can really knock the wind out of its sails. It’s charming enough to find it funny, but very much in a “so bad it’s good” kinda way. Eggman’s voice actor is an exception though. Deem Reginald Bristow actually kills it with his performance. It’s really lively compared to every other character in the game, and he sounds like he’s honestly having a lot of fun with the role, as opposed to everyone else, who just sounds like they’re phoning it in.

By far the best part about this game is its soundtrack. God, to this day nothing really hits me like this game’s soundtrack. It’s honestly pretty damn close to perfect. Each track just adds so much to the immersion of each stage, while also being immensely groovy or electrifying songs on their own. Some of my favorite tracks include Run Through the Speed Highway, Red Hot Skull, and Pleasure Castle, but in all honesty, pretty much every single song is a banger, and aside from maybe some of the vocal tracks, it’s really difficult to find a song that isn’t great in this game.

As for how this compares to the DX version, I think that visually, environments look a lot more appealing in comparison. The textures in the Dreamcast version are a lot more colorful, and places like the Mystic Ruins look far more lush and appealing. Other than that though, I’ll be honest: I don’t think that this version has much else that makes it worth playing over DX. For the sake of making a good faith comparison, I did play through a chunk of Sonic’s levels really quickly in DX to see if I could run into any obvious bugs or glitches, but I didn’t encounter anything, and I don’t ever recall running into any particularly notable glitches in the DX version during the several playthroughs of it when I was a kid. If anything, I feel like I still prefer DX a bit more because it has a free camera option you can turn on during stages, which is a huge blessing since the auto camera is so terrible. You can also skip cutscenes in DX which is super convenient. I feel like the glitches and bugs of DX are overblown, it seems like you really gotta go out of your way to experience them. You could argue that since I didn’t play DX from beginning to end that I’m not making a fair comparison, and y’know what, I won’t argue with you. I just really don’t have it in me to play this game from front to back a second time.

It’s clear that there was a lot of passion and ambition that went into Sonic Adventure and I have nothing but respect for that. I feel like this is one of the most experimental games I’ve ever played, especially for its time. It’s just that not all of its ideas pan out very well, and it causes the game to feel bloated and boring at times. Sonic Adventure, no matter which version I play, is always going to be a big source of nostalgia for me, and I’ll definitely treasure those memories I had of playing the game as a kid. But it’s impossible to deny how rough and flawed the game truly is.

can't hold on much longer
-- but i will never let go
i know it's a one-way track
-- tell me now how long this'll last
i'm not gonna think this way
-- nor will i count on others
close my eyes and feel it burn
-- now i see what i've gotta do

open your heart, it's gonna be alright!

Sega had a rough transition to 3D.

It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.

The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.

The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.

It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.

With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.

The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.

Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.

It wasn’t. The game is bad.

Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.

Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.

I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?

Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.

Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?

Well.

It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.

The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.

I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.

Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.

What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.

Killer soundtrack, though.

Now I see what I've gotta do, Open your heart, and you will see

Heart and soul. What drives our heroes, and our villain to their goal, but also what killed Sega’s Dreamcast and fierce notoriety in the gaming industry. Mentioned in a previous review, I’ve always been curious about the rivalry that the moustached man and the speedy hedgehog had throughout their early lives. Although, throughout my earlier life too, I’ve always favoured Mario. Not my fault as a child I guess, there’s some kind of wiring in a young kid’s brain that forces you to essentially pick between one or the other. It wasn’t actually until late 2022 and even up to January this year that I picked up and played Sonic’s earlier titles for myself, and I was sorta disappointed? My perception of him was this cool attitude, daredevil speedster that zoomed and wittily ruined the plans of Dr Eggman and Co. The Genesis titles don’t do his character or what the franchise means as justice, as for some these games may be good but being made and produced just to be competition can ruin a franchise. Sonic however improved over the years, as each title progressively began being better and better. Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a game which I just think is fine but god if you’re a Sonic fan you’d probably find this game really awesome.

This is where 3D gaming comes along. The Nintendo 64 saw less sales than the Famicom and SNES but changed the course of gaming forever. If you look at the 64 now, you’d find it’s probably the worst ageing console ever, and it wasn’t even the dominating console this time around. The PlayStation released nearly two years prior, and with the increased competition, and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme, the team only had 10 months to produce something new for the Dreamcast. Born out of struggle, desperation and love, came the most ambitious game yet.

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There’s something about the atmosphere and how the game presents itself that makes Sonic Adventure seem so respectable. For starters, it’s kinda wild to see that this game was released as early as 1998. Few 3D platformers were released at the time (weird to think Banjo and Spyro were released in the same year as this!) but none seemed as advanced and less polygonal than the Dreamcast ones. Unfortunately, you do have to put up with releasing the same year as Ocarina of Time, Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid so you probably mean little importance in the year of 1998. Ok, maybe this one didn’t age that well visually too, but I’m happy that the aesthetics of this game still sticks today. The game swaps between this more monotone city scenery, new for Sonic at the time, and swaps them out every now and again with the more colourful palette that older Sonic fans would recognise; think Emerald Coast and Casinopolis for example. Helps balance out the repetitiveness of the game, as most levels are more unique than your average Mario. The level design in this game is actually really good! The more open environment does allow you to make more riskier and faster moves, and when you go fast as Sonic it feels great. The more linear levels mean little to no path choices unlike the classic Sonics, but it’s up to you if that’s a pro or a con. All are great EXCEPT FUCKING SKY CHASE. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO PLAY IT SO MANY TIMES? The minigames are good and chop up the gameplay loops a little but having to basically sit through a 4 minute fucking cutscene when I was already bored from Sonic 2 is mindblowingly dumb. Another thing that the Sonic Team tried was the “Adventure Field'', just another hub world where characters would travel in between. It’s cool and neat for the idea, but it's mostly just two areas. And the fucking jungle. Whoever designed that is genuinely a horrible human being. I don’t want to talk about gameplay problems that much, mostly because I’m playing this on the PC port which is a port of the Gamecube port which is a port of the Dreamcast one. All I can say is, just use the BetterSADX and Dreamcast Conversion mods, and that is much about bugs that I’m touching in this review. Frankly because I'm also tired of hearing, “Sonic had a rough transition into 3D!!” Yeah everyone did, buddy, and every reviewer in the whole wide world has mentioned it. The game did what it could do best, and it threw anything it could at the wall and it stuck. The gameplay is fairly unique, seeming as there’s 6 or sorta 7 heroes to choose from. I have to probably talk about them now.

Welp, a quick round-up:

Sonic is what you’d imagine the game to be. Your average levels, go crazy fast with his broken spin dash (unsurprisingly fun!), jump on enemies, what you’d expect. His movement is really great and his abilities make you feel unstoppable. You’ll spend the quarter of the game playing as him albeit it spends the time introducing you to the rest of the cast, and acts as the “main story” of the game.

Tails is kind of a repeat of Sonic’s levels with the new criteria of beating him in a race. Basically, go as fast as you can. His fly ability is, really, really, broken and that automatically makes him great. Seriously, fly off the map and see how many shortcuts you can find. Makes Tails a fun character to play, especially after playing as him after beating Sonic’s story (on a side note, I forgot how Tails is literally 8 until I heard his voice. Bring back the kiddy voice. It’s way funnier).

Knuckles’ gameplay is fairly different to the first two. You still explore area’s similar to Tails and Sonic but instead you search for parts of the Master Emerald. Essentially he acts as a big metal detector and it’s our turn to play Hide and Seek with magic crystals. Really cool too! Either you spend about 2 minutes on each level or 8 depending if you’re as stupid as me. Not much to say about his moveset? His punches are kinda boring but the glide is pretty useful. His story arc acts as a semi-explanation for the whole Master-Emerald-Chaos-Thingy but who was really listening..

Amy does absolutely nothing to impress. Her movement is slow and her hammer jump is SO inconsistent. Practically her loop is running away from a big robot which is so sluggish that you don’t notice it except the first ten seconds of the stage. Also, she had absolutely no need to be in the story, except her bird friend ate a Chaos Emerald?? Worst part of the game. Girlboss fail.

Big the Cat.

Gamma is quite interesting, as we finally get to play from the villain’s perspective, although he turns good about a third through (but he’s cute so it’s ok C:). You speedrun through Sonic’s levels with some changes, except you have a rocket and you’re constantly on a timer. Fine, but the level changes are kinda improvements over the original.

