Sonic Retrospective Part XII - Sonic Adventure

There was no real Sonic game for the SEGA Saturn, so it wasn't until the Dreamcast that a real 3D Sonic title was made. There was work on a game called Sonic X-treme, but that got canceled after being shuffled between systems. This is unfortunate, because Sonic's love interest in the game was planned to be a new character called Tiara Boobowski, which is ridiculous.

In making Sonic Adventure, the team redesigned the characters, making Sonic lankier and more cartoony. They also added a lot more characters, and decided that giving each one their own level types would be more interesting than each playing as similarly as they had in the past. They also took trips to South America for research on temples and jungles in order to plan the appearance of areas in the game like Mystic Ruin.The new, skinnier sonic

They also expanded on the game's storyline, adding another villain and more characters. Oddly, the game takes place in a world with humans walking around accepting human-sized, talking animals as normal things. The story centers around a blob-monster named Chaos who gets stronger the more Chaos Emeralds it eats and a prophesy around it. It also intersperses trips to the past in each character's storyline to explain the history of Chaos. It's an acceptable storyline, but still pretty lame.

What makes the story worse is the awful voice acting every character has. Tails' and Big's voices are particularly grating. The acting is awful and the voices annoying, and the words that come out of their mouths are usually poorly written. It's bearable for the most part, but there are so many awful moments it gets grating pretty quickly.

The game is divided into two section: action stages and adventure stages. Adventure stages involve traversing an overworld, unlocking passages to new areas, and talking to characters. There are a few bonuses to find in the overworld, such as some of the collectable medals and Chao eggs, but as a whole, the overworld can get a bit boring at times. The adventure stages are basically just three areas: Station Square, Mystic Ruins and the Egg Carrier. It's kind of fun at first to just run around and find stuff, but it really just exists to shuttle you to the next action stage, which it can do poorly at times with the game only vaguely hinting at where to go next.

Sonic's first action stage. Yes, that's a whale.The action stages vary from character to character and are the actual gameplay of Sonic Adventure. Sonic's stages are straightforward, run to the end of the level. It's a 3D environment, so the gameplay is different, but it's essentially how the old Sonic games play. Just run around, dodge enemies and collect rings. Sonic is given a homing attack to make up for the difficulty of precisely attacking in 3D, which allows him to lock in on an attack. It's a good way around the 3D space problem, but it can be innacurate at times and cause Sonic to fly off the stage. His gameplay is pretty fun, but Sonic Team likes to randomly add sections where you have to walk or have to stand there waiting for something. It's a bit jarring, especially since most of the game involves going ridiculously fast, even by Sonic standards.

The other characters vary in quality. Tails' stages are just like Sonic's, except you race someone to the end goal and have to get there first to win, which is pretty fun, but suffers from the same things Sonic's stages do. In the Knuckles stages, you have to locate missing pieces of the master emerald in a treasure hunt. It's an okay concept, which can be fun sometimes, but every once in a while hides the pieces behind annoying puzzles. Amy's stages are like Sonic's, but slower. They have a robot chase her through the level as she slows it down and attacks other enemies with her hammer. Her stages are okay, with a few really fun aspects like using her hammer jump ability when running. E-102 is an interesting character as a robot built by Eggman who goes rogue, but his stages are actually pretty boring. You go through a level shooting everything and have to destroy a boss at the end. Shooting is pretty simple and is not ever challenging. 

Amy, with some of the special chao.Finally there's Big the Cat, who fishes on his action stages. It's not the worst fishing minigame ever, but it's really irritating to have to look all over the level for his friend Froggy, who you have to capture to win. Then, after finding him, you go through the trouble of catching him, which takes forever. Add in his even more irritating voice acting and personality with his very boring plot and Big the Cat is easily the worst character in the game.

There is also a side-game of raising Chaos. Chaos are tiny teardrop shaped things that are basically your Tamogatchi for this game. You can give them animals and food to change their appearance and abilities for races. It's kind of a fun time-waster, but nothing special.

Sonic Adventure also began the Sonic Team's reputation for glitchiness. Sonic will randomly stop moving, fall through the floor, get stuck behind a wall or any other number of terrible, game-breaking glitches. While the Sonic Adventure DX port fixes some of these issues, it's still very common—and frustrating—to die for absolutely no reason. 

The game's soundtrack takes the time to give each character their own theme song, with lyrics. The results are not good, with irritating singing and goofy lyrics. The soundtrack is fine otherwise, but not as memorable as other Sonic games.

The glitches, the tedious overworld, and the more boring characters drag Sonic Adventure down a bit. It's the first 3D Sonic game, and it feels like it. However, the game as a whole is still fun. It hasn't aged wonderfully, but there is still some fun to have.