I'm not very happy right now. Sega has ported Sonic Adventure to the Gamecube, but that's not what upsets me; I think Sega's doing a great service to people by porting the Dreamcast's best game to a system where more people will notice it. I'm really angered because Sega completely butchered this amazing game. Newcomers to the game won't notice it, but I really think that they deserve to play this amazing game without the severe problems that plague this director's cut.
Sonic Adventure came out on Sega's Dreamcast back in 1999, and it was the first truly 3D Sonic game (Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R don't count). The story for both the old and new versions remains the same; the game opens with the blue blur investigating a strange disturbance in the city of Station Square. A monster named Chaos has come to town, and Sonic takes care of the threat. However, Chaos escapes and later, Sonic finds out that his nemesis, Dr. Robotnik, is going to use Chaos to try and conquer the world. He plans to collect all seven Chaos Emeralds which, when fed to Chaos, will transform him into a Godzilla-like monster. Robotnik will then use him to destroy Station Square so he can build his own utopian society on the city's ruins, with himself as dictator. It's up to Sonic to put a stop to the evil scientist's plan. Sonic is joined by various characters (friendly and unknown), who are unknowingly part of Robotnik's evil scheme.
The player starts the game as Sonic, but as the game progresses, they can play with 5 other characters, each with their own gameplay style. Sonic, of course, is the speed demon and his levels involve blasting through the levels as fast as possible, just like in the Genesis days. Tails's stages play out similar to Sonic's, but as Tails, the player must race another character to the end of the level. Knuckles' job is to collect the missing shards of the Master Emerald by exploring the various levels. Other characters include Amy Rose, whose stages play out like slower paced adventure/platform games, Big the Cat, who must fish to finish each level, and E-102 Gamma, a robot who blasts through third person shooting style stages. In between these stages, the characters must explore an overworld that connects each level to one another, much like Super Mario 64.
Sounds good, right? Well it is, or it's supposed to be anyway. One of the best parts of the game (and one of the things that wasn't completely destroyed in this remake) is the variety of gameplay. Along with the racing on foot, exploration, fishing, shooting, and adventure styles, there are many mini-games here that cover various gameplay styles. In one level, you're snowboarding down a snowy mountain. On another, you're shooting down enemy planes with Tails' fighter plane. In others, you're sandboarding through a desert, racing go-karts, playing pinball, or playing a Sonic-themed game of Whack-a-Mole. In addition, there's also the raising of Chaos (pronounced chows) to win races (the whole idea of the Chaos is kind of like Tamagotchi with competitive racing, kind of like horse racing). It's all good here.
Another excellent facet of the Dreamcast game that survived the voyage to the Gamecube was the audio. I love the classic Sonic sound effects and all the new ones, as well. I even kind of liked the voiceovers, which fit their respective characters perfectly, even though some are quite goofy. Big the Cat, for example, sounds a lot like Dudley Moore. The music in the game is amazing, though, with very high quality tunes (with many different music styles and the use of real instruments like guitars and pianos), some classic Sonic music and a couple of original vocal songs that perfectly complement the characters and situations in the game. Even better, this Gamecube version has Dolby Pro Logic support, so players can hear the wonderful audio in crisp surround sound.
Everywhere else, we run into severe problems. The graphics looked amazing on the Dreamcast back in 1999, but the graphics have not been upgraded that much for 2003. Sure, the characters look a little shinier and the load times are faster than in the Dreamcast game, but that's about it. Even worse is the game's framerate. This version tries to bump up the framerate from 30 FPS on the Dreamcast to 60 FPS on Gamecube, which is a great idea. However, the game's constantly slows down to a framerate speed that's even worse than the Dreamcast version's. The Gamecube is the more powerful of the two consoles, isn't it?
This wouldn't too much of a problem if it occurred rarely, but it slows down very frequently, killing the sensation of speed. The whole point with the Sonic games is that the amazing speed and the sight of your character blasting through levels is supposed to blow you away. To have a poor framerate in a game like this is inexcusable (especially when the game runs worse on the more powerful system). Hey, Sonic Team, Sonic Adventure 2 ran like a dream on the Gamecube (just like it did on Dreamcast), so what happened here?
Now for the big question: how does this game play? Well, the horrible framerate really hurts the controls of the game, but aside from that, we have other problems. The Gamecube controller, with its different sized buttons, can be kind of confusing and the game overall doesn't respond nearly as well as it with the Dreamcast's controller. The camera work is even worse than before (if you can believe that) and the developers stupidly removed the first-person look-around function from the Dreamcast game. This came in handy in certain places, so why did they get rid of it? It makes no sense.
I mentioned earlier that the game is a director's cut, so what's new? Well, there are new missions to complete (but no new levels), but the biggest difference is that you can now unlock and play ports of all the Sonic games ever released on the Game Gear (some have never been released in the US until now). My favorite of these is Tails' Adventure, a slower paced, 2D game that played out a little like Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link from the NES. I really enjoyed it, and its here in all its glory (just like Sonic Adventure, now more people can be exposed to this great game).
You may have not been able to tell from this review, but I am extremely angry at Sega for taking the opportunity to expose more people to a great game and then screwing most everything up. They did the same thing with Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 on Dreamcast, and I was angry then, too. I'm angrier now, though, because it seems as if Sega believes that they can lazily port these old games to new consoles with little to no effort, and then still have the consumers buy it without catching wise and calling them on it. Well, think again, Sega. You may be my favorite game company, but I'm not gonna stand for this anymore. If you want to play this game the way it was meant to be played, buy the Dreamcast version instead. The Gamecube version is just an abomination, and if you give Sega any of your hard earned dollars for it, you're only encouraging them to keep up this shameful practice. I'm giving Sonic Adventure DX a very angry score of 3 out of 10.
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