Growing up, I loved Sonic Adventure 2 on the Gamecube, and I played it all the time. However, the Gamecube DX port of the original Sonic Adventure was a game I rented several times back then, but never ended up finishing. With all the fun I had going back through Sonic Adventure 2 a month or two ago, I had been keeping my eyes out for a copy of the original game on Dreamcast, and I finally happened across one. It was then once I'd already spent my 300 yen on it that a friend asked me if I'd gotten the "fixed version" to which I responded "Fixed version? ^^;" XD. Turns out, Sonic Adventure had not one but two releases in Japan. One in 1998 at the launch of the Dreamcast, and another "International" version nine months later when the game launched in the rest of the world. From what I understand, this "unfixed" version isn't as buggy as the laser Gamecube port, but it does have some wonky cutscenes and, most importantly, an absolutely dire camera. All that said, I did this time what I couldn't do as a kid: I beat all six stories and even the secret one at the end, and it took me around 10 hours to do it.
Sonic Adventure is Sonic's first proper foray into 3D after the absence of any such game in the Saturn generation outside of the hub world of the Sonic Jam collection. Angel Island falls out of the sky one day after an attack by Eggman, and Station Square City is under attack by a mysterious watery entity known only as Chaos that appears to grow and evolve as it absorbs more chaos emeralds. You play through not just Sonic's path through these events, but also Tails', Knuckles', Amy's, as well as two new characters: Big the Cat's and Gamma the Robot's. They experience strange flashbacks to events far in the past that slowly elucidate Chaos' origins as well as those of an echidna civilization far gone. The story is a kind of weird space between serious and silly in a way the later games don't reach in quite the same way. Sonic's story is fairly standard "gonna save the world", but then you have Tails where he's learning that he doesn't need Sonic to be brave or be a hero and Gamma's story of destruction towards his fellow Eggman-built robots. You also have Amy's story which sort of results in "she helps emotionless characters feel emotions because girl = emotions and also she helps animals" and then there's Big's which is comically entirely about single-mindedly trying to save his friend Froggy, but warts and all there's a corny sincerity to it, and it makes for an experience I found quite memorable and charming. The game has a very interesting approach to how it constructs its six story campaigns. Sonic's levels are usually all about going from point A to point B through a stage, and he has ten stages in total. His campaign is by far the longest, and it took me about 3 hours in total to do (on a stream, for the record). Most of the other characters, however, have nearly no unique stages, and their stages are constructed in whole or in part out of bits from Sonic's stages. Each of their campaigns ends up coming in at about an hour (with the one exception being Big's stages, which I'll get to later). This would seem like a really awful over reuse of assets (and to a certain point it does feel that way sometimes), but they vary this up by giving each of the six characters different gameplay styles and control methods. They each have different jumps and movements speeds/momentums, but it's more than just that. Tails' missions are largely Sonic's missions (sometimes literally the same for the shooting side missions), but are otherwise made up of races against Sonic through more streamlined bits of his stages. Sonic's stages certainly weren't built for Tails and his flying (no mech suit in this game), but they're still modified a bit to accommodate him and they work out alright. Knuckles' levels are his famous "hunt the master emerald shards down" levels in more open areas of Sonic's levels, and the main difference they have to later games is that all emeralds are tracked at once, so you won't end up walking past one you simply weren't looking for yet. Gamma's stages are action-based and he plays a lot like Eggaman's and Tails' would in the sequel, where he has a targeting lock-on that he uses to kill enemies. The only catch here is that you have a countdown timer to finish the level, so you need those chain kills to get more time. Amy's are her running from an otherwise invincible robot chasing her, but they're nothing special than how awkwardly she controls compared to the rest. Big's stages, finally, are oddly enough a total shift in genre as you need to play fishing mini-games to catch his best friend Froggy after he runs away from Big's home once he accidentally eats a part of Chaos. One of this game's biggest black marks is not so much the gameplay conceits themselves but the level design as a whole. I've always maintained that the overworld the game gives you to go between levels is largely confusing more than it is good, but this level design problem extends far outside of that. It doesn't just feel like Sonic's levels weren't designed for Tails. They don't feel like they were really designed for Sonic either, quite frequently. Sonic moves very fast, of course, and the tons of tiny railways they have you walk across and otherwise common precision platforming are far more frustrating than fun. All the characters have this looseness to how they move that makes it feel like you're fighting against the game to walk precisely any time you want to do it (especially to pick up an object, as you often have to do), and that is all irrespective of the camera that plagues this version of the game (it constantly gets stuck on things and in walls and is generally a bad time). Then you have some campaigns that feel like total afterthoughts like Amy's who only has three levels to speak of and barely a story at all. The only character other than Knuckles whose stages feel all that special are Big's, and those are for the wrong reasons. Big's fishing mechanics, especially for Froggy, are utterly broken and arbitrary. Froggy will bite your line whenever he feels like it, and that is nearly never. The first level took me over an hour, with the second one taking me an hour and a half, with the third and fourth very mercifully taking eight and fifteen minutes respectively. His levels and just how awful they are are what kept me from completing the game as a kid, and if I didn't have my friends to suffer through this with me on Discord while I played it, they might've kept me from completing it this time too XD One thing this game does not skimp on, however, is the presentation. It's a very pretty game for the time, and even though some facial animations are hilariously broken-looking, they just add to the comedy and silliness of the whole thing. The Japanese voice acting is really nice, and all the characters manage to come across in ways that are appealing (as a side note, I really like this VA for Eggman's Japanese voice, especially over the guy they got to replace him in the games after this one). The music especially is fantastic. Although I'd say Sonic Adventure 2 has stronger vocal tracks, this game definitely has stronger instrumental tracks (with my personal favorite being the pinball stage). As a final note, while this game DOES have a Chao garden like the sequel has, I never really interacted with it much because the presentation of it is so unclear. You can collect rare Chao in the hub world and bring them back there, and you can also collect animals in levels to feed to them, but it is never super clear to what end you're doing that other than just to play with the Chao. It's a fine diversion for its time, but it's definitely not as user-friendly or as fleshed out as the sequel would make it. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I would maintain that Sonic Adventure 2 is still a fine game that has stood the test of time in many ways, I cannot say the same about its predecessor. Even outside of just how heckin' dire Big's levels are, the overall poor level design and looseness of the controls really makes this a difficult game to go back to these days. Sonic has had far better 3D outings than this since 1998, but if you really want a 3D Sonic game, you can certainly do a lot better than this, and you'll likely enjoy a decent enough amount of your time to feel justified with it if you can find it for cheap.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|