Blog:Sonic Adventure (CGW Version)

Article originally created by SpazJR61 and deleted by Allistayrian

Sonic Adventure is a platformer video game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega. It was originally released for the Dreamcast as a launch title in Japan in 1998, and worldwide in 1999. It was later re-released as "Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut".

Why It Opens Its Heart In A Bad Way

 * 1) While the story is decent, it's rudimentary and sloppy at times since half of the character's arcs have nothing to do with the main plot. In fact, the only characters who arcs are actually connected are Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. E-102 Gamma's main purpose is to destroy all the E-100 series of robots while Big the Cat's and Amy Rose's main purpose is to rescue or protect their animal companions from being captured. Speaking of the latter two...
 * 2) Big the Cat was strongly disliked both as a character and as a playstyle. The character is often mocked over the fact that him and Duke Nukem are voiced by the same actor (Jon St. John, of all people).
 * 3) Likewise, Amy's playstyle is also disliked by some people, as she has the slowest walking speed of all the characters (so slow that even Big the Cat walks faster than her), although this can be solved by exploiting a glitch in the Dreamcast version, where jumping sideways makes her build up speed very fast.
 * 4) While the characters' power ups are well integrated in the gameplay, Sonic got the low end. Sonic's power ups feel useless and (apart from the forced segments) one can complete his story without using them once. The same thing can be said with Amy and her hammer spin.
 * 5) Speaking of moves, while it’s fun to play as him, Sonic feels sloppy sometimes; when running very fast the controls feel extremely sensitive and the homing attack sometimes can either hit a random target from a mile away, miss the one you wanted to hit or make Sonic start spinning in circles around it.
 * 6) The camera is clunky, usually ending up getting stuck on walls and other times struggling to keep up with the characters. This was later fixed in the DX version, which added a "Free Camera" mode.
 * 7) The large amount of playable characters somewhat takes the spotlight from Sonic. His campaign is the longest, sure, but he never gets to Hot Shelter, a level only accessible by Gamma, Amy, and Big.
 * 8) * The different characters also travel through the same levels with little differences, making their campaigns rather repetitive.
 * 9) Choppy frame rate that looks barely any better than a mh:awesomegames:Sony PlayStation or mh:awesomegames:Nintendo 64 game. The frame rate issue was fixed in the DX version.
 * 10) Poor English voice acting and translation. Some of the lines sound very weird, like "That's Eggman, I wonder what happened to Sonic?" from Tails' story, and Knuckles’ English voice is so bad it almost sounds like text-to-speech.
 * 11) While the multiple bosses are fun to fight, you'll have to fight some bosses multiple times if more than one character encounters them during the story, like Chaos 4. There are only two characters that don't fight Chaos: Amy and Gamma.
 * 12) * On that note, the fights against another character, like Knuckles or Gamma, are ridiculously easy.
 * 13) Navigating the hub world can be confusing and tedious, especially in the jungle section of Mystic Ruins, where, due to the low-quality of the leaves and the fact that invisible walls are everywhere, makes it a maze to navigate. Thankfully, Tikal can help you if you get lost.
 * 14) The collision detection is very broken: it's possible to glitch through the floor and fall out of bounds, in the town hub world it's very easy to get stuck on a door or a street lamp and colliding with some vertical surfaces at a high speed will stop you dead in your tracks.
 * 15) Some cutscenes have poor audio mixing (like the music being a tad louder than it should), lip-syncing is terrible because it isn't synchronized with the English dialogue and the character animations in the cutscenes are baffling, with the Sonic and Knuckles' facial expressions and Eggman moonwalking in some scenes being the highlights. Thankfully the animations were improved in the sequel, though the lip-sync is just as problematic.
 * 16) The DX port (Also the Xbox Live Arcade/PSN/Steam ports which are based on DX) suffers from poor lighting, different textures, mono audio for some sound effects, lower-pitched ring collect sound, and having some glitches not in Dreamcast game due to the porting (though to be fair, it did fix some glitches too). This is very noticeable in the original PC version of the port which would be the basis for every future port. The DX version also lead to many misconceptions by detractors and created the false narrative of Sonic Adventure being a terrible game.
 * 17) While the game has one of the best soundtracks in the Sonic series, some of the music doesn't sound very good, like "My Sweet Passion" (Amy's theme).

Redeeming Qualities
Despite not having that aged very well, Sonic Adventure is still a good game. For good qualities, click here.