Sonic Adventure serves as a springboard for Sonic Team’s express love of the world and its diverse cultures, as well as all that is simple, pure, and beautiful. Transporting Sonic from Mobius to the real world may have seemed like an uncanny choice at first: the game opens with him straddling the rooftops of a city before descending to defeat a boss. Yet the following level is a real treat—an archipelago of ramps, slopes, springboards, and trampolines spread across pearly-white beaches (inspired by the developers’ trip to Mexico), capped off with a particularly memorable escape from a Killer Whale.

What strikes me so succinctly about Sonic Adventure is how many of its levels take place in pedestrian settings, lending the game a laid-back and optimistic atmosphere. Sonic could be hopping between islands to escape lava in a less charming game, but here the hazard is an expansive ocean and coconuts thrown by monkeys. Another level has Sonic playing pinball in a casino, while another is set in a theme park.

The game features multiple playable characters, some of whom play worse and some more enjoyably than others, but the aesthetic appeal remains consistent throughout. Over time, Sonic Adventure has come to be celebrated as a cornerstone of Y2K optimism and jet-set holidaying—long before Sonic became associated with a more insular culture and endless derivative fangames and fetish art.

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