Lately I've been replaying the original Sonic Adventure, particularly thanks to the work of some wonderful modders who have completely overhauled the PC version of the game to be dramatically better (and, not coincidentally, more like the original Dreamcast release). I've always liked the original Sonic Adventure way more than its sequel. Yes, Adventure 2 is indisputably the ”objectively" better game, whatever that means. It's tighter, more focused, with better controls and less padding and blah blah. It executes on what it sets out to do much better than the original game does.
I just don't like it as much.
If I'm totally honest here, I actually prefer Sonic Adventure to Super Mario 64, too. I suspect that, upon reaching that sentence, some people might just check out of reading any further, but bear with me here. Many people would just leave their opinions at that - beauty's in the eye of the beholder, art's subjective, and so on. Still, I'm too invested (for better or worse) in the Sonic franchise not to interrogate my feelings about this, to figure out why I feel that way. Is it just nostalgia? Console war favoritism? What on Earth do I see in this game?
For the longest time, I don't think I knew the answer either. I'd replayed the game quite a few times over the years (primarily through the unmodified PC release of Sonic Adventure DX) and thought it didn't hold up all that well, and, well, it still doesn't in many ways. During this latest replay, though, I've come to appreciate what it does right, or at the very least, the things it does that appeal to me specifically. Maybe being able to recreate that wonderful Dreamcast-y aesthetic just made it click for me in a way it didn't before.
First and foremost, Sonic Adventure is ambitious as hell. Not content to be ”just" a platformer, it was also a racing game, and a treasure hunting game, and a shooter, and a fishing game, and a snowboarding game, and a virtual pet simulator, and a Panzer Dragoon knockoff. I'm sure I don't have to tell you it wasn't actually good at being all these things, but it shot for the moon even if it often missed. There's a charm to games with ambitions this high even if they fail, something immensely human about them. Some of my favorite works of art in multiple mediums fall in this category. Persona 5 is a recent example - through all the stilted dialogue, tonal dissonance and sometimes glacial pacing, you can still tell that a team of people put every bit of themselves into making something they thought was bold, daring, and powerful. That's not to say Sonic Adventure is remotely as good a game as P5, just that for all its glaring flaws, you can tell it was a labor of love at its core.
One of the defining aspects of Adventure that its sequel completely abandoned were its proto-open-world Adventure Fields, a change most people probably consider for the better. As an adult, I can look at the Adventure Fields and see how barren and empty they are, how needlessly labryinthine that damn jungle is, how often confusing it is to figure out what you need to do or where you need to go to actually get to the next level. Here's the thing, though: Adventure wasn't made for adult me. It was made for kid me.
Sometimes I think discussion about games (especially on GAF) becomes a little too faux-objective - grounded in notions that there are provably ”good" games and ”bad" games, with Metacritic scores and armchair game theory thrown around as Indisputable Facts. These Adventure Fields serve so little gameplay purpose! They just waste your time! And that's all true, but as a kid, I genuinely didn't give a shit. My time was free to be wasted as much as the game wanted to waste it, and I enjoyed it anyway. Adventure was designed for an era when a kid didn't have endless supplies of free-to-play games on their iPad (and when adults didn't have Steam backlogs worth more than the balance of their checking account). It was made for a kid who got a Dreamcast and two games for Christmas, and one of those games was Sonic Adventure.
When you're a kid, you don't care that it's confusing to figure out where to go, because you just wander around endlessly doing every little dumb thing you can until you hit upon the next part of the story. And that's, really, the way the game was made to be played, not zipping from one level to the next. If you do that, you miss out on so many little details.
For instance - and forgive me, Sonic fans reading this, for some of this may be common knowledge to you - did you know you can unlock Big early by going to Station Square at a point in the story where you're in (and have no real reason to leave) the Mystic Ruins? In fact, because of the way the game tells six overlapping stories across its multiple characters, you'll often run into other characters during their stories if you go out of your way to find them. Did you follow the little NPC story of the train workers striking for better working conditions, and how this delays a young girl at the station from reuniting with her dad? How often did you chat up Mr. Know-it-All? Where can I buy one of those maid robots cleaning the Egg Carrier? Some of the upgrades can only be found through random exploration, too - did you ever find Knuckles's yellow gloves?