If I were to rank them:
Sonic
Tails
Knuckles
Gamma
Him.
Amy

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Story spoilers ahead

The game finally climaxes with the Super Sonic, which ties all the heroes stories’ together into a final fight against Perfect Chaos. It was then, during the second phase, the vocals for Open Your Heart kick in, and I feel something I’ve never felt before. This is what Sonic is. The rebellious counterpart, always crazy, inconsistent but filled with so much heart and love that you can’t help but feel admiration for the series. And when it’s all over. You feel like a hero. You feel like a badass. And that might never be recreated in the way that Sonic can ever again.

The Dreamcast flopped, and due to this Sega had to step down as a console manufacturer in the industry, even third-partying for their rivals. Because of this Sonic has had a messy and mediocre history ever since. Icarus, Sega pushed themselves so hard it destroyed their long-term longevity. However recently there’s been a revival in the sixth-generation. The Dreamcast and Gamecube, both market failures, have received a cult-like following as of recently as many have realised the under-appreciativeness they’ve received. Coming out of the end of this, I have only one thought:

Sonic is really awesome.

”Our positive feelings toward each other can make them work.”
”Our hearts together form awesome power.”

"sonic had a rough transition into 3d"

cool, weird-ass game that proudly wears its status as sega flexing its shit on the previous gen right upon its sleeve. the monolithic status this game has in the fandom and the historical context of sonic as an entity is pretty interesting to me considering there really isn't that much to it - ten solid sonic levels and then little fragments that more or less exist to flaunt the possibilities of the dreamcast and what all sega was capable of at that point. i'm really endeared by games of this era that were chock full of weird side content and minigames just to show what the fresh hardware was capable of (final fantasy x also comes to mind), and sonic adventure is maybe nothing BUT that. combine that with its weird atmosphere and bizarre, campy writing and it fits right up there with the pantheon of Weird PSX JRPGs of '99.

speaking of writing - i was surprised on a playthrough how this game basically doesn't have a story so much as it has a bunch of isolated events that happen in proximity to one another in an arbitrary and sort of staggered fashion. sonic's story may be the main draw here in terms of gameplay (and clearly the star of the show in general; he's the only one of the stories you can't knock out in an hour tops) but it's also the story where pretty much nothing of note happens. honestly as cute as tails and amy's little mini-character-arcs are the only story worth writing home about here is gamma's, which i still find really poignant and thought-provoking even as an adult... something fatalistic and genuinely dark about this power-hour of pathos, even in comparison to the really dire places that sonic adventure 2's writings and greater themes go. honestly gamma's just the best part of the game in general, between his story, his variant of hot shelter easily being the best level in the game, and the boss fight against beta being one of the game's very best. kinda wish i cared for drakengard 3 at all because i would KILL for a version of his general plot pitch that's not written for children

can't help but feel like some of these little stories deserved a bit more time in the oven; gamma's shooting gameplay and knuckles' hunting were both eventually expanded upon in SA2 but i really like the "puzzle platformer where the female protagonist has to avoid a creepy stalker" idea with amy's gameplay and how tails' levels take sonic's ethos of playing as little of the level as possible to their natural extreme... such a shame their stories take about 11 minutes apiece to complete.

definitely not as polished, focused, effortless or full of finesse as sonic adventure 2, but honestly i don't think being less Good in one linear direction makes it Bad in the opposite linear direction either. sonic adventure is a strange, curious, funky little game, and it's lovely for it.

eu gosto de sempre manter um pouquinho de boa vontade quando eu começo a jogar alguma coisa pela primeira vez. acho q se a gente se deixa levar muito pela opinião alheia e já parte com a intenção de odiar seja lá o q estiver pela frente, a gente vai acabar tendo uma má experiência. a síndrome do Angry Videogame Nerd e o motivo de meio mundo odiar Simon's Quest e The Adventure of Link de cabo a rabo, saca?

o q já é frustrante se torna insuportável. problemas técnicos e uma apresentação mais atrapalhada já deixa um gosto azedo na boca de cara. tudo q o jogo tem a oferecer de pior se torna a única coisa q o jogo tem a oferecer. já é caixão e vela preta. n tem nada mais q possa salvar esse videogame.

acho q isso é algo q rola um pouco com Sonic Adventure. uma galera online já há quase 20 anos decidiu q a franquia teve uma transição complicada pro 3D e meio q isso se tornou fato. digo, realmente n foi lá a transição mais elegante do mundo se comparada a Ocarina of Time ou Super Mario 64, mas n deixa de ser uma experiência interessante. n deixa de ser um jogo com seus próprios méritos.

eu adoro Sonic Adventure, e fico muito feliz por ter dado uma achance para ele uns tempos atrás. os ports modernos roubam um pouco do charme dele, mas a versão original de Dreamcast é muito lindinha. os cenários paradisíacos, a densas florestas sul-americanas, os templos flutuantes e as gigantes naves aéras são cenários tão gostosos de simplesmente estar presente neles. juntos com a maravilhosa trilha sonora de Jun Senoue e companhia, este acaba q se tornando o jogo do Sonic com o melhor senso de espaço. o mundo realmente parece ser um lugar vivo, apesar de todas as plataformas flutuantes por aí.

e navegar por essas plataformas é divertido! a física do jogo é meio esquisita e um tanto q primitiva, mas eu acho q justamente por conta dessa primitividade q é meio q divertido brincar com ela. ela te fornece bem mais liberdade q muitos dos outros jogos modernos da franquia, e acaba sendo meio q impressionante como vc consegue impulsionar certos personagens pra praticamente o outro lado do mapa se vc souber o q está fazendo. meio q adoro isso.

e sabe outra coisa q eu adoro? as fases do Big the Cat. talvez eu seja doida, mas eu realmente acho q o jogo só faz um mal trabalho em tutorializar elas. depois q vc pega o jeito, dá pra pescar o Froggy em segundos, e depois nenhuma das fases dura mais do q vc quer q elas durem. meter um Sega Bass Fishing no meio do seu platformer 3D frenético é uma escolha um tanto q destoante, mas eu meio q gosto. acho charmoso.

outra coisa charmosa é a historinha aqui. ela é um tanto q boba e simples, mas eu gosto q ela consegue manter uma boa balança se levando a sério o suficiente para evitar se tornar uma paródia de si mesma, mas ainda evitando o melodrama desnecessário de alguns futuros jogos do Sonic. eu gosto dos pequenos arcos dos personagens. da Amy e do Tails se tornando mais independentes e tendo suas pequenas aventuras pessoais, do Gamma buscando salvar sua família e a si mesmo, do Knuckles lidando com o passado do seu povo. gosto como aos pouquinhos vc vai descobrindo mais sobre a Tikal e seu passado. é tudo coisa boa, coisa gostosinha. meio burra as vezes, mas tudo bem.

acho q muito do q eu disse aqui vale pra Sonic Adventure 2, apesar de eu n ter me conectado tanto com ele. eu n teria muito o q falar dele sem ficar fazendo comparações demais com o primeiro. mas eu amo o Shadow, meu ouriço bad boy favorito! eu adoro tudo relacionado a ele e a Maria. eu amo o Eggman explodindo a Lua e todo mundo tratando isso como se ele só tivesse colocado fogo em um ônibus ou coisa assim. eu amo esse cara agressivamente italiano q aparece do nada em uma cutscene! eu adoro o Sonic e o Tails invadindo a limousine do presidente dos Estados Unidos da América! só coisa boa tbm.

recomendo vc dar uma chance pra Sonic Adventure, se nunca tiver tocado nele antes. talvez acabe n sendo muito a sua vibe, mas eu diria pra vc ir de coração aberto e formar suas próprias opiniões sobre ele. pelo menos vc vai ter do q reclamar de primeira mão!

Possibly my most replayed game of all time; there's never an occasion that I'm not in the mood for more Sonic Adventure.

From its sandy beaches and clear blue skies to its dreamy guitar riffs and metropolitan cityscapes, Sonic Team's first foray into 3D has left an immeasurable mark on me and my gaming sensibilities. It is pure, distilled nostalgia, and no matter how many times I've slipped that CD into the tray over the years, I'm always transported back to the tender age of 11, stood at a Dreamcast demo kiosk inside my local Virgin Megastore, my eyes wide and mouth agape, the future in my hands. And what a bright future it is.

(2D Sonic fans are in denial- this is the best game in the franchise by a mile.)

so many reviews of this game have people saying "oh it sucks but i love it" or "it's obviously not GOOD but it's good" which is The Coward's Copout. I have no respect for this line of hedging your bets for fans and people who hate it, especially since Sonic Adventure is good.

I am bold enough to say that Sonic Adventure IS a good game. It's creative, made with love and passion, and actually makes good on the no doubt stressful task of translating Sonic into 3D. Of course not everything is going to work, Sonic Team were just fucking nuts, and I have way more respect for a game that shoots for the sun than something that is just another product.

