SONIC ADVENTURE: The Cost of Ambition | GEEK CRITIQUE

a lot can change in four years four years since the release of Sonic the Hedgehog three four years and Sega the one-time market leader had fallen far behind its rivals but in 1998 a dream was cast and the company got one final opportunity to turn things around for years a long time I'm Josh Mullen and this is the key critique for Sonic Adventure so what does Sonic Adventure mean to you to some people it's an embarrassing relic of the field days of 3d gaming a glitchy unstable mess of a game that only helped to drive the nails into Sega's coffin bafflingly to other people it's the closest sonic ever came to doing 3d write a landmark title that shows Sega meant business what I'm saying is it's a little bit of a divisive game either way adventure did see the Hedgehog finally make the leap to 3d after setting on the sidelines throughout the previous generation and honestly maybe it's a good thing he did I say that for two reasons for one the first half of the 90s were bursting at the seams with Sonic and taking a hiatus freshened up the series for two I just don't think the Saturn could have really done Sonic justice I don't get me wrong I'm sure a good game featuring Sonic could have been feasible but 3d was brand new and I think we needed to learn to Mario with this new dimension before we could learn how to Sonic but even if said I could have made it feel right the sheer size of the stages that a high-speed platformer necessitates would have made it impossible at the time in much the same way 2d sonic couldn't have really been made manifest in 8-bit 3d Sonic just couldn't have been done right in 32-bit enter the Dreamcast technology had come a long way and I never seen anything like this it's so compact and smooth it gets online they say it is literally thinking and for the first time you can't even see individual polygons on the characters this thing knew how to Sonic after two years in development and a vacation in Central America Sonic Adventure was revealed to the world in August of 98 I remember going to a AOL keyword aunt I saw a teaser image finally for all this time a brand new serie what have they done this was my first view of the redesigned modern sonic and at 10 years old I hated it he was linky and dangling and awkward with colour clashing green eyes and a smirk that said yeah I'm trying way too hard to be cool now sonic an always been cool he had this badass yeah whatever flippancy that masks so much heart so much determination the new artwork made him look like the pootie to those violent in drones always said he was what then I clicked on this picture and ok wait for word it was dial-up ah I breathed a sigh of relief the art style might have been bad but the in-game model was much better Sonics few appearances on the Saturn made one thing clear he looked weird in 3d the character was built to run on a 2d plane not with a camera trailing behind him modern Sonic's longer legs and curved spines combined with a new running animation to keep him looking happening it his green eyes served to yeah still gonna get that one but the character design wasn't the only thing that needed to be modernized the franchise's continuity was a convoluted mess in only about 7 years let's see we had the deputy stories for Sonic lived alongside humans on earth the American stories that took place on Mobius the US comic the UK comic the insane adventures cartoon the gritty realistic Saturday morning cartoon the god-awful Sonic Underground cartoon the OVA where knuckles were the Hat God trying to follow all this was like a child-friendly introduction to multiverse Theory the Genesis trilogy was very light on in-game plot leading most of these finer details up to Sega's regional marketing but adventure built on its predecessor where Sonic 3 introduced swords interlinking silent cutscenes to move the action along Sonic Adventure is far more plot focused with fully voiced in-game cutscenes and so it would serve to unify the chaos going forward sonic games would follow one single cannon well they would for the next 16 years anyway oh the plot itself Robotnik whom we in the West discover is now called Eggman ruins of an ancient monster named chaos who was sealed away inside the Master Emerald 3000 years ago and he's like yeah what could go wrong this causes Angel Island to once again crash back down to earth somehow the master will charge are like Dragon Balls or something because they scatter far and wide and Knuckles gets to wander around and pick them up chaos is a shapeshifter and was designed specifically as something the previous generation hardware could not achieve the more Chaos Emeralds the bad doctor feeds him the stronger chaos gets he comes across like more of an entity than character and that's actually really cool given what we learn about him this monster chaos was an awesome contrast to egg man's usual more technology-focused schemes unbeknownst to Eggman he also set free the spirit of - called an ancient a kid that concealed chaos and herself in the Master Emerald he manifests a ball of light and in terms of gameplay that serves as your hint system the ball of light is easy to spot but you won't accidentally activate it or be interrupted by it since you have to jump into it a hint system would have been ludicrous in 2d but it makes sense here both thanks to the more complex controls and because Sonic Adventure split its areas into two styles there are three Adventure stages open hub worlds where most of the story plays out within them you solve ridiculous puzzles