None of this stuff has any real gameplay importance, but as a dumb kid, that stuff's still super interesting to you, and you will seek it out just because it's something to do with this game you're playing... and that's a totally valid way to design a game. Not every game has to subscribe to some Unified Theory of Ideal Game Design. A game designed like this probably won't be something an adult with limited free time will find compelling, but that's okay. (On a related note, this kind of thinking is also precisely why the game tries to be so many different kinds of games - imagine how much replay value a kid gets out of having so many different game modes!)
Just as importantly, though, having an ”open world" like this gives the game a sense of scale and life, even if that sense is a bit illusory. Day and night cycles shift as you progress through the game. NPCs have small stories that unfold as you go if you care to talk to them. Other characters can go check the Master Emerald now and then to see how far along Knuckles has gotten in restoring it. This all seems so quaint and expected now, but for a 3D platformer in 1998, this was compelling and different. Mario 64 had a castle, but that castle never felt alive - it was just a hub, more or less. Sonic Adventure had a world.
I remember, when I was a kid, I was fascinated with the parking garage entrance in the hotel in Station Square.
Those cars are going in and out all the time! There's got to be a way for me to get in, right? Can I jump on top of a car and ride in? Maybe it'll open at some other point in the story? Well, spoiler alert: you never get into that garage. There's nothing there. But as a kid, I always wondered. Years later, I watched the Run Button Let's Play of Sonic Adventure, and was incredibly amused when they talked about that garage. They joked about how they wanted to go in there as a kid, too, and made a running gag of checking the garage to see if it was opened throughout the story. Completely independently, thousands of miles apart, this game created this weird little shared experience between me and a pair of guys I've never met.
Sometimes the best game design is accidental. Sometimes even the simplest shit can endear you to a game.
Sonic fans often divide the series into two fairly distinct halves, ”classic" and ”modern", with Sonic Adventure most commonly cited as the dividing line between the two. This is where all the characters underwent their ”modern" redesigns, where Sonic started walking among normal human beings, where we started hearing buttrock character themes and battling ancient evils and getting overloaded with new playable characters. That's a very one-sided way to look at the game, though. From another angle, it's the finale of the ”classic Sonic" era. The truth, though, is that it's a bridge between the two.
Adventure doesn't get enough credit for how much of it is grounded in the heritage of the Genesis/Mega Drive games, especially compared to what came after. As a kid who grew up with a Genesis and all of the original Sonic titles for it, the original Sonic Adventure truly felt like an evolution of that series. Adventure 2, on the other hand, felt nearly like a reboot, with the only notable references to past Sonic games being a few ultimately meaningless nods to the the first Adventure (and a painfully hidden Green Hill remake to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the franchise). Where Adventure 2 stuffed the vast majority of the enemies with ”Chaos Drives", every enemy in the original releases a cute animal from captivity when destroyed. Adventure 2 explored hidden military vaults, prison complexes, urban streets, and abandoned space stations; Adventure took you through spiraling pathways in the sky, into a volcano where weird hoop-folk are imprisoned, a rollercoaster theme park with a race track and bowling alley, and of course, a pinball-laden casino (this time with a sewer-y underbelly). SA2 has goal rings, SA1 has the classic capsules. SA2 jumps make a ”whooshing" noise, SA1 has a classic-style jump sound. You get the idea.
This extends to the story too. While Chaos is the first of many ”prehistoric evil" enemies Sonic would later face (like Iblis and Dark Gaia), Chaos is unique in that his backstory is based in classic Sonic lore. The entire story of the ancient echidna race and their possession of the Chaos and Master Emeralds is really just building on the Master Emerald and Floating Island lore originally established in Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Tails's backstory of being an insecure and bullied kid who found strength in Sonic was established in the manual of Sonic 2, but is turned into a character arc in Adventure where he moves past his insecurities and dependence on Sonic to find his own strength. In Sonic CD, Amy fawns over Sonic and clings to him obsessively even when he's clearly uninterested; in Adventure, she realizes Sonic doesn't respect her and finds the resolve to move on. Gamma's story, indisputably the best in the game, is a weird, bittersweet tragedy centered around the premise of the whole franchise - Eggman is taking animals and putting them into robots.
