After my recent sonic kick, I sat down and decided to have some fun with a game that would kind of set the tone to an extent for the series for years to come: Sonic Adventure. I'd heard loads about it over the years, had some time to burn, and decided the time was right to see what I'd missed out on. I wasn't disappointed!
The story works well enough and is your typical Sonic the Hedgehog affair: Baldy McNosehairs (who is actually called Eggman for the first time here) is collecting Chaos Emeralds to power up Chaos, a water based god of destruction who starts out laughably pathetic and mostly stays that way throughout the game, where smacking him 3 times is usually enough to make him decide to not play with you anymore no matter how strong he is. However, if he gets them all, Chaos could wreck everyone freaky fast like it's Jimmy Johns... So we're told. Being that this game was made some time ago, the game can be a bit light on telling you what to do in the overworlds, and you're sometimes best off wandering around the overworld until you eventually trigger a cutscene or boss fight, which I'll mark down as a me problem more than a game problem. The game stays pretty easy and you're unlikely to burn through too many lives until you hit the interior of Red Mountain, where it suddenly decides to give you a spring loaded boxing-gloved punch to the face delivered in a neatly wrapped present consisting of some of the most awesome music in the game. One of my only real gripes is that this game practically gaslit me into not trusting the locked-on spindash/air attack much at ALL, as it can sometimes be so wonky that you won't HIT the enemy you were locked onto, but instead be forced to watch Sonic spindash neat blue circles around the enemy in the air like a blue moon, and then watch the game throw up its hands and declare it has given up when the attack suddenly cancels itself and you fall to your death. Multiple times, I caught myself taking some sharp breaths inward when I pulled off some air-attacks of faith, just HOPING the shot would actually connect... Speaking of that, I feel there's a serious elephant in the room here that I gotta discuss: the first end boss, the Egg Viper. Functionally, there's basically nothing wrong with the fight, but get ready to phase straight through the boss at least one time without any explanation as to why, or the air-attack deciding to not work again and dumping you off the side of the stage to your doom. At least we have Robotnik's WONDERFUL voice acting to keep us company... And yes, you know I have to talk about the voicework. Sonic occasionally has some weird deliveries ("Tails! Look out! You're gonna crash! Aaah!") and Knux made history by going "Oh no." in the most apathetic voice whenever you smack him, but I'm partially inclined to ignore it for 1. Making this game all the more endearing with it's weird moments and 2. Understanding that many other amazing games suffer from VA work that is far more consistently painful than Adventure any day. Games this old tend to have this problem, and it feels a little unfair to hold it against it. Playing from the fairly wide selection of characters, including Gamma for example, is a lovely trip as all characters have their own abilities and attributes that make them unique. Gamma, for example, fires rockets at targets he locks on to, and you have to lock onto them manually using a laser. The more targets in a combo, the more time you'll be awarded to complete the stage with. (Gamma's idle animation speeding up when he gets excited will always cause me to break out into giggles.) Knuckles can glide and climb just like in Sonic 3, and he can also punch things real good as you'd expect. Amy bonks people. You get the picture.
The story works well enough and is your typical Sonic the Hedgehog affair: Baldy McNosehairs (who is actually called Eggman for the first time here) is collecting Chaos Emeralds to power up Chaos, a water based god of destruction who starts out laughably pathetic and mostly stays that way throughout the game, where smacking him 3 times is usually enough to make him decide to not play with you anymore no matter how strong he is. However, if he gets them all, Chaos could wreck everyone freaky fast like it's Jimmy Johns... So we're told. Being that this game was made some time ago, the game can be a bit light on telling you what to do in the overworlds, and you're sometimes best off wandering around the overworld until you eventually trigger a cutscene or boss fight, which I'll mark down as a me problem more than a game problem. The game stays pretty easy and you're unlikely to burn through too many lives until you hit the interior of Red Mountain, where it suddenly decides to give you a spring loaded boxing-gloved punch to the face delivered in a neatly wrapped present consisting of some of the most awesome music in the game. One of my only real gripes is that this game practically gaslit me into not trusting the locked-on spindash/air attack much at ALL, as it can sometimes be so wonky that you won't HIT the enemy you were locked onto, but instead be forced to watch Sonic spindash neat blue circles around the enemy in the air like a blue moon, and then watch the game throw up its hands and declare it has given up when the attack suddenly cancels itself and you fall to your death. Multiple times, I caught myself taking some sharp breaths inward when I pulled off some air-attacks of faith, just HOPING the shot would actually connect... Speaking of that, I feel there's a serious elephant in the room here that I gotta discuss: the first end boss, the Egg Viper. Functionally, there's basically nothing wrong with the fight, but get ready to phase straight through the boss at least one time without any explanation as to why, or the air-attack deciding to not work again and dumping you off the side of the stage to your doom. At least we have Robotnik's WONDERFUL voice acting to keep us company... And yes, you know I have to talk about the voicework. Sonic occasionally has some weird deliveries ("Tails! Look out! You're gonna crash! Aaah!") and Knux made history by going "Oh no." in the most apathetic voice whenever you smack him, but I'm partially inclined to ignore it for 1. Making this game all the more endearing with it's weird moments and 2. Understanding that many other amazing games suffer from VA work that is far more consistently painful than Adventure any day. Games this old tend to have this problem, and it feels a little unfair to hold it against it. Playing from the fairly wide selection of characters, including Gamma for example, is a lovely trip as all characters have their own abilities and attributes that make them unique. Gamma, for example, fires rockets at targets he locks on to, and you have to lock onto them manually using a laser. The more targets in a combo, the more time you'll be awarded to complete the stage with. (Gamma's idle animation speeding up when he gets excited will always cause me to break out into giggles.) Knuckles can glide and climb just like in Sonic 3, and he can also punch things real good as you'd expect. Amy bonks people. You get the picture.
