Sonic Adventure in Retrospect

Retro loved it until everyone nerdgasm'd about Colors and it's Unwiished engine, so now everyone loves the Unwiished engine better.

Of course it was good. Great, even. You weren't always on such a fucking linear plane; you could move around in actual three dimensions. Colors got this all wrong: 90% of the time you're using the floaty 2D engine, and the other 10 you're playing as Grounder pretty much.

I'd have loved it if Colors had used the Adventure engine, personally.

 

I don't like it. I don't see why everyone's complaining about Colours' linearity, considering Adventure rarely gave you any more than two paths through a level. Also, pointless adventure fields, bland level design, very little sense of speed, and lots of unwanted characters.

The only redeeming feature is the Chao Garden.

 

The Adventures makes sense in the past. If they return now will be a retrogress in the franchise.

Seriously.

All the 'Adventure-like' Sonics: Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic 06 have many things the most of the fans complaint:

• Many characters which you are obligated to play, even you don't want to play.
• Senseless Adventure fields
• New Hated Characters
• Boring Mini-Games (Chao Garden, and Missions in 06)
• Gigantic Creature which runs out of the control and Eggman asks Sonic to save the world.
• Super Sonic only to beat the Gigantic Creature.
• Irritant unasked help

Now, Sonic Colors has fixed the most of the fans complaints, and for pure nostalgia they want this hell which are the Adventures back.

Sonic Colors has:

• Only Sonic playable - The most of the fans asked it.
• No new characters for the franchise- The Whisps doesn't count since they are disposable at the end of the game.
• The mini-games in Sonic Simulator are decent.
• No gigantic creature as final boss
• Super Sonic is playable in the normal levels
• Even the unasked Help can be disabled!
• Plus, Sonic Colors has platforming!

Ok, it is not perfect. But I am sure Colors is in the right way. A Adventure-like Sonic will mess up everything. I think even the Adventure-fans doesn't want to see a Adventure 3 which doesn't fell like a continuity for Sonic Adventure 2 like Sonic 4 cant fell like a continuity for Sonic 3.

My only complaint about Colors is Tails being only a Sonic's chauffeur. I think he should at least be the second player at Sonic Simulator.

 

No problems about correcting me.

If they make an Adventure with the good points of Colors, I think it will be a Sonic Adventure-Colors-like, in other words: A Sonic Colors with the Adventure name. So, I wouldn't complaint. Maybe the Adventure fans will.

 

Honestly, when I was a lad, I didn't have a dreamcast. My friend down the street, and he had Sonic Adventure. I said "IWANNITIWANNIT" but I didn't get to play it until DX came out.

At the time, I really liked it. I loved Chaos's design and loved the idea Gamma, and my favorite character, Knuckles, was fleshed out perfectly. (Calm, cool, and collected, but gullible and strong).

I finished it like 8 times.

What I liked about it was:
Sonic's Gameplay was great
Some really creative level designs, like the Egg Hangar (That one level on the side of the ship with the monkey bars)
Knuckles' emerald hunting fit my perception of his character to a T.
I loved Gamma, and even cried at the end of his story because I have a soft spot for robots.
The Soundtrack was wonderful.

What I didn't like, however:
Amy, Big, and Tails' gameplay were crap or lackluster.
The animations were mostly awful (Spastic Facial expressions, pretty much all the humans)
It took place in the city and had humans
Giant Monster

Admittedly at the time, I liked the idea of Sonic going super to fight a giant Monster, but after like 20 times... eh.

But my biggest gripe was the way emeralds were handled. After playing some 5 or so games where I collect emeralds of my own accord and go Super, suddenly mr. monster man needs them? For the sake of Storyline? No. That's shit. There's fucking rings everywhere. Use those.

And we don't get to collect our own emeralds and go super again until Sonic 4. That's bullshit.

 

Best game ever. Thread over.

 

Good game on its own, but it's full of the cancer that kills Sonic games today (Giant monster, LOADS of characters, stupid plots, ugly character designs that have finally began to improve, etc.).

 

In October I started a new file on DX and actually got all 130 Emblems. I liked it much better than SA2, despite SA2 being far less glitchy. I just like the adventure fields, the bright colorful graphics (as opposed to SA2's dull gray-tinted graphics), and the not-so-generic music.

Why the hell would Sonic Team use Dimps' shitty PS2 engine? The team that worked on Sonic Colors is the same team that worked on Secret Rings, with absolutely 0% Dimps involved. Sonic Colors doesn't run off the Unwiished engine, as the Unwiished engine is far shittier than Sonic Colors's engine.