I'm being very kind to the game here, so I know what you might be thinking. All this theoretically interesting story stuff is, of course, majorly kneecapped by the fact that the voice acting, script, and choreography are all totally laughable. You're right, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, dammit! If you want to hear complaints about all the dumb things Sonic Adventure does wrong (and, in fairness, there are many), there are plenty of those articles and forum posts out there. I'm here to spread good vibes about this weird and fascinating game.
Speaking of good vibes, check this music:
Be Cool, Be Wild and Be Groovy ...for Icecap
People associate Sonic Adventure with the start of the ”buttrock" era of Sonic, and it's hard to deny that there's some of that in there, particularly with the game's main theme and Sonic's character theme. Still, there's a ton of variety in the soundtrack that people have forgotten about. Crunchy guitars were key to the game's sound signature, yes, but there was so much more to it. If anything, a lot of the game's music practically borders on ska with a touch of funk, with tons of horn sections and the occasional saxophone, plus some quirky synths mixed in for good measure (especially for Eggman-themed stages like Hot Shelter and Final Egg). But the score can set a darker tone when it wants to, with moodier pieces like Gamma's piano-and-synth character theme or Lost World's foreboding string sections and tribal percussion.
Frankly, Sega's sound team in the late 90s and early 2000s was untouchable. Actually, they're still pretty good to this day, even if some of the greats like Hideki Naganuma and Fumie Kumatani are no longer with the company. At a time when competing platformers sounded like this or this or even this, Sonic Adventure's music was vibrant, fresh, and bold in a way that none of its competitors came remotely close to.
Graphically, the game has undoubtedly aged, but not as poorly as you might think. The art direction carries the game fairly well, though everything is naturally fairly low-poly and low-res by today's standards. This is actually where I'd like to talk more about those mods I've been playing with, because for the past 14 years or so, the version of Sonic Adventure most people are familiar with is the Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut rerelease originally made for the Nintendo GameCube. Versions of this port have also made their way to the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC (twice), so it's far more widespread than the original Dreamcast release.
The problem is, this version looks like shit.
The changes that version made to the original game aren't all bad - hey, characters have individual fingers now! - but on the whole, it does a serious disservice to the game. The lighting system from the original game was gutted and replaced with a new one that is flatter, duller, and sucks all the atmosphere out of places like Final Egg. Many levels and areas had their color palettes dulled, and redesigned to just look plain uglier. Only the hardcore Sonic fans ever noticed this, though, because who bought a Dreamcast? And even among those who did, who played the Dreamcast and DX versions close enough together to notice the difference? They look similar enough at a surface level.
I mentioned there's a PC version, though, and you know what that means - mods! The Sonic fandom has always been blessed with a thriving and incredibly talented mod community, and I'd like to give a well-deserved shoutout to a few of them including MainMemory, SonicFreak94/Morph, and PkR for their wonderful work on both mods and mod tools for the game. Not only can you play SADX with the original Dreamcast textures and object layouts restored, but they've even reverse engineered and reimplemented an entire lighting system used in the original Dreamcast release and cut from the DX version. The differences are pretty dramatic (left is the vanilla PC version, right is with Dreamcast-style mods):
It's a god damn crime that the version of this game Sega sells today is so dramatically worse than the one they released in 1999. If you are ever interested in revisiting Sonic Adventure, I can't recommend these mods enough. It's not just lighting and textures either. There are other graphical effects restored, like the waves caused by the dolphin in the Dreamcast release's Emerald Coast that were replaced with a simple gelatin-esque bobbing of the water in SADX:
Perhaps some of these sacrifices were made in SADX to help raise the framerate, which was 30fps with drops on the Dreamcast and 60fps with drops on the GameCube. Still, those changes have also carried over into versions running on much more powerful hardware that's more than capable of rendering all the bells and whistles at high framerates. It's a shame that the DX version of the game is how Sonic Adventure will probably be remembered, due to being more widely available on more successful platforms.
