One word, wow.

Bioware developed this game, and so you would think it would be great, picking up Sonic and making an RPG sounds like a great combo but my word is this game terrible. The combat, the sound design, the graphics, the story, all come together to create the biggest clusterfuck in gaming history.

I beat this game 3 times

I can sum up Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood in one simple word: incompetence. Really, that's the entire game everywhere you look. The battle system? The story? The overworld and exploration? The visuals? The MUSIC? All a result of complete and utter incompetence, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Sonic Chronicles, as you may know, is a turn based RPG developed by BioWare. It isn't good. As a matter of fact, it's legitimately horrendous in almost every single possible way. First off just examining the visuals, this game looks awful, even for a DS game. Cutscenes are presented in this weird jarring comic book style that wants to be stylistic but ends up looking cheap, tacky and something made in flash and put in Newgrounds during its early period. Second, the game itself. The environments in Battles look...ok I guess, but the map is literally a flat image with the main character's 3D model awkwardly plastered against it, and as for the models themselves whew are they awful. I personally don't think Sonic Rush was a spectacular looking game to tell you the truth, I think the mesh of 2D sprites and Sonic's 3D model never sat super well with me but in all honesty, Sonic's model in Sonic Rush was really well done for a Nintendo DS game, so how this game 2 years later managed to make one that's even worse is beyond me. Every character just looks like the developers smeared these already lackluster textures onto the geometry of these models with no thought to how it would look afterwards and the end result is a really jagged model with huge bug eyes and it just looks super off for every character in the game. On a technical level, the game is absolutely rife with constant slowdown during battles so that should speak for itself.

I'm sure everyone and their grandma has told you how bad the sound design is in this game, and they are all 100% right in that regard. The music speaks for itself, just go on YouTube and listen to some of these horrendous compositions, they genuinely need to be heard to be believed. The sound effects are just as bad honestly, most sound either really weird and out of place, low quality, stock, or in most cases all 3 at once. There was one instance where we were encountering Shadow as a boss turned party member in the story and when he approached us, he made a sort of a gobbling noise like a turkey and it caught me so off guard that I bursted out laughing, and there's stuff like this all over the game.

Now to dig into the gameplay. First off, simple overworld navigation is a chore. You need to use the touchscreen to maneuver Sonic and co around these areas and the touchscreen movement feels clunky at best, unresponsive at worst. It doesn't help that these overworlds are so incredibly lifeless. No interesting secrets or locales, no interesting side quests besides blatant copy pasted fetch quests and borderline insulting puzzles, there's...really nothing to do in these areas other than fight the same generic enemy encounters littered everywhere. It doesn't help that there isn't anything that spices up gameplay at all. There's this one section near the end of the game where the area you're in is submerged underwater, and the main gimmick is that your POW energy constantly drains, you can't use POW attacks in battle, and you can restore POW energy by using air bubbles in the overworld. Now I don't think this particular gimmick is...good, but it was SOMETHING at least, it was an interesting concept that added to the gameplay, but to jump the gun here that is the ONLY TIME IN THE GAME that something like this even happens, the rest is just constant battles that are all the exact same.

Speaking of battles, let's get this out of the way: this battle system is absolutely atrocious. To start, the entire game is balanced around evasion which I will never understand. For example, you would think that when you level up and decide to upgrade your attack, you would deal more damage in battle right? Nope. The attack stat only increases your chances of actually hitting your opponent, and pretty much all the other stats are like this as well. With a battle system revolving around accuracy, be prepared to miss attacks a LOT, and miss attacks you will. Standard attacks barely do anything of worth, they deal a piss poor amount of damage and miss almost all the time so there's not really any reason to use them. This is even worse when the enemies randomly enter "evasive" states in the middle of your turn while you're attacking so if you chose standard attacks all throughout, oops! Sorry, try again next turn. The only way to really deal damage is by using special POW moves, which are essentially character specific special attacks or techniques you can pull off using the POW meter (it's literally no different than how MP works in traditional RPGs). The issue is that not only are these really the only way you're gonna deal good damage which basically means you need to spam these over and over again to get the job done, but in order to even execute one of these attacks, you need to perform a set of touchscreen based minigames. Tapping circles, tapping a big circle multiple times, sliding the stylus and tracking a circle as it crosses a line, not only is it visually uninteresting to do, but it's super tedious as well. You can't screw these up either, because if you do then you could either risk dealing like 1/4 of the damage, or the move just completely fails all together, and this applies to supportive healing abilities as well. As a result POW moves (and subsequently battles in general) become super tedious and repetitive and get old extremely quickly, and this combined with the enemies often having ridiculous defense, self heal, self revive, extremely high health, etc means that battles drag on for an absolute eternity. This isn't difficult to counter by any means (in fact the game as a whole is pitifully easy), it's just super mind numbingly boring to complete. There wasn't any engaging strategy I needed to think of as elemental weaknesses barely did anything from my experience and certain characters are completely outclassed by others (i.e. Cream basically being a better Tails in every single way imaginable) so there wasn't any thought to my team composition either. The bosses especially are a slog, and the final boss is literally only one turn long if it isn't obvious enough of how little they actually cared. And if THAT wasn't bad enough, if you want to run away from everything and not even bother with battling them (which to be fair I don't blame you), you need to play ANOTHER horrid touchscreen based minigame just to run away and escape (or subsequently catch up to them if THEY decide to flee, which can sometimes happen pretty frequently and wastes even MORE time in these already time wasting battles). The pace of these battles and the game as a whole is an absolute slog, nothing interesting ever happens anywhere in the game, battles or otherwise. The overworld has nothing to offer and isn't fun to explore, and battles are tedious slogs that encourage you to spam POW moves to speed things up and get anything done yet still end up taking an eternity to finish.

