I decided to go ahead and recomplete this but on the GameCube version this time so I could get access to all of Sonic's Game Gear library in this version, and now I can safely say that this game is still just as goofy and janky as I remembered from my original completion several years ago. In terms of an overall experience, I'd say it's alright though. I can't really speak on the quality of the Dreamcast original because I Have Never Owned A Dreamcast, but I generally feel as this is just a more awkward and less polished experience than SA2. I've generally preferred SA2 over this one since I mainly feel it does everything this does but better. Sometimes that works out in it's own benefit, and other times it really doesn't. It's overall jankiness really does make for quite an experience. Seriously, you can really tell how badly all the clear tape and paperclips are holding this game together, it's kinda amazing in it's own right. It really is just lovably jank... well, until it isn't. I'll get to that soon, however.
This main highlights of the game come from Sonic's, Tails', Knuckles', and Gamma's stories. As I cover each gameplay style, I mainly wanna talk about how each of them play normally and how each is affected by their extra stage missions as well. (I like to talk about my experiences not just from casually playing but with doing everything the game has to offer, after all) Sonic is pretty self explanatory, he's the iconic fast man. You run, jump, and spindash through stages. It seems that Sonic is mainly who the game was based around as he has easily the most stages in the game with 10, as the max the others get was 5 iirc. Not sure if it was generally okay to try and build other character's stages off of Sonic stages, as sometimes I feel as certain stages are designed like playing a Sonic stage in a Knuckles stage, or vice versa. This kinda makes most of the stage designs here kinda wonky as they don't really feel as sometime they don't really feel like they were made with a specific playstyle in mind. Speaking of the game being built around sonic, it might also generally reflect on his stage missions as well as his are generally the hardest due to the sheer quantity as well as the strict timers for some of the A missions. Twinkle Park and Lost World are particularly bad cases of this. Twinkle Park has a very strict time limit of 3 minutes for it's A mission, so you have to basically play the level near flawlessly. And Lost World is just generally my least favorite stage in the franchise honestly. It has so many incredibly frustrating bits, and with the 4:30 time limit for the A mission it becomes one real test of how much you can put up with.
Tails might honestly be my favorite story solely on the virtue of how utterly broken it is. Adding in a character that can fly really shows the cracks in this game. Tails can just fucking eviscerate these level designs. There's nothing more hilarious than just skipping the literal entirety of the first stage. The other stages don't get the same mercy either. Aside from Icecap, Tails has plenty of opportunities to soar right past anything the developers intended you to play through legitimately. The only exception to this is Icecap but that's solely because you're locked to a snowboard the entire stage, so I guess this stage gets to feel lucky as it doesn't get to be victim of Tails at his full potential. I haven't even really touched on his other gimmick of racing Sonic/Eggman to the end as you don't even really need to pay attention to them. They're pretty easy to beat even on their A mission variants, and unleashing The Wrath of Tails on them basically means you never really get to see them at all. The fastest thing alive really doesn't seem to mean much when you can just fly past everything he has to maneuver around.
Knuckles is kind of an odd one. He has what might be the one aspect that I feel SA1 does better than SA2, and that's the emerald radar. I'm gonna be honest and say that they really didn't need to limit the emerald radar they way they did there. But I still feel as SA2 does it better mostly and that's mainly due to the stage design. Alot of the gripes I had earlier with the whole "stage design fusion awkwardness" mainly shows in this story. I feel like they tried to somehow make certain stage layout try to work as both Sonic and Knuckles and I don't feel as if it really worked on Knuckles' end, and just ended up being a detriment on Sonic's end. The treasure stages in SA2 to me felt like they were make for the treasure hunting playstyle, unlike here. Aside from those gripes, it's still a rather solid story. Knuckles' A missions can be really annoying though, with the very strict time limits on them combined with the random placement of the emerald shards. I learned you can abuse restarting, as it resets you at the last checkpoint in this game, which for Knuckles is at the last emerald piece he got, so you can scavenge around for the emerald pieces the go straight for them after restarting when you know where they are to potentially make those A missions easier. (i don't remember if this was changed in later rereleases so please don't get angry if it was)
Gamma is another kinda odd one. They have a new shooter-type gameplay style, which went to be expanded upon in the mech stages of SA2. I've heard some people prefer Gamma's gameplay to the SA2 mech but I honestly don't see it. In comparison I feel as the target laser is less responsive and wears off annoyingly fast, and the hover noticeably screws up your momentum when you use it. Like Knuckles I feel as Gamma is still a solid story even with my gripe with it. His A missions aren't too bad aside from Emerald Coast which is another annoying strict one (I only managed to beat that one because of a big combo I got at the very end barely getting me over the time I needed).