Putting aside graphical fidelity, though, the main thing the game brings to the table visually is the god damn spectacle. For 1998, Sonic Adventure was a visual tour de force, with stunning setpieces and wild level design flair. As an audio-visual experience, this game was Sega at its creative peak, firing on all cylinders to make a game no other company could. The level design loves to fling you far above the stage so you can admire how expansive the level designs were for the time, and stages twist and turn and turn to bring classic Sonic's loops and slopes forward into vertigo-inducing three dimensional rollercoasters. There was nothing else like it.
There was another aspect to Sonic Adventure that goes practically forgotten in this day and age, and that's the internet connectivity. No version of the game after the Dreamcast had this, and as you might expect, you can't really use these features on that version anymore either. I was recently delighted to find, however, that someone has kept a mirror of the original Sonic Adventure website. This is exactly what you would get if you accessed the ”Internet" option in the main menu of the original game.
I still remember hooking my Dreamcast up to the internet for the first time. With a 56k modem, it was actually faster than the 33.6k connection my old Compaq had. I have so many memories associated with the online features of this game (and the Dreamcast in general) that are nearly impossible to recreate now. I remember getting stuck on the Chaos 4 boss fight and learning how to beat it from the Guide. I remember downloading people's Chao from the Daycare, and being blown away at how much better they were than mine. To be fair, some people used a Chao Editor program developed to run on your VMU that could modify your chat's stats however you wished. Yes, even in 2000, people had made homebrew for the VMU. The official #sonic IRC channel was also my first exposure to IRC, and the birthplace of my earliest real internet handle which I shall leave unnamed out of embarassment. On a less personal note, the site was also home to DLC downloads. DLC! In a console game from 1998! There were extra Twinkle Circuit courses, holiday events taking place in Station Square, and even some promotional in-game challenges for companies like AT&T and Adidas. None of this content is fully accessible in any modern release of the game, though thankfully, that hasn't stopped modders from working to bring it back. Does anyone else remember that AT&T-sponsored Knuckles time attack competition?
It's such a bummer to me, honestly, that so many people today are so immensely dismissive of Sonic Adventure. If I think about it, it's not hard to imagine reasons why. The Sonic franchise has worked very hard over the years to burn away all its goodwill. History is written by the victors, and the Dreamcast was not a victor. The version of the game that predominantly lives on today is inferior in many ways to the original release. There's plenty of aspects of the game that haven't aged well - the controls are loose, walls and floors often only exist in a state of temporal flux, most of the voice acting and cutscenes are awful (but hell, that's true of a lot of classics people still love), and Big the Cat will always be Big the Cat.
I'm writing this because in whatever small way I can, I want to fight back against a prevailing narrative that Sonic Adventure is some irredeemable pile of shit, best relegated to the dustbins of history along with Sonic 06 and Shadow the Hedgehog. By no means it is a flawless game, but it's a game with a tremendous amount of heart and talent poured into it. It broke new ground in its time in so many ways - the soundtrack holds up to this very day, the visuals dripped with style and helped usher in the 128-bit era, it supported DLC and online save-data sharing in a world before broadband was mainstream, and the game's boundless aspirations tried to bridge platformer gameplay with an RPG-style world and dabbled in more genres than the designers could reasonably juggle.
I mentioned earlier that I like Sonic Adventure over Super Mario 64, and I stand by that. Of course SM64 is a more competent game, with tighter controls, more clever platforming, and none of the janky glitches and ridiculous cutscenes that plague Sonic Adventure. I don't blame anyone for preferring it for those reasons alone. But I'll be damned if it isn't more boring. I joked to a friend recently that Mario is Disney - it's incredibly polished and accessible, with the best titles being masterpieces and even the lesser titles being at least competent. Almost anyone can love Disney. Sonic, though, is anime. Anime can be an absolute mess, with huge variations in quality and tons of elements that are horribly off-putting to the mass market. Many people will struggle to ever see the good in it. At its best, though, it's deeply ambitious and dares to make artistic choices mass-market media never would.
