Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

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Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Bioware, legendary RPG manufacturer, just released their first entry into the handheld market, in the form of a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG. I'm so glad Big the Cat is in it. I know everyone else hates the shit out of him, but I think he's great.

Reviewer:
Brad
Categories:
Games

Reviewer: Brad Cook

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Alright, so everyone flipped out when Bioware announced that they were making not only a Sonic game, but a Sonic game for the DS. For good reason, too. Bioware has quite a back-catalog to live up to, with games like Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate, and Mass Effect breaking new ground in the RPG genre, there were high expectations for Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. I couldn't have been more excited, I've always been a huge fan of Sonic games. The recent Sonic DS games, Rush and Rush Adventure, were actually pretty decent games, especially compared to the absolute garbage coming from the Sonic team for the Xbox. So is The Dark Brotherhood the Sonic version of Mario RPG? Well, not quite.

Wait a second. Comparing anything to Mario RPG is retarded, because that game is unbelievable. If you try to relate Sonic Chronicles to Mario RPG, it is going to come up short. But so would most of the other DS RPG games, so that's not saying much. Sonic Chronicles delivers in a variety of areas, but it also is lacking in a few.

I'll start with the graphics. The hand-painted backgrounds for each map are fantastic. They have a soft, warm feel to them, and they look great. The cut-scenes also look wonderful, they're often done in comic style, with people and events being shown in small boxes, but there is also video once in a while. While there is not enough video and too much boxy event sequencing, any video content is appreciated. A cool feature Bioware has implemented in Sonic Chronicles is that if you close the DS during a cut-scene, it'll start the cut-scene over once you open it. Quite convenient. The character builds are faithful to the classic Sonic games. They look exactly like they used to, just a little more polished. When battling the characters look the worst, and even that's not saying much because they still look pretty good.

Battle animation is surprisingly smooth and fluid. Characters and enemies have a full range of motion that makes battle more enjoyable and can seriously help you out, but I'll get to that later. One area of the animation I had a small issue with was when you're just walking around, it can get a little choppy. To walk around, you guide Sonic with the stylus, and when moving at full speed it's the choppiest. After a few minutes you stop noticing it, though. You learn to concentrate on where you're going, rather than where you currently are. However, even that presents problems once in a while, as in certain areas it's too easy to walk up to an object, a very tall rock, for example, that is up in the sky, but since it's relatively 2D, you might get stuck on it just trying to walk behind it. Again, it's easy to kinda learn not to do this with just a few minutes of gameplay, but it can be frustrating.

There are so many characters. The crazy thing is, I found myself actively using all but about two of them. That's right, every character is powerful and useful in some way. Depending on where you are and what enemies you're going up against, you have to plan your party strategically. This is because every character has different POW moves that affect different enemies in various ways. I'll talk more about POW moves when I get to the battling section. I'm not going to post a list of characters just incase anybody doesn't wanna know. Plus, it's not like it's hard to find. Just know that the character selection is abundant, satisfying, and reminiscent of multiple old Sonic games. Not only that, but Bioware did an amazing job with each character's personality. Throughout the entire game, each character's mannerisms, vocabulary, and attitude are completely consistent, which made the game more enjoyable on an overall level. There are three "classes" of playable characters: power, support and shifter. Power classes obviously just have attacks that hit hard. Support classes have moves that help your party, like Tails can use a move that heals people, or puts a shield around someone. Shifter classes are basically a mix of the previous two.

While on the subject of characters, I have to mention that Bioware has gone through lots of old Sonic games and created a coherent narrative for the game that includes backstories for all characters, places you can visit, items, and ancient relics and events. Any longtime fan of Sonic will most likely find the backstories extremely interesting, as they do a great job of connecting loose ends in the half-assed storylines of older games in the franchise. The overarching story in Sonic Chronicles is a little basic, but it plays out superbly and it really is an adventure. I don't wanna give away much, but it involves inter-dimensional travel, chaos emeralds, and a whole mess of alien races to fight/hang out with. I found the story to be enjoyable and I think it worked out really well. There were some twists, nothing particularly spectacular, but some cool and intense parts.