And now we get to the parts of SA1 that I really don't like. I've said that this game has alot of endearing jank to it until it doesn't, and these next two stories are where we reach those really low lows, and are what mainly cements SA1 as the lesser game imo. Let's start off with Amy's story. It may only be three stages long but it sure feels like the most exhausting and drawn out three stages I've ever played. God, Amy moves agonizingly slow. Her overall movement feels like such a jarring and sluggish dissonance from the stories we've just been through. Her stage design really doesn't compliment this as well, as they have so many annoying aspects to them that makes slow gameplay that much more unbearable. Her A missions surprisingly weren't that bad but always had that looming feeling that I wasn't sure if I was gonna make it because of how horribly slow Amy was combined with all these annoying stage gimmicks, so that's a relief.
And then there's Big the Cat. Hoo boy, do I have some things to say about Big. Generally when going back through all the A missions again, I didn't have much trouble with them this time around surprisingly enough. I remember having trouble with some of them back in my original completion but dealt with them in very few tries this time around. Hell, the Sky Chase score emblems were one thing I was dreading from having bad memories struggling on them, and I managed to sweep through them almost instantly this time around.
BIG'S MISSIONS TOOK ME SEVERAL HOURS TO COMPLETE.
ONE OF THEM IN PARTICULAR TOOK ME OVER AN HOUR ALONE.
I wanna get into Big's gameplay and how utterly bullshit it is. It's generally infamous from it being a jarring change from action platforming to... an awkward fishing minigame. But oh god do these stage missions show how bad the fishing really is. Big's main story is just whatever, it's funny on it's own. Froggy barely puts up a fight when you're trying to catch him. But the 1000/2000g fish you need to catch for his B/A missions? Someone decided that a good idea to make them hard to catch was to make them as bullshit as possible. First off, when you hook them, they very often just get a head start on you for no goddamn reason. And when you're reeling them in, sometimes they can just go into an advantage state where your reeling does jack shit and you literally can't do anything about it but let them get further from you. They can just activate this at will too, and the heavier they are, the more keen they are at doing this. You basically just have to pray that they cooperate with you for a long enough time for you to catch them and that the don't just set you back to square one just because they felt like it. Hooking the fish is chore in of it's own as well. You have to try and show the lure in front of them, and you can adjust the lure by tapping left and right on the joystick I believe. But from my experience, adjusting the lure is extremely unresponsive. I could tap in a direction multiple times and it still wouldn't move until like a couple seconds later. These controls aren't just unresponsive in casting, the controls for reeling in fish are genuinely painful. The best method I had was maintaining a rhythm of A presses, what was I supposed to do about that advantage state bullshit though? Did jerking the joystick work? I didn't know, so I tried every time I heard that dreaded bubbling noise, but I still wasn't sure if it was helping at all. I eventually came up with a method that ended up having some sort of noticeable difference. It was where I kept my rhythm of A presses while rapingly spinning the joystick around. Can you believe that? The one time I noticed a sort of difference was the method where I felt like I was literally wrestling with the game's bullshit. I'm not quite done yet though, I wanna get into Twinkle Park Mission A. This is the goddamn mission that took me over an hour to finally clear. When I was doing Big's A missions, I had about 2 of the hidden lure upgrades I believe. I was still able to find 2000g fish even without the other 2. Twinkle Park decided it wanted to be the exception to this however. I spent multiple attempts