Review: Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

By
Ryan Bloom
– October 17, 2008

Can this speedy action star slow down for an RPG?

I begrudgingly admit I’ve never actually played a Bioware game before. Don’t get me wrong, though, because I’ve wanted to play them – I was interested in seeing Neverwinter Nights back when it debuted. The praise given to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is second only to the praise given to Mass Effect, and both games have definitely caught my eye. And then, looking back, I have friends who still speak lovingly about Bioware classics like Bauldur’s Gate and its sequel. Some may find it a little sad, then, that the first toe I dip in to the Bioware pool happens to be with Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the Nintendo DS.

The game gives a really terrible first impression; after being treated to a barely-even-Flash-movie-quality animation, you learn that it is now a time of peace; Dr. Eggman has been defeated, presumably once-and-for-all. Sonic and his friends, however, are facing a new threat, from a group calling themselves The Marauders. One of the first things you’ll notice about Sonic Chronicles is the sound design. Throughout the entire game, Sonic Chronicles is, universally, a terrible sounding game. At its best, music is tolerable and forgettable, but the further you get in to the game, the worse the music becomes. Even the so-called “remixed” tracks do little to make the music enjoyable; only ardent Sonic fans will be able to place which lesser-known games they come from and more often than not, these “remixes” feel more like somebody downloaded a Sonic MIDI off the internet, re-arranged all the instruments, and changed the tempo. The mastering quality of the music doesn’t do the game any favors either, sounding as if they were recorded using the generic Windows MIDI Synthesizer. Awful sound effects compliment the poor music, with awkward Looney-Tunes-esque “boinks” for KO-ing enemies in battle, strange grunts and moans coming out of characters when they take damage, and more.

About the time you get a chance to freely move about in the world, you’ll have to contend with the fact that nearly the entire game is controlled using the touch screen. Similar to The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, putting your stylus on the touchscreen will make Sonic move towards that point. The further away the stylus is from Sonic, the faster he moves. The first and most immediate problem this presents is the fact that you have to touch the very edge of the screen to get Sonic to run up to full speed – the same edges where elements of the game’s interface reside. It was a frustratingly common occurance to accidentally open the main menu or switch to a different party member by accidentally touching part of the HUD interface, when, instead, I was simply trying to make Sonic run northwest.

Battles start out equally frustrating; not only do you have to contend with ugly character models (featuring huge, scary doe-eyes), but having to wait for the camera to adjust itself in between tapping the touch screen can be annoying; in Final Fantasy, it was easy just to hold the “confirm” button and let the game auto-target a foe. Sonic Chronicles never gives you such a luxury, asking you to hand-pick your targets for nearly every single attack in the game. The game’s version of Magic/Special Abilities, called “POW Moves”, also require detailed touch screen input. In order to execute each move successfully, you must tap or drag across specific sections of the screen in rapid succession. These can take some getting used to – especially moments that require you touch your stylus and drag it across screen. Touch detection seems to be a bit weird, as there were definitely some instances where tapping or dragging would not register properly.

As one begins to play Sonic Chronicles, however, these problems slowly matter less and less. Though they are definitely issues, I slowly realized that they were not game-breaking issues. I eventually stopped caring about the horrifying character models, I learned to play with the sound turned off, and, yes, eventually I came to grips with how the touchscreen stuff worked. Even the plot – which, for the first few hours, is full of plenty of moments that will have you rolling your eyes – eventually blossomed in to a pretty decent story with a pleasantly strong sense of continuity with past Sonic games (something SonicTeam themselves have never, ever been good at). I’ll even dare to say that the storyline is pretty clever in spots – at least for a Sonic game. Compared to the plots of games like Sonic Rush Adventure, Shadow the Hedgehog, and Sonic 2006, Sonic Chronicles might as well be Shakespeare, with sharp characterization and plenty of amusing lines of dialog. This is, of course, greatly aided by the now Bioware-staple conversation trees, which allow you to pick how Sonic responds to characters; Sonic can be as sarcastic as you want him to be.

