Retro Review: Sonic Adventure

After the sheer awesomeness that was Sonic 3 and Knuckles SEGA began trying to bring its mascot into 3D, with little to no success for 8 years..., well I shall give a little backstory.
-Sonic 3D Blast in 1996..., and that was barely OK.
-A Hub world/ Minigame in Sonic Jam called Sonic World which was fun but nothing fully fleshed.
-Then a game called Sonic Xtreme was in development for a long time and then it was cancelled.
And THEN, after the lifetime of the Sega Saturn ended a new Sega console came out named the Sega Dreamcast which was revolutionary and one of the launch titles was Sonic Adventure, and how does it hold up today? lets find out.

SONIC ADVENTURE REVIEW!!!!!

The Story:

This game"s plot was actually very big for a Sonic game at the time but is actually divided in 6 different stories, I"ll explain Sonic"s story because if i talked about all the stories we are going to be here all January.

Sonic vs Chaos 0

-Sonic"s story: Sonic is jumping around Station Square and he starts seeing the police heading towards a building, he then sees that the police are fighting this weird liquid... thing, he then attacks it and defeats it, this thing escapes through the drain, the next day Sonic sees Tails"s plane crashing into an island and you have to get to him and then we explains that its a new plane powered with a chaos emerald, then after some traveling you end in Tails"s workshop and you find Dr.Eggman who steals Tails"s chaos emerald, and then feeds it to the thing Sonic saw earlier, it is revealed that this thing is called Chaos and if you feed him all the chaos emeralds he will become the god of destruction so your job as Sonic is to stop this collecting chaos emeralds and defeating Eggman.

The story is actually really big and each character"s individual story is well done, but the main story in general is a mess.

The Gameplay:

Now this is where Sonic Adventure really diferentiate itself from the old Sonic games, there are a total of 6!, at the beginning you can only use Sonic but as you progress you unlock different characters with different gameplay styles, each one of them corresponds to the story of that character.

First there is the most important of the game, Sonic"s gameplay style:

-Sonic levels consist of getting into a chaos emerald or other things, Sonic plays here like in Sonic 3 and Knuckles only, well, in 3D, everything he could do before he can do here, spindash, jump, everything except the insta-shield that got replaced with a completely new technique called the homing attack, if you press the action button while on midair sonic will homing on the closest enemy on the screen and you can chain it to kill lots of enemies, this attack keeps things flowing and Sonic"s gameplay is brought well into the 3D world, its fast and well done in levels like Emerald Coast and Speed Highway but some of the levels do not match perfectly Sonic"s style like Windy Valley.

-Tails plays just like sonic and even as fast, but he can fly and his levels are designed to race, so they are a lot shorter than Sonic levels, he controls all right and the only problem with him is that sometimes you can lose control of him.

Knuckles plays actually pretty different, his story consists of recovering the master emerald so his levels consist on finding 3 emerald shards on each level, thankfully he has a radar that blinks harder and harder depending on the distance between you and the shard, the level are closed in but Knuckles is just as fast as Sonic or Tails and he still has his gliding abilities, even though his gameplay style is not really what we expected  but thankfully its fast and the gameplay style works fine itself.

So overall the main trio has been incorporated well enough, but in this game there are 3 newcomers, Amy, E-102 Gamma and... Big.

Amy plays like Sonic but is nowhere near as fast and her levels have more an emphasis on regular plattformers than an emphasis on speed, oh, and a hammer, you have to reach to the end of the level while escaping from a giant robot named Zero, she only has 4 levels but thankfully they are not that bad, it truly is a love it or hate it kind of levels.

E-102 Gamma is more like a shooting platformer, Gamma is slower than sonic but still is kinda fast, his levels have a time limit and you can extend this time limit by killing enemies and then reaching to the end to fight a pathetic boss fight, Gamma is enjoyable but it feels out of place.

Big is just... fishing for his frog named Froggy, thats pretty much it, and Big is one of the biggest problems i have with this game, the fact you need to complete his story in order to get the final story is irritating because his gameplay style has nothing to do with high-speed plattforming, I truly hate Big and his gameplay style.




And overall I enjoy a lot Sonic, Tails and Knuckles gameplay styles, Gamma and Amy"s styles are, while not perfect kinda enjoyable but Big... ugh.

There are Hub worlds between the levels, and i didnt really liked them, they are not as bad as Sonic 06"s hub worlds but they are still not enjoyable.

Oh, and the chao garden, its a pet simulator in which you train your chao and prepare him for races, i dont find the appeal.

The Music:

Im going to say it right now, the sound is AMAZING, songs like Speed Highway or Emerald Coast are awesome, each character theme song is pretty good, its awesome.

The graphics:

Now the game looks nice and all but some of the models dont look as good as they used to when it first camed out, but if there is something i hated since the very first time i played this game is the lip-syncing, the japanese lipsyncing is mixed with the english voice actors and the result is a disaster but the game has nice aesthetics but they are not perfect, the backgrounds and levels look nice.



The replay value:

In this game each time you complete a level you get an emblem, you can play a level multiple times to get more emblem, there is no real meaning but its a nice distraction and the chao garden can also entretain you.

Conclusion:

Sonic Adventure is a game hard to judge, I really enjoy Sonic, Tails and Knuckles stages, and I enjoy Gamma"s and Amy"s enough,  I dont like Big"s at all, the game has ok aesthethics, the story is a mess when joined together, the soundtrack is amazing, it has aged well enough, not perfect but its a fun game, if you want to try a 3D Sonic game, you can try this one, its worth at least a look.

7/10

A 7 means the game is pretty good, while not perfect the game is still enjoyable enough.

SORRY FOR TAKING SO LONG

see you in a few days!.