 

It by no means perfectly set Sonic right in 3D, but it laid out a nice groundwork to build on in future titles: Things that worked could be focused and improved on, concepts that didn't work at all could be retooled/scrapped, etc. You can see a bit of the improvement in Adventure 2, what with Sonic's speed increase. Ideally, I'd think every playable character would be given a single goal like in Sonic's levels, but with unique environments suited to their individual abilities (or alternatively, the same levels with vastly different paths).

And as I've pointed out repeatedly...they seemed to completely ditch a working formula for no reason with Sonic Heroes and never look back. Aside from Sonic 06, but that was dragged down by other issues.


Colors and Unleashed are decent games, but I feel like I'm forced on rails/2D paths too much for my own liking.

 

I think it was one of Sonic's best attempts at 3D, if only it wasn't so rough around the edges.

Developers seemed to get the idea right first time around, knowing players would want to play as Sonic, the storylines are all separate thus you can choose to play as whoever you wish (at least until Super Sonic's unlockable story comes into the equation). I personally didn't mind the extra characters as that was sorta the gimmick for this title, unfortunately they repeated it with even more enthasis in several titles afterwards.

I liked that Sonic's story was the most refined and longest, however I don't think it would have hurt to put a little extra time and effort into the alternate characters too. While I'm not that against most of their gameplay mechanics (par maybe Amy and the two newbies being a bit too slow) the levels feel a bit sparse and short.

Knuckles' levels (in contrast to his ridiculously linear and mind meltingly tedius levels in SA2) got the sandbox idea for his stages correct, along with a properly working radar, however the emerald locations are too limited and blatant for the most part.

Big's are okay for the concept they use, though I admit they could have used more platforming elements in between the fishing segments (along with giving Big a better attack move). A lot of his levels have a lot of redundant areas and puzzles, suggesting they were actually meant to be more platforming orientated before the team decided to tone down the difficulty.

Tails is basically Sonic's gameplay but with a race AI and shorter levels of Sonic's with some hoops placed here and there. Fun but nothing that innovative. Speed Highway shows the potential in design and gameplay it could have had with other opponents and challenges however.

Amy's levels are actually pretty well done and satisfying, lots of clever puzzle elements and ZERO is an amusing twist. However the character's slow speed makes it a bit tedius and three levels seems kinda short for a full story (I personally think all the characters should have each got around six or seven levels at least like the usual classic game fare).

E-102 Gamma was to me the most entertaining extra character mechanic, the shooting is rather well implemented. However everything feels so downgraded. The levels are ridiculously short and the bosses basically just stand there as you hit them. This seemed like it had much more potential in fun if it offered more of a challenge.

The cutscenes are pretty awful in both animation and dialogue (a shame since there's a pretty neat story in there, watch Japanese Sonic X for a pretty decent revision of it). The Adventure Fields are an interesting manner of accessing new levels and story elements but seem very barebones and underutilized. It would have been nice if they had placed more missions and extras into the hubs rather than just using them as a means to access the levels back and forth (DX kinda did this but in a rather roughly implemented, almost fanhackish manner).

I think the overall story tone was better handled and more authentic to original series' concepts than most of the following titles, which got a bit too far into grimdark anime cliches. Gamma and Tikal's stories are the closest to dark and are still balanced by the whimsical tone and the use of traditional Sonic concepts (if anything I think this helped establish a more plausible poignant tone that you could take seriously in a Sonic universe, I felt more for Gamma sacrificing himself to free his animal battery than I did for Maria being gunned down by a cliched corrupt military). My only big complaint is the use of realistic human dominated cities, which I always thought was kinda superflous and made the main characters seem like a fish out of water in their own world. Replace the anime-ish humans with cartoon animals and I don't think it would have had much of problem.

DX had all the potential to fix a lot of these problems and make it a near perfect title, but alas the 'Director's Cut' did next to nothing but prove how outdated the classic looked on a modern console. Shame.

 

Not, really. Did you forgot that they firstly they made Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic R, Sonic World (in Sonic Jam) and (tried to made) Sonic X-Treme?

All these tries failed to be the "greatest jump to 3D Sonic" because Saturn sucked at 3D because it wasn't fully ready to 3D.

Because of that, it had a gap by 5 years between Sonic & Knuckles and Sonic Adventure. More than 5 years, with the fans playing again and again the classics.

It's no surprise the classics are so deep in the most of the fans hearts. And so they still wanted the classics back. So Sega did Sonic 4.

 

I can beat it too fast, but then again I don't go though all of the extra stuff to 100% it.

I'd say it is like playing Sonic 1; it is too simple to keep me interested for an extended time, but to just play when I have nothing else to play, it is good.

I should try to fully complete one of these newer games someday, but since you get nothing in return, I can't say I am motivated enough...