Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut is Sonic Team’s 2003 GameCube version of Sonic Adventure, first released on the Dreamcast in 1998. Dr. Eggman sets free Chaos, a creature made of water that grows stronger with every Chaos Emerald it takes in, and six characters each follow the story from their own side. DX adds missions and a set of Game Gear games from the Sonic series to unlock. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.
What you need
- An iPhone 12 or newer, or an iPad with an A14 chip or newer, with iOS 17.6 or later.
- Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
- A disc image of your copy of Sonic Adventure DX:
.iso,.gcm,.rvz,.cisoor.gcz, or a.zipor.rarcontaining it. The game fits on a single disc.
No BIOS file is needed.
How to play Sonic Adventure DX on iPhone
- Install Nagori from the App Store.
- Copy your Sonic Adventure DX disc image to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone.
- Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. Add GameCube games from inside Nagori: the Files app’s Open in menu doesn’t hand formats like
.rvzand.gcmto Nagori. - Find Sonic Adventure DX on the GameCube shelf and press Play.
- Switch to a touch layout with a stick. The default Standard layout has no stick, and every character moves with one. Pause, open Settings → Touch Layout and choose Stick Focus for a large stick, or D-Pad + Stick. With a controller connected, you can skip this step.
Controls
Move with the control stick and jump with A. Press A again in mid-air for Sonic’s homing attack; Tails flies and Knuckles glides from a jump as well. L and R turn the camera, and in Nagori they register as full presses.
Sonic’s stages are narrow and fast, so open Edit Layout in the pause menu, make the stick larger and pull it a little away from the screen edge so your thumb doesn’t slide off.
With a controller, A is the bottom face button, B the left one, X the right one and Y the top one. Press the left stick to open Nagori’s pause menu. The controller doesn’t rumble in GameCube games.
Six characters, six ways to play
Between stages you explore three Adventure Fields: Station Square, the Mystic Ruins and the Egg Carrier. Each character plays the stages differently:
- Sonic runs the high-speed stages.
- Tails races a rival to the goal, and flying lets him cut corners.
- Knuckles hunts for pieces of the Master Emerald with a radar.
- Amy escapes the robot ZERO, with her hammer for defense.
- Big fishes for his friend Froggy, which takes patience.
- E-102 Gamma shoots robots against a timer, locking on to several at once.
Finish all six stories to unlock the final one.
Saves: memory card and save states
Sonic Adventure DX keeps each character’s story progress, your emblems and your Chao on the memory card. That card works in Nagori as it did on the console. It stays inside the app, though: it isn’t in the Files app, isn’t part of Export Saves and doesn’t sync to iCloud.
Nagori adds two things on top:
- Quit any time. Leave the app mid-stage and Continue puts you back exactly where you were.
- Save states. Pause and choose Save before the part of a stage that keeps beating you, then Load to try again. Nagori keeps your last four saves per game.
Treat the memory card as your main save: a save state may not load after some Nagori updates.
Chao Gardens and the Game Boy Advance
In the Chao Gardens you hatch and raise Chao and give them the small animals you free from robots in the stages. Trading Chao with the Tiny Chao Garden on a Game Boy Advance isn’t available: it needs a link cable between the two consoles, and Nagori can’t connect to one.
Best settings
In the pause menu, Settings → Quality trades frame rate for heat. Start on Medium, the default. Low keeps the device coolest, and High gives the smoothest motion on the newest iPhones and iPads. If your device gets warm, step down one level. GameCube games show at their original resolution, and Full Screen stretches the picture to fill the display.