So enough with this "The game is bad but I like it" bullshit. I think for having no other template to work off of, the amount Sonic Team gets right here for technology of the 90s, is genuinely impressive and shouldn't be given backhanded compliments. Sonic Adventure deserves either your love or hate, not some shit in-between.

the egg carrier theme alone means anyone who gave this game a 3.0 or under is out of their mind, sorry. im sorry u werent entertained by sonic going "ready?? 🤓🤓🤓" every time he has to charge a light speed attack or big the cat SOLOING chaos 6 in what has to be the shortest boss battle of all time (tvtropes powerscalers say hes capable of class z-2 omniversal annihilation in this one), or gamma just somehow managing to tell an oddly emotional existential story completely lacking in the bombast that strings the rest of the game along. thank you random npc

people dont even hate on this game for the right reasons. having to play sky chase 4 times and fight chaos 4 3 times is way more annoying than any of big's levels lol. you literally play sky chase the same amount of times as big has levels and each one is longer!! and its just kinda braindead!! fuck sky chase it sucked in sonic 2 and it sucks in this!! and i also read someone calling the final boss bad. did you even watch dbz?

its very funny to imagine the universe where sonic adventure came out as an rpg as originally intended. people would be comparing its multicharacter storytelling with live a live and all u fishing in rpgs ppl would have SOYED at being forced to fish for an entire campaign. but alas

look at amy's face. thats all i have to say there, its an aesthetically distraught face. thats like half a star on its own. thats the face of a girl who breaks a tony hawk record tenfold every time she swings her hammer while running

the virgin "koji kondo loads a cart with rompler sounds" mario 64 vs the chad "we got 5 people on guitar and 6 people on bass" sonic adventure. u get this free y2k-ass 3d platformer with talking animals alongside that album you bought, how cool is that. no wonder they stopped making consoles 3 years later with a business model like that. they mustve run out of the sound budget when it came to recording eggman's lines bc they reuse them so hard that its incredibly funny hearing him say "he's not going to get away with this!" like 5 times in the egg viper fight and then the exact same line w/ same cadence in a super sonic story cutscene shortly after

huge fan of giving sonic a very broken spindash and tails the ability to fly and making the levels large and branching (like the classic games) with this in mind. the proto-parkour of the future. shame it never returns for any other sonic game ever!

Sonic's story independently might be the best game in the whole series - near-perfect pacing, back-to-back fantastic level concepts, a thrilling sense of adrenaline, so much joy to be had in the vocal deliveries and iconic lines, and the best video game soundtrack ever performed.

Sonic's friend's stories could be better - not primarily because of the gameplay, but because of the overworld/story padding. They each only get about 15 minutes of gameplay between them, but they all took over an hour each because you're re-watching all these scenes you've already seen. It was really fatiguing fighting Chaos 4 a total of three times (all while Redream fucked up the floor textures and triggered my acrophobia, ewww). But believe me, I do like playing as all of them, one way or another.

I'm not a remake-obsessed guy but if Adventure ever did get revisited, I'd want them to go the extra mile with these other character's stories - change up the dialogue, do more to reflect how they're experiencing these events from their POV, maybe add in more inner-monologue, definitely make the gameplay sections a little meatier and difficult too.

Sonic >>>>>> Amy > Knuckles = E-102 Gamma > Tails >>>>>> Big

The Brainworms Got Me And I Will Absolutely Be Playing Sonic Adventure 2 Again Soon :)

Navigating Sonic Adventure’s legacy is difficult; it’s simultaneously a landmark title within console gaming and unquestionably the Dreamcast’s killer app while also featuring a wealth of discordant gameplay elements and many difficult-to-stomach aspects. As one of the first true AAA games, its legacy looms as large as contemporaries Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid while struggling to achieve the same average quality throughout. Its inconsistencies have good merit thanks to being rooted in first-of-its-kind 3D traversal elements and a sense of locomotive freedom that few games would manage to touch in its wake. Weighing both its content in the absolute sense versus the context it arrived in is paramount to understanding its importance.

Sonic Adventure itself started in tech demos on Saturn hardware under the direction of the series' veteran programmer Yuji Naka. To my amusement, I must say that Naka's infamously abrasive personality rears its head often during this time period. Who else could start a development group called Sonic Team that not only refused to make a Sonic game for years in favor of new IPs but also sabotaged the actual American Sonic development team until their dissolution at the end of the Saturn years? Regardless, Naka and his team finally got to work on an initial NiGHTS-derivative engine that became a part of the Sonic Jam compilation, and afterwards they transitioned to a higher-tech engine developed in tandem with the burgeoning Dural/Katana project that eventually became the Dreamcast. While not a launch title for the system in Japan – which is unfortunate considering how tepid their starting lineup was – the game did make a holiday release date for 1998 in a slightly less-than-finished state, and it would arrive stateside a year later during the legendary 9/9/99 western Dreamcast launch. It still stands as the best-selling Dreamcast game at 2.5 million copies sold; not bad at all for a system that only sold a little over 9 million units to begin with.

It would be negligent to say that Sega had a difficult time adjusting to 3D gaming; in fact, Sega's arcade output at the start of the 3D era is without question the most impressive of any developer at the time. The company had developed important early works in the racing genre (Daytona USA, Sega Rally Championship), the first 3D fighter (Virtua Fighter), and a multitude of smooth polygonal experiences in other genres (Virtual-On, House of the Dead, Dynamite Cop). However, adjusting to the conventions of console 3D gaming was a different issue altogether. The Genesis and Saturn were both arcade-port powerhouses in their own right, and much of their console-exclusive output up to that point had not strayed far from those design elements. While Sega was perfecting spectacle platformers such as Shinobi, Sonic, and Castle of Illusion, Nintendo was laying the groundwork for their exploration-focused 3D work with games like Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, Link to the Past, and Super Metroid. The latter style proved to have better staying power with the growing trend towards longer experiences and more approachable gameplay; a reality that hit Sega hard when their arcade-focused Saturn bombed in America. Sega truly had some of the best game developers in the world working for them, but how could they translate their frenetic, short-and-sweet design to a more fully-fleshed game? Sonic Adventure at its core is an answer to this question, and viewing it through this lens makes some of its more unwieldy design choices seem rational in a trail-blazing era for 3D gameplay.

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Sonic Adventure is a lean 11 platforming levels, all tightly choreographed for breakneck speed and glamorous setpieces. On first boot you start as Sonic, firstly in a brief fight against primordial antagonist Chaos and then in the first true stage Emerald Coast. Without question this strongly sets the tone and design language of the rest of the game: heavily-scripted events such as the whale chase, dashes across sweeping pathways that swirl around the screen, creative use of verticality, and a wide variety of obstacles. The graphical fidelity can also not go unmentioned; at the time this would've been possibly the best looking game you could play outside of the arcades. Even playing the game today hooked up with VGA cables it still looks incredibly crisp. No more blurry N64 textures or twitchy PSX polygons: this was the future of console graphics.

Of course, little imperfections in the engine pop out quickly. The physics and collision are obviously patchy and struggle to keep Sonic in check when actions the game doesn’t expect occur, such as holding incorrect directions during some tight turns or spin dashing in the middle of loop-de-loops. Later stages with more varied terrain make Sonic’s character judder and certain edges will catch him, stopping him in his tracks. Indeed, the optimization model of 3D Sonic is an odd one: memorization of specific physics interactions on given terrain features serves as the major hurdle when shaving off seconds from best times. Rather than explicit obstacles in the environment being the main hurdle, knowing how to work within the limitations and quirks of the engine yields the best results. This may be one of the particular reasons a lot of players dislike these games, and to be fair it bucks convention on how games provide challenge within story-driven works such as this. Generally obstacles to the player are driven by the scenario, such as engaging enemies explained through the narrative or avoiding setting-specific hazards such as sand pits or missile turrets. Sonic Adventure features all of these and more of course, but the nature of the high speed and often unintuitive character-environment interactions destroys the immersion. In essence it’s the difference between “I need to jump over this enemy and then run to the left around the spikes” and “I need to hold the left stick at this specific angle to avoid flying through a wall or getting stuck in a spot on the ground.” If you derive more enjoyment from the play optimization than the immersion, this may not matter much to you. It’s difficult for me to put a valuation on this conceptually given that so many people will react to this style of play differently; for me it feels fucking sweet when it works and frustrating as hell when it doesn’t.