catching several fish in hopes that a big one would spawn but to no avail and eventually before I caved completely and just looked up what the hell I was doing wrong. Twinkle Park is somehow the only stage where you need all of them to get a 2000g fish. So I looked up where the upgrades I was missing were, then got it and went back to the stage, spent several attempts catching many fish in hopes a big one would spawn, and got very nervous thinking that my game might be bugged somehow. As it turns out, I was missing ANOTHER lure upgrade that I didn't know about. So I go and trudge all the way over there, get the upgrade, and go back to Twinkle Park. I had hope now since the robot fish now started to spawn, so I thought that was a good sign. But even then, I had to struggle catching so many goddamn fish to get a 2000g one to spawn in, all the while through all these attempts before and after I found out about the lures I was missing, I was getting repeatedly teased by the game as it kept giving me fish weighing in 1700-1900g. And the one time I actually net a 2000g fish, IT BREAKS MY LINE. So the stage resets and I have to find one all over again. The total relief I felt once I finally got the 2000g fish was unbelievable. Sorry if most of this review is venting about Big, I just really wanted to go into detail how terrible his gameplay made this to complete.
Now I want to talk about something SADX disappointed me on; the Chao Garden. I was such a huge fan of the Chao Garden in SA2, and was excited to try it out here, but ended up finding out it was just kinda... really awkward in comparison to it's SA2 counterpart. I've said that alot about part of this game, but this one was just kinda disheartening honestly compared to the rest. Playing with Chao just didn't feel as good here. There are some other things about SA1's Chao Garden that kinda annoy me as well, like with certain limitations making it feel really inferior like the absence of a school making it hard or impossible to check your Chao's stats and teach it non-animal activities, the lack of a Skeleton Dog making me assume that animal parts are just permanent on your Chao (Which is a shame as the only way to make your Chao stronger here is through the animals), and other stuff like that. I'm not sure if I'm wrong on those but I really hope I am.
And lastly, I wanna talk about mission mode. It honestly just generally feels like padding for completion. You just search around for mission prompts (which is particularly annoying as Amy or Big) and just do them. They have a very awkward difficulty imbalance too. A great majority of them are really easy and forgettable, some are a bit annoying, and then missions 53 and 54 are on new layers of awful. An annoying trend of these missions are having the objectives being quite a ways into or near the end of a stage. These two in particular are right at the end of Icecap, meaning if you screw up on them, you have to go through the same minute and a half of snowboarding just to get another attempt at it. Mission 53 is really bad because you have to do three super precise ramp jumps all in succession, but mission 54, oh mission 54. This was the one mission I was dreading rebeating and for good reason. You have to get 13 flags laid out right at the end of the stage. First off, grabbing the flags are easier said than done because their hitbox is so small, combined with how wonky the snowboarding controls are and your small hitbox as well makes missing them a very frequent occurrence. "Well maybe I can slow down for them and maybe even jump my way back up if I miss one." Unfortunately you don't have such luck, as since you're playing as Tails for this mission, YOU ARE TECHNICALLY TIMED ON THIS AS WELL. Sonic is really keen on darting past you with no regard for any objective you seem to be going for, and if he beats you to the end, THE STAGE JUST ENDS PREMATURELY. And since you don't have the luck of being off of the snowboard, you won't get much opportunities to get distance from Sonic. Ugh, I'm just wondering if this was even playtested. Hopefully I never have to do mission 54 ever again, for real this time.
