Sonic Adventure: Recollections

I know this is kind of coming out of nowhere, but here me out. Actually, it's not really from nowhere, just from my mind.

 But anyways, awhile back I was replaying through Sonic Adventure DX. I was playing through this just for the sake of it. Now, I usually like to go back to games I enjoy (as we speak, I'm on my 5th or 6th playthrough of Paper Mario on a low health run without resorting to Danger Mario), but playing through this, I realized that the game wasn't nearly as enjoyable as I once thought it was.

Now why do you think that is? I mean, going through Sonic's stages, he had quite a few enjoyable levels, but he had his share of awful ones too (the last one in particular throwing weird physics and gimmicks into a level which should've been more interesting). Now, Sonic's portion is arguably the best, save for possibly E-102 Gamma's shooting stages which were good minus his poor jumping ability, but the others are just painful to go through. Tails only manages to scrape by due to having similar levels to Sonic, but just "racing" with other people.

Let's start with Knuckles. In the 2D games, he runs fast, he glides, he climbs walls. Pretty cool stuff. His stages here are focused on looking for pieces of the Master Emerald, with an emerald radar that blairs in your ears louder as you get closer. These are the least worst out of the "baddie three" group, but there are stages that it's just ridiculous, including the Casino and the last level that says "fuck you" to physics and throws you around in an air hanger as you try to not tear at your face trying to get it to work for you.

"I don't know why an ancient and powerful relic breaks so easily either."

Then there's Amy, who has changed from Pink Sonic clone into curvy hedgehog girl thing (seriously what are Sonic and all his friends? They're certainly not normal animals) in the span of a few years. She's a slower version of Sonic who can use a hammer and hammer jump. Let me stress the slow part. Her parts concern herself running away from a robot that wants to capture her due to a subplot involving this bird she chills with. Now these levels aren't hard, but super frustrating because you'll be hearing the same laser noises over and over. Worse yet, there's a puzzle involving putting color cubes into matching holes. This wouldn't be a problem, but your robot friend shows up to piss you off. You can hammer him to shut him down for a few seconds before he gets right back up and continues to chase you.

Prepare to hear WHIIIRRRRRR BEEEP BEEEP BEEP over and over
until you like it.

Let me paint the picture for you. You're working with a puzzle. Doesn't matter how many pieces. Now some asshole comes into your room and flips over your chair. You can punch him in the face, which stuns him for awhile, but he's going to keep pushing you off until you beat this puzzle which allows you to move on. This is essentially how these levels work. Frankly, they're just annoying. Worse yet, you fight off this very robot at the end of her stages anyways and beat it just fine, so what was stopping you before? At least there are only three levels.

Now Big. Big the Cat. Big the "Let's go fishing and settle down in a game that's focused on running around and action" Cat. Your job as Big is to find Froggy and to fish him out. Froggy is his friend. You are trying to catch your friend with a hook that will rip the sides of his jaw. Next time I hang out with my friends, I will stab them in the mouth, reporting how I'm trying to save them.

Now fishing isn't the worst thing in the world. It's quite relaxing. Not here though. It's clear Sega wanted to throw in a random element at the very last minute, and lo and behold, fishing. Now, as you cast your bait, the camera shifts towards it, you can kind of move it around as it sinks. Whether the fish give a damn about the bait is up to Random Number Gods themselves. Even if they bite on your bait, you have to contend with a very bizarre system, where you can't pull too much and snap your rope, and can't pull too little and, you guessed it, snap the rope. So it's kind of a battle to let the stress meter fall so you can reel in these fish/Froggy the friend with a gored mouth, a process which can take literal minutes.

Rolling around at the speed of snores

And if the line snaps? You lose and lose a live. I don't know how this works. Maybe Big realizes his failure as a giant fisher cat and just commits suicide. Plus, you have to do this 4 times. 5 times if you count his encounter with a boss, where you have to fish Froggy out of a watery body that is Chaos 6. You just throw the lure at the boss and win. There is no trickery. The boss doesn't fight you, it sidesteps left and right. This is a being powerful enough to wipe out entire cities. Truly, Big is a slayer of gods themselves.

Now, with all that in mind, I haven't even explored glitches. Such horrible things. It's clear that even with DX, a bonus version of the original version on the Dreamcast, that Sega did not try to fix this. Whether it's Sonic spinning through a wall into a black hole or jumping out of the level boundaries themselves, these aren't hard to find. Plus, with some bugged mechanics, like springs not taking you as far as they should in some levels, you will fall to your death, with no means of stopping it.

"Look Fwoggy! I broke reality again!"

Now this is just the first adventure. The second adventure game has it's own plethora of flaws.

Sonic and Shadow's levels are fine, save for maybe the final ones that mess with gravity and are therefore buggy at times. But Knuckle's collect stupid shit levels now return, but now Rouge the Bat, is also after pieces of the Master Emerald. Now hold up. It broke so easily in this game, Eggman just carried it off, dropped it, and it shattered to pieces that went to a Desert, Pumpkin Mountains, an Aquatic Mine, and then FUCKING OUTER SPACE. The first game had an excuse; Chaos comes out of the Emerald, which causes Angel Island to fall, which the pieces are spread out to various places during the fall. But here? Why is this necessary Sega? Do you think we wanted to play a dumb little treasure hunter even more? I just want to do stages with Knuckles, is that so hard?

"But why are they in space? There's no reason for them to be in space!"