And if that weren't enough, there's also the story. I don't really mind if Sonic stories are bad (they usually are) because if the game is good then that's all that I'm really looking for and I can still have a great time. Here however, in an RPG a story is more integral to the game than ever before, so it being good should be a pretty good priority to maintain. Well, I've already established how the game isn't good, but unfortunately the story doesn't fare much better. To give some honest praise, the dialogue tree and character interactions are easily the best part of this game. You can make Sonic into either a person with a heart of gold or make him to be a giant snarky prick, and honestly it's a lot of fun to do and the options they give you are quite enjoyable. The actual plot however? Geez, what a nothing story. The main villain is this generic dictator that shows up twice in the story and doesn't really have anything interesting to him at all, Shade just exists, and the ending is a cliffhanger that is likely never going to get resolved because of how bad this game performed.

I wouldn't even bother playing or emulating this. This is just such a bore to play, between the lifeless dull overworld to the monotonous boring battles with tedious combat mechanics and unrewarding gameplay with zero depth or strategy to be found at all, combined with the lame story, awful presentation and sound design, I would recommend never touching this game. I'm not advised to Sonic doing an RPG again, get help from Atlas to make an excellent turn based one or even an action RPG akin to Kingdom Hearts 2. That imo would fit Sonic's fast paced nature even more than a turn based one, though obviously a turn based system could still work well if done right. Just...don't do what Chronicles did. Ever.

my biggest guilty pleasure game, I know it has (lots of) flaws but there is something this game has that can keep me coming back. most likely nostalgia. I found the story to be great up until around chapter 6 after that it became absolutely convoluted. the fact you need a stylus to move is a fun gimmick until its not, would've been good to has d-pad movement. the combat also suffers from this same problem where the stylus is necessary and even one slight error causes the skill to do little damage, fail or just flat out miss the target(at least there is a chao that removes the need for stylus actions during skills). overall, you will only remotely enjoy this game if you have nostalgia for it or love bad games

Look, does Sonic get to go fast here? Not really. Does he spend a lot of time waiting his turn in line? Ye... Yeah. Does all of this happen while a rough approximation of music blonks in the background? You're darn tootin'.

I don't love Sonic Chronicles, but I didn't hate my time spent with it. I know the bizarre background music is a meme at this point, but I enjoyed the soundtrack's outsider-style plinks and plonks. It's also nice to see the Sonic cast act like actual characters (mostly) reacting to a plot, rather than spouting some kind of nonsense about being cool, blue dudes who love adventure or whatever the two Adventure games are about.

As far as the game itself goes, no, Sonic doesn't really work as an RPG, but some ideas tossed into Sonic Chronicles, like the use of quick-time prompts for special attacks, help liven things up, and while a lot of other ideas don't work, there at least seems to be an attempt at making something more interesting (or at least professional) from whatever anonymous boardroom decision prompted a Sonic RPG. That's more than I can say about a lot of these games.

I played some of this while I was sick and, if anything, I enjoyed it more than being sick. So, y'know, that's something.

It's your average jank-ass low-budget DS game, complete with incredibly awkward touch based mini-games, but it's also an rpg involving both Sonic and Bioware, so it's sort of funny that it exists.

Also the soundtrack sounds like farts and Sonic is in full renegade mode, being a complete dick to everyone he meets.

It's bad, but it's also sort of a weird/cool time capsule.

I remember renting this game from Blockbuster back in 2008 when it came out, and on the way home I had to shit so fucking bad that I was begging my Mom to drive home faster. I literally was in a half-standing stance in the backseat pleading with God. A moment that makes you truly realize time is a construct and that 5 minutes isn't always just 5 minutes. It was the kind of sweaty, painful, and restless experience that you never forget; I couldn't believe I didn't shit my pants.

Anyway, I remember that experience more than this game because it was so bad. You know a game sucks if even as a Sonic-obsessed kid you just have no interest in it.

I don't wanna defend this too hard but it's certainly overhated. The sound design is an abomination for sure, every time I closed a menu it played a screeching noise that made me pray to God for salvation, but it's really just a stylish yet average ds rpg. The writing and plot are certainly all fluff but the game gives you dialougue options to role play sonic as. I always picked the smug asshole option.

When you transition between worlds the game plays this animation of sonic running through the hills as you're speeding through the map on the bottom screen. Each character has distinct play styles and special moves that appeal to their personalities. There's a minor Chao garden mode for Pete's sake!
These are the types of touches that keep the game from feeling soulless. I've played many a ds game in the past year and while the game is fairly flat and gimmicky it has enough charm to where I'd say this is not really a contender for WOAT as people make it out to be.

