[OcelotBot]

I replayed Sonic Adventure about a month ago.

It's got it's share of issues. Naturally the graphics feel dated, the character animations in the cutscenes look really bad and some of the dialogue is so cheesy, and yet Sonic Adventure is a game I always enjoy playing.

The main appeal for me is the diverse and original stage design, the gameplay and the wonderful soundtrack. The best part of the game for me is Sonic's story. I like how Sonic has to fight off four different versions of Chaos, and each fight gets a little more challenging. I like how all 10 stages have unique designs, gimmicks and none of them feel like a rehash of a previous stage.

Emerald Coast is a nice easy opening stage. Windy Valley has that bizarre, really neat sequence where Sonic gets sucked in a tornado, and you have to fight your way to the top to escape. As weird as Casinopolis is, it definitely has a certain charm. Gotta love the pinball tables, especially the NiGHTS one. Ice Cap has some good platforming ideas, although the snowboarding sequence needed better controls. Speed Highway is a really cool city stage. Twinkle Park is probably my favorite stage. The bumper-car sequence, the rollercoaster, the carnival and castle theme looks so cool, especially being able to knock-down skittles! Red Mountain is the first real test of the controls. Sky Deck is a bit of a nightmare due to the camera, but I love the end sequence when you have to climb to the top of the ship whilst it keeps twisting and turning. Lost World is perhaps the most frustrating level because it exposes some of the problems with the controls, especially the sequence when you're in the dark and you need to move the mirrors to light the way. The camera is horrendous in the Snake sequence.

Final Egg isn't particularly a hard stage. It's also generous on extra lives, you can get like 13 if you explore all the areas. The Egg Viper is an excellent final boss for Sonic's story. The only tricky bit for me is when Eggman launches the last 'suicide attack'. It's tricky to jump out-of-the-way in time.

Pretty much every stage has a really catchy piece of music. I honestly can't think of a music track in the game which I don't like.

Sometimes I'll just play Sonic's story and none of the other characters stories, because I get enough enjoyment from playing just with Sonic.

Not that the other characters gameplay isn't fun. It's fun racing Sonic using Tails, and I really like his final boss against the 'EggWalker'. It's a drag that you have to play both Sky Chase acts in Sonic's stpry and then again as Tails story. They're not hard stages, just kind of boring. Gamma's story is short but sweet. I would like Amy's gameplay if she wasn't so slow. I think Amy with a fast shoe power-up is still slower than Sonic's normal speed! It's frustratingly slow, which is a shame because her gameplay is pretty good. Knuckles has the second best gameplay after Sonic. It doesn't take long to find the emerald shards. The other day when I was playing with Knuckles in Casinopolis, I couldn't find the final emerald shard piece, which turned out to be hidden inside the massive statue in the center of the casino! A clever hiding place. I also like how Knuckles is the only character who gets to take on 'Chaos 2'. As for Big the Cat, once you learn how to catch Froggy it's easy enough.

Perfect Chaos is an easy final boss, although I always need two attempts to beat him.

Sonic Adventure has an interesting story. I like the sequences when each character gets a flashback of Angel Island's past, which - rather confusingly - pieces together what happened to Chaos, Tikal and the Echidna tribe.

Yeah, SA has it's share of issues and I really wish the PSN version had been given proper 16:9 widescreen like with Sonic Adventure 2. The spindash isn't that good and the light-speed dash could have been better designed, but I can overlook those flaws because there's too much about the game I enjoy.

Can't believe in a few years time this game will be 20 years old!

This post has been edited by OcelotBot: 26 April 2015 - 01:58 PM

[Elston87]

Fantastic, on 07 February 2015 - 07:32 PM, said:

I really like Sonic Adventure. Except for Big's story. Big can go fuck himself for all I care...

...

...

..but his theme song makes up for his story. I love the soundtrack for this game.

The soundtrack is like half the game. It just oozes with awesomeness. All of the character themes, despite some of them being zany, were good.

I'm surprised I even completed the entire Sonic Adventure story; I was majorly turned-off by Amy's and Big's gameplay segments, but I pulled through.