Damn this was longer than I expected it to be. I guess I just had alot to say. SADX is janky, goofy, and awkward as hell, but I think it's pretty neat for all that. I'd say it's worth experiencing with how dumb it is. It's still a lesser experience than SA2 in my eyes, but it's still one hell of a ride on it's own. Also I wanna talk about how bad these cutscenes are, practically every single one of them are the best worst things I've ever seen and I honestly think SADX's cutscenes are up there with the CDi Nintendo games in terms of hilarious awfulness.
"That's Eggman! I Wonder What Happened To Sonic?"
This main highlights of the game come from Sonic's, Tails', Knuckles', and Gamma's stories. As I cover each gameplay style, I mainly wanna talk about how each of them play normally and how each is affected by their extra stage missions as well. (I like to talk about my experiences not just from casually playing but with doing everything the game has to offer, after all) Sonic is pretty self explanatory, he's the iconic fast man. You run, jump, and spindash through stages. It seems that Sonic is mainly who the game was based around as he has easily the most stages in the game with 10, as the max the others get was 5 iirc. Not sure if it was generally okay to try and build other character's stages off of Sonic stages, as sometimes I feel as certain stages are designed like playing a Sonic stage in a Knuckles stage, or vice versa. This kinda makes most of the stage designs here kinda wonky as they don't really feel as sometime they don't really feel like they were made with a specific playstyle in mind. Speaking of the game being built around sonic, it might also generally reflect on his stage missions as well as his are generally the hardest due to the sheer quantity as well as the strict timers for some of the A missions. Twinkle Park and Lost World are particularly bad cases of this. Twinkle Park has a very strict time limit of 3 minutes for it's A mission, so you have to basically play the level near flawlessly. And Lost World is just generally my least favorite stage in the franchise honestly. It has so many incredibly frustrating bits, and with the 4:30 time limit for the A mission it becomes one real test of how much you can put up with.
Tails might honestly be my favorite story solely on the virtue of how utterly broken it is. Adding in a character that can fly really shows the cracks in this game. Tails can just fucking eviscerate these level designs. There's nothing more hilarious than just skipping the literal entirety of the first stage. The other stages don't get the same mercy either. Aside from Icecap, Tails has plenty of opportunities to soar right past anything the developers intended you to play through legitimately. The only exception to this is Icecap but that's solely because you're locked to a snowboard the entire stage, so I guess this stage gets to feel lucky as it doesn't get to be victim of Tails at his full potential. I haven't even really touched on his other gimmick of racing Sonic/Eggman to the end as you don't even really need to pay attention to them. They're pretty easy to beat even on their A mission variants, and unleashing The Wrath of Tails on them basically means you never really get to see them at all. The fastest thing alive really doesn't seem to mean much when you can just fly past everything he has to maneuver around.
Knuckles is kind of an odd one. He has what might be the one aspect that I feel SA1 does better than SA2, and that's the emerald radar. I'm gonna be honest and say that they really didn't need to limit the emerald radar they way they did there. But I still feel as SA2 does it better mostly and that's mainly due to the stage design. Alot of the gripes I had earlier with the whole "stage design fusion awkwardness" mainly shows in this story. I feel like they tried to somehow make certain stage layout try to work as both Sonic and Knuckles and I don't feel as if it really worked on Knuckles' end, and just ended up being a detriment on Sonic's end. The treasure stages in SA2 to me felt like they were make for the treasure hunting playstyle, unlike here. Aside from those gripes, it's still a rather solid story. Knuckles' A missions can be really annoying though, with the very strict time limits on them combined with the random placement of the emerald shards. I learned you can abuse restarting, as it resets you at the last checkpoint in this game, which for Knuckles is at the last emerald piece he got, so you can scavenge around for the emerald pieces the go straight for them after restarting when you know where they are to potentially make those A missions easier. (i don't remember if this was changed in later rereleases so please don't get angry if it was)
Gamma is another kinda odd one. They have a new shooter-type gameplay style, which went to be expanded upon in the mech stages of SA2. I've heard some people prefer Gamma's gameplay to the SA2 mech but I honestly don't see it. In comparison I feel as the target laser is less responsive and wears off annoyingly fast, and the hover noticeably screws up your momentum when you use it. Like Knuckles I feel as Gamma is still a solid story even with my gripe with it. His A missions aren't too bad aside from Emerald Coast which is another annoying strict one (I only managed to beat that one because of a big combo I got at the very end barely getting me over the time I needed).
