Review Surfing – Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (DS)

Sonic the Hedgehog is back in the Nintendo DS, but it’s not quite the same Sonic that we’re used to. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is an RPG—and get this—the game is developed by Bioware, a developer known for critically-acclaimed RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Mass Effect.

Just what is Bioware, a console/computer RPG developer, doing in Nintendo’s kid-friendly realm? We don’t know either. Perhaps the more important question: how well is the game doing, ratings-wise? Let’s find out.

1UP: (95%) [Sonic Chronicles] takes the franchise in a new and welcome direction, uprooting the titular anthropomorphic hedgehog and friends from their action-packed comfort zone and dropping them into a traditional-with-snazzy-modern-action-elements RPG environment that closely resembles — and, really, outright apes — Super NES classic Super Mario RPG and its handheld sequels, to great success.

IGN: (65%) 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.

Eurogamer: (70%) Sonic Chronicles is undeniably a nice-looking game, and its slick presentation makes for an enticing experience to begin with. The longer you play, however, the more the cracks start to show, and what seemed like a potential minor classic is soon reduced to just “pretty good”. Sonic fans will get the most from its short-lived charms, but with so many superior RPGs on the DS, the blue hedgehog needed to provide a lot more substance to make his genre debut an essential offering.

The critics have spoken, but the question remains. What do you think of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood?

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