Personally, I'll always prefer a beautiful mess to plain perfection.
I just don't like it as much.
If I'm totally honest here, I actually prefer Sonic Adventure to Super Mario 64, too. I suspect that, upon reaching that sentence, some people might just check out of reading any further, but bear with me here. Many people would just leave their opinions at that - beauty's in the eye of the beholder, art's subjective, and so on. Still, I'm too invested (for better or worse) in the Sonic franchise not to interrogate my feelings about this, to figure out why I feel that way. Is it just nostalgia? Console war favoritism? What on Earth do I see in this game?
For the longest time, I don't think I knew the answer either. I'd replayed the game quite a few times over the years (primarily through the unmodified PC release of Sonic Adventure DX) and thought it didn't hold up all that well, and, well, it still doesn't in many ways. During this latest replay, though, I've come to appreciate what it does right, or at the very least, the things it does that appeal to me specifically. Maybe being able to recreate that wonderful Dreamcast-y aesthetic just made it click for me in a way it didn't before.
First and foremost, Sonic Adventure is ambitious as hell. Not content to be ”just" a platformer, it was also a racing game, and a treasure hunting game, and a shooter, and a fishing game, and a snowboarding game, and a virtual pet simulator, and a Panzer Dragoon knockoff. I'm sure I don't have to tell you it wasn't actually good at being all these things, but it shot for the moon even if it often missed. There's a charm to games with ambitions this high even if they fail, something immensely human about them. Some of my favorite works of art in multiple mediums fall in this category. Persona 5 is a recent example - through all the stilted dialogue, tonal dissonance and sometimes glacial pacing, you can still tell that a team of people put every bit of themselves into making something they thought was bold, daring, and powerful. That's not to say Sonic Adventure is remotely as good a game as P5, just that for all its glaring flaws, you can tell it was a labor of love at its core.
One of the defining aspects of Adventure that its sequel completely abandoned were its proto-open-world Adventure Fields, a change most people probably consider for the better. As an adult, I can look at the Adventure Fields and see how barren and empty they are, how needlessly labryinthine that damn jungle is, how often confusing it is to figure out what you need to do or where you need to go to actually get to the next level. Here's the thing, though: Adventure wasn't made for adult me. It was made for kid me.
Sometimes I think discussion about games (especially on GAF) becomes a little too faux-objective - grounded in notions that there are provably ”good" games and ”bad" games, with Metacritic scores and armchair game theory thrown around as Indisputable Facts. These Adventure Fields serve so little gameplay purpose! They just waste your time! And that's all true, but as a kid, I genuinely didn't give a shit. My time was free to be wasted as much as the game wanted to waste it, and I enjoyed it anyway. Adventure was designed for an era when a kid didn't have endless supplies of free-to-play games on their iPad (and when adults didn't have Steam backlogs worth more than the balance of their checking account). It was made for a kid who got a Dreamcast and two games for Christmas, and one of those games was Sonic Adventure.
When you're a kid, you don't care that it's confusing to figure out where to go, because you just wander around endlessly doing every little dumb thing you can until you hit upon the next part of the story. And that's, really, the way the game was made to be played, not zipping from one level to the next. If you do that, you miss out on so many little details.
For instance - and forgive me, Sonic fans reading this, for some of this may be common knowledge to you - did you know you can unlock Big early by going to Station Square at a point in the story where you're in (and have no real reason to leave) the Mystic Ruins? In fact, because of the way the game tells six overlapping stories across its multiple characters, you'll often run into other characters during their stories if you go out of your way to find them. Did you follow the little NPC story of the train workers striking for better working conditions, and how this delays a young girl at the station from reuniting with her dad? How often did you chat up Mr. Know-it-All? Where can I buy one of those maid robots cleaning the Egg Carrier? Some of the upgrades can only be found through random exploration, too - did you ever find Knuckles's yellow gloves?