where runes fall out of the sky to gain access to the more traditional action stages hub worlds were a staple of 3d platformers at the time yet another principle that was codified in mario 64 they were a safe space to learn to move and explore in three dimensions these adventure fields were all creatively varied and never too confusing or repetitive I remember spending hours just running around the mystic ruins spin dashing off of mountains and trying to land them a Master Emerald I'm not sure if I'd have the patience for them nowadays but if you do get lost the hitmarkers always point you in the right direction the hub worlds are also where you'll find most of the upgrades these I'm not such a fan of I mean adding moves as the game goes on that's great but ruining the clean aesthetics of the cast in the process I mean look at Knuckles what even is that meanwhile back at the plot sonic oh yeah it'd be happier is not voiced by Kahlil white I'm not kidding hearing anyone else's voice come out of that character was the weirdest thing in the world do me in 99 do your lawns of favor plant a tree Ryan Drummond happens upon this liquid monster calls him a big drip and since him packing but he knows nothing fool it's chaos the god of destruction ah see the emeralds are like dragon balls but true blue won't be alone tails quickly joins up with him after wrecking a new prototype biplane and they soon cross paths with knuckles on a scavenger hunt meanwhile um Eggman builds some bipedal robots Amy Rose is just here again and chaos happens upon a frog who somehow eats his tail so an enormous feline abomination has to fish to catch to the Frog the Sonic series is known for iconic melodies and Sonic Adventure is legendary even among them it's insane how varied and memorable these Tunes are then seriously this soundtrack puts even modern video games to shame the cutscenes on the other hand are the most ancient part of the experience at their best they'll have you wondering why we ever thought this was impressive if their worst everybody just looks like marionettes now the story itself is fine but it's underlined by hilarious facial expressions and awful lip-syncing the actual dialogue is typical of Japanese English dubs of the era and that's not a compliment characters just tend to speak in exposition Sonic 3 rounded out the classics with three playable characters but adventure would double that this tends to be a real point of contention nowadays six playable characters each with their own unique way style abilities and paths through the story let's just see if that was a good idea Sonic's your main man the longest story in the most stages and you'll get the bulk of my focus as well the homing attack will be an integral part of the arsenal from here on and so long as the perspective is 3d I think it's fine as for the spin DET sgt used to feel like pulling back a slingshot but an adventure it's mapped to one button and it can be spammed you don't have to be standing still use it it's overpowered as hell but god it's fun sonic team spent a lot of time thinking about how the classic gameplay could be adapted to 3d the slopes and physics and momentum are all still present and for the most part the level sign supports them well there are multiple paths and even secrets shortcuts and goodies for going off the obvious route most of the stages make good use of 3d space and great use of Sonics abilities and momentum sonic feels unhinged and loose and if you know what you're doing he's a joy to control if you don't though a lot more can go wrong in three-dimensional space there are plenty of areas where adventure comes pretty close to actually being classic Sonic in 3d but there are plenty of areas where it does not whose pads will become just as integral as the homing attack and making sure sonic goes exactly where the game needs him to no longer will he burn through loops shoot off ramps based on the player skill those moments are now exclusively automated and often used in conjunction with something I'll call spectacle spectacle is the moment the whale crashes through the dock on Emerald Coast spectacle is every time the camera pulls back to show sonic speeding around a loop getting pulled into a tornado and then making your way up and out of it snowboarding just ahead of an avalanche blazing like a maniac down the side of a building spectacle is going through a series of escapes tunnels and being flung high into the air off of a halflife spectacle is not a bad thing it was always a part of the appeal of this series I used this music back in the Sonic 1 video and that was very deliberate I imagine that moment was just as much of an adrenaline rush for kids playing Sonic in 1991 as speed highway skyscraper was for me seven years later now the focus on spectacle over substance will be to the detriment of the series going forward but for the most part adventure spectacle was extremely impressive well-chosen and most importantly it was still focused on gameplay the problem comes when you consider that sonic running up the inside of a tree was no longer impressive by 1999 but even when the shine wore off the classics there was still a rock solid game underneath Sonic Adventure with Ellie is strip away the spectacle and what you're left with is anything but rock solid there are times when I mean that literally these glitches don't break the game by any means it's still very playable and when it works it has a fluidity befitting the classics but when that flow breaks it breaks hard even aside from the death traps characters stick to geometry