Sonic Adventure in Retrospect

I'm just curious as to why someone ACTUALLY thought Big was a good idea. So, let's break this down:

1) He's a ridiculously obese purple creature who is supposed to be a cat (but doesn't resemble one), and has unsettlingly creepy, emotionless, flat eyes.

2) While all the other characters get to run around fun levels and smash bosses, Big likes to sit and fish. Even his lone boss, Chaos 6, who proved challenging for Sonic and Knuckles (especially the latter), involves fishing. You aim a target at him, and if you come close to your frog once, you win the boss battle, thus completing Big's story. Uh....?

3) He's CLEARLY suffering some sort of mental retardation. His dim-witted nature can't even be blamed on being a hillbilly (a factor that made Banjo's "guh-huh!" demeanor tolerable, and dare I say, lovable). He's not a hillbilly, he's just plain retarded. He even has problems controlling the tone of his voice like a retard would. ("HOLD ON, FROG-GEEE! I'm CUH-MING.")

4) His ability to speak is a waste of Jon St. John's talents. The voice of that retarded cat is DUKE FUCKING NUKEM! One of the most distinctive voices in video game history! (Obviously this one isn't Sega's fault, and Mr. St. John would probably like to leave "Sonic Adventure" off his resume.)

Honestly, how could Sega dare to create a character more intolerable than Tails? No, more intolerable than Jaleel White's nasal-voiced, chili-dog-loving Sonic?!

 

I had absolutely no problem with Big as a character. He just had the misfortune of being saddled with a gameplay mechanic that feels completely out of place. I'd even be alright with him being playable again in a major title so long as they found a gameplay style for him that didn't jar so much with the rest of the game.

I love how Big's role is in the narrative though: he just fixates on his personal dilemma and doesn't even seem to care/understand why people keep going after Froggy, or why he ends up in strange places like the Egg Carrier or Mystic Ruins Past. He's an innocent bystander who's life intersected with Eggman's World Domination plot and he's just kinda...dealing with it so he and his frog can go back home. Saving the Tornado 2 and giving Sonic a Chaos Emerald in the finale are pretty much the only things he does that involve the bigger picture, and there's no way he knew the first one was that significant. He's as out of place in the story as his gimmick is with the rest of the game.

 

There actually is a sort of Banjo parallel there... after the initial game (well, if you don't count "Diddy Kong Racing"), Banjo's sister Tooty mysteriously disappears. I'm not sure why, she wasn't overly annoying or anything. But in Banjo-Tooie and Nuts & Bolts, they merely make references now and then - Tooie has her 'missing' on a milk carton.

I watched the video of Big's Dreamcast cameos - God, he just becomes CREEPY. Why would he just be peering out from behind bars or something? He's just a mad stalker the second time around.

 

You should have a look at some of those ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 magazines from the day. Very few games dip below 70%, but even fewer games can be said to have "aged well".

 

I honestly believe someone at Sega said "lets put a fishing mini-game in our big Sonic game so we can get kids interested in fishing and sell more copies of Sega Bass Fishing"

And I honestly believe that someone was fired not long after the release of Sonic Adventure.

 

I had more fun jumping around with Big than with fishing. It was almost like playing Super Mario 64, only even slower and without being able to bellyflop robots. Other than that, he simply contributed little to nothing to the game, much less to the plot or the franchise. Given he only had about 3 or 4 levels, it should've just been an optional side-game like in the Breath of Fire games. That's all.

Hey, does anyone else think the music to Final Egg is pretty anti-climactic? It at least could've been more upbeat, like ... any last zone theme from the classic games. Except for the Death Egg Zone in Sonic 2, but something like that could've worked too.

Actually, Final Egg just came out of nowhere. and you barely got a sense of what it was or its scale outside of a quick horizon shot and the big corridor leading to it. One could draw a line between the Egg Carrier and Final Egg, but that still hardly told us anything about how Dr. Eggman created Final Egg or what the station was capable of. It's like they left out a cutscene or a stage or two.

