The History of Sonic Adventure DX Modding: End of 2023 Followup

It has been a LONG while, hasn't it?

As I was checking some of my stuff published in Wordpress, including the mammoth sized project that turned out to be the original History of Sonic Adventure DX Modding, I had a sudden realization: It had been three years since I had originally ended the story with a very optimistic note of the future with how everything had advanced since the first years I had been following SADX mods.

This little return is meant to conmemorate not only the 25 years of the original Sonic Adventure's release, but also to celebrate once again any and all new breakthroughs the modding community at X-Hax has done since the last time I really sunk my teeth into it, including a handful of things I've been lucky to try out. HREF

And let me emphasize how much of the new cool stuff is not only thanks to the advances in modding for the game, but also the ever growing passion of the modders to come up with these projects for this now 25-year old game, such as a full Latin American Spanish translation of the entire game with subtitles and voice acting- even if I'm already used to the usual English text and either original dub for the game, as someone from Venezuela, it is INCREDIBLE to see that much effort for a consistent way for Spanish speakers that don't know a lick of English to enjoy this game at its fullest.

Before I can get to dive into the new mods I've seen since then, though, I do have to highlight the backbone that supports all of these creations being easily usable with the game getting a major update...

SADX Mod Manager is resting in peace...long live SA Mod Manager

Sora and ItsEasyActually, two noteworthy names in this modding community , had come together to release an updated tool to replace MainMemory's SADX Mod Manager as the tool you need to boost your Sonic Adventure experience. Also taking influence from HedgeModManager, this tool is essentially an update to the old mod manager with some quality of life tweaks for the end user, and likely much easier to maintain today thanks to the internal rework. If you are using SADX Mod Manager, it might even prompt you to update to SA Mod Manager whenever you accept to auto-update, but from my own experience, it is a perfectly smooth transition and everything I had previously installed still worked correctly.

New characters for the old adventure

Back in the early days of the 2004 SADX PC port, CHRMODELS.DLL hacks were the first thing that had become common, from simple retextures to fairly altered models, but all bound by the limitations of the primitive way not only it had to be modified to work, but also to be stuck with one model or set of models per CHRMODELS.DLL, having to swap the files out if you wanted to try something else.

But since the advent of more streamlined modding support and upgrades to the tools, getting to see sets of new character models to play as with sounds and everything without h aving to meddle with your game folder alongside being allowed to mix and match is quite the difference. And even more so when the models that can be imported now are much more different than before.

For example, there's this mod that replaces Knuckles with Rouge, but it also retrofits Knuckles's campaign to use Rouge's voice lines and such, as well as how she (like many other character mods now) has her own modified animations. And there's the brand new cutscene at the end of the story that is not only cool to see in the game engine, but is also both hilarious...and happens to fit with the next game's story.

If you are looking for something with more nostalgic vibes though, even more so than the accurate Dreamcast models available for the game, there has been a few mods that have tried to bring classic Sonic's design to SADX, either as a high-quality take on his illustration, bringing his Sonic Jam model back, or this recently released interpretation based off the few glimpses at Sonic after the initial transition to the Dreamcast- that last one reminds me of the design he has in some of the mission objective cards and is a neat in-between of the original classic design and the higher-poly intention for the Dreamcast.

Time to enter a new stage

Last time I had done a deep dive into these mods, custom levels were starting to become solid, though still there was a lot needed to wait to see more stages taking advantage of the back-then new progress in this regard. But revisiting this has given me more surprises than expected.

Near the end of my original journey, I had mentioned the old Mushroom Hill custom stage being updated to work with the Mod Manager after being noteworthy as the first visibly original custom level in SADX...and now we have yet another classic Sonic stage to play with in 3D: Kell's Hill Top Zone!

I would like to highlight the creations of a certain modder: Jesus_PK97. I hadn't seen this before until now, but at first I was intrigued that he had made a neat looking custom version of Emerald Coast by rearranging its pieces- just like the old days...

...And then I realized that he was later responsible for the Spyro levels for SADX, which I DID catch wind of without even researching as someone shared the release of one of these, and I was left really impressed to see a ported stage of this noticeable quality, both in the way it looks and how it has been implemented to work with this gameplay compared to the source material.

Changing your gameplay experience

Want the drop dash in Sonic Adventure? Here you go. Do you feel like it would be nice to give Tails, Knuckles and Amy back their spindashes plus some extra moves? Kell you got you covered for that too!

Or maybe you've always wished to play this game in split-screen multiplayer with your friends? Because now that's also possible too!

While these gameplay changing mods aren't

A game with potential finally opened

Honestly, it is awesome that nowadays people can enjoy Sonic Adventure in arguably the best way possible: A native PC port that can use the original Dreamcast models for everything while also having a visible layer of extra polish for certain oddities present even in the original game, all thanks to mods that can be applied to arguably one of the worst versions in its 2011 Steam release still available today thanks to the existence of SA Mod Manager and the ability to patch said release into the old 2004 version that had been fixed over this past decade.

Even if the engine is still something that iosdoesn't allow an absolutely complete facelift some might expect