Eggman and Tails levels are E-102's levels, both piloting mechs that shoot stuff. This is honestly not too bad, with being able to focus a laser on targets that allows you to shoot flurries of missiles the more targets you hit, but here's a problem. These levels require platforming. The mechs are heavy and do not jump very high. Needless to say, there are times you will not be able to properly jump from one area to the next without difficulties. You get a nice hover ability later, but even then, there are times you'll simply plummet into the water/pits/sand/space(effectively meaning you burn up in the atmosphere), and more!

Now, while I'm not a big fan of Adventure DX (even as a kid, it was pretty average to me), Adventure 2 will always have a spot in my gaming heart for one reason: The Chao. A mini game where you raise Chao, similar to the idea of Pokemon, with various stats for you to boost. In a magical place of the Chao Garden.

From left to right: Hero Chao, Neutral Chao, and Dark Chao.
Also Sonic and Shadow too I guess. Sonic's kind of a jerk here.

The idea of this is that enemies drop animals and chaos drives in levels, and giving these things that you find to the Chao effect their growth, whether its increasing their stats or giving them an animal trait (giving a penguin for example will possibly transform their arms into flippers, getting a macaroni penguin brow, or giving them bird feet). And with that, there's also stuff like changing their little antennae thing over their head into a floating fireball, an animal that lets them breath fire, different wings on their back, a tail, one that lets your chao put on headgear, and more. So you can tell Sega put a bunch of effort into this.

"The heart on my head is a lie. Stop adding crap to me."

Not to mention, their stats effect what they can and can't do. 100 Swimming allows them to swim in water. 50 running allows them to walk, later on they can take bigger steps and trip less. 150 flying allows a small chance while flying off edges for them to glide in the air. And that's not all! With power and stamina, you also had the other sidequests: Chao Racing and Chao Karate (exclusive to SA2: Battle). The first one is a test of your Chao's abilities in a race where certain abilities are tested more than others (for example, one is climbing a rock wall, one that needs power). These grow harder and harder as you go on, but more interesting, allowing for a good sense of progression. Once you fully complete one, you get items, such as TVs, watering cans that let you plant trees, beach balls, and more.

Solar Powered TVs are the way of the future

The other one, my personal favorite, is Chao Karate. Here, you get to see your cute little guys beat the shit out of each other. Again, stats effect where they stand up or stand down, throw soft punches or do spinning kicks, how much health there is, etc. While not very complex, it's very entertaining.

KICK HIS FACE IN, PAINT YOUR FACE WITH HIS BLOOD
I mean Karate, wooh.

Not to mention, your Chao has three different species it can be: Hero, Neutral, and Dark, as seen above. Have good guys/bad guys pet them, receive that chao type. Now remember those stats I told you about? They can effect how your Chao looks after it becomes "an adult." It can look like a normal one above, or it can be a different type all together. For example, there's dark swim types, and hero run types. Now once you do get one of these, if you focus on ANOTHER stat, it will morph even further! Not to mention, since Chao do eventually die (but are reborn if they love you), there are more ways to change them.

Click below link for all the types made. My particular favorite Chao I have, along with
along with having my favorite apperance, is a Hero Swim/Run Chao.

Chao, Chao, and Chao, Oh My!

To add in all these things, you can name your Chao by going to the Fortune Teller. Not only this, but you can take it to Kindergarten, where it will learn various things, such as how to play the trumpet, sing, play drums, play tambourine, draw, and more. What's even cooler, if you have Chao with multiple instruments, if one starts playing and others are nearby, they will join in with their own instruments/singing. And the drawings Chao are neat too. Even better, taking them to the same classes multiple times allows them to get more proficient with this!

On top of everything, there's more! (I can hear that groan, stop that!) There are eggs for Chao, and these eggs can be normal, a mono tone color, a gem style egg, or a shiny gem. Raising these will keep your Chao that specific color. But what's even better, is that if you breed (yes, Chao breeding is a thing, and it is needed to make the best Chao, so get ready to do some baby making), you can combine these to make different Chaos entirely, including transparent Chao. This is something I only barely touched upon with a friend, where we breeded our best Chao and ended up making a chao that could go dark and instead of turning the usual red, would become black and blue, which actually looked really cool.

This isn't what the Chao looked like, but your Chao CAN look like this!
The NiGHTS style Chao are pretty great themselves.

Now you might be asking, "Goose, you handsome man you, why are you going on and on about it when you just talked about how terrible the other games are?" First of all, why are you complimenting me like that? And second; THIS is what I like about the games. In fact, the only reason I play the main part of the games is to get emblems to unlock more Chao stuff, to get rings so I can afford this stuff, and get stat stuff for the Chao. Which usually means playing City Escape a million times, in the same pattern to get tons of rings to get stat items.

This is a feature in both the games, and its clear a ton of work was put into it. But it's really a shame. This is what I enjoy about these games. If the game had no Chao Garden, I would get bored quickly. I might even find the games a waste of time. With each level in the second having five missions, each one having to be an A rank to get another emblem, for EVERY character, is just stupid.  In the first, there's 3 missions for each level. Running these same levels over and over isn't fun. Especially not the bloody hard mode for Knuckles and Rouge.

What do I have to say to sum this all up? The games simply don't hold up as well as they do today. Sure, their time on the Dreamcast was stunning, with cutting edge graphics and decent music, but the charm really has gone away with time. With bugs, awkward camera angles, music that grows monotonous in some areas, samey gameplay, and more, it really takes a toll on the enjoyment overall. At least the Chao will continue to be with us. I even sort of wish that in itself, it'd be its own little game. Maybe someday we'll get a Sonic Adventure 3, with good gameplay, and even better Chao Garden.

Not any time soon, Sonic.