I have owned DX on PC for a quite a while now. I think it might even be the first game I ever bought on Steam. I watched so many YouTubers talk about Sonic back in the day, I have seen every take imaginable on Sonic Adventure so even though I didn't have much of a history with Sonic (I played the classics on mega collection but never got far, and I played Generations 3DS) I thought this would be the perfect entry to get me into the series and get me into the 3D games.

And I never finished it, I tried but man Big and Amy I just go so stuck in and I was way worse at games back then so I got stuck on even some later Sonic and Knuckles stuff. Eventually after a couple months of playing I had four stories completed and I just never picked it up again. I got Generations for really cheap and I played through that game have a pretty fun time with it. I eventually got into the classics due to their mobile versions. Sonic 2 was free when I got my kindle fire which started me doing that and let me tell you I put so much hours into that version of Sonic 2. I got a genesis just to play Sonic 3 and then I played Sonic 4 which was awful. Then with the release of Mania that became one of my favorite games and finally submitted me as a Sonic fan.

After this though all I played was Forces and Frontiers with me not really liking Forces. Frontiers was really fun though. I was a big Sonic fan in that I loved the characters, and through YouTuber I was aware of all the other games in the series and what main thoughts were about them but I never still have actually given any of those games a real shot. The main games from SA2-Colors I haven't even touched and I still never truly beat Adventure. There are games in here I am sure that I will love like Heroes but I still haven't even sat down and actually played it. I watched KingK's reviews of these games recently and it made me really want to finally play SA2 and Heroes and maybe get me down this journey of eventually playing these games. But in order for that to happen I needed to beat Sonic Adventure first so I booted up the game and spent 10 hours on it that I should've been using towards P3 Reload just so I can finally have an opinion on the game.

Sonic had a rough transition into 3D, kinda, I don't know Sonic's campaign is pretty great. The game has lots of parts where it rewards clever thinking in using your abilities and the level design is the perfect blend of linear but keeping side paths and collectibles. Sonic is really fun to control and I loved stages like Speed Highway and Red Mountain a ton. This game though is programmed couple of rocks and a potato however. I know I played DX but there were many times in this game where I would get Sonic Adventures and fall through the platform I was on or the automated section wouldn't work correctly or I would get hit by something off screen and would lose all my rings right before the stage (I lost like 250 rings on Emerald Coast). I had a surplus of lives but I'm so thankful for that because I lost so many of them thanks to bull crap that wasn't my fault. This affected all characters too not just Sonic. I will say though that Sonic's gameplay here is almost a perfect transition into what I want from 3D Sonic gameplay, something that Generations and Forces while fun at times is not really what I'm looking for.

Tails is weird, they gave him only half of Sonic's levels and they made sure to make each of his stages only a third of the length too but yet despite this he still has both of the unfun tornado levels. Tails is really fun in concept and I like his controls while flying though they felt a tad inconsistent with how much flight time they gave you. However racing Sonic is a pretty dumb goal and the game does rubberbanding on Sonic's AI anyway so any clever gains you get are completely lost. Now I will say I never lost any of these races despite the rubberbanding but it felt dissatisfying either way. Also the stages are so short and easy that they don't really get time to stick like they do in Sonic's campaign. I think I like Tail's stages more than most people do but I'm not surprised they changed him to mech gameplay in SA2.

Knuckles has a really fun concept and I love his radar. I had so much fun searching for emeralds in Speed Highway and Red Mountain. Sky Deck kinda sucked though with you constantly having to go back and change the angle to see if you could now obtain the emerald and I was stuck for quite a while because I didn't realize the doors only opened if the ship was tilted a certain way. Knuckles was definitely the second best gameplay style though and I am really excited to see what SA2 does for him despite the maybe worse radar.

Amy despite me not enjoying her much when I was like 12 I actually had a really fun time with here. I don't like how long it takes for her to get to max speed but she's really enjoyable when she gets to it and her hammer flip is really fun. I found her levels fun and despite them being slow and "puzzle" focused I had a good time with her campaign. I think it's bias because she's one of my favorite Sonic characters (I like cute creatures that carry giant hammers), but she might be my third favorite campaign here.

