Sonic Adventure is one of my favorite games of all time; it's one of the first games that I ever played, it has a really cool setting and characters, and it has a lot of neat mechanics that feel good to play. On my Tumblr page, I wrote a retrospective essay series on the game, citing its successes and flaws in game design. For my website, this will be a more concise, focused version of the retrospective that closely follows the YouTube version.
Sonic Adventure introduces players to the new, stylish, and rebellious Sonic, selling itself on rock-and-roll, 3D graphics, and high-speed action. The game was quickly solidified as a fan-favorite and kickstarted the modern era of both Sonic and its fandom. In fact, this game was so popular that for years, Sonic fans asked when another game would come out just like it. When I wrote the original retrospective, I asked myself whether the franchise really needs a game just like it. To make thousands of words short, Sonic Adventure is a bad game. Poor level design, lazily padded game sections, and a cavalcade of glitches all serve to harm a smooth and rewarding game experience. But, in a strange way, that is exactly why this game matters to Sonic fans. There is as much potential as there are flaws, and so many fans ask about a return to this Sonic Adventure-style of game because they want to see that potential fulfilled. The game features multiple playable characters, and they mostly have great mechanics. Each of them play the way you expect them to, with unique abilities that distinguish them from each other as they navigate the game world. Almost every aspect of their movement, from the jump height and distance, to acceleration, turning, and deceleration, is both reliable and satisfying. There's a great sense of momentum as Sonic carries his speed into a jump, or transitions from a jump into a run. Controlling Sonic and his friends has never been as good as Sonic Adventure. These mechanics lend themselves to great gameplay dynamics. With Sonic, you can use a spin dash on a slope and carry that velocity and direction into your jump, and then finish that jump with a homing attack to get that little bit of extra distance to clear a gap. Players can keep that in mind as they traverse the level, looking for opportunities to use this knowledge and skill to discover something new. Unfortunately, these dynamics are rarely played with in the intended designs of the level. As these action stages are mostly designed as single-track gauntlets, the intentional design and the speedrunner exploit become easy to distinguish. Sonic's levels feature so many narrow tracks, loops, and dash panels that serve to show off how fast Sonic moves. Speed is a spectacle, and that spectacle makes a level memorable, but takes away from an active player experience. Sonic Adventure treats speed like an expectation, when Sonic games should be treating speed like a reward. Maybe the player completed a really tricky gauntlet and they need that shot of adrenaline to keep them excited until the end of the level, or maybe they saw a secret path in the stage that requires them to build up the momentum to reach it. Speed should be fueling the excitement and exploration, and players seeking that speed should be challenged and rewarded for it. Tails races against Sonic in linear sections of Sonic's levels. He can't move as fast, but his key mechanic is his ability to fly. The developers make an attempt at using this mechanic by placing aerial speed-boosting rings throughout the stage, which allow Tails to skip over sections of the level and gain the advantage. What ended up happening is that Tails' stages became incredibly too easy and left players seeking challenge feeling unsatisfied. Not only does this come off as obvious game padding and lazy level design, but it also presented a ludonarrative dissonance in Tails' character arc - a disharmony between gameplay and story. Tails struggles with his insecurities as a sidekick and wants to believe in himself as Sonic's equal, but it's hard for players to believe this struggle when gameplay usually has Tails leaving Sonic behind in the dust. Gamma's levels operate as 3D shooting galleries; players move from Point A to Point B within a time limit and shoot down everything in between to buff up their remaining time. Time becomes an economy, where players must know where enemies are and when to shoot them down in order to complete the stage in time. The biggest issue here is that these levels pass by without needing those extra seconds; the average Gamma stage could be as short as 30 seconds. Treating time like an economy doesn't feel like an important mechanic because the starting time is more than enough to get through each stage, and this makes every stage feel too easy and unfulfilling. Amy spends her levels on the run from Eggman's hunter robot, Zero. This robot supposedly ruthlessly pursues the player through sections of the stage, but it never feels like a real threat. There are a few jump-scare moments and chases that are enhanced by tricky level mechanics, like the mirrored sections of Twinkle Park or the rolling levers and ladders in Hot Shelter, but any tension is either broken by the scripted nature of the encounters or the fact that hitting Zero with Amy's hammer will stun it long enough to get away. There is a great moment in Hot Shelter where the player needs to push a ladder towards an escape vent as Zero closes in on them, but it's quickly ruined by the game script. As soon as you stand next to the pushing mechanism, Zero flies away. If playing as Amy is supposed to make players feel more vulnerable and desperate, the game did a poor job of communicating that with their main mechanic. & Knuckles' levels are themed around exploration and treasure hunting, which work well with his gliding, wall-climbing, and digging abilities. Players are dropped in an open area to explore and uncover shards of the broken Master Emerald. Because the emerald radar tracks all pieces simultaneously, it often attention is taken away from the stage itself as the eyes are drawn squarely to the interface. Additionally, random placement means that the treasures could be found in less than a minute more often by luck than skill. And Big just should not have been in the game. The second biggest point of the game is its adventure field - a central hub between action stages. Sonic Adventure succeeds at crafting an interesting world with strong visual and narrative themes - the Mystic Ruins hints at a deeper and mysterious past that's