Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Grimchief - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

I played through the game recently and, overall, it's a pretty decent game.

Sonic's (and Tails, since, you know, he's pretty much the same with only a few key differences) gameplay is the closest Sonic Team has ever come to getting Classic Sonic into 3D. Its physics and overall gameplay style are a good start to what should be the "ideal" 3D Sonic. Sonic's fast, but not too fast, and he controls really well. The levels are decently fun and aren't too linear or restrictive. However, I do have some problems with it. For one, it's obviously not polished very well; by that, I mean that there are a lot glitches and weird graphical quirks. Now, that's more of a criticism against the game itself, not the gameplay style. The one complaint I have about the gameplay style is that... well, it's not as close to "the Classic's in 3D" as it could be.

Sonic controls perfectly fine, I admit, but his levels, while fun, don't really take advantage of the physics. Sonic should be about rolling into a ball, going up slopes, and using that momentum to access new areas of the level. Sonic Adventure doesn't really do that, and neither does anything (at least, in terms of the 3D games) since. There are points in SA1 that are sort of like that, but most of the time it isn't. The levels aren't too linear, as I said, but they could be even less linear than they are; they could have had more pathways, more slopes... I guess you could say that the levels should have been more natural, more flowing than what they ended up being (the Windy Valley Beta level is close to what I'm talking about). Again, I'm not saying it's bad or anything-- far from it, actually, as it's decent fun-- but it could've and should've been refined just a bit more. And if that couldn't have happened here in SA1, then they should've done that in the sequels. Unfortunately, that didn't happen (mostly), but I digress...

As for the other gameplay styles, I'm not too fond of them. I mean, Knuckles, Amy, and Gamma are alright, but they aren't something to really look forward too. And Big is just... ugh. So, I really only enjoy about a third of the game. The rest is just 'okay'.

For me, though, the alternate gameplay styles aren't my biggest problem with the game. My biggest problem is the presentation. The voice acting is horrible (outside of a few of Eggman's lines), the lip-syncing is god-awful, and the cutscene animation is really bad. The story itself is actually pretty good, but the presentation and writing of it just take me out of it. Granted, most of these problems are due to the age of the game, and if it were remastered today with better voice-acting and animation, these problems would all but vanish. But still, the presentation is a problem in the game as it is now, and it really detracts from my enjoyment of the game.

Reading through this post might make you think I don't like SA1, but honestly, I do. It's not my favorite 3D Sonic (hello Generations and SA2), but it's still a damn fun game to go through every now and again. The presentation and a couple of the alternate gameplay styles may kill some of the fun, but overall it's a decent first attempt at 3D Sonic that really should've been expanded upon and refined in later games. It's too bad that future games (no matter how good they are) would just exacerbate the fundamental gameplay issues that permeated SA1 instead.