Sonic Adventure - The Wolfy Review

[Wolfy]

I felt this needed an honest review so here goes nothing:

Sonic Adventure: The Wolfy Review



~Story~

Sonic Adventure's story starts with Sonic the Hedgehog investigating a recent event occurring in Station Square. As he arrives, he comes into contact with an invulnerable liquid-based beast known only as Chaos, who has the unique ability to gain power with each Chaos Emerald he carries. Sonic quickly attempts to take him down, but Chaos ends up fleeing the scene. Sonic along with his partner Tails later discover that Chaos is a part of Dr. Eggman's plan to take over the world and build Robotnik Land. Sonic, obviously not allowing that to happen, takes on Dr. Eggman and searches for the remaining Chaos Emeralds to keep them safe. Before Sonic's encounter, however, Knuckles encounters Chaos himself who breaks the Master Emerald into shards, sinking Angel Island and forcing him to search for them to recover his emerald and cause Angel Island to float again. Halfway through Sonic's journey, Amy is kidnapped by a robot only known as Zero and held aboard Eggman's ship, the Egg Carrier. Her story is spent attempting to escape from the robot's grasp. Convinced by Amy of Eggman's evil, another robot known as E-102 γ (Gamma) decides to track down the other E-series robots and destroy them in order to "save" them (yes it sounds overly ridiculous.) Big the Cat (I really don't like Big the Cat.) wanders the land in search of his beloved frog that he manages to lose every five minutes, forcing him to fish for it.

~Gameplay~

Gameplay is different among all of the six characters. Sonic and Tails carry high-speed platforming style gameplay with the objective of reaching the capsule or Chaos Emerald for Sonic, and with Tails racing against either Sonic or Eggman to a set finishing area. These stories the best experiences you encounter in Sonic Adventure: they're fast-paced, fun, and carry the most replayability of all of the stories in the game. Next to that, you have Knuckles' treasure hunting gameplay. The objective is to use your radar at the bottom of the screen to locate three shards of the Master Emerald hidden within the stage. Sonic Adventure is, by far, the only game to use the treasure hunting mechanic properly. The stages here can be very enjoyable at times, albeit not as much as Sonic and Tails.

Now: We move onto the unfavorables.
Amy's gameplay involves moving through incredibly slow platforming areas whilst avoiding Eggman's creation known as Zero in the process. These stages are often incredibly tedious and just no fun compared to the fast paced action experienced in other levels. Still, Amy's story only lasts about three levels so it isn't all that bad.

On the other hand we have E-102 Gamma, formerly one of Dr. Eggman's robots. He controls exactly like you would expect him to: walking around and blowing the shit out of everything he possibly can! While this is far more enjoyable than both Amy and Big the Cat's stories, it lacks depth and easily gets boring after the first two levels after you realize the key to winning was spamming B.

Now we move on to what many say is the worst experience in the game, Big the Cat. Big has about four stages and his gameplay revolves around fishing for his long-tailed frog named Froggy. Basically, it's fishing. In a Sonic game. It's as out of place as ever and can be a major chore to play at times. Okay, all the time. In fact, this delayed me as a child reaching the Super Sonic story of the game due to ragequitting for about three months simply due to the fact that I had no idea how they expected me to catch that damned frog. It doesn't belong in a Sonic game, nobody liked it, and it certainly didn't do anything for Sega Bass Fishing on the Dreamcast.

~Graphics/Presentation~
Super Sonic model comparison. Dreamcast is to the left, Gamecube/PC/360/PS3 to the right.


Sonic's default model in Emerald Coast between both versions of the game.

Sonic Adventure's original design amazed many at first but that feeling was very short lived. Soon, even games on the same console began to outclass Adventure's design in many ways. Sega decided to address that with the rerelease for the Nintendo Gamecube but unfortunately, not much was changed aside from a few textures, higher-poly character models (some of them) and gloss. Gloss everywhere. The game's look hasn't dated all too well but it doesn't look bad, nor does it really look astonishing.

~Music/Soundtrack~

The music of Sonic Adventure is some of the best in the Sonic series containing many memorable tracks which carried on throughout just about all of Sonic's games, even to date. I can't say much, just about all of it is fitting and memorable as can be.

~Differences between versions~

Sonic Adventure and its counterpart Sonic Adventure DX do not carry many differences aside from the obvious bug-fixes, FPS smoothing, and higher-quality models (with gloss effects). Numerous textures are changed for no particular reason and unnecessary scenery was removed from areas such as Angel Island. Along with that, the Chao system was further expanded upon adding the new Hero and Dark chao as well as more evolutions and second evolutions. The total rereleases for Sonic Adventure count up to three, first with the Gamecube version of Sonic Adventure DX, second with the PC version, and third with the Steam/360/PS3 rerelease.

~The Verdict:~

SOUNDTRACK: 10/10
GAMEPLAY: 4.5/10
STORY: 6/10
GRAPHICS/PRESENTATION: 6/10

FINAL: 6.5/10

thanks for sitting through my entire review guize!

[Tanassy]

+5 karma

Thank you for the only truly honest review I've seen since Johnny vs SA1.

[dreamcasthime]

Seems honest enough and I'm sure you put in the best review you could without any bias so yeah. I pretty much agree with most of this.