further explored in the Tikal flashbacks, Station Square features many NPCs with their own stories and arcs that indicate a changing present, and the Egg Carrier gives a rare look into the stylish, but cold and robotic lifestyle of Eggman, and foreshadows the kind of future he wants to build. World-building is meant to make people think about how they would live in the fictional world presented to them, and Sonic Adventure's success in this is proven by the years of fanart and fanfiction that proliferate throughout the internet over the past twenty years. This game presented people with a colorful, changing world with a rich and interesting history that people wanted to learn more about. In terms of gameplay, however, the adventure field is inconsistent and confusing. Adventures need three things to drive player action - an objective, a motivation, and a direction. The adventure field, as the means of taking players between action stages, often fails to provide all three, and sometimes fails in giving just one. Sometimes levels become available through a key-and-lock system, sometimes they require a new ability to access, and sometimes they need you to walk around the area until a cutscene triggers. Some of these sections provide an objective and direction without motivation, which leaves players asking "Why do I have to do this? What does this have to do with my character's goals?" Sometimes these sections provide an objective and motivation without direction, leaving players asking "Where do I have to go?" And if the game gives you nothing, you just walk around until it does. The way this adventure field is set up constantly breaks the flow of the game, confuses players, and mostly relies on you knowing what to do because this section crossed over with another character's story. Sometimes an NPC would point you to where you need to go, and other times they say nothing important at all. Most players might not even talk to NPCs because the game never presents them as being valuable to the play experience. Lastly, the adventure field is devoid of any reason to explore it after the story. There are a few optional ability upgrades (that have no real use to gameplay), some hidden emblems, and the Chao Garden minigame, but it's otherwise empty. Each of these characters have unique ways of interacting with and exploring the environment, like Sonic's light speed dash, Tails' flight, Gamma's laser, Amy's hammer, & Knuckles, but they only use their abilities to find something new just a handful of times. There are no meaningful collectibles or secrets to discover. With no incentive to keep the adventure going when the game is over, the adventure field wastes any potential that these characters had to explore it. This game had so much going on for it when it came out - brand recognition, great presentation, good mechanics with interesting dynamics, and characters that weren't just avatars for gameplay. Sonic, Tails, Amy, Gamma, & Knuckles all had their own stories with their own character development. They had goals, motivations, fears, anxieties, strengths, weaknesses - for cartoony animal video game characters , they had depth that no other platformer games were offering. The world wasn't just some playground, but somewhere these characters lived; it had a history, a future, and even though it borrowed elements of the real world, it was still just fantastical enough that you could believe Sonic spent his time there. The game inspired imagination for possible stories to explore, characters to meet, and adventures to be had. And even if the gameplay had flaws, I still remember each of the levels fondly for their great visual themes and music. The game relied so much on spectacle, but they did it so well that my first impression lingers to this day. Despite its overall flaws, there are still some brilliant examples of good game design that really got me thinking on my feet as a player, like some parts of Lost World (the stage, not the game), and nearly all of Red Mountain. Most players might not think much of Red Mountain because it lacks the spectacle of other stages, but it offered the most freedom in tackling each platforming challenge while keeping your momentum going. There's a small detail that I love where the level begins and ends with launching Sonic on a rocket. Skilled players can get off the first rocket and land Sonic on a shortcut at the start of the level, and skilled players can get off the last rocket and land Sonic on the goal capsule to finish in style. It's a satisfying mirror that offers a nice punctuation to the stage. Not every level is made like this, but each of them are just as memorable. There is not a single forgettable level in Sonic Adventure, and that is something even the best games struggle to achieve. The biggest problem with this game is that there is something special there buried under laziness. The ideas are all there, with an imaginative setting and great balance of serious story-telling and cartoony anime aesthetics; the foundation is there, with solid gameplay mechanics that have interesting ways of working together; but the execution is lazy and wrong. I like to compare this game to Mass Effect - not in scale, scope, or quality, but in the fact that the first game has a lot of great things going on and a few not-so-great things. In Mass Effect 2, BioWare cut out anything that didn’t work and iterated on the things that did, streamlining the experience. But it was missing some of that charm or aesthetic from the original. In Mass Effect 3, BioWare iterated again on the best of Mass Effect 2 and found a way to merge them with the cut elements of Mass Effect to see the potential, the ideas of the first game fully realized. Sonic Adventure 2 similarly cut out the poorly received sections of Sonic Adventure and worked on streamlining what they considered their strongest game mechanics. And while Sonic Adventure 2 is a lot of fun and overall feels good to play, I always missed the charm of Sonic Adventure, for all its flaws. I think a lot of the fanbase agrees – Sonic Adventure had a lot of potential that never went fulfilled. I think that the reason why fans of these games want Sonic Adventure 3 is because they want Sonic Adventure to be given the same chance Mass Effect had – to improve its best ideas and evolve its weaker ones – to see the game it was always meant to be.
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AuthorGreg Anthony is a game designer and writer who turns his long essays into videos for YouTube. ArchivesCategories |