in close quarters cameras walking in Bali positioned even the snowboard sections a bumpy ride half the reason that I do still have fun with adventure is because I generally know how to avoid the instability I know when and just as importantly when not to press forward so I don't break the scripts learning how not to break the game should not be the players responsibility speaking of breaking the game though you've got tails and sana three tails was the easy object thanks to his ability to fly over obstacles and find secret paths and that's the idea here to guess why it's much faster and he uses that to essentially break sonic stages in order to outrace him often there are flight rings to automatically fling you the right way but it's always cooler when you in tune a more clever path tills is a lot of fun knuckles could climb walls and glide and those abilities are put to use in 3d he puts the adventure in Sonic Adventure his stages are wide open and nonlinear as some kind of internal radar leads him to the Master Emerald shards he controls well aside from wall climbing feeling a bit too sticky at times but whether he's fun or not all comes down to the level design casino AAPIs is all indoors with stacked layers and it's easy to feel like you're just gliding in circles waiting for the radar to go off by far his best day just the expanse of Red Mountain I really like how the classic trio turned out Sonic Team honed in on what made each of them unique and designed their gameplay around it it's just hard not to wish for a little more from Tails and Knuckles I'd like to see their stages span the length of Sonic's instead of just select sections and emerald hunting is ok but I also kind of wish knuckles that just had more linear stages of his own the please his ability is to use more like the exclusive paths in Sonic 3 that brings us to the trio of new playable characters Amy's game involves solving incredibly simple puzzles while fleeing the indestructible robot zero sonic team remembered their lore and gave her the Piko Piko hammer to fend him off I think the team might have wanted to bring in some tactical espionage action but it never really comes into focus her game is the shortest and I love the hammer jump he 102 gamma puts us in the role of one of Eggman's badniks for the first time the team had always wanted to implement a shooting mechanic but were sensible enough to recognize that an anthropomorphic Hedgehog has no business wildung a gun the timer takes down for gamma and you lose if it out gamma can add to it by comboing multiple targets why would a man build a robot that literally dies if it goes too long without shooting something actually no wait a minute that sounds exactly like something he'd do gamma is influenced by aiming to turn on his creator and seeing the evil that a man does he sets out to rescue the other east series robots and by that I mean a 103 Delta rescues complete oh so that's how you rescue your brother maybe it's the lack of goofy facial expressions but gamma story is the closest this story ever comes to affecting genuine death in the end ganna self-destructs to set the animal inside free it's completely out of left field to use this cutesy explanation from the classics in this way but I think that's why it's such an effective emotional gut-punch man speaking of guts it's the last member of the SI crew big the cat he spins the game waddling after his pal froggy you get to fish for him and I thought a knee was slow based much as everyone likes to rag on big including the official Twitter account I can't say I hate the big log I think he was thrown in mainly to show off the Dreamcast realistic water effects and yeah the fishing is clunky and the camera is bad but his game is always over so fast I barely noticed in retrospect though sonic team would have been better served to cut fig a me and maybe even ganna and give that development time to Tails and Knuckles instead but I don't really belong there decision I remember well a time when the internet was positively teeming with fake guides on how to unlock Luigi in Mario 64 label characters were a big selling point for 3d platformers an adventure boasting six of them was a huge deal the boss battles don't fare so well in the classics the bosses were tests of how well the player had mastered the controls physics and gimmicks of a boss if you knew what you were doing they could be over really fast sonic adventures bosses tend to again be more about spectacle you dodge attacks until the boss shows its weak spot hit that and repeat now that doesn't mean they're awful it is a valid way to design bosses and the egg viper chaos 6 and even 0 and E 101 beta are all a lot of fun some of them just seem to go on and on and on the most egregious by far is chaos 4 who does almost nothing but shoot out lily pads and throw simple attacks dodge weight from the surface run around some more it's made even worse because Sonic Tails and Knuckles all have to fight it and it's just the same thing every time those unique abilities don't make a difference here that repetition really gets bad in the original Dreamcast version where you can't skip the cutscenes I hate when games don't let you skip cutscenes and it's even worse here because it's so much fun to see the same exact thing play out from 27 different perspectives you also get to enjoy both acts of the utterly tepid sky phase minigame as both Sonic and Tails at some point in every adventure to call spirit appears and whisks a character in the distant past revealing the backstory to call was the daughter of