 

What made Sonic Adventure 1 good was the adventure field and Chao's

 

I think Big would have worked better as a full on platformer with the fishing gameplay more as minigames or additional missions. It made his game unique but yeah, it wasn't the most gripping thing to base a whole mode on, and got a bit repetitive quick. So much as adding more platform elements before the fishing segments may have made the levels more entertaining however (something they actually seemed to be doing at one point).

I don't mind Big that much. I actually kinda like him. He was at least an attempt at something unique both in gameplay and design (not a Sonic clone or a clitched stoic anti hero). Yeah the dopey persona isn't that original, but I still think he's loveable and less harmful and intruding to the franchise than a lot of other new additions.

Final Egg did seem a bit anti climatic, Sonic just chased Eggman (who randomly appeared) and trashed his lair for no reason. It had a little more drama in the Sonic X adaption where Sonic and Eggman are both absolutely sick of the sight of each other and want blood. Then again given the final story I suppose it was meant to be something of an anti climax.

 

Tail's story and his final confrontation with Eggman made more sense. And the sand-boarding was pretty cool.

 

Does anyone else think Sand Hill might have been intended as a full level? There just seems much more attention to design and implementation in it than some of the other more simplistic mini games (come to think of it the lack of these was perhaps one of the other downers of the game, that and only Sonic and Tails played most of them).

 

It certainly would've served to distinguish Tail's arc more from Sonic's. And given a little more meat to what made Sonic Adventure enjoyable, despite its technical flaws.

 

Congratulations, you succeeded in completely missing the point.

I'm not comparing the proportion of games that have "aged well" in one era to another. I'm saying that the games from the 1980s that had good gameplay still have good gameplay. The games from the 1990s that had good gameplay still have good gameplay. The games from the 2000s that had good gameplay still have good gameplay.

Conversely, a bad game from the 1980s is a bad game now etc. etc. Of course, other aspects of the games DO age, especially graphics and sound, but gameplay doesn't.

And I have several microcomputer magazines from the 80s. My argument stands.

 

Hogwash. When I say Sonic Adventure didn't age well, I don't compare Adventure to Mario Galaxy. I compare it to other games released at the time that are still fun and still keep their charm to this day.

Brave Fencer Musashi, Crash Bandicoot Series, Spyro Series, Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver, Medievil series, Legends series, Rayman 2, Spider-Man, Threads of Fate, Vagrant Story, Jet Grind Radio, MDK 2, Phantasy Star Online, Shadow Man, and Shenmue. These games clearly show their age when you compare it to modern titles, but they're still much better overall products than Adventure.

 

That point is pretty indisputable, as much as I want to emphasize Sonic Adventure's good points and leave out the obvious flaws. Overall, Sonic Adventure has too many flaws to be considered a great game. It's a B game at most, a C at least. But a lot of us still consider it the most fun we've ever had with Sonic in 3D because it had better controls and better designs than most of its predecessors. It's good enough, has some positive charm to it, and the music is arguably some of the best 3D Sonic game music until Colors.

Sonic Adventure 2 is much more polished, but it's design takes a step back from Adventure's basic setup. Instead of selecting which character you wanted to play as, you were made to swap between speed, mech, and scavenging gameplay types each with their own respective soundtracks, and the Chao gardens basically stepped in where you'd expect a Special Stage instead of going to them from within an adventure field. The story and animations were much better executed and more interesting, but the levels propping them up felt much more linear on one hand and the sandbox treasure-hunting stages were so vast they were either frustrating or boring.

 

Sonic Adventure 2 was a step backwards in some ways, but I think it also had a lot to contribute. It's the first Sonic game influenced by NiGHTS, something that brought me many joys. Even if the Sonic stages are more linear than their Sonic Adventure predecessors, I had a lot more fun toying around with various mechanics to score more points. The Knuckles stages were an absolute hassle the first time through, but after that, I had a lot of fun messing around in those in order to get A's as well. The Tails stages come off pretty shallow, though, since their high score mechanic doesn't require much finesse.

I'm a Nintendo guy, so I bought Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and then Sonic Adventure DX, each as they came out. SADX's lack of scoring mechanics was a real disappointment at the time.