And now we get to the parts of SA1 that I really don't like. I've said that this game has alot of endearing jank to it until it doesn't, and these next two stories are where we reach those really low lows, and are what mainly cements SA1 as the lesser game imo. Let's start off with Amy's story. It may only be three stages long but it sure feels like the most exhausting and drawn out three stages I've ever played. God, Amy moves agonizingly slow. Her overall movement feels like such a jarring and sluggish dissonance from the stories we've just been through. Her stage design really doesn't compliment this as well, as they have so many annoying aspects to them that makes slow gameplay that much more unbearable. Her A missions surprisingly weren't that bad but always had that looming feeling that I wasn't sure if I was gonna make it because of how horribly slow Amy was combined with all these annoying stage gimmicks, so that's a relief.
And then there's Big the Cat. Hoo boy, do I have some things to say about Big. Generally when going back through all the A missions again, I didn't have much trouble with them this time around surprisingly enough. I remember having trouble with some of them back in my original completion but dealt with them in very few tries this time around. Hell, the Sky Chase score emblems were one thing I was dreading from having bad memories struggling on them, and I managed to sweep through them almost instantly this time around.
BIG'S MISSIONS TOOK ME SEVERAL HOURS TO COMPLETE.
ONE OF THEM IN PARTICULAR TOOK ME OVER AN HOUR ALONE.
I wanna get into Big's gameplay and how utterly bullshit it is. It's generally infamous from it being a jarring change from action platforming to... an awkward fishing minigame. But oh god do these stage missions show how bad the fishing really is. Big's main story is just whatever, it's funny on it's own. Froggy barely puts up a fight when you're trying to catch him. But the 1000/2000g fish you need to catch for his B/A missions? Someone decided that a good idea to make them hard to catch was to make them as bullshit as possible. First off, when you hook them, they very often just get a head start on you for no goddamn reason. And when you're reeling them in, sometimes they can just go into an advantage state where your reeling does jack shit and you literally can't do anything about it but let them get further from you. They can just activate this at will too, and the heavier they are, the more keen they are at doing this. You basically just have to pray that they cooperate with you for a long enough time for you to catch them and that the don't just set you back to square one just because they felt like it. Hooking the fish is chore in of it's own as well. You have to try and show the lure in front of them, and you can adjust the lure by tapping left and right on the joystick I believe. But from my experience, adjusting the lure is extremely unresponsive. I could tap in a direction multiple times and it still wouldn't move until like a couple seconds later. These controls aren't just unresponsive in casting, the controls for reeling in fish are genuinely painful. The best method I had was maintaining a rhythm of A presses, what was I supposed to do about that advantage state bullshit though? Did jerking the joystick work? I didn't know, so I tried every time I heard that dreaded bubbling noise, but I still wasn't sure if it was helping at all. I eventually came up with a method that ended up having some sort of noticeable difference. It was where I kept my rhythm of A presses while rapingly spinning the joystick around. Can you believe that? The one time I noticed a sort of difference was the method where I felt like I was literally wrestling with the game's bullshit. I'm not quite done yet though, I wanna get into Twinkle Park Mission A. This is the goddamn mission that took me over an hour to finally clear. When I was doing Big's A missions, I had about 2 of the hidden lure upgrades I believe. I was still able to find 2000g fish even without the other 2. Twinkle Park decided it wanted to be the exception to this however. I spent multiple attempts catching several fish in hopes that a big one would spawn but to no avail and eventually before I caved completely and just looked up what the hell I was doing wrong. Twinkle Park is somehow the only stage where you need all of them to get a 2000g fish. So I looked up where the upgrades I was missing were, then got it and went back to the stage, spent several attempts catching many fish in hopes a big one would spawn, and got very nervous thinking that my game might be bugged somehow. As it turns out, I was missing ANOTHER lure upgrade that I didn't know about. So I go and trudge all the way over there, get the upgrade, and go back to Twinkle Park. I had hope now since the robot fish now started to spawn, so I thought that was a good sign. But even then, I had to struggle catching so many goddamn fish to get a 2000g one to spawn in, all the while through all these attempts before and after I found out about the lures I was missing, I was getting repeatedly teased by the game as it kept giving me fish weighing in 1700-1900g. And the one time I actually net a 2000g fish, IT BREAKS MY LINE. So the stage resets and I have to find one all over again. The total relief I felt once I finally got the 2000g fish was unbelievable. Sorry if most of this review is venting about Big, I just really wanted to go into detail how terrible his gameplay made this to complete.