a warmongering ruler of the echidna tribe her father intended to use the master emeralds power to conquer the world and raging the entity that protected the emeralds chaos chaos absorbed the emeralds power and killed the warmongers leading to call to seal them both in the master and mode chaos was guarding the children of the emeralds the Chao and here's yet another mechanic in Sonic Adventure the animals you rescue in stages can be brought to cow Gardens and they take on the traits of the animals you give them to build stats to compete in races the only time I ever really cared about Chao was in Sonic Adventure and it was all because the Chao could be transferred to the Dreamcast awesome vmu memory card or you could name them win fruit and mate with other chao pinkie to digress these flashback scenes are a missed opportunity every character experiences them but nobody ever talks about them not even knuckles he's supposed to be the last of his race the guardian of the Master Emerald yet when confronted for the first time by people who look like him all he can say is hmm this is very strange ten people say knuckles isn't a dumbass no wonder Eggman tricks him all the time I think these flashbacks would have been more effective if they had played out in order did you complete Sonic's game first you see one of the very last scenes before any of the others the playable characters never really interact with anyone in the past and considering they also never discuss it amongst themselves Sonic team might have intended them to happen chronologically at some point in development once you get through every character story you unlock one more Super Sonic you can't use him in Sonic stages this time around but given how unstable the engine was and how untested Sonic was in 3d anyway Oh at Sonic Team off fistina instead this consists of a short epilogue where chaos comes back absorbs all the emeralds and absolutely obliterate Station Square this scene is awesome man blew my mind when I was again but chaos only absorbed the negative thought over the internals and our feelings toward each other can blah blah blah just do it already oh yes oh that is the most wonderful thing I've ever experienced in all my 12 years on this planet Oh perfect chaos we are gonna take you down a us with a badass name supersonic rockets through the destroyed city approaching the absolute beast that chaos is becoming it's a lot more challenging that I'm making it look but it's exhilarating it's kind of a funny harbinger of things to come though the winning comes down to little more than hitting bruise pads and dodging obstacles the figma step here is that halfway through the fight the amazing theme song open your heart is replaced by this slow repetitive theme it should have really been the other way around beating chaos to oblivion calms him down because this is a video game and he and Jack all float off into the heavens all's well that ends well right sure if you ignore the wrecked flood city in the inevitable death toll at all this took freakin tales bud Eggman managed to survive and in the blink of an eye Sonic's African again roll credits so what does Sonic Adventure mean to me well on the one hand it's a mess it's unfocused and in trying to do so much it ends up being less than the sum of its parts but when I think back to the first time I played it I don't remember any of that I don't remember the cutscenes being so cringe-worthy I don't remember the wonky physics or glitches or wondering why I was fishing in a Sonic game I just had a blast playing it Sonic was finally back and just as importantly well look it's easy to pick in just about any game of this era for the same reasons people pick at Sonic Adventure the awkward and unnatural cutscenes the convoluted yet distressingly simple excuse plot the continuous grasp on movement in a 3d space what people tend to forget when they look at Sonic Adventure nowadays is that we actually did think this was impressive because Sonic Adventure pushed the envelope beyond anything that had been done before there's a reason this game turned out the way it did it has six playable characters and tons of minigames in an a life system it had online leaderboards and downloadable events and themes in 1990 freaking nine it tried with so much ambition to take videogames storytelling to the next level it innovated the speed Focus 3d platformer the same way the original game did for 2d two generations before it was a genre defining risk that fired on all cylinders and then some and in so doing changed the measuring stick of what a video game could be Sonic Adventure was more than just the return of Sonic it was the return of Sega now none of that invalidates the criticism that I've laid here there is also a reason the game was reviewed so much more harshly when it was released on a GameCube five years later because Sonic Adventure is very obviously flawed once the shine wears off the same way this was no longer impressive in 1999 this was absolutely laughable even by 2003 make no mistake from the focus on Story 2 the loads of playable characters to the glitchy unstable engine to the reliance on spectacle in place of substance nearly all the woes that would damn near kill the franchise began here but Sonic Adventure itself has substance despite what was to come the fact that it's so dated now is a testament to how groundbreaking it was at the time Sonic Adventure carried on its shoulders responsibilities of showcasing everything the Dreamcast had to offer and so it was it had to be the most ambitious game Sega ever made