I guess now is as good a time as any to talk about the battle system. After reading a bunch of reviews, I think the battle system is the most widely disliked aspect of this game. I have a hard time understanding this, because aside from a few issues, I think the battle system works nearly perfectly for this game, and I never really experienced it getting old or repetitive like many have pointed out. All members of your four-person party choose their moves at the beginning of each round. Each player has a specific amount of times they can attack per round based on their speed. Sonic, for example, attacks three times per round, whereas Big the Cat can only attack once per round. You can choose to do a normal attack, a POW attack, defend yourself, use an item, or flee. A POW attack is just a special attack that uses PP, but it's also where the Elite Beat Agents-style gameplay makes its debut. There are a few different types of touch-based strategies you have to do to complete a POW move: tap a target as the outer circle closes in on it (the classic Elite Beat Agents style), tap a circle eight times before the outer circle closes in on it, and slide a icon across a dotted line in time with the icon. It may sound confusing, but once you try it out it gets easy quickly. There's a huge variety of POW attacks per character, and it's fun to try them all out. Some do tons of damage too, and the support class POW moves can be infinitely helpful, such as Tails' 'scan' move, which basically just makes your attacks hit for a lot more. Enemies can also perform POW attacks, in which case you still have to do the Elite Beat Agent techniques, but in my opinion this is a very good thing. It allows you to actively utilize your defense; if you correctly tap everything, their attack will miss. Basically, if you get hit, you know it's your fault. Much better than just leaving it up to chance. I've yet to verify the fact that you can alter the outcome of your attacks or blocks by hitting the L or R buttons on the DS, but if you can't time attacks and blocks in this game then I must be crazy, cause I could swear it helped me out a lot through the entire game. If I'm right, you can cause your enemy to miss an attack by pressing said buttons the instant before they actually hit you, and you can make your attack count for more by hitting it the instant before your character's attack lands. There definitely are some frustrating scenarios that play out in battle, however. To take out enemies quickly, it's a good idea to use all your characters to attack one enemy at once. However, the risk in doing this is, because you all choose your moves at once at the beginning of each round, the enemy you're all attacking could pull an 'evade', in which case you will miss every attack, or the enemy will counter your attack, doing significant damage to you, and possibly even regaining some HP from the counter. So you can imagine how lame it is when you have an enemy practically dead, he pulls an evade, counters all four of your characters' attacks, and recovers 3/4 of his HP. Another equally frustrating and similar situation is when you're fighting a specific alien race, you could have them down to one HP and then they hit you once, even if it's only for like 20 HP, and somehow they recover all of their HP. It WILL make you want to whip your DS into oncoming traffic. However, it never lasts too long, as eventually the enemy will keep using POW attacks that you can block, giving you an opening to kill them. But I have to stress that this isn't a fault of the battle system; it's a strength that certain enemies have. A cool feature that the battle system has is the ability to undo your chosen actions if you haven't picked it for all four party characters yet; there are two back arrows on the bottom left of the screen, the first of which will erase all actions you've chosen thus far, the second of which will erase the action you chose for the most recent character. This comes in handy pretty often. One last note about battling: often times I found myself not wanting to waste my HP and health-recovering items, so I would avoid battling. This isn't a good idea, as the more you progress the harder the enemies will be. If you don't run from most battles, you'll find yourself powerful enough to advance rather easily. Bottom line: it's not breaking any new ground, but Bioware's battle system is simple and it usually works, and it gives you a more than adequate amount of control of the damage inflicted by and upon you.

I'm sure this will disappoint many, many people, but there is no voice acting. Good riddance, too, I say. A game does not need voice acting to be interesting or entertaining. In fact, I often find it more of a hindrance, because either you can't skip through what they're saying, or if you do, it sounds stupid and gets on my nerves. I like being able to read the text at my own leisure. But that's just me. The music in the game is simply not up to par. And it pains me to say that. I know Bioware isn't exactly known for amazing soundtracks, but Sonic kind of is, and they really should've put more effort into producing memorable tunes, because none of them are. This is the area where I find the game most disappointing. A good soundtrack would've enhanced this game ten-fold. Sound effects are, for the most part, equally disappointing. Lots of classic sonic sounds make an appearance, but they aren't worth more than a second or two of pleasant surprisedness.

Items and power-ups don't play as big a role in this game as in most RPGs. Well, items do, but power-ups don't. There is a decent amount of additional equipment to bolster your party throughout the game, but none make a huge difference in stats. In fact, I don't think the game would've suffered at all had the equipment not even been included. So it's more of a neutral thing than a bad thing.

Overall, I have to say Sonic Chronicles is almost as good as I had been hoping. The gameplay is 90% awesome, battling works pretty well, and I loved the story. The game is aesthetically pleasing, and the menus are very clean, simple, and efficient. The dialogue is a high point of the game, and it's quite often humorous, even poking fun at the Sonic archive a few times, which was really cool. It's also not too wordy, and it has just the right amount of dialogue. Chao are back, and they basically do what the animals in Castle Crashers do; they increase your stats, give you elemental powers, restore some PP or HP at the beginning of a round, and just generally help you in various ways. Rings count as currency, and there is a fair amount of them to help you buy whatever you may need. The story is handled maturely, and never really felt cheesy or contrived. The final battle was surprisingly easy, and maybe a little bit anti-climactic, but taking the rest of the game into account, I don't think it's a big deal. Also, Bioware wins for the coolest way to list credits. You don't have to sit through them! A true stroke of genius. I'll be eagerly awaiting the sequel (they're already working on it!).

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

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