In this entry in particular I can excuse some of the bugginess for simply being a little messy on the first outing. Sonic himself handles remarkably well in this iteration compared to even SA2 or Heroes; he has the exact right amount of twitchiness without being unable to make precise movements, and he stops on a dime unlike some of his slippier later outings. His spin dash from the original games can now be fired off instantly, allowing the player to maintain or regain speed with little effort. This alone makes his handling here my favorite in the pre-boost era precisely because it’s a straight-up free boost, and it frankly feels more organic with the light charging it has rather than just utilizing a limited resource. The biggest addition to his arsenal is unquestionably the homing attack, which gives Sonic the ability to dash forward in midair towards an enemy or object when the jump button is pressed. This particular tool truly actualized this series thanks to the flexibility it offers in the trickier platforming sections, as well as keeping combat from killing Sonic's momentum. Without the extra layer of control the homing attack offers in how it tightly couples Sonic to interactables and allows for reaction-based aerial maneuvering, I’m not sure how any of these level designs would have been feasible.

No single level takes much longer than five minutes to complete, so to increase the runtime of Sonic's slice of the game you spend a significant amount of time navigating hub worlds to open up each level. For new players this is likely the first truly noxious part of the game, and for experienced players this is likely trivially tedious. The story is fully linear and requires you to navigate to the right location to trigger the next event, thought occasionally it necessitates locating a particular power-up or plot key. I found this endlessly confusing as a child, though thankfully the developers included a hint system with no penalties that does an okay job of pointing you in the right direction.

Every actual level is pure gold. The zone system from the originals quietly reemerges here as both a transition point for your Dreamcast to loudly load the next area and a shift in theme, music, and visuals. Consider Windy Valley, where a tornado terrorizes an idyllic countryside scene Sonic is moving through before he is eventually sucked up into it. Forced to ascend the storm to escape, he finally breaks the vortex to rush through a dreamy, calm sky. Each of these levels varies its environments and narrates Sonic’s journey in their own subtle way, from Speed Highway’s nighttime police chase giving way to a yawning sunbreak, or Red Mountain’s craggy exterior descending into an active volcano. Compared to its collectathon contemporaries, which mainly preferred to compartmentalize different modes of play in different regions, this game instead chooses to thrust you into new events every few minutes with very little repetition, giving the levels an organic flow that heightens the sense of speed. There are snowboarding sections, switch puzzles, bumper car races, haunted ruins, and so many more spectacular moments in store. I would go as far as to say this is probably my favorite 3D Sonic experience in the whole series.

Connecting all of this is the story, which never moves forward in any meaningful way beyond Dr. Eggman repeatedly powering up Chaos with the Chaos Emeralds from previous games. Every one you collect as a goal for a level inevitably gets taken from you during a cutscene with no player input. Sonic and Tails get soundly trumped over and over again by anticlimatically taking a thud across the head or tripping and letting the emerald fly from their hands, often after supposedly defeating a form of Chaos or another boss. Even defeating Eggman takes two attempts of flying up to his gigantic Egg Carrier fortress to do it right (both of these flight sequences feature a neat Panzer Dragoon-esque rail shooter segment as a distraction). They are without a doubt some of the most useless protagonists in a game of this time.

Finally, after a climatic battle with Eggman, Sonic succeeds in stopping Chaos from being unleashed onto the world and returns to the main hub, Station Square, for some well-deserved R&R. At this point, if you have been playing as Sonic exclusively, you have probably clocked around 2 hours on the game. Credits roll. This is for all intents and purposes the end of the game, or at least the “novel” content contained within it. Thus begs the question: how did Sonic Team fill out the rest of the game? I have already extensively covered how Sonic Team successfully translated spectacle platformer concepts to 3D, but how did they synthesize this with the dominant content-stuffed design strategies of the time?

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Over the course of the game you unlock a total of six playable characters as you encounter them in story sequences. Each character has a Rashomon-style perspective on the story with a unique playstyle and progression through the levels you have already played. The ultimate key to stretching out this rather short game that Sonic Team settled on was repurposing elements of Sonic’s stages to create new campaigns staring each of his companions. Frankly, I find this a perfectly adequate solution that strategically reuses assets to give the game a fresh veneer each time you play through it. However, the execution leaves so much to be desired that it unfortunately hinders the quality of the overall product. Sonic Adventure has an excellent Sonic game enclosed within the bloat of a much more middling product.

The Tails and Knuckles campaigns tend to be most peoples' runner-up favorite behind Sonic due to their more conventional gameplay. Tails' campaign thematically focuses on an arc that sees his independence blossom and his self-conception flourish as more than just Sonic's partner (or at least this is gestured towards in his unique cutscenes). His gameplay focuses on racing opponents through Sonic's levels (usually against Sonic himself) while taking advantage of his flight abilities. Knuckles, on the other hand, seeks to find pieces from the shattered Master Emerald throughout open-roam segments of each level. This “collect all X items” design was smartly cribbed from the successful 3D platformers before it, though to speed things up the developers included a nifty radar that gives a warm-cold measurement of your distance from each of the three shards in each stage.

Tails’ campaign is passable at best but overall lacks much of the panache and originality of Sonic’s levels. The level designers rather conspicuously leave giant flight boost contraptions littered throughout carbon copies of segments from Sonic's levels, which feels telegraphed to the point of boredom. The segment played tends to be just a single zone, meaning that an overall Tails level can take less than 90 seconds to beat, and the paucity of alternate paths within these sections compared to their original versions unfortunately increases their linearity. To make matters worse, Tails spends much of the story alongside Sonic, which means that you must rewatch many of the same cutscenes and fight multiple identical bosses. Even the aforementioned rail shooter sections must be played again with absolutely no modification. The only truly unique segments are one of the snowboarding segments and a forgettable final boss in a game already chock-full of forgettable bosses. These factors combine to make Tails' campaign seem like a lesser retread of Sonic' campaign.

The Knuckles campaign is the most well-realized of all of the non-Sonic campaigns thanks to the aforementioned ease of the item-search concept. He retains his unique moves from his earlier appearances such as the ability to climb any wall and glide endlessly, both of which do an excellent job letting the player explore in all directions with significant verticality. These bear the weight of allowing the player to meander through and recontextualize areas they had previously traversed at the blink of an eye. However, it's hard not to compare the design of his levels here to his later Sonic Adventure 2 environments, which featured much more intricate and memorable locales (though with plenty of issues of their own). His levels here simply expand upon Sonic’s segments, and even with randomized shard locations no one should have trouble finding each piece within a few minutes time for each stage. Thankfully he does have a significant amount of bespoke rooms that give his areas some individuality. He has a single unique boss (the bouncy Chaos 2), yet he also has to fight two bosses that you have already fought in other campaigns. One of these bosses, Chaos 4, is present in Tails' campaign as well, meaning you fight it three times overall with absolutely no change in difficulty or strategy. Overall, I've found his campaign never fully capitalizes on its potential while still potentially being the best of the non-Sonic bunch.

The other three campaigns make up the more experimental side of the game, though with results just as mixed as the previously mentioned characters. Amy reappears from Sonic CD, effectively cementing her as a main cast member for many games afterwards. Her gameplay focuses on light puzzle and stalker elements as she attempts to escape from Eggman's robot ZERO. E-102 Gamma appears initially as one of Eggman's robot henchmen and later a defector, with a shoot-em-up gameplay style that would later reappear in Sonic Adventure 2. Finally, and most infamously, Big the Cat debuts for a brief fishing campaign focused on rescuing his emerald-mutated friend Froggy. These three are all interesting attempts at trying to spice up gameplay for the preexisting levels, stretching the variety to a point where no other 3D Sonic would try to go.

Out of all six main stories, Amy's three-level long story seems the slightest even with the interesting ideas it contains. While the ZERO chase mechanic consistently drives the action forward, the gameplay in this section feels rather plodding thanks to Amy’s poor acceleration. She feels sluggish when running from a stop and especially when walking up slopes. Her saving grace is her Piko Piko Hammer, which not only serves as her weapon of choice but gives her a nifty bit of momentum when used in the air, as well as allowing her to vault when running at her top speed. This meandering pace may have been a deliberate design choice to keep Amy from having too much of a leg up on the robot trailing her, as ZERO isn't remotely hard to escape from due to the scripted nature of its appearances and its heavily-telegraphed attacks. In a few places barrels that you can hide in are available, but using them is frankly a waste of time and comes across as an afterthought. Each level has a puzzle or two to solve while playing keep away with ZERO as well, which fit the nice adventure game niches such as “use the funhouse mirrors to detect where ground exists” or “put each cube in its color-coded slot.” With just some touch-ups to the controls, this campaign could have felt more playable, if still not enthralling. It would also significantly help if her iteration of Hot Shelter wasn’t three times longer than either of her other stages. Her story leaves very little to speak about as well, with Amy attempting to escort a Flicky carrying a Chaos Emerald back to its parents.

