Thoughts on Sonic Adventure

I haven't played a whole lot of sonic compared to some people, only really the Rush games and Color, which I considered to be pretty good (also played Secret Ring but frick that game).

I do however have a little hobby of playing older games on real hardware, and I got a copy of adventure bundled with my dreamcast, so I've played a bit of it, and here are my thoughts.

So far I have completed Sonic and Tails campaign, and the levels are pretty fun, they feel good to move about in, and the camera is okayish for the most part, even if having a camera stick would be nice, but the dreamcast only has one joystick unfortunately.

The casino level was definitely a highlight for me, very creative and the Nights into Dreams cameos were very cool

The graphics are simple but have their charm, the models are surprisingly fluid for early 3d and you only really notice stiffness when it's two models interacting with eachother in cutscenes (like when any character holds a chaos emerald).

Although keep in mind that while I did play on real hardware, I used an custom dreamcast hdmi cable that upscaled and smoothed things out, and not standard composite cables, so I looked better to me then people back in the day lol.

The UI was fine, did it's job but could be better, like how when you went into the start menu you had to press start instead of A to select something, which really fricked with my mind.

What may be a hot take I have though is the audio and sound design, which I was disappointed in. The music was fine (even if it did overuse the few songs with lyrics it had), but the audio balancing was so bad that it was hard to appreciate it in the first place.

My biggest complaint is the overworld, it's a confusing pain the butt to navigate and adds nothing to the overall game besides showing off the dreamcast capabilities back in the day. It would be tolerable of there was a minimap or a map your could pull up in the start menu, but nope. There is a funny orb that tells you where your supposed to go, which ranges in usefulness from "here is exactly where you should go" to "idk just walk around the city more"

Finally, unfortunately I couldn't try out Chao garden because my memory card has a dead battery and only works plugged into the controller, which is a bummer.

Overall, going off Sonic and Tails campaigns alone I would rate the game a 7/10, flawed but still dumb fun that was worth checking out. I plan to do the other campaigns in the future so maybe my opinion on it will change after I do those.

Also I'm writing this pretty late so I'll probably pin it tomorrow when everyone is more awake.

@Elias_Acorn Discuss