Now I want to talk about something SADX disappointed me on; the Chao Garden. I was such a huge fan of the Chao Garden in SA2, and was excited to try it out here, but ended up finding out it was just kinda... really awkward in comparison to it's SA2 counterpart. I've said that alot about part of this game, but this one was just kinda disheartening honestly compared to the rest. Playing with Chao just didn't feel as good here. There are some other things about SA1's Chao Garden that kinda annoy me as well, like with certain limitations making it feel really inferior like the absence of a school making it hard or impossible to check your Chao's stats and teach it non-animal activities, the lack of a Skeleton Dog making me assume that animal parts are just permanent on your Chao (Which is a shame as the only way to make your Chao stronger here is through the animals), and other stuff like that. I'm not sure if I'm wrong on those but I really hope I am.
And lastly, I wanna talk about mission mode. It honestly just generally feels like padding for completion. You just search around for mission prompts (which is particularly annoying as Amy or Big) and just do them. They have a very awkward difficulty imbalance too. A great majority of them are really easy and forgettable, some are a bit annoying, and then missions 53 and 54 are on new layers of awful. An annoying trend of these missions are having the objectives being quite a ways into or near the end of a stage. These two in particular are right at the end of Icecap, meaning if you screw up on them, you have to go through the same minute and a half of snowboarding just to get another attempt at it. Mission 53 is really bad because you have to do three super precise ramp jumps all in succession, but mission 54, oh mission 54. This was the one mission I was dreading rebeating and for good reason. You have to get 13 flags laid out right at the end of the stage. First off, grabbing the flags are easier said than done because their hitbox is so small, combined with how wonky the snowboarding controls are and your small hitbox as well makes missing them a very frequent occurrence. "Well maybe I can slow down for them and maybe even jump my way back up if I miss one." Unfortunately you don't have such luck, as since you're playing as Tails for this mission, YOU ARE TECHNICALLY TIMED ON THIS AS WELL. Sonic is really keen on darting past you with no regard for any objective you seem to be going for, and if he beats you to the end, THE STAGE JUST ENDS PREMATURELY. And since you don't have the luck of being off of the snowboard, you won't get much opportunities to get distance from Sonic. Ugh, I'm just wondering if this was even playtested. Hopefully I never have to do mission 54 ever again, for real this time.
Damn this was longer than I expected it to be. I guess I just had alot to say. SADX is janky, goofy, and awkward as hell, but I think it's pretty neat for all that. I'd say it's worth experiencing with how dumb it is. It's still a lesser experience than SA2 in my eyes, but it's still one hell of a ride on it's own. Also I wanna talk about how bad these cutscenes are, practically every single one of them are the best worst things I've ever seen and I honestly think SADX's cutscenes are up there with the CDi Nintendo games in terms of hilarious awfulness.
"That's Eggman! I Wonder What Happened To Sonic?"