Gamma draws the aforementioned lock-on gun feature from Panzer Dragoon and attaches it to a steadily-dropping timer that you can only boost by killing enemies. An upgrade later in the game adds a hover as well, making his movement surprisingly versatile combined with his smooth gliding speed. While this is a great concept, the actual levels are extremely short with generous timers that render the whole time attack mechanic pointless. However, Gamma's final level Hot Shelter shines through as a premier moment for the game as a whole. This level has an actual threat of failure from time-over due to a length on par with one of Sonic's levels, and shows off a great sequence where Gamma hops between two parallel trains blasting shooting galleries of robots. Constant targets appear in view from badniks to bombs to door latches, and various small environment puzzles such as changing the rotation of a large gear to use as a staircase pepper the hectic proceedings. Even though the shooting is simplistic, there's a real sense of carnage with the sheer volume of enemies and destructible environments. A full game in this style could have been a great turn-of-the-millennium new IP for Sega (Gunvalkyrie is vaguely similar), and it's a shame that it only reappeared in Sonic Adventure 2 with longer, duller stages. Gamma's story also has the most depth to it out of any of the non-Sonic stories, with many unique cutscenes detailing Gamma's training and eventual decision to destroy each robot in its line to free the animal inside. With some more meat on its bones, this could have been easily the second-best portion of the game other than the main Sonic story.

It's worth bringing up the usual Sonic Adventure cutscene criticisms at this point. This game has the pretense of having a serious story but suffers from the usual late-'90s laughable acting and stiff translation you'll find in lesser games of the era, leading the actual plot to become muddled. There's no real cinematic quality to the cutscenes thanks to the lack of camera movement and lifeless framing, and the staid dialogue makes watching each one a chore. The Dreamcast original offers no skip feature as well, and since multiple cutscenes must be watched repeatedly between the separate stories, waiting for them to end becomes a strain. At the very least the over-expressive character animation is pretty funny to watch for a few minutes.

This leaves us with Big's story. The brunt of the game here is fishing directly cribbed from Sega Bass Fishing, where one must cast their rod, manually reel in their lure, successfully hook a fish, and then play the line while reeling it in without exerting too much tension. In each level the only objective is to catch Froggy, Big's mutated companion, and with a little practice you can complete each in under a minute, though other fish can be caught as well to contribute to an overall weight total. The core elements are here, and thanks to a smattering of secret fishing holes and no timer this can become a relaxing diversion to the main game. Unfortunately the game relays much less information about its mechanics than its source material, and it is unfortunately unintuitive without the on-screen prompts and frequent fisher vocalizations of SBF. I'm not sure that this campaign really warrants the intense negativity it receives on its core gameplay alone. However, outside of these mechanics the campaign amplifies all of the issues mentioned up to this point: irrelevant cutscenes, extremely short stages, and a heavy focus on hub exploration. On repeat plays I’ve found this story in particular more enjoyable when tuning out these extraneous elements, but I’m reluctant to pretend like a fresh player wouldn’t encounter significant roadblocks to thriving in this fishing engine until they learn the ropes.

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All of these stories are wrapped up in sequences where each story member inexplicably travels to the past and witnesses scenes from an Aztec-inspired Echidna kingdom where Chaos hails from. The game’s hint and info system (represented by a floating orange ball floating through the hub and levels) is actually the spirit of the chieftain's daughter, who befriends Chaos because he protects these creatures named Chao that reside with the Chaos Emeralds. Each character gets a unique slice of these past events to witness and their events are completely out of order, with Sonic witnessing the final destruction of the village with no context given. The ambition is certainly there and piecing together the plot from these gives a little more weight to playing each of the separate stories, but the way they are woven into each cast members’ personal story feels patchwork and often not reflected upon in any meaningful way by the characters.

Speaking of the Chao, these creatures are included as an optional virtual pet feature via a “Chao Garden” placed in each hub area. These draw from the A-Life system the dream inhabitants used in NiGHTS, a background mechanic so unintrusive it would not be surprising if you missed it completely. Each Chao you raise can be given small animals found in each level to boost their stats for races against computer-controlled Chao, and they can also be transferred to the Dreamcast's VMU memory cards as a Tamogatchi-style pet. This is a rather feature-rich part of the game if you're into that sort of thing. Having spent dozens of hours as a child in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle's further-developed Chao Gardens, I really have never spent any time raising Chao in this game, but my exposure to it indicates it has many identical features and a similar incentive to grind for stat boosts by playing and replaying levels.

I've levied plenty of criticism over the course of the review so far, but playing this on a Dreamcast over the last couple years after many years on the inferior Gamecube port has given me a bittersweet appreciation for just how ambitious Sonic Team went with this title. Regardless of all of the padding I've brought up, the main campaign is easily in the 10-hour range, which is no small feat for a game of this era. Each character has three separate goals for each stage as well, encouraging at least three playthroughs of every level with each character in the game. The strict targets in the time attack missions in particular provide a skill objective for dedicated players. Big's missions specifically flesh out his stages into a full-fledged fishing game with weight goals to hit and a variety of fish to catch. Completing each goal scores you one of 130 emblems in the game’s gesture towards the trappings of a collectathon, and further emblems can be found throughout the game’s world and for small side tasks. Unfortunately, there’s no bonus to be received for collecting all of these besides self-satisfaction.

Along with the impressive amount of content, the graphics are rendered particularly gorgeously. The hub environments and varied levels showcase what the Dreamcast could do with first-party hands on the wheel, particularly with the tasteful lighting engine unique to only the original release. Chaos itself has a translucent, amorphous quality to its body that mutates constantly in each fight as a superb effect. Many settings in the game also feature plenty of little touches, such as NPC storylines in the hub worlds that progress along with the player and a scripted day-night cycle that alters the ambiance. Eggman's Egg Carrier is rendered in impressive detail even though you barely spend any time in it outside of Gamma's story. There's even a small Angel Island from Sonic 3 for you to visit with a broken Master Emerald. These continuity nods also appear with many of the enemies, whom draw from actual Genesis-era Sonic baddies in some cases. It’s evident that Sonic Team aimed to make Sonic Adventure a visual showpiece for the console and exert what true AAA graphics could look like in the shift to the sixth generation.

This small point on the Genesis-era callbacks indicates to me that Sonic Adventure was really a transitional game from the mischievously fantastical style of the originals to the tween-culture-focused sequel and beyond. More often than Sonic Adventure 2 does this game feel like it tries to summon the cheery emotional range and tightly-wound level design of its forebears. The only thing preventing the team from concocting a full extension of the classics is the need to provide what a consumer expected in terms of late-90s game length. What you're left with is a tightly-designed core game that was inflated to be a sprawling introduction to the Dreamcast in all of its sloppy aims, visionary design choices, and awkward attempts to extrapolate Sega’s arcade-centric design philosophy to the home. Even the final battle against Perfect Chaos, unlocked only after every other characters' story has been completed, throws a new angle into the mix with a controllable Super Sonic. This battle feels unfortunately undercooked as Sonic responds poorly to precise movements and requires a specific velocity in order to actually damage Chaos, which causes precious time to be wasted repeating certain sections. In many ways this fight is the microcosm of the experience as a whole: visually stunning, immaculate in the wide variety of moods it summons for its child audience, but compromised in key areas that make actually attempting to engage with the game difficult.

The amount of features in this game are staggering compared to many games of that era, and it would be hard for me to cover any more of them without making this review way too long to read. This game even had some of the earliest DLC through Sega's internet service, with seasonal events changing the hub worlds and adding small missions with extra content. In many ways, Sonic Adventure provides an expansive sampler to the many flavors of Sega. Their flamboyant blue-sky visual stylings, eclectic mix of design chops, and furious attempts to center jolts of pure gameplay excellence over long-form sagas all are exhibited here. Open references to their other IPs and winking nods to their extensive legacy abound. Perhaps more than solely existing as the Dreamcast’s calling card, this game crystallizes the Sega aesthetic as it existed before their dying days. The question of flash-in-the-pan gameplay versus extended content funnel serves as the dichotomy hindering their success all the way back to this point. It is only fitting, then, that Yakuza would eventually usurp the blue hedgehog as Sega’s tour de force property, as it welds the melting pot of different engines and wild array of moods into the decades-long epic the company needed to draw dedicated fans into.

