User blog:TyrantRex/TyrantRex's thoughts on Sonic Adventure

Note: This isn't a proper review, but rather my thoughts and opinions on the game!

Background
A while ago I decided to give Sonic the Hedgehog a chance and tried 3 different Sonic games, one of them being Adventure 2 which everyone said was one of the best. It didn't exactly go well though... putting it simply, I couldn't finish the game because I hate the Treasure Hunting and Mech Shooting levels and turns out the most of the game was Treasure Hunting and Mech Shooting. However I did like the Sonic levels but they made such a small part of the game that were not enough to salvage the game as a whole.

About a month later I realized that for some reason Steam is still installed on my computer even though I'm sure I deleted it forever and Adventure 1 is dirt cheap so I decided against my better judgement to give it another chance. And luckily I had already sorted out the Dualshock 4 problem so no more trying to use a keyboard as a controller.

The Game
Are you sure this is a Dreamcast game? Because I've seen N64 games that look better than this. Character models are even more obviously polygonal than Mario was in Super Mario 64 and the animation is... yeah, Eggman doesn't even have a mouth. On the bright side the soundtrack is quite good and has a lot more variety than SA2's. The plot of the game.... well I honestly have no idea what it is because after 20 minutes I started skipping every single cutscene because the voice acting is so bad it makes my ears bleed.

ANYWAYS, my biggest problem with SA2 and the reason I couldn't finish was the alternate playstyles. Both sucked and were too overabundant to the point that they completely overshadowed the Sonic/Shadow levels, it also didn't help that you were constantly forced to play them because the story modes alternate between playstyles as the story progressed. Well I'm glad to see that problem isn't present in SA1. Even though there are twice as many playstyles, every character is separated into their own specific story modes. If you pick Sonic, you'll only play as Sonic no constantly being forced to tolerate characters you hate just to get to the one you do want to play as, if there' a character you hate playing as you can ignore it (unless you want the final boss).

For that matter, out of the 6 characters there were only 2 I hated playing as and both were so short lived there wasn't much reason to get upset about them because they barely showed up. That's another thing SA1 does better, even though Sonic still gets less than half of the levels, he does get the longest story mode so he feels more prominent. Regardless, here's what I thought of each character: So yeah, aside from the robot and the fat cat I don't have much problem with the different playstyles, imo they should've cut those two and give more levels to the rest of the characters. My biggest problem with SA2 is not a thing here so I could finish the game. However there was a huge constant problem that irritated me the whole time: THE CAMERA.
 * Sonic:  More or less the same as in SA2, only not as fleshed out. Reasonable I guess, and still good despite some control issues and some levels being dumb.
 * Tails:  He's basically Sonic on easy mode, you race another character to complete the stage using shortcuts.
 * Knuckles:  Surpsingly he doesn't suck to the point of ragequitting! The radar tracks ALL THE PIECES AT ONCE so you won't fumble around in circles for 20 minutes. If anything, this only made me hate the SA2 Treasure Levels even more because gimping the radar was such a terrible design choice.
 * Amy:  Most people say Amy is one of the worst characters in the game. Honestly, I didn't mind her at all, she's more traditional platformer levels while avoiding a robot, don't see what the problem is. The real problem however, is that she only gets 3 levels and a 50 second boss fight! I beat Amy's story mode in about 30 minutes not counting the time spent on hub worlds, it's so short that it feels pointless.
 * Robot whose name I never learned: Pointless filler.
 * Fat cat voiced by Duke Nukem:  WHY??????

I've seen some really bad primitive cameras but SERIOUSLY this game has the worst camera I've seen in my entire life, it's so bad it makes the game borderline unplayable at times. The thing constantly gets stuck on walls making it impossible to see where you're going, is horribly stiff to turn around, constantly moves when you don't want it to, and is always pointing at the worst angle possible. Running fast for longer than 4 seconds was next to impossible because the broken camera made me bump into a wall I couldn't see. The amount of times I died because the camera suddenly shifted to a different angle in the middle of a jump were infuriating too.

...sooo yeah. As a whole I liked Sonic Adventure 1 a lot more than Adventure 2, it also reinforced my belief that when people praise the Adventure games they're only talking about Sonic levels and ignoring the rest. Honestly, I still wasn't very convinced, but hey I didn't regret playing the game and had a good enough time. Not playing it again though.