Sonic Adventure/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anticlimax Boss: There's only one boss battle in Big's story and it's possible to beat it in seconds.
    • The bosses with playable characters, along with the first few E-Series battles have particularly slow AI and can be defeated before they even so much as make a proper attack.
  • Best Level Ever: Consensus seems to be Speed Highway, the fastest-paced Sonic level in the game. Sega appears to be part of the consensus, as they practically brought it back in Sonic Adventure 2 (under the name "Radical Highway") and chose it as the representative stage of this game in Sonic Generations.
  • Contested Sequel: This game started the trend of creating the series' notoriously Broken Base.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Hello? Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • Deader Than Disco: While initially praised by critics, the years after have not been kind to this game -- in fact, the recent Xbox Live and PSN port has been savaged by critics. However, fans and gamers, as well as indy reviewers like The Video Game Critic have been much kinder to the game, and the Xbox Live version is now one of the highest rated games there. A number of the professional critics also made it clear that they considered the game itself So Okay It's Average or even decent, but took it to task for the sloppy porting job.
  • Good Bad Bug: Any person who competes on these games sure know how to abuse the bugs in the games. Casinopolis in 16 seconds sure stands out.
    • Not to mention some glitches in the game that allow characters to enter usually inaccessable areas or play around with unused content in the game (there is a glitch method for nearly every character to get into Emerald Coast for example). Granted a lot of them have the potential of screwing up gameplay or save data.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In the Last Story, Perfect Chaos floods Station Square, leaving the city a destroyed mess, and no doubt drowning many people. Fast forward to 2011, and we have the Sendai tsunami and earthquakes.
  • Memetic Mutation: ↑ & ↓ & ↻, thanks to the sampling in Speed Highway.
  • Moral Event Horizon - The Echidnas trampling and killing the poor chao standing in their way just to get to the Chaos Emeralds and the Master Emerald. They didn't have qualms about taking down Tikal either (she wasn't killed though); even her FATHER Pachacamac didn't care, just as long as they seized the emeralds. This wasn't a very good idea.
  • Most Annoying Sound - "Get a load of- Get a load of- Get a load of this!"
    • "No way, I can't believe this!"
    • The moaning in the background music of the Mystic Ruins Adventure Field. Which you'll have to hear a lot of.
  • Nightmare Fuel - Chaos, in general. Especially when Knuckles is alone on the soon-to-crash Egg Carrier with Chaos 6.
    • Will you continue?
    • If you exploit a glitch that allows Knuckles to reach Sky Deck through the Egg Carrier's swimming pool, you'll enter his flackback with Tikal as normal, but there will be no dialog whatsoever. Even when you reach the area where the emerald shrine is on fire and Tikal and the chao are laying on the ground, no cutscene plays, making it seem as though they're all dead. The kicker? You're stuck here forever. If you quit the game and return to Knuckles' adventure, he'll still be there with nothing to do but watch the shrine burn endlessly. The only way to fix it is to start a completely new file.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Somehow Big managed to fly Tails' highly advanced Tornado plane back to his home with zero experience. Sadly we see about a second of him taking off from the Egg Carrier. No Sky Chase minigame for you, Big.
  • The Scrappy - Big the Cat for a great many people, and not just because of his levels.
    • Base Breaker: Of course he has garnered a plausible fanbase over the years to balance it, especially following his cameos in the latter title below.
  • Scrappy Mechanic - While all of the 3D games have bits of this, SA1 has one of the most loathed in the form of Big the Cat's fishing stages. If you jiggle the control stick even slightly the wrong way, you don't get the fish on the hook, you move the line the wrong way, and you have to reel it in exactly right or it will just magically get off the hook, at minimum stress, when it's right next to you.
    • Hunting for Emerald shards is also well-hated.
    • The need to charge the Lightspeed Dash renders it useless in almost all instance. Changing it to the sequel's one button dash is a feature of the most popular non-fix mod for the PC version.
  • Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The Chao Gardens.
  • Tear Jerker: Gamma's death.
    • Tikal's implied death.
  • That One Sidequest: Try the Ski Slope Snowboarding mission in the DX version's mission mode and you'll find it very hard to not go crazy trying to beat it, to add insult to injury you can't save the mission as your last one or you risk running into a game breaking bug that courrupts your save file.
  • That One Level - Hot Shelter as Amy. It's not especially difficult, but it's like the level equivalent of Goddamned Bats: very long and full of annoying mechanics like doors you have to open by twizzling the analogue stick (which, if you have the PC version of SADX, means mashing the arrow keys in the correct order) and key hunts. Meanwhile the robot Zero is chasing you and putting you under constant pressure the whole time. No wonder the developers gave it an A-Rank time of 6 minutes 30 seconds...
    • Most of this is because Sonic generally visits the majority of any given stage, but Sonic never goes to Hot Shelter, so Amy gets the job of showing the level off instead. Amy's playstyle deals with slower gameplay than Sonic's does.
    • Some of Sonic's A-Rank levels are horrendous, and the first level (Emerald Coast) is a prime example. It's a fairly straightforward level to run through on the C and B levels (finish the level and finish with 50 rings, respectively). For the A-Rank, though, you have only two minutes, forcing one to take all of the stage's normal shortcuts (as in the ones the developers wanted you to take, not Game Breaker shortcuts found by speedrunners). It gets worse with levels like Red Mountain and Lost World, to name a few.
  • The Woobie - Tikal
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