The actual RPG portion of Sonic Chronicles is handled pretty well, as should probably be expected from Bioware’s pedigree. As you gain experience points after each battle, your characters will eventually level up and when they level up, in addition to the usual increases in strength and health, you can put various attribute points in to four specific stats: Speed, Attack, Defense, and Luck. Unfortunately, the game is never quite clear what some of these really ever do. Even more confusing is when you start buying weapons and armor, you’ll often run across something that will, for example, lower defense but increase armor. Even by the end of the game, I was never really given an explanation as to the difference between “Defense” and “Armor” or why one was more important than the other. Status effects can also be hard to discern sometimes; though an icon representing a brick wall obviously translates to higher defense, flashing dots around a character’s head aren’t as easy to understand. Like everything else, though, these never really ruin the game, and it’s easy to get through fights even if you don’t understand what status effects are doing, especially given status effects are instantly cured once the battle is won. Chao, from the first two Sonic Adventure games, can now be “bonded” to a character to give further effects and bonuses, like regenerating health, increased luck, and the ability to imbue attacks with elemental effects.

Unfortunately, there are some problems that are harder to ignore. Every character in Sonic Chronicles has specific “field abilities” that they can use in the overworld. Sonic, for example, can “Dash”, which allows him to run around loops and down ramps. Tails can obviously “Fly”, which allows him to clear gaps. There’s some overlap between field abilities, as well – both Amy and Knuckles can use the “Smash” ability, which gets rid of crates that are blocking the way. As characters level up, their field abilities also level up, and though there is overlap, each character usually specializes at one ability the best – only Tails can use “Fly Level 3″, for example. The problem in all of this is that using field abilities is not very intuitive; generally you have to stand on a very specific part of the overworld for the icon to appear, and it can be tricky to hunt out a specific spot to stand in order to get the icon to come up. The other big problem with this method is in regards to how illogical it can feel; in particular, there are so many situations where Tails could simply just fly over something, but can’t, because the game doesn’t let him. I recall a specific situation where there was a stream I could cross simply flying across to the other side, but the game forced me to find a bridge instead. It can get downright insulting to jump large gaps in earlier locations only to be forced to use “flight” to cross a small crevice.

But the biggest, most heinous crime this game commits, is the ending. For those of you sweating spoiler material, you have no worries. I’m not going to say what happens in the ending; it’s the type of ending that bothers me. If even knowing this small detail bothers you, I suppose you could consider this a minor spoiler warning regarding the very end of the game and just skip to the last paragraph – but you may want to read onwards anyway, as this may have a serious impact on your enjoyment of the game. Essentially, the ending to Sonic Chronicles is what I consider one of the great game design sins: the cliffhanger ending. Though Sonic Chronicles wraps up the immediate events of this specific game, the whole thing ends on pretty large plot twist – the ramifications of which are left as a question mark. To rub further salt in to the wound, after you see this cliffhanger ending, the game cuts to Sonic and Tails, who promptly break the fourth wall and pretty much address the player directly, teasing them about “having to wait until the next episode” to see the conclusion. The pair then proceed to chat up Bioware themselves, listing by name everybody who works at the company and what they did for the game. The whole thing is full of cheese-ball humor and uncharacteristically poor grammar.

At that moment, all the good-will Sonic Chronicles had built up with its story, all the enjoyment I had from its gameplay, was almost completely washed away. Any effort the game had to immerse me in its world had evaporated in the face of one of the worst endings to a videogame I’ve seen in over ten years.

In the end, I’m hesitant to admit I enjoyed Sonic Chronicles. The game as a whole has a very amateur, almost home-brewed feel to it – like the game was created by a bunch of high school students. The game has a lot of minor problems that never really do anything to ruin the game on their own, but combined, and with the terrible ending, you end up with a product that I’m having a really hard time recommending anybody pay full price for. In all honesty, if you can stomach the game’s numerous little faults, it can be somewhat enjoyable. That being said, the only people I expect to tolerate these shortcomings are die-hard Sonic fans or people who are just really, really starved for a portable RPG. If you do not fall in to either of those categories, I’d suggest you stay away from this game; and even if you are one of the two types of people I mentioned, err on the side of caution and rent the game first.

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