None of this stuff has any real gameplay importance, but as a dumb kid, that stuff's still super interesting to you, and you will seek it out just because it's something to do with this game you're playing... and that's a totally valid way to design a game. Not every game has to subscribe to some Unified Theory of Ideal Game Design. A game designed like this probably won't be something an adult with limited free time will find compelling, but that's okay. (On a related note, this kind of thinking is also precisely why the game tries to be so many different kinds of games - imagine how much replay value a kid gets out of having so many different game modes!)
Just as importantly, though, having an ”open world" like this gives the game a sense of scale and life, even if that sense is a bit illusory. Day and night cycles shift as you progress through the game. NPCs have small stories that unfold as you go if you care to talk to them. Other characters can go check the Master Emerald now and then to see how far along Knuckles has gotten in restoring it. This all seems so quaint and expected now, but for a 3D platformer in 1998, this was compelling and different. Mario 64 had a castle, but that castle never felt alive - it was just a hub, more or less. Sonic Adventure had a world.
I remember, when I was a kid, I was fascinated with the parking garage entrance in the hotel in Station Square.
Those cars are going in and out all the time! There's got to be a way for me to get in, right? Can I jump on top of a car and ride in? Maybe it'll open at some other point in the story? Well, spoiler alert: you never get into that garage. There's nothing there. But as a kid, I always wondered. Years later, I watched the Run Button Let's Play of Sonic Adventure, and was incredibly amused when they talked about that garage. They joked about how they wanted to go in there as a kid, too, and made a running gag of checking the garage to see if it was opened throughout the story. Completely independently, thousands of miles apart, this game created this weird little shared experience between me and a pair of guys I've never met.
Sometimes the best game design is accidental. Sometimes even the simplest shit can endear you to a game.
Sonic fans often divide the series into two fairly distinct halves, ”classic" and ”modern", with Sonic Adventure most commonly cited as the dividing line between the two. This is where all the characters underwent their ”modern" redesigns, where Sonic started walking among normal human beings, where we started hearing buttrock character themes and battling ancient evils and getting overloaded with new playable characters. That's a very one-sided way to look at the game, though. From another angle, it's the finale of the ”classic Sonic" era. The truth, though, is that it's a bridge between the two.
Adventure doesn't get enough credit for how much of it is grounded in the heritage of the Genesis/Mega Drive games, especially compared to what came after. As a kid who grew up with a Genesis and all of the original Sonic titles for it, the original Sonic Adventure truly felt like an evolution of that series. Adventure 2, on the other hand, felt nearly like a reboot, with the only notable references to past Sonic games being a few ultimately meaningless nods to the the first Adventure (and a painfully hidden Green Hill remake to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the franchise). Where Adventure 2 stuffed the vast majority of the enemies with ”Chaos Drives", every enemy in the original releases a cute animal from captivity when destroyed. Adventure 2 explored hidden military vaults, prison complexes, urban streets, and abandoned space stations; Adventure took you through spiraling pathways in the sky, into a volcano where weird hoop-folk are imprisoned, a rollercoaster theme park with a race track and bowling alley, and of course, a pinball-laden casino (this time with a sewer-y underbelly). SA2 has goal rings, SA1 has the classic capsules. SA2 jumps make a ”whooshing" noise, SA1 has a classic-style jump sound. You get the idea.
This extends to the story too. While Chaos is the first of many ”prehistoric evil" enemies Sonic would later face (like Iblis and Dark Gaia), Chaos is unique in that his backstory is based in classic Sonic lore. The entire story of the ancient echidna race and their possession of the Chaos and Master Emeralds is really just building on the Master Emerald and Floating Island lore originally established in Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Tails's backstory of being an insecure and bullied kid who found strength in Sonic was established in the manual of Sonic 2, but is turned into a character arc in Adventure where he moves past his insecurities and dependence on Sonic to find his own strength. In Sonic CD, Amy fawns over Sonic and clings to him obsessively even when he's clearly uninterested; in Adventure, she realizes Sonic doesn't respect her and finds the resolve to move on. Gamma's story, indisputably the best in the game, is a weird, bittersweet tragedy centered around the premise of the whole franchise - Eggman is taking animals and putting them into robots.