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 285,776

Rating: 4.8242798 out of 5

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen, sonic, sonic adventure, Dreamcast, Sega, sonic the hedgehog, review, analysis, critique, tails, knuckles, big the cat, Anny rose, Amy Rose, ambition, Sega Dreamcast, sa1, sa, sonic adventure 1

Id: mZO2P3HVUD4

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/sorin255]

Outdated - eh, yeah. It's aged pretty poorly.

Ambitious - it's pre-'06 Sonic Team, everything they did was ambitious.

[u/keero16]

A game can be outdated but also a classic.

I would say the original Metroid falls under that category.

[u/SonicPunk96]

Somewhere in the middle in all honesty. It warts have become far more apparent as time has passed, and it has aged worse than SA2. However there is still a ton of enjoyment to be had with this game, and for when it was released, there was a lot of ambition and creativity in the game. Still stands up as my favorite Sonic game of all time.

[u/C-Abdulio]

An outdated relic for the generation raised on boost to win, but to long time fans raised on the Genesis eager to play some 3D Sonic, this was probably the best thing since buttered toast. Certainly no Mario 64 or OoT, but I feel just as influential in regards to it's place among the Sonics.

Aging visuals and presentation aside, I certainly think it earned a status as an ambitious, genre-defining classic, for at least providing a very solid framework that the rest of the 3D games has since built upon and got the Modern Sonic brand up and running. In terms of tone and even some mechanics and physics, it was a nice bridge between the games of the past with the more speed-oriented games of the future (and some will debate that it was a better representation of Classic Sonic gameplay on a 3D plane rather than SA2).

I agree with what a lot of TGC says (great vid by the way) and I agree that they only used the expansive cast to show off the system and to piggyback the tropes of the 3D platformer genre. However, I felt that Amy, Big and Gamma certainly added a lot more charm and brought a much more unique perspective then later additions; it was dull fluff, but better fluff then the narrow vision of later games.

I hope you don't toss your channel TGC, I really wanna know your look into SA2 and why people keep putting it on a pedestal.

[u/SuspiciousScout]

It's rather perplexing for me. In some ways I think Adventure is still a well-done game with some very fun and creative gameplay elements. While on the other hand... It's age really shows with it's multiple bugs and level design in some stages. Not to mention Amy's and Big's levels are just a waste of time while Tails' levels are just shorter versions of Sonic's (Also not to mention the awful voice acting and animation). It was definitely ambitious for it's time though, creating huge lore for the Sonic series, putting them in a different location full of humans, modernizing the gameplay and putting new spins on the Sonic formula.

I really do have mixed feelings about Adventure, but I think it's safe to say not everyone will enjoy playing Adventure in this day and age, but some of us still might find enjoyment in it from time to time.

[u/Burtzman]

I always enjoy your vids!

[u/KFCNyanCat]

Classic. It's graphics and voice acting are outdated and it's a bit glitchy, but it's gameplay is not outdated. Just like almost every 3D game made before 2002.

[u/[deleted]]

It will depend on what future games look like. Are they bringing back Chao Gardens? Are they going to return to multiple character gameplay? I think there was a lot of potential in the Adventure Series (and I am still playing SA2B), but unless they are going back to it (you can argue 06 was SA3 here if you want), then its just a relic of what could have been.

[u/[deleted]]

Uh, both? The two aren't mutually exclusive