Reviews – Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (DS)

The long-awaited Sonic game is finally here. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is “long-awaited” because the blue hedgehog’s games have been quite bad as of late. Sega, the franchise’s publisher, tapped legendary RPG maker Bioware to develop Sonic Chronicles for the Nintendo DS. The million-dollar question: is The Dark Brotherhood good enough to bring Sonic’s groove back? That’s what we aim to find out today.

The Sonic Chronicles storyline isn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material as Sonic and his friends go on another recover-the-chaos-emeralds quest. The 15 to 20 hour quest can be divided into two main activities: exploration and combat. Moving Sonic and his friends around the map is done by tapping the stylus at any point. Context-sensitive commands are used to negotiate through certain parts of an area, but would require the use of a certain character.

Sonic, for example, can zip through huge ramps, Tails can fly over gaps, and Knuckles can bash crates. The need for certain characters to get over obstacles is quite inventive, but the context-sensitive parts can be a pain because one would need to position the characters in a specific spot before said commands can be activated.

Combat is a mixed bag of brilliant ideas and unbalanced issues. Encountering an enemy on the map would automatically shift into turn-based battles, but winning these fights isn’t always so simple. Typical enemies could be beaten using ordinary attacks, but more powerful foes would be defeated only with POW moves. Activating POW moves would fill the touch screen with arcs and circles, requiring precise taps and slides. The POW moves make the battles more engaging because success doesn’t depend on stat crunching. Instead, players would have to time their onscreen taps and slides correctly, à la Elite Beat Agents. The idea seems brilliant on paper, but its execution is rather flawed because characters have a very limited amount of POW Points (PP). As a result, players have to constantly replenish PPs by either blocking attacks or consuming certain items, disrupting the flow of combat.

In addition, the attacks miss too often. When enemies randomly decide to evade the player’s attacks, they become impossible to hit. To make matters worse, there are regular enemies capable of taking down protagonists in one or two hits, while the good guys’ attacks take forever to beat certain foes.

While aspects of the core gameplay are imperfect, the rest work quite well for a supposedly casual RPG. The Chao can be “bonded” with Sonic and his friends, resulting in a different range of benefits that provide a considerable amount of depth. Better still is the option to trade Chao with other players via Wi-Fi. The Chao characters feel a bit underdeveloped because aside from obvious color differences, they all look alike. In addition, the benefits they provide are on the minor side.

Like other aspects of Sonic Chronicles, the sound and visuals offer both pros and cons. For the pros, the hand-drawn environments and character artwork are a joy to behold. The 3D models move smoothly, while the audio is appropriately loud and crisp. However, the 3D models don’t look too good at close inspection and the music is nothing to write home about.

Sonic Chronicles is quite tricky to review; though it shows a lot of promise, there are quite a number of blemishes that hurt the game’s overall quality. Even if the good may outweigh the bad, the difference isn’t quite far enough, resulting in merely a “good” DS game that could easily get lost within the deluge of must-have titles that rain from the sky every holiday season.

6.5/10

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