Sonic Adventure is a fun, enjoyable, but definitely flawed game. First off, download the Sonic Adventure Mod Manager, not BetterSADX as it is outdated. Sonic Adventure DX has a few weird problems that don’t exist on the original hardware, the Steam version is a port of a Gamecube port of the original Dreamcast game. In each translation they changed certain things. Many of these changes are considered a downgrade and negatively affect the artistic vision. If you download SAMM, it’ll let you patch the game with better models, a new lighting system, as well as bug fixes and other important tweaks.
Once you do that, the game is good. What stops it from being amazing is the poor camera angles that happen pretty frequently. It makes it especially annoying when you’re doing the Sonic A missions where you have to beat the stage really quickly. You NEED to jump over loops, abuse the spin dash to skip over areas of the level if you want to complete the stage in the required time. The camera often assumes that you’re going the “correct” way and makes doing shortcuts harder than they should be because of bad camera angles. What also isn’t too great is how annoying the world map is to navigate. It’s really not fun to have to have to periodically look at guides just to find the next level or upgrade. This is a Sonic game, why do I need a walkthrough? The Genesis games were pretty simple. Hold down right, and look out for spikes, enemies, and bottomless pits. The Adventure Field is a cool idea but it’s just really annoying trying to find the next stage and figure out where to go sometimes. Additionally, I find some of the A stages(there’s C, B, and A on each stage with C being the easiest) to be really annoying to complete, though you don’t need to worry about that unless you want to 100% the game and get those sweet sweet achievements.
That, and the robot guys levels kinda suck, Amy is just alright, and Bigs, why the hell was that guy’s story even included man. Tails levels are all really easy, and Knuckles are alright except for the A stages which you basically have to abuse extra lives to cheese if you don’t wanna be trying each stage all night. If you’re wondering how to do it, you find the emerald piece, but before picking it up you pause and hit restart. It’ll use a life but it won’t change the spawn locations. Beeline it to that location, grab the shard of the master emerald, it has now placed a checkpoint. Take your time in finding the next piece, restart once you’ve found it before you pick it up. Rinse and repeat.
A unique problem with the PC version is your saves are in your game's install folder. Which is fine I guess but if you uninstall the game your saves are gone, and mine weren't backed up in the Steam cloud which is because I assume, this game doesn't have that. I've never lost my saves on any other steam game so that must be it. Just keep this in mind. If you do end up making significant progress, just make sure you backup your saves before you uninstall the game.
It’s a fun game but it’s just a little annoying sometimes. Worth playing for sure, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to complete everyone’s story or 100%ing the game unless you’re up for a tedious and annoying challenge. Sonic has the vast majority of stages anyways, everyone else only has a handful.
