Sonic Adventure

I have a bizarre soft spot for this game because of how weirdly ambitious it is for its time - six characters with intertwining storylines in a sorta-open-world and also one of them is basically just a fishing game? But don't get me wrong, it's a terrible game.

This is when everything went downhill FAST.

This is a good Sonic game.

One of the few games to literally make me feel sick while playing, but in of itself isn't particularly good. It has too much emphasis on going fast, foregoing the fun platformer elements of the 2D games. Even worse is how it gets muddled up in a bunch of different playstyles due to the multiple characters you can play as, with mixed results. As someone who grew up with Sonic, it was pretty depressing to see this lead to the disasters this character would be associated with in later years.

if you enjoyed this game as a kid, congrats! never play it again.

It's buggy, it has absolutely no idea what tone it's trying to establish, and it's packed with amusingly awkward voice acting and idiosyncratic vocal tracks. It is, in short, the model of a 3D Sonic game. As much as the tendency to fall through the floor frustrates, and the games really could have done without the bathos that bled over from all the spin off media, it's a (mostly) fun spectacle with lots of odd ambition—down to a gratuitous raising sim, and of course, fishing.

The 'guided' parts often stop you dead or throw you out of bounds or into an enemy. The controls are also hypersensitive and you can often send yourself to death just because you want to slightly adjust your position on the track. There's also no guidance for where to go after a level and you are left wandering around for ages if you don't use a walkthrough. When the racing parts work though, they're quite fun, but there are few of those moments.

The Sonic levels themselves, pretty amusing. Everyone else's subgames, oh dear.

This is a very ambitious game that tries to do a lot. Sure the game is buggy at times, and Big The Cat sucks, but the music is bumping and the levels are all very beautiful and fun to go through. This game is in desperate need of a remake because this formula in my opinion is way better than the formula Sonic Team has been using since Unleashed. I want to play as multiple characters and actually explore the levels again.

I didn't like it when it was new; 3D doesn't do well for Sonic and I don't like the way it has to compensate for those flaws. And Big the Cat. I was already souring on Sonic and this game just turned that sour into bitter.

If at any moment you see Sonic not be a 2D sprite rip the game out of the system and destroy it before it destroys your time.

Sonic Adventures is seriously flawed in many ways but I just love it. It's a classic 3D platformer and, while it's very glitchy, focuses a lot on set piece moments that age badly, and has a scattered gameplay style that ranges from janky platformer to awful fishing game, there's just something unabashedly FUN about it. Maybe it's the hilariously awful story and voice acting, maybe it's the bizarre pleasure I get from taking advantage of the glitches, or maybe it's just that I enjoy the game.

I'll give it some credit for being ambitious. But since it is a later-day Sonic game, it is still quite bad.