I'm being very kind to the game here, so I know what you might be thinking. All this theoretically interesting story stuff is, of course, majorly kneecapped by the fact that the voice acting, script, and choreography are all totally laughable. You're right, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, dammit! If you want to hear complaints about all the dumb things Sonic Adventure does wrong (and, in fairness, there are many), there are plenty of those articles and forum posts out there. I'm here to spread good vibes about this weird and fascinating game.
Speaking of good vibes, check this music:
Be Cool, Be Wild and Be Groovy ...for Icecap
People associate Sonic Adventure with the start of the ”buttrock" era of Sonic, and it's hard to deny that there's some of that in there, particularly with the game's main theme and Sonic's character theme. Still, there's a ton of variety in the soundtrack that people have forgotten about. Crunchy guitars were key to the game's sound signature, yes, but there was so much more to it. If anything, a lot of the game's music practically borders on ska with a touch of funk, with tons of horn sections and the occasional saxophone, plus some quirky synths mixed in for good measure (especially for Eggman-themed stages like Hot Shelter and Final Egg). But the score can set a darker tone when it wants to, with moodier pieces like Gamma's piano-and-synth character theme or Lost World's foreboding string sections and tribal percussion.
Frankly, Sega's sound team in the late 90s and early 2000s was untouchable. Actually, they're still pretty good to this day, even if some of the greats like Hideki Naganuma and Fumie Kumatani are no longer with the company. At a time when competing platformers sounded like this or this or even this, Sonic Adventure's music was vibrant, fresh, and bold in a way that none of its competitors came remotely close to.
Graphically, the game has undoubtedly aged, but not as poorly as you might think. The art direction carries the game fairly well, though everything is naturally fairly low-poly and low-res by today's standards. This is actually where I'd like to talk more about those mods I've been playing with, because for the past 14 years or so, the version of Sonic Adventure most people are familiar with is the Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut rerelease originally made for the Nintendo GameCube. Versions of this port have also made their way to the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC (twice), so it's far more widespread than the original Dreamcast release.
The problem is, this version looks like shit.
The changes that version made to the original game aren't all bad - hey, characters have individual fingers now! - but on the whole, it does a serious disservice to the game. The lighting system from the original game was gutted and replaced with a new one that is flatter, duller, and sucks all the atmosphere out of places like Final Egg. Many levels and areas had their color palettes dulled, and redesigned to just look plain uglier. Only the hardcore Sonic fans ever noticed this, though, because who bought a Dreamcast? And even among those who did, who played the Dreamcast and DX versions close enough together to notice the difference? They look similar enough at a surface level.
I mentioned there's a PC version, though, and you know what that means - mods! The Sonic fandom has always been blessed with a thriving and incredibly talented mod community, and I'd like to give a well-deserved shoutout to a few of them including MainMemory, SonicFreak94/Morph, and PkR for their wonderful work on both mods and mod tools for the game. Not only can you play SADX with the original Dreamcast textures and object layouts restored, but they've even reverse engineered and reimplemented an entire lighting system used in the original Dreamcast release and cut from the DX version. The differences are pretty dramatic (left is the vanilla PC version, right is with Dreamcast-style mods):
It's a god damn crime that the version of this game Sega sells today is so dramatically worse than the one they released in 1999. If you are ever interested in revisiting Sonic Adventure, I can't recommend these mods enough. It's not just lighting and textures either. There are other graphical effects restored, like the waves caused by the dolphin in the Dreamcast release's Emerald Coast that were replaced with a simple gelatin-esque bobbing of the water in SADX:
Perhaps some of these sacrifices were made in SADX to help raise the framerate, which was 30fps with drops on the Dreamcast and 60fps with drops on the GameCube. Still, those changes have also carried over into versions running on much more powerful hardware that's more than capable of rendering all the bells and whistles at high framerates. It's a shame that the DX version of the game is how Sonic Adventure will probably be remembered, due to being more widely available on more successful platforms.
