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Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Publisher: SEGA
Developer: BioWare - Handheld Development Ground
Genre: RPG
Release Date: September 30, 2008
Platform: Nintendo DS
Reviewer: Eric
The Sonic franchise has been around for almost twenty years now. During the
early years Sonic was the best thing on the market. When Sonic took the jump
into the 3-D world everything started to change. Games started to lack and new
characters look like jokes. Is Chronicles here to save the Sonic franchise or
ruin it?
 Sonic is SEGA and to show off their blue hedgehog they decided to let BioWare
develop the first Sonic RPG. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood looks
beautiful with it’s painted/cell shaded graphics. For a DS game Chronicles looks
better than what I expected. This is how a Sonic game should look like, but this
is not how a Sonic game should play.
Dr. Eggman has finally been destroyed for the final time. Sonic and his friends
took down the evil doctor for the last time and it seems like everything is back
to normal. That is not the case when Knuckles is captured. Thinking that Dr.
Eggman is behind this, Sonic and his friends find out that there is a new evil
and they mean business.
Chronicles plays like a gimmick role playing game that should only last one to
two hours. In order to walk around on any of the maps in the game you have to
use the stylus. I hate when games like this force you to use the stylus. It is
always so much better when the stylus is an option. By moving any of the
characters around the maps in Chronicles just feels and looks slow. There is no
way you can run from a battle. Even seeing the enemies on the screen does not
help, the enemies move much faster than any speed you can run.
The battle system is the same way; use the stylus to achieve victory. Selecting
if you want to attack and use your special attacks if fine. Watching your team
do normal attacks is fine too, but then you notice more misses than actual
damage coming off your enemies. Chronicles pretty much tells you to raise your
attack to see less misses. In order to get a higher attack you either have to
buy items or level up. When you level up you get to put a point in a few stat
points. There is a level 30 cap on your characters so I don’t see how it is
possible to never see misses. Battles will last longer than they should because
you are always missing.
Well I guess I should have mentioned that you can use your special attacks to
not miss as much. To do these attacks you need to do use your stylus, from
hitting bull eyes to following a pre-determined line. If you screw up once you
then that attack misses. These attacks cost precious power points to use and the
only way to gain that back is either by using items of defending. By defending
you are giving the enemies a chance to attack and defending in this game does
not help you take less damage. The battle system in Chronicles is not on your
side, either do the attacks without screwing up or make a battle last for eight
to fifteen turns. You can use the L and R triggers for some battle features, but
it doesn’t help matters.
Also during battle there is a chance where the enemies might run away. A mini
game starts up where you have to tap your characters to jump over boxes and gain
coins, which are precious in this game. There are speed-up boosts as well, but
when you have four characters to control this can be impossible to do. How can
you tap two characters at the same time to jump? BioWare dropped the ball here
and it is annoying having to do this all the time, there is no way to skip this.
Just like every other RPG you can buy items and equipment. In order to buy items
you have to collect coins. It makes perfect sense to fight to gain coins. Guess
what, the only way to gain coins in this game is by collection all the coins
that are in every map or selling items or your old equipment. Health items are
too valuable in this game, but if I want Tails to gain +1 in his attack then I
have to sell some potions. This is not an RPG; this is a game that will cause
Sonic fans to riot.
 Sonic and his friends can use their signature moves outside of battles. The
problem? All you do is touch a cloud that comes up (blue means you’re good) and
they do their action. I would have rather of used a circular motion to have
Sonic run around a loop or tap a few different buttons (a mini game) to have
Tails fly up to a ledge. Chronicles just adds pointless tapping motions to the
battle system, which makes no sense at all.
Some of the games music is real well done. At times it seems like the music was
compressed a bit too much, same with the sound effects from the characters. Hell
the sound effects from the characters don’t seem to match the characters too
much, they are extremely random. Oh don’t expect to hear the game talk to you
during cut scenes, just admire the graphics, that’s all.
Underneath the mess there is a real good aspect about this game. With all of the
different side quests this game will take you around 20 to 30 hours to complete,
it all depends on how good you are at role playing games. This might not sound
like much, but most modern RPGs on the Nintendo DS (not including Square Enix
remakes) tend to start and finish within 8 to 12 hours.
Final Verdict
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood sounded like a good idea. Mario was able
to spawn a few decent RPGs so why can’t Sonic? BioWare had enough time to make
this the sleeper hit of the year, both on the DS and RPG genre. Chronicles
relies too much on the stylus and the mini game like battles get dull after a
few hours. Sonic fans should defiantly give this one a shot, just don’t expect
this game to resurrect the Sonic franchise.
Rating
6 out of 10
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood Trailer
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