I’ve always had a complicated relationship with this game and its sequel. As a kid, I was a huge Sonic fan and the Sonic Adventure duology were two of my most played childhood games because I was just so enamored with their music, characters, and general aesthetic. I also never actually beat them until adulthood because I would invariably reach a part where I stopped having fun and turned the game off. While I hesitate to call Sonic Adventure 2 bad because there is so much I genuinely love about it, I don’t have that same hesitancy with Sonic Adventure 1 because I think this game feels like total shit to play. I do commend Sonic Team for what they were able to achieve with this game because there truly was no blueprint for what they were doing, but they still made a bad game.

There is genuinely so little that I like about what this game does beyond its music and aesthetic. Instead of picking one central idea and sticking with it to the end, Sonic Adventure has so many half-baked (sometimes quarter-baked) it throws at you with little regard to how they fit together or if they actually even work properly. The best thing I can say about Sonic Adventure is that the stuff everybody complains about isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, but I can’t say any of that stuff is actually good. Like, sure, the hate for the Big the Cat fishing minigame is extremely overblown, but no matter what defense you can conjure up for it I don’t understand how you could walk away from it saying that it was fun. I’ve said before that I can understand how most Sonic game could be someone’s favorite, and that includes Sonic Adventure. There is some genuinely good stuff here (keyword here being ‘some’) and I think video games as a medium would be worse off if this game didn’t exist. But everytime I play it, I don’t see a gem that’s rough around the edges, but an overly ambitious game that I wish was far better than it is.