Putting aside graphical fidelity, though, the main thing the game brings to the table visually is the god damn spectacle. For 1998, Sonic Adventure was a visual tour de force, with stunning setpieces and wild level design flair. As an audio-visual experience, this game was Sega at its creative peak, firing on all cylinders to make a game no other company could. The level design loves to fling you far above the stage so you can admire how expansive the level designs were for the time, and stages twist and turn and turn to bring classic Sonic's loops and slopes forward into vertigo-inducing three dimensional rollercoasters. There was nothing else like it.
There was another aspect to Sonic Adventure that goes practically forgotten in this day and age, and that's the internet connectivity. No version of the game after the Dreamcast had this, and as you might expect, you can't really use these features on that version anymore either. I was recently delighted to find, however, that someone has kept a mirror of the original Sonic Adventure website. This is exactly what you would get if you accessed the ”Internet" option in the main menu of the original game.
I still remember hooking my Dreamcast up to the internet for the first time. With a 56k modem, it was actually faster than the 33.6k connection my old Compaq had. I have so many memories associated with the online features of this game (and the Dreamcast in general) that are nearly impossible to recreate now. I remember getting stuck on the Chaos 4 boss fight and learning how to beat it from the Guide. I remember downloading people's Chao from the Daycare, and being blown away at how much better they were than mine. To be fair, some people used a Chao Editor program developed to run on your VMU that could modify your chat's stats however you wished. Yes, even in 2000, people had made homebrew for the VMU. The official #sonic IRC channel was also my first exposure to IRC, and the birthplace of my earliest real internet handle which I shall leave unnamed out of embarassment. On a less personal note, the site was also home to DLC downloads. DLC! In a console game from 1998! There were extra Twinkle Circuit courses, holiday events taking place in Station Square, and even some promotional in-game challenges for companies like AT&T and Adidas. None of this content is fully accessible in any modern release of the game, though thankfully, that hasn't stopped modders from working to bring it back. Does anyone else remember that AT&T-sponsored Knuckles time attack competition?
It's such a bummer to me, honestly, that so many people today are so immensely dismissive of Sonic Adventure. If I think about it, it's not hard to imagine reasons why. The Sonic franchise has worked very hard over the years to burn away all its goodwill. History is written by the victors, and the Dreamcast was not a victor. The version of the game that predominantly lives on today is inferior in many ways to the original release. There's plenty of aspects of the game that haven't aged well - the controls are loose, walls and floors often only exist in a state of temporal flux, most of the voice acting and cutscenes are awful (but hell, that's true of a lot of classics people still love), and Big the Cat will always be Big the Cat.
I'm writing this because in whatever small way I can, I want to fight back against a prevailing narrative that Sonic Adventure is some irredeemable pile of shit, best relegated to the dustbins of history along with Sonic 06 and Shadow the Hedgehog. By no means it is a flawless game, but it's a game with a tremendous amount of heart and talent poured into it. It broke new ground in its time in so many ways - the soundtrack holds up to this very day, the visuals dripped with style and helped usher in the 128-bit era, it supported DLC and online save-data sharing in a world before broadband was mainstream, and the game's boundless aspirations tried to bridge platformer gameplay with an RPG-style world and dabbled in more genres than the designers could reasonably juggle.
I mentioned earlier that I like Sonic Adventure over Super Mario 64, and I stand by that. Of course SM64 is a more competent game, with tighter controls, more clever platforming, and none of the janky glitches and ridiculous cutscenes that plague Sonic Adventure. I don't blame anyone for preferring it for those reasons alone. But I'll be damned if it isn't more boring. I joked to a friend recently that Mario is Disney - it's incredibly polished and accessible, with the best titles being masterpieces and even the lesser titles being at least competent. Almost anyone can love Disney. Sonic, though, is anime. Anime can be an absolute mess, with huge variations in quality and tons of elements that are horribly off-putting to the mass market. Many people will struggle to ever see the good in it. At its best, though, it's deeply ambitious and dares to make artistic choices mass-market media never would.
Personally, I'll always prefer a beautiful mess to plain perfection.
![IlVkty8.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/IlVkty8.jpg])
