Monday, October 25, 2010

Sonic Adventure (XBLA) Review





When it comes to Sonic versus Mario, I’ve always been a Mario fan. I most certainly do not hate Sonic, and Sonic Adventure continues the fairly neutral trend I have when it comes to Sonic. I found myself getting angered throughout the game with the story being the reason I wanted to keep playing, and once I beat it I was satisfied with my choice.


Throughout the Sonic series, Dr. Robotnik, also known as Dr. Eggman, is stirring up evil by getting his hands on the chaos emeralds, and Sonic must put his plans to an end. In Sonic Adventure, this basic storyline continues; Dr. Robotnik is feeding the chaos emeralds to a monster, Chaos. As Chaos eats more emeralds, he gets stronger. When he eats all seven of the emeralds, he will be invincible, and obviously, no one would want Dr. Robotnik to have an invincible beast on his side. So, Sonic is on a race to get the emeralds before Robotnik. In addition to the main story being about Sonic, each of the five other side-characters, Tails, Knuckles, Big, Amy and E-102 “Y”,  have a story of their own.   It was really cool how each story tied in with the main story, but still gave each character separate levels. Although, occasionally the E-102 and Knuckles stories deviate from the main story causing a little confusion. Deviations aside, each side-story was still well worth it to see how each character got involved with the story.

Sonic Adventure may have worthwhile story, but it is a miserable journey to see the story unfold. For starters, no matter what character you choose to play as you will be faced with horrible camera angles. There are also a lot of glitches that drop you through the ground and walls, and if that’s not enough there are invisible walls as well! It can be frustrating at times to deal with these problems, but nothing can compare to the horrid physics engine, constant glitches and disgusting camera angles on Big’s story. I got about half way through Big’s story when I had enough and needed to quit. If I hadn’t quit, I would not still have a functioning Xbox 360, and my TV would have a controller-sized hole through it. None of the other characters’ stories were nearly as bad as the painstaking adventure of Big. The combat is also poor. For a majority of the story you have just one attack which seems to be able to kill anything. The combat could have definitely been spiced up a little. Sonic Adventure definitely fails in gameplay, which takes a lot away from the overall experience.

Because Sonic Adventure is an HD-port of a Dreamcast game, the graphics should be much improved. The graphics may have a higher resolution, but I feel as if there should have been more of an improvement. Even though the graphics haven't seen a huge update, they still look fine. The game looks nearly exactly like the present-day Sonic games. However, the enemies in certain levels are of bad enough quality to actually see the pixels. The levels, in contrast to the enemies that inhabit them, are above and beyond the originals. Some levels could have been improved, but a majority of the levels are unique and have awesome scenery.

The music in Sonic Adventure is not of the greatest quality. Each level has its own soundtrack, but it is hard to notice and nothing really sticks in your brain. If it takes you a while to complete a level the sound track also gets repetitive. As well as each level having their own soundtrack, so do the characters. This can be extremely annoying to listen to over and over again, especially when it comes to Ami’s sound track, which sounds as if a few ladies had just ran a mile and had begun panting. Try listening to that for an hour! The music may be annoying and repetitive but it’s not nearly as bad as the characters saying the same things continuously. For instance, in the final battle against Eggman, it seems all he can say is “Get a load of this Sonic!”  Along with the speaking being repetitive, there are audio/video sync problems when characters are talking. There is definitely a lot more work that could have gone into updating the audio of Sonic Adventure.

If you’re looking for a cheap game with hours of gameplay this should be fine for you. For an XBLA game this has an enormous amount of levels and replayability. Sonic Adventure keeps you coming back with its unique levels, like as an awesome snowboarding level that I played at least five times before I moved on. Along with the normal levels, that you can replay anytime you want once you've finished the story, there are also sub-games that include races and other mini games. Once you beat a character's story, you won’t want to replay it, but having six separate stories makes up for this.

Sonic Adventure isn’t good enough to sway my opinions about Sonic games, but it doesn’t lower my opinion of Sonic games either. The upsetting camera angles and constant glitches were hard to deal with, but it was worth playing the stories to see it all tie together. Sonic Adventure is a good game to get if you want a full-sized game for a cheap cost as long as you can deal with the glitches and other gameplay issues.

-Blake Everett

                                                                    5/10 Okay
                                   Value: $20

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