Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood [DS]

Battles can also go on forever, due to some random elements that come into play with the enemies you're fighting. Some characters will automatically heal after every round, others will come back to life if all enemies aren't dead after the round ends (sometimes with more HP than you can deliver with a team in the following round), and status buffers can cause a whole team to miss multiple times, round after round. There's something to be said for more strategic fights, and the addition of all enemy HP on the top screen does allow you to plan out more of what you're doing each round, but it's still a bit much. One battle can take minutes to beat if under the right conditions. Pair that with slow, point to point RPG exploration, and missions can get pretty tedious extremely fast. In addition, enemies don't know to run from you if you're overpowered, and they don't scale with your level, so when you return to Green Hill Zone to collect a few quest items six hours in, they'll be scaled to level one teams, and still want to fight over and over. Oh, and the miss buffers will still work, making the battles longer than they need to be once again.

It's not all bad, but it'll take a dedicated RPG player (or rabid Sonic fan) to want to get to the good parts. The characters are a great mix of different class types, for example, so while I figured I'd just be using Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and a random other fourth character, I truly did want to make use of everyone on my team. Healer classes make it so you can get back much-needed Power Points, while other characters can steal items from baddies, and even more so, the skill upgrade system will make you choose which characters you'll want to pair together, since certain special attacks can't be used unless the other teammate is there to help out. The game also does a nice job of keeping you stocked full of items, and the game treats rings as your currency, but also as a way to try again during hard fights or get hints during puzzles. If you collect enough rings, you can get through any of the hardships that await.

Unfortunately, the characters and interactions are really the only actual Sonic-like aspects of the game. It still feels like a generic, point-to-point quest, and what little that was added (you can escape from battles with a quick race mini-game, for example) feels tacked on and thin. Even the classic Bioware expandable dialogue trees aren't effective, with various options not really impacting the game in any way. You can be a jerk to one character the whole time, for example, and never get a long-term effect from it. One such example of this occurred with Tails and his save recommendations. Since the game is more of a starter RPG, Tails is constantly reminding the player to save. One of the options is "Tails, stop telling me to save all the time," which he quickly responds by saying "Ok." to Sonic. Sure enough, a few minutes down the line and Tails will again remind you before a boss fight or main story sequence. This occurs again when Eggman joins your team, as you have the option to be mean, and basically say that you don't want him in your group, but it's inevitable. Even generic "jerk" moments available result in nothing more than one quick response from the character, and then the storyline as usual. We weren't expecting a Mass Effect level of branching dialogue or anything, but for what little characterization there is at all in the game, the moments of open-endedness should at least feel, well, open-ended.

As a few final notes on the game's interface and audio/visual offering, the 3D models, animation, effects, and environments are all very well done. On the audio side though, clips are low-quality and often cut very short, with even the constantly-used post-battle item sound cutting out after every fight. We're assuming it's because of the slickly animated item display on the top screen that's happening simultaneously, but for something that happens so often, it'd be a nice bug to get rid of. Other sounds, such as attack impacts and specials sound really out of place, using spring sound effects for huge hits, and slapstick audio when knocking players out. If this was part of making the game more kid-friendly, it could have been toned down a bit for the rest of the Sonic fan base.

Closing Comments
Sonic Chronicles isn't a bad game overall, but it does suffer from a list of things that keep it from being a title we can recommend to just anyone. The character balancing is strong, the game is simply beautiful, and there's more effort put into the front end and general flow of the game than most DS titles out there. On the gameplay front though, players will need to suffer through tedious point-to-point fetch quests with very little story to push the experience, and a battle system that gets too repetitive far too fast. Random balance issues make the fights a bit awkward, while the framerate and camera follow issues mix with some odd collision in the overworld and broken flow that requires you to talk to NPC's to solve a puzzle that's sitting right in front of the team. The dialogue doesn't push the story at all, and it just takes too long for the story to get moving, having you repeat areas long after they wear out their welcome, and do fetch quest after fetch quest just to lengthen the experience. There's fun to be had, and the game does pick up after the first few hours, but we'd be surprised to see many DS gamers get behind Dark Brotherhood while there are so many superior role-playing games on the platform. There's a good design in here somewhere; it's just lost in the shuffle of it all.

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