[Blades]

SA1 was an interesting run through Sonic's world, I found it miles more interesting than any other game in 1999 and it occupies it's own niche today. There hasn't been another game like it.

Plot elements like ancient/modern Mystic Ruins and the Chaos Story made Sonic much more than he was in the Green Hill Zone days. SA made you think about how futile the things people do are; wage war, greed etc. Or at least that's what 8-year-old me thought about.

[Dr. Corndog]

I was playing this the other day while my wife, who is not a gamer, watched. I had already pointed out to her that while this is a very buggy game, it is not the main reason I love Sonic. I was playing Sky Deck, and I was at the part near the beginning where you have the option to bounce off a chain of Badniks to a small platform, where for some reason the last Badnik rarely gives you enough air to actually make it. After watching me try it and fail repeatedly, despite my doing everything correctly, my wife said, "Is this just a terrible game?"

I stopped myself from responding immediately, thought a second, and then said, "Yes. It is a terrible game. It's a game that I and many other people have very fond memories of, but it is a terrible game."

Which is not to say I didn't have fun playing it for the first time in eleven years. I even got 125 of the emblems, and the only ones I lack are for Chao racing. It's just that now, with its sheen of newness so many years gone, it's easy to see this game's multitude of issues.

[BigTheCat]

OcelotBot, on 16 February 2015 - 03:26 PM, said:

Omega's story is short but sweet

This makes me sad.

[null1024]

I played SA1 again recently too.

here's my results:

* General things
It looks nice. Really. The music is also top-notch all around.
Bosses are mostly okay. All of the in-overworld "boss" fights are hilariously bad though ("OH NO").
I've never liked the Adventure Fields. Not ever. Not in 1999, not today.

* Sonic
The spindash in this game is perfect. Instant speed, perfect for jumping over everything and skipping large portions of level with. Or for just spindashing up walls and shit. It's great.
SA2's toned down spindash and charge time disappoint me after playing this game, playing Classic Sonic in Generations brings back some of the joy of SA1 Sonic spindashing (bit of a charge like SA2, but it goes super fast).

The stages are hit/miss, far, far more than SA2's. Red Mountain is very, very good. Lost World and Sky Deck are pretty bad. Not even hard, just unenjoyable. Windy Valley is hilarious. Starts off good, but the spinning, spiraled second half pretty much just has Sonic bumping along the walls and almost dying a lot. Fallen through the ground a lot.
Casinopolis would be nice if the pinball was well designed. It's not exciting. At all.
Icecap is worse than I remember, I used to love that stage.
Sky Chase is dumb.

He controls fine enough. There are some dumb issues (jumps that hit a ceiling kind of just float there, like said in the OP, falling through the ground isn't exactly uncommon, the lightdash mechanic in this game is dumb), but overall, Sonic handles nicely. The homing attack is weird at times.

* Tails
Speed Highway is dumb, but it's fun in a way. Flight controls are silly. Casinopolis is actually a level here, so it's automatically better.
His little sandboarding bit is nice too.

* Knuckles
I like him here more than in SA2, gameplay wise. The radar makes things really easy, but it's actually enjoyable to run around looking for them here.

* Gamma
This should be better. Too lazy to detail how and why right now.

* Amy
Not as bad as I remember, but she's still slow and her stages are mostly boring.

* Big
It's like someone took the fun out of Sega Bass Fishing. Sure, the engine is actually good as an arcade fishing game, but having to find and then get Froggy to actually bite is a pain.

SA1 is supremely flawed, but there's fun to be had.

Spehiroth, on 07 December 2014 - 01:44 PM, said:

I'm surprised NOBODY has mentioned the damned loop in Emerald Coast, right before the whale. It is so easy to fall through that loop that to this very day I still fall through it. I swear, the first time I played SA1 I fell through it and wondered what the hell happened.

this happened to me repeatedly the first time I played SA1, and I wanted to throw something
I dunno what I'm doing now that it doesn't happen on DC now. Never happened to me in SADX (but I've died to the whale in SADX, so that's something).

This post has been edited by null1024: 23 February 2015 - 11:21 PM