I must also touch upon the music from this game, as it is possibly the best soundtrack in the whole franchise. Legendary Sega composer Jun Senoue really broke out with this game, and his playfully melodic guitar leads define much of the feeling and attitude of this era of Sonic games. Unlike some of his later soundtracks, this game features a broad range of instrumentation that blend nicely with the FM synth sound of the original classics. Orchestral, industrial, lounge, jungle, and hip-hop all collide with Senoue's guitar to create the most consistently interesting soundtrack in the series. As mentioned prior, each level features multiple internal acts that change the backing track while maintaining the motif, a feat that modern Sonic games should take note of. Some characters even get unique themes for stages, including the yawning slide guitar for Big's version of emerald coast. I love his Fish Caught! theme that leans into angular sputtering synths reminiscent of Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's work on Virtua Fighter. Elsewhere the sounds presage dance-punk, such as the much-loved Speed Highway theme, which veers into jungle without missing a beat. Venture into the Mystic Ruins and experience tumbling and jilted rhythms overlayed with washy pan flute and indecipherable praises, or drop into Casinopolis and its Latin Jazz-tinged Vegas revue. I could continue on and on like this (the soundtrack is insanely long) but rest assured that every new concept, every stage transition, every mood, vibe, and affect are all captured here in their full glory, showcasing the genius of a studio already well-acquainted with CD-quality audio and lovingly orchestrated soundtracks.

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Much like the game itself, there’s many discordant threads running through this piece, so I’ll try to summarize my main design takeaways from Sonic Adventure into some key points.

First: Sonic Adventure benefits greatly from its permissive yet simple toolkits per character. Each character has a well-defined set of ways to traverse space and deal with obstacles that overlap in key ways without becoming samey.

Second: Sonic Adventure thrives when it is presenting new content and shocking the player visually. Its design patterns reward delighting the average player and delivering totally new obstacles instead of iterating on older ones. I would argue that it requires this for success even more than its peers, which featured slower paced levels, frequent backtracking, incentives for exploration, and toolkits based around these facets. Sonic Adventure’s toolkits are not built for this outside of Knuckles, who most closely resembles the playstyle of the game’s contemporaries.

Third: Sonic Adventure struggles to stretch out its systems in meaningful ways beyond simply switching the script up entirely. This creates a highly uneven experience exacerbated by the game’s rough physics/collision and unequal attention to each member of its cast.

Fourth: Sonic Adventure attempts to create new experiences across its many playable characters but suffers from the choice to repeat parts of the game without alteration (or with small edits) across its campaigns. These repeated sections are often the weakest parts of the game: cutscenes, hub exploration, and bosses. The overabundance of these elements have caused me personally to dislike this game quite a bit in the past. Replaying stages from the Trial menu absent of these external factors has given me a greater appreciation for the game’s particular gameplay stylings; the extra padding around these levels is unfortunately a detractor from the experience.

Fifth: Despite these criticisms, Sonic Adventure encapsulates much of Sega’s charm and design at a time when they were making a last stand in industry based on the talent of their creators alone. Its ambition and scope took the company in very different directions than similar studios; emphasizing the head-rush of exhilarating spectacle rather than more inquisitive exploration-based outings in the collectathon subgenre. Finally, their emphasis on speed and player expression in 3D environments cemented the Sonic series as providing satisfying tactile experiences unavailable in virtually any other series.

Sonic adventure is hard evidence that Sonic most certainly did not have a rough transition to 3d. Even 26 years after this game released it still looks amazing and runs great. The music, and level design in this game is fantastic as always. I also really liked all the stories, my least favourite was probably big the cats and even then it wasnt bad. Here is my Ranking:
1. Sonic
2. E-102
3. Tails
4. Amy
5. Super sonic
6. Knuckles
7. Big the cat
All of the stories are amazing and I'm looking forward to play adventure 2 after experiencing this absolute masterpiece

So in the cutscene right before the final boss, you get to see how everyone in the destroyed city chants Sonic's name which restores the true power of the Chaos Emeralds and allows him to transform into Super Sonic and defeat Perfect Chaos.
What many may not know is that this chanting is actually a recording from a 1998 event in which the game was first revealed, where Segata Sanshiro himself asked fans to chant Sonic's name at the end, right before Crush 40 performed Open Your Heart.
What I'm trying to say is that Sonic Adventure is the single game with the most SOUL out there, just for this fact alone. And everything else is SOULLESS compared to it.

It was Christmas 1999, shortly after flying all the way out from the west coast to live with my dad in Chicago. Everything was covered under a thick blanket of snow, and I was on box five of... clothes. No kid likes getting clothes for Christmas, but that's all there was. Except for one, which had a copy of Sonic Adventure carefully placed on top of a sweater. I sheepishly explained that I couldn't play it because I didn't have a Dreamcast. "That's fine, we can take it back."

There was only one present left, large and boxy and wrapped in reflective red paper with a big green bow on the top. "Why don't you open it up for me?" Well alright, I do like tearing shit up so why not?

It was a Dreamcast. He got me. The son of a bitch got me.

Being terminally obsessed with Sonic was fine when all the games were coming out for a console I owned, but as the series shifted from the Genesis to the 32X, Saturn, and eventually Dreamcast, it felt like I could only enjoy the games by proxy, reading about them in magazines or occasionally getting to play them when I went over to a friend's house. It's for this very reason that Sonic CD gestated into the "perfect" Sonic game in my mind, not because it was (it's not) but because I was kept from it. When Sonic Adventure released in 1998, it was just more of the same... For about a year. Christmas 1999, that was the first time I had a new Sonic game in my hands since Sonic & Knuckles, and that felt significant.

If you asked me at the time what my favorite Sonic game was, no question it would be Sonic Adventure. That's because it was new and it was in three dee, and in my adolescent mind, being new simply meant something was better. That's not always the case, and on hindsight, Sonic Adventure is not my first, second, or even third choice when it comes to the question "what are the best Sonics?" Something one should ask if I'm ever hospitalized for a traumatic brain injury, you know, to make sure it's still me in there.

I have a lot I want to get into with this game, and I think the best place to start would be to break down each of Sonic Adventure's six playable characters and tell you what I like and what I don't like about them. Ok, number one: big the cat is the most erotic character the series has ever ha

Sonic: The backbone of the Sonic Adventure, which every other gameplay style derives from in some way. Overall, I like Sonic's gameplay the most. It's the most polished and fleshed out by far, and takes you through the most levels, giving you a solid baseline for what Sonic Adventure is before tackling the other characters. Sonic also does some very interesting things with his mouth!

Unfortunately, Sonic's story will also give you an appreciation for how janky the game is. A lot of collision issues rear their head in later levels (Lost World especially), and the game's dogshit camera can make a few sections an absolute pain. The light speed dash is a very interesting mechanic that gets smoothed out in later games, but here it requires you to completely stop and charge it, which disrupts the flow of levels. That said, you can also break Sonic's stages in some really fun ways. Spindashing up the sharp incline near the end of Emerald Coast and using it to fling yourself past a large portion of the last act made child-me feel powerful, and it's become such a habitual part of playing the game that there's a whole chunk of that level which I have not seen since the early 2000s.

Tails: A mostly solid extension of Sonic's gameplay wherein you race Sonic through truncated versions of his levels. My only complaint here is that they're not challenging in the slightest bit and are arguably even easier than Sonic's stages thanks to the abundance of dash rings Tails can fly through. There's something to be said here about requiring the player to develop a keen understanding of the level layouts by playing Sonic's story first, but that is not at all a pre-requisite here, nor should it be given the demographic the game was designed for at the time. That's just something I - an old man who has played this game dozens of times - would like to see, if only so he can wring a little more out of the experience.

Knuckles: Well, the nicest thing I can say about this is the levels are shorter than they are in Sonic Adventure 2! I never liked emerald hunting. Nobody I knew at the time liked emerald hunting. There's so much you could do with Knuckles, and yet he's been saddled with this and Chaotix as his two breakout gameplay styles. To make matters worse, shortly after the Adventure series (I'd argue it even began in SA2) Knuckles' character devolved to the point of being an unfathomably huge dunce. Just dumb. Dog dumb. Quit disrespecting my son like this.

Amy Rose: I love Zero's theme.. Very buzzy, synthetic, and with this energy that is both weird and exaggerated in its aggression. Amy herself? Not a fan.

What if you played Sonic's levels but like, uh, really slow. No wait, hear me out, she can use a hammer! Well yeah, sure, it feels kinda wonky and it's not as fun to use as the homing attack, or Gamma's gun, or Tails' spin, or anything else in the game really -- but if you play her levels obsessively you might discover tech that makes her feel halfway as good as the other characters, and then you can go online and tell everyone they're just playing her wrong!