On the other hand, that NiGHTS influence is part of what caused a lot of people to fall out of favor with the series (you know, aside from glitches... unfun gameplay modes... other stuff...); NiGHTS has bland, generic (though I prefer the term "subtle") stages that work better as a whole, something today's gamers don't care for in a platformer (this is the ultimate debate of SMW, the subtle game, vs SMB3, the gimmicky game).

With Sonic Unleashed we finally saw the NiGHTS influence fading. With Colors, it's there even less—the stages are a sequence of memorable, tightly-designed 2D scenarios bridged by bland, flat, and very short 3D sections. Of course, scoring and ranks are still present, but they're being approached in a new way.

Since Colors is undoing some of the conventions Sonic has developed in his 3D career, I could see Sonic Adventure becoming an influence for future 3D Sonic games. Sonic Adventure might not be the game today that it was 12 years ago, but I'd pin the blame for Sonic's fall from favor on Sonic Adventure 2.

So far as I can tell, the initial question of the thread boils down to these two points:
Is Sonic Adventure still fun? No. (Well, okay, it's still fun... but not as fun?)
Does Sonic Adventure still have design traits that we (or, I should say, you, the Sonic fan community) value? Yes.

 

Hell, I still think the Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles gameplay is pretty fun. Not mindblowing, but good.

 

What the hell are you smoking? Explain how in any way it is even slightly influenced by the NiGHTs series? SA1 has more NiGHTs influence seeing as it has an entire pinall table about it and even then that's just a reference to the series not influence. If making a game linear counts as being influenced by NiGHTs then 90% of all games are "influenced" by NiGHTs.

 

NiGHTS' gameplay is based around performing things (collecting orbs, passing through rings, etc.) in quick succession in order to create a chain, not unlike scoring a combo in a fighting game. These chains give you points; the longer the chains, the more points you earn.

In NiGHTS, clearing the stage is just a maguffin; it's your "goal," but it's not what you're really after. You're really after higher scores.

The same is true of every 3D Sonic game, starting with Sonic Adventure 2. Sonic Adventure 2 wears its NiGHTS influence the most openly, even implementing chains in Sonic's and Tails' gameplay (Sonic by way of multiple homing attacks in a row without hitting the ground, and Tails by way of locking onto multiple enemies).

Sonic Heroes is the next most related to NiGHTS, also implementing chains. When you kill one enemy, a timer starts; kill another enemy, and more time is added to the timer. Kill two enemies before the timer runs out, and you get 400 points (IIRC). Kill three enemies, and you get 800 points. So on and so forth, capping at 2000 points.

However—and this is why I've been playing 3D Sonic games for so long—each 3D Sonic game has its own unique scoring mechanic.

For example, in Shadow, it's the dumb hero/dark thing. If you're doing a hero mission, you'll score higher if you kill only dark enemies and don't touch the hero enemies. The catch is that this limits your gun selection; if a hero enemy has a gun you want, you have two options: 1) take the gun and take the hit to your score or 2) get along without the gun. Guns are of course important because they're the only way to efficiently kill enemies. In Sonic 2006, it's some weird thing I never bothered to understand because just getting through that game once was horrific enough. Gameplay aside, the loading times killed it for me.

When you're focused on score, you're more interested in honing your reflexes and spotting opportunities for gaining points than exploring. Starting with Sonic Adventure 2, I'd argue, Sonic stages are more designed around high score runs than anything, something it picked up from NiGHTS. A few Sonic games have chaining in common with NiGHTS, but that fell off after a while.

Of course, games like Devil May Cry and Cave's shmups are all about high score, too, but it's hard not to see a correlation between different high score-focused games from the same developer.

With Sonic Colors, I get the sense that each stage is designed around discrete 2D scenarios that are interesting in and of themselves, but don't really flow as a part of a high score run. But, I'm not done with the game yet, so I'm not ready to settle on that conclusion.

 

I wouldn't say that a game that has a decent scoring system where factors other than time are included means that it's influenced by NiGHTS.