Starting off a Sonic review with talking about his transition to 3D has become a cliche but for this game I believe it's necessary. In terms of control and level design Sonic transitioned into 3D swimmingly. Sonic Adventure has my favorite soundtrack of any Sonic game and the game still looks great. But this game did introduce the two things that will haunt 3D Sonic for the next 25 years, jank and content padding.
It felt like the camera was always fighting against me, getting blocked by geometry and whatnot. Collision issues were another problem I ran into. I wasn’t falling into the floor or anything but there were a lot of little issues that made traversal more cumbersome. Things like brushing against invisible walls in the jungle area that I felt like didn’t belong, snowboarding feeling super awkward due to every tiny bump sending you airborne and not being able to in certain spots as Knuckles. Even compared to other games of its time Sonic Adventure lacks polish.
Technical issues aside, Sonic's campaign is quite fun, all of the high speed platforming you’d want from Sonic. The rest of the campaigns suffer from being too short while also reusing content from Sonic. While the rest of the cast does control well, these issues make their campaigns satisfying to play through. The exception is Big’s campaign, whose short length is its only saving grace. Despite all of my bellyaching I didn’t hate my time with Sonic Adventure. But I wonder how good it could have been if they’d cut out all the fluff to make Sonic’s campaign as good as possible.
It felt like the camera was always fighting against me, getting blocked by geometry and whatnot. Collision issues were another problem I ran into. I wasn’t falling into the floor or anything but there were a lot of little issues that made traversal more cumbersome. Things like brushing against invisible walls in the jungle area that I felt like didn’t belong, snowboarding feeling super awkward due to every tiny bump sending you airborne and not being able to in certain spots as Knuckles. Even compared to other games of its time Sonic Adventure lacks polish.
Technical issues aside, Sonic's campaign is quite fun, all of the high speed platforming you’d want from Sonic. The rest of the campaigns suffer from being too short while also reusing content from Sonic. While the rest of the cast does control well, these issues make their campaigns satisfying to play through. The exception is Big’s campaign, whose short length is its only saving grace. Despite all of my bellyaching I didn’t hate my time with Sonic Adventure. But I wonder how good it could have been if they’d cut out all the fluff to make Sonic’s campaign as good as possible.
5 Comments
@CDX
Don't start with the port myth. I've played the Dreamcast original start to finish and it was absolutely full of clipping failures, I fell through the ground much more than once. If the Dreamcast version got more praise it was only because people were still honeymooning over the jump in presentation. It might be the case that the remasters and ports are worse, I don't know. I have only played the original, and the original is broken.
Don't start with the port myth. I've played the Dreamcast original start to finish and it was absolutely full of clipping failures, I fell through the ground much more than once. If the Dreamcast version got more praise it was only because people were still honeymooning over the jump in presentation. It might be the case that the remasters and ports are worse, I don't know. I have only played the original, and the original is broken.
@GuiltClause I never said the original was flawless in the polish department. It is indeed janky and baddly tested throughout. But the ports are SO MUCH worse in that respect. lol
@CDX I should have put it in the review for the sake of clarity but I played the Steam version with mods installed to make everything more accurate to the Dreamcast version. While I cannot say if my experience was 100 percent accurate to the Dreamcast version since I don't own a Dreamcast I did try my best to get as close as possible. And compared to the PS3 and vanilla Steam versions it was better. That being said I still ran into issues that hampered my enjoyment of the game.
Yeah, the mods are said to help. Never tested them myself, though. Someday I will.
...this talk is making me itch to play SA1 and SA2 again, damn it! XD
...this talk is making me itch to play SA1 and SA2 again, damn it! XD
CDX
7 months ago
If you look at, say, Metacritic or Wikipedia, you can see the Dreamcast version being praised to the moon and back, while the ports' ratings are way worse.