E102 Gamma: Kinda neat. Part of what makes Gamma's levels work, I think, is how short they are. Having to win time back by shooting enemies and creating combos gives this mode a decidedly arcadey feel, and I never felt like it overstayed its welcome. Boss battles are pretty unengaging, however, though they're really all about the emotional beat of freeing Gamma's friends. Gamma also has my favorite character theme in the game, and E101 Mk.II gets the best boss track in the game excluding Open Your Heart.

Big the Cat: There was a period of time where I was weirdly forgiving and perhaps even defensive of Big's gameplay. "You don't get it, it's all about subverting your expectations. Sometimes you gotta take it slow!" Stupid. Terrible opinion. I like Sega Bass Fishing as much as the next guy, but I don't see any reason why that kind of gameplay needs to be shoehorned into Sonic, especially not in this state. Even by the standards of other fishing games at the time, it just feels like junk. That said, Big fishing Froggy right out of Chaos 6 and implying that this happened concurrent with Sonic's battle against him is hilarious. That's canon, and it's one of my favorite moments in the game. I figure that justifies Big's existence.

Super Sonic: oh, spoilers, you can unlock Super Sonic by beating the other story modes. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry that I ruined this for you.

Although Sonic & Knuckles was the first game in the series to introduce a Super Sonic exclusive boss, Sonic Adventure is the entry that solidified it as a staple. Almost every mainline game after this has concluded in a triumphant battle between Super Sonic and the big bad, and this one opens in a way that is downright stark compared to the rest: Sonic straight up fails. Station Square is destroyed, there's probably a lot of dead people, dead drowned people, which is really one of the worst kinds of dead people! And it's all because Sonic decided to take a nap instead of tying up loose ends. Not that game dwells on this. As Tails says, "all's well that ends well!"

It's just a shame that the fight against Perfect Chaos is kinda crap. Super Sonic doesn't control well, and the ramps and debris leading up to Chaos create a lot of collision issues. The loop of rushing into Chaos with enough force to damage him is also fairly unengaging and lacking in the kind of dynamism the set piece calls for. There's a second phase here, and nothing about it feels deserved. At least Open Your Heart is such a banger that you'll stay hyped up for half of the fight.

I've linked to a few songs throughout this review (apologies to future generations if those videos get pulled down and the URLs start linking to like, baby sensory videos or something), and that's because the soundtrack for Sonic Adventure has stuck with me every bit as much as the Genesis games. Makes sense, considering a number of songs are repurposed from Sonic 3D Blast, effectively creating a throughline between Adventure and the Genesis. Subsequent games would push further and further away from the jazzy and energetic sounds of Sonic Adventure, eventually settling on more orchestral music, and now generic house trance that I find completely unmemorable and flaccid. Sonic Adventure, though? Easily in my top three favorite Sonic soundtracks.

I think the story also finds a perfect balance in tone. It takes itself just seriously enough, neither up its ass with melodrama in the way Frontiers or even Sonic 2006 are, while also being a far cry from the irreverent style of Sonic Lost World and Colors. There's a genuine attempt to provide each character with their own arc, with returning character's growing in ways that feel like a natural progression of how they were depicted in the 16-bit games. The way it treats its characters and world conveys a sense permanence, like it's just one part in an ever-growing continuity that cannot be wiped clean, returning everything to a squeaky-clean state by the next adventure. Of course, that's eventually what the series would degenerate into, to the point that things like Angel Island or Tails saving Station Square (which actually mattered at one point) are only ever invoked as hollow call backs, because the canon is tangled beyond redemption. Uhhh, I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that it's my favorite narrative in a Sonic game, which isn't saying much considering... Well, you know.

The A-Life system from Knights into Dreams also makes a return in the form of Chao. Throw those fuckers against a wall, crack 'em open, make them work for you. I'll talk more about them in my review for Sonic Adventure 2, because they serve more of a function there and are significantly fleshed out. In Sonic Adventure, they're largely superfluous and easy to ignore because the emblems don't matter (not that it ever stopped me from collecting them all.) I'm also so far removed from the era of putting Chaos onto my VMU and taking them around with me to really talk about it. I just want to acknowledge that they're here, because some people are waaay into Chao. I'm not one of them, but I also feel that when people talk about Chao, they're not talking about Chao in Sonic Adventure Number One.

I knew I was going to write a lot about this game before I even knew what I was going to say about it. There was a long stretch of time where continued replays made me like it less and less. "This has aged," or rather I have aged, as tends to be the case with that sort of rhetoric. "This was never good. Even at the time, there were far more competent platformers." Yes, what a salient point you made, edgy-19-year-old me. What a smart boy you are. Counterpoint: it doesn't matter. I see all the flaws, I see the rough edges, I see Sonic vibrating atop that stone snake in Lost World, and I just don't care. I like Sonic Adventure, maybe not as much as I once did, but enough that to pretend I don't would be a lie. Perhaps a lot of my love comes from that Christmas morning, remembering how much I lit up to see a new Sonic game and still being able to feel something about that.

And that's ok. There is nothing wrong with that. My love for this series is gone, but I can always go back to the classics and remind myself what sparked that feeling in the first place, and that's the uncontrollable need to get vored by big the c

So…sega made some pretty stupid decisions…they make an add-on to the genesis and the Saturn at the same time, they don’t prepare a new sonic game for the Saturn, make the Saturn more expensive then the PlayStation…of course that was all gonna go well. So sega had to think fast about what to do…they were making a sonic game for the Saturn but…ehh…they may as well start over. So they brought in the sega Dreamcast with hopes that it would be able to learn from mistakes and deliver something powerful…until the PlayStation 2 would just appear and claim supremacy. But unlike the Saturn, sega did at least come prepared…they gave us a sonic game, one of the most experimental sonic games in the entire franchise!

It’s been highly known that not many people like this game. Sure, it hasn’t aged the best, some things don’t look entirely great, but the story is still powerful and the ideas it was trying to show us still stand strong to this day.

The story is definitely really interesting. Instead of it being just one storyline, it’s split between 6 characters and a finale. You have sonic’s story, tail’s story, knuckle’s story, Amy’s story, big’s story, and gamma’s story. Big and gamma were new characters introduced to basically give 2 different experiences from the normal ‘just run and get to the end’. Big incorporates a more laid back approach as you just play a fishing mini-game…honestly not as bad as people make it out. And gamma is the complete opposite, going for a more run-and-gun approach which works quite well and is really fun.

All the stories culminate into one final story, whereby you try to take down chaos once and for all. And you even get help from every single hero (even robotnik surprisingly) and the finale is just so good and cool like geez.

Those that say ‘sonic doesn’t work in 3D and never has’ in my opinion are wrong, if anything, sonic got a great start in 3D and gave us a story that could never have been told in 2D and honestly I’m so proud they did make this game because this game is just so powerful and great and arguably one of the best sonic games of all time with some of the best characters (even big). To this day gamma’s story still makes me cry and is just beautifully told. And sure, maybe some of the character gameplay could’ve done with a bit more work in the oven (Tails and Amy especially) but I still think their fun experiences at their core and we should all respect that. And debatably the whole game really does rival how Mario was doing in terms of 3D and really pushes the fact that 2D games could make the jump to 3D!

Great story, wonderful gameplay, great characters, no matter what version they can’t get sonic’s mouth right

It doesn't get even half the credit that Mario 64 does--and it's easy to forget because we've been awash in mediocre-to-bad Sonic games for sooo long--but Sonic's jump to 3D was remarkable. The way they nailed his movement, alone, is kind of astounding; and on top of that you have all of these wonderful level designs with different variations on the theme depending on what character you choose (fuck Big, everyone else is cool), an open world that actually works to make the game feel bigger and more interconnected than its stages strung together otherwise would, and a story that doesn't suck complete ass.

Why Sonic Team couldn't ever successfully iterate on this compelling formula, I have no idea... but Sonic Adventure is a goofy triumph of the particular brand of game design that existed (and thrived particularly on the Dreamcast) after 3D games really found their footing but before everything got too big-budget and prestige and had all of the life sucked out.

It has the jankiest train level known to man, a casino zone where you win rings and then climb up the pile of rings once it's sufficiently high, a Knuckles rap song, Panzer Dragoon-like shooting stages, a brilliant true-last-boss where you have to be going fast enough to kill him, gorgeous Sega blue skies, loop-the-loops...

...and I remember my sheer joy at 11 years old, waking up early before school just to be able to play it for 15 or 20 minutes, every time I boot it up and hear that title theme.