Big I didn't really care for. The fishing controls are actually pretty simple so I didn't have a hard time doing that, I was really stupid at 12. But I'm really docking him down for what happened to me in Ice Cap. Ice Cap is his only level that gets you to explore and platform and I was lost for a good little bit because of that. There was also one part because of his life ring ability I was stuck in a patch of water for 5 MINUTES and was unable to get out because every time I would try to jump out it would just sink me back down again. I eventually forced the game to fix itself but this really aggravated me. But yeah besides Ice Cap Big wasn't that bad, I don't know why he got more stages than Amy did though.

Gamma is cool as hell and I really enjoyed his gameplay but the levels they give him kinda suck. Emerald Coast is way too short, and Windy Valley because of those big purple enemies make it way too easy to stock up enough time. The concept of having to beat a timer and keep expanding it is really cool but all the levels are short enough that you are never actually in fear of the timer killing you. I'm so excited to see what SA2 does for him because he's really not brought to his full potential here.

Miscellaneous things, the bosses all really suck even Perfect Chaos which I was kinda disappointed by how fast and easy he was to beat. The voice acting is really bad but it's so charming that I love and I quote this game all the time "CHAOS", "I'll play with you some other time", "Whatever you say Eggman", "I can't believe this". The story I think is pretty neat but the way they tell it is so uninteresting and with me already seeing most of these cutscenes before I started skipping them at a certain point. Replaying bosses and watching the same cutscenes again and again on multiple routes is also not fun, I freaking hate Chaos 4 he takes so god damn long. The music is incredible but you know that it's freaking Sonic Adventure. I think hub worlds in games are really cool and I love Station Square and Mystic Ruins in concept but progressing through this game got pretty confusing at times and I hate how much time I spent just trying to find out where I was supposed to be going next or where they hid the key to the next level. There's also way too many parts to the hub world I really don't like how the Egg Carrier and especially the Tikal flashbacks are treated as hub areas. I feel really conflicted in this score because I feel not much of this game is good but I am still having fun with it most of the time. I feel it fails at a lot of what it's trying to do but also I really like Sonic and Knuckle's gameplay enough to not really have me care. If anything this just makes more excited to play SA2 I have a feeling I'll really jive with it.

I am surprised to see most of the scores so low for this game. I did come in to the game with low expectations but all I really wanted the game to be was a game that felt like a sequel to BFBB and while this game doesn't have the same structure I felt like they delivered that really well. So level design wise if BFBB played like Mario Sunshine than this game is more design like Mario Galaxy 2, the levels are much more linear especially on your first visit but they make the level design just open enough to hide a lot of collectibles in them. The level design is really fun too they took Rehydrated's Spongebob and gave him a glide and a few other moves and he's really fun to play with. Keep in mind the glide is lot more limited than Sandy's glide, you can't really make much distance with it but it feels right for correcting jumps and finding clever ways to skip segments. This level design is also made where there are a lot of intentional ways to skip some level design if you know how to use your abilities well which is really cool and I feel will have some great speedrun potential. The level themes I was really worried about at first as they borrowed five of them from BFBB but the theming and level design made them feel not even remotely like their BFBB counterparts. Levels especially like how they redid Downtown Bikini Bottom and Goo Lagoon I would have just given them different names because they have such good theming that I feel like they didn't need to call them after those original levels. There are two original levels in this game too and I won't spoil them but they're incredible and work really well. This game's levels are pretty simple there never was anything super challenging like you would see in BFBB's dream world or Flying Dutchman but the levels have this really good momentum in them with the platforming being fast and all the moves really flowing into each other. The boss design is probably on par with BFBB's but there's more of them so it works out well and they aren't just fights a few of them are kinda creative. The final boss is really unremarkable though, really short and easy and because of that I thought there would be a true final boss once I went back and 100% every level but nah. The game forces you to play every level twice in order to 100% because they put new collectibles in them and a couple levels have new objectives but I really liked this it made revisting the levels really fun especially since the new challenges they add with your complete move pool felt satisfying. The costume mechanic is fun even if they aren't tied to gameplay and there's a lot of references in there. This game references a lot of Spongebob material even some stuff from later seasons which is really cool. The humor isn't that great but I do think it's better than BFBB's. I know I am very biased with why I'm giving this game such a high rating but I just was really pleasantly surprised with and even when I was going for some annoying achievements I was having fun the whole way through. I do hope someday they make a game with level design a bit more open ended but this game feels like a genuine sequel to BFBB it really does feel like what the next game would have been like if Heavy Iron kept making these games.