I love it.

So over the past couple years I've really turned around on a lot of Sonic stuff. With the help of some passionate fans I follow, I've sort of learned a lot about what makes Sonic appealing, what unique traits the series holds over its contemporaries, and how to properly appreciate a title as seemingly unwieldy as Sonic Adventure.

The first time I played this game was the DX version on the Gamecube, and I sort of thought nothing of it when it was done. At the time, it was another case of 3D Sonic simply not appealing to me, and I kind of decided that there probably won't ever be a 3D Sonic that really gets at what I want from platformers. But revisiting this game after watching other people play it and really explain why the title is so important to them, I really feel like I "get it" now.

First of all, as most people know, the DX version is largely a visual downgrade of this game, and coming to this version really helped me realize that this is possibly my favorite interpretation of the Sonic cast in 3D. Sonic's model here is this really good in-between of the classic era and what would become his modern look, same goes for all the characters. They have that good classic-era stoutness I like, and I love the stylistic decision to basically make the character's mouths disappear when they're not talking. The lip-synching and some of the animations on the characters show their age, but in a way that is incredibly charming rather than ugly.

Another thing I've come to realize is impressive about this game is just how ambitious every aspect of it is. This came out in 1998 in Japan, and looks insane for the time. Honestly, it's visuals haven't aged that poorly in most cases. Even the human models, which of course are kind of dated, have this stylization to them that really makes them feel like a natural addition to the Sonic world.

Of course, it's not just in visuals that this game shows its ambition. Six playable characters, all with their own playstyle, some of which are extremely different, and all having their own versions of the story that intersect, follow up on, and occasionally (frequently) contradict each other. The first time I played this game, these contradictions, as well as the fact that there are multiple versions of the same scenes with slightly different dialogue, really bothered me, but now I realize that this game is basically Sonic's own Rashomon. Each path is not just a different part of one big story, but also a specific viewpoint of the events of the story. One of the more obvious examples of this is in Tails's story, in which Eggman's lines and voice acting come off as a lot more sinister and menacing than how he comes off in other parts of the story. In Knuckles's story, when he confronts Sonic, Sonic's dialogue is less jokey and more cautious of Knuckles, which I think is hilarious. There are a lot of little moments like this where the differences can really say something about the characters, and sure sometimes it seems kind of unintentional, but the fact that they bothered to record all these different versions of the same cutscenes tells me there's absolutely an intent to have the characters' personality shine through their version of events.

As I said earlier, there are moments where the events of different stories don't really line up at all and just outright contradict each other in a way that can't really be chalked up to differences in perspective, but the fact the game still manages to pull off this whole story style, while telling the story of Tikal and the Echidna tribe in parallel out of order, is super impressive. The story and setting of Sonic Adventure is a really great continuation of the classic trilogy of games and the bits of lore they were able to create. I never liked the idea that 2D and 3D Sonic are just entirely different people, this game sets out to connect them both, and it pulls it off. Like, obviously there's some awkwardness in the dialogue and some story beats, but this game's attitude and spirit manages to just make those into more charm points. Also, the voice acting is just straight up good, like occasionally there might be an awkward phrasing or weird direction, but pretty much everyone here is doing a great job, and the child voicing Tails is cute enough that I'll let his whole thing slide. I've talked a little too much about the story in general, so I'm going to go character by character for a bit.

Sonic in this game is the most I've clicked with a 3D Sonic game. People joke about the spin dash making this game broken, but to me the spin dash being able to skip huge chunks of levels and do all kinds of crazy shit is what makes it good. I love learning how to really use Sonic's movement and spindash to really bust levels wide open, try to find challenge yourself to make it somewhere you think you can't, or find an easier way around an obstacle that would take longer to go around the normal way. The Sonic levels have more openness to them than I've seen in other games. Like, you're still going towards an objective in a linear stage, but it always feels like there's multiple ways to get there, and a lot of fun gimmicks and deviations to make a long the way, which is something that stays true for a lot of characters. I felt really encouraged to look for all the weird nooks and crannies of each level. Also, some of the best set pieces in any 3D Sonic. The Ice Cap Zone snowboard segment not only has god-tier music, but the beginning is beautifully TIMED to the music, and that whole segment is like top 10 moments in any Sonic game for me.

Don't have much to say about Tails or Amy, but I do enjoy the way the game encourages players to make some crazy shortcuts in Tails stages, and he's just fun to control in general. Amy's hammer jump is good, but I wish she didn't take so long to get going fast enough in order to do it.

Knuckles's stages are very interesting as someone who played Sonic Adventure 2 first. The stages here aren't as elaborate, but I think they manage to be a lot of fun to explore around as Knuckles. I love the way Knuckles gets tricked in this game, where Eggman doesn't even try really hard to convince him that Sonic is against him, Eggman just says "I heard Sonic has some master emerald pieces, idiot. Why don't you go find him, dipshit" and Knuckles just believes him. Also how dare they remove the emerald radar's ability to detect more than one piece at a time in SA2, I mean I can understand why but it makes some of the more frustrating levels in SA2 feel that much worse, to know they gave a better radar in the game before.

Before I talk about Big and Gamma, I wanna say I love that their stories come right after the other because their stories barely crossover with the other's. They are very much doing their own thing, but in extremely different ways, and I love the contrast. People talk about Big's story being pointless, but I think every multiple-perspective story needs one guy who has no idea what's actually going and just sort of bumbles their way in and out of the story. It's a fun diversion after four stories that covered a lot of similar ground, just some guy who's fishing for some reason. The fishing isn't that bad, but it does require learning how it works first. Honestly, all you need to do is read the in-game instructions and you're good, it's honestly not hard to figure out. Like, it's not my favorite thing to do in the game but it serves it's purpose well as a fun break from the rest of the story.

To me, the fact that Sonic Team did something like Gamma's story is one of the most, I'm using this word again, ambitious things in this game. You can tell this was a team excited to be able to tell bigger and more complex stories, and having Gamma be this strange, moody, and semi-tragic story that none of the characters are even aware of is such a good choice on their part. The gameplay is also just a better version of the mech segments in SA2. I'm not gonna say Gamma's story is like, Top Ten Saddest Moments in Gaming type shit, but I really love it, it's such a wild thing to witness.

Sonic Adventure is kind of a mess, but one that I love exploring and playing in. It tries so many things, it has so much it wants to do and show the player that it sometimes trips up on itself, it's just too damn excited for its own good, and I love that. The hub world in Sonic Adventure isn't one of my favorites, but the fact that every NPC has their own storyline going on throughout the game, the hidden rooms and secrets you can find, it's so lovely, especially if you grew up with this game. Honestly, even by SA2, some of the magic of this game is lost in the name of streamlining and smoothing off the rough edges.

Lastly, that soundtrack, holy fucking shit that soundtrack. Every character song is a banger, every song in general is, and there's a huge diversity in instruments and song type. Probably the best Sonic soundtrack in my book. Sorry if there's a lot of typos in this one, I gotta go to bed because I spent way too damn long figuring out this review, and I probably still didn't say all I meant to. I might give this game a higher score down the line.

EDIT: OK TWO THINGS I FORGOT TO MENTION. First, I think this game making you fight Chaos 4 three times, with almost no difference in between these fights sucks. Same with having to do Sky Chase in Sonic and Tails's story. Feel like having to repeat boring/annoying sections is one of the weaknesses of this style of story. Second, whoever made the choice to have Open Your Heart play on the first phase of the final boss but not the second should be fired.

EDIT 2: Spent some time trying to get all the emblems. Definitely not nearly as fun as just playing the game, I wish the rank system in later games was in this one. OK, pretty sure that's all now.

Eu não esperava que eu fosse gostar TANTO desse jogo
Sim, as cutscenes e a história são ridículas, a câmera é complicada, as colisões são estranhas, os chefes são péssimos, ele é datado e bugado, mas ele diverte, e me divertiu muito.
Correr com o Sonic nas fases é muito divertido, isso somado com visuais espetaculares, é o visual mais bonito da série, os shows visuais com as set pieces que esse jogo tem são incríveis de ver, e com a trilha sonora animal e muito variada que que deixa tudo com esse sentimento de aventura, é um jogo que realmente te faz se sentir numa grande aventura épica, e esses elementos bons do jogo me fazem relevar todos os seus problemas.
A campanha do Big é horrível, mas as outras campanhas fazem coisas muito interessantes nas fases, e a forma com que o jogo junta todas elas é muito legal.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles é o melhor Sonic, mas esse é o meu favorito, por muito, e eu considero que é uma das melhores transições de 2D pra 3D já feitas.