If the idea of a Sonic-themed RPG sounds like a bad idea to you, this game is to blame. A bizarre presentation of horrible character models and animations against ugly backgrounds, the use of nothing other than the touch screen to control everything (even things that could be easily assigned to buttons, like menus), a battle system that works like a more punishing version of a rhythm game, where missing one note will cripple your entire action, a dreadful soundtrack with the most boring and lazy MIDI files you will ever hear, and weird implementation of a dialog tree system where you can turn Sonic into the biggest asshole you will ever see.

I know some people still wish for a good Sonic RPG, but we all know how this franchise works. If a new concept for a Sonic game isn't a home run from the very first attempt, they will simply kill that concept out of fear of failure, instead of giving it another chance and hopefully improve upon it.

It was okay! A lot of game reviewers make it up to be the absolute worst Sonic game ever made along with Forces, but I’ve had a decently okay time with both. With this more than Forces, admittedly, but the latter still holds a special place in my heart.

It really feels like the team at Bioware were trying to go for something unique, despite the horrendously rushed development time. They went out of their way to make intentionally misleading promotional art so as to not spoil that there were going to be new echidnas introduced. They even had a website that took secret codes from the game!

I think my favorite part of it was the story. A rival echidna clan to Knuckles’ that had advanced technology and fighter robots suddenly returning to Earth to finish their world domination sounds like a Ken Penders storyline (derogatory), but when put in practice it’s much less convoluted than it could have been. The cliffhanger ending was very unfortunate, but it didn’t ruin the experience for me.

This game honestly has some of the better characterization I’ve seen so far. I can single out a couple negatives, such as Rouge being weirdly rude and Big being more stupid than usual, and Shadow being on a very fine line between his modern “all edge no substance” character, but they’re minor blemishes for me. They really nailed Knuckles’ dilemma of not wanting to defeat the big bad Echidna in fear of never seeing other members of his race again, making him hesitant without putting a Penders-shaped spotlight over him at all times.

Reformed Eggman was pretty well done while it lasted. There’s one particular dialogue box where Tails gets excited to talk about a scientific discovery with him (and Sonic can reprimand him for it), and it was cute to imagine what kind of father-son or colleague-kindergartner relationship these two could have had in another universe.

I didn’t really like the graphics all that much. I think the models are cute, but something about the art style of the 2D environments doesn’t do it for me. The comic book style animatics could have worked nicely, but they were cheapened by the weird choice of music (which I will talk about later). The human NPCs in particular feel like they were supposed to match Sonic Unleashed’s humans in style, but they ended up looking like something I’d see on Jetix when that was still around.

The alien NPCs are the complete opposite though, I’m very fond of how they turned out. Their 2D portraits benefit from the unfamiliar cartoony style, and their 3D models are honestly fantastic. Their animations are a mixed bag, but some highlights are the Kron Warrior rock spinning and throwing animation, and the Voxai knocked down and getting back up animation. They take a solid chunk of the battle time, but they’re nice to look at.

Speaking of battles, I’ve found the whole RPG gameplay quite nice actually! The battles have GBA Mario RPG (what a string of words) style button prompts — or rather, Elite Beat Agent/Osu! style touch screen prompts that show up when performing or defending from a skill. For defending, they get surprisingly more lenient as you level up, allowing you to miss almost half of them and still get a perfect evade. But for attacking, you still need to execute them perfectly, which was quite annoying at some points. I can understand why that was a thing, most likely to add some stakes to the use of strong skills such as Cream’s Refresh (infinite MP/PP restoration), but I’d still enjoy a middle ground or at least some transparency that I’m about to fail miserably.

It’s a well known fact at this point that half of it consists of MIDIs stolen from fansites, but I don’t feel good calling those bad. They were definitely not pleasant to listen to for the most part, oh no, but what made them bad was the misplaced and sometimes entirely missing MIDI instruments and not the songs themselves. I don’t want to insult a fan’s MIDI remix when the developers are at fault, they got their songs stolen and misrepresented and are already going to be bashed for all of time. Granted, they’re unrecognizable from their originals at this point, but still.

The other half of the soundtrack, the one that didn’t get affected by the legal troubles that made them hastily steal MIDIs, is bizarre to say the least. From hard rock to electronic, none of it sounds too fitting nor too misplaced at the same time. It’s a weird middle ground where you can get used to it but you’re not sure if you should.

I am confident in saying I did not like the sound effects. The sound for when you KO an enemy is a stock boing sound. When you win a battle, there's a stock kids cheering sound. The sounds from getting hit are a random combination of grunts that don’t sound like a character getting hit at all plus robotic sounds that play even for the organic characters.

This game could have been more polished. This game deserved way more development time than it got. It’s a miracle they managed to make something stable with all these missteps. I would be hopeful for a sequel if not for the whole Ken Penders fiasco, and I’m slowly leaning towards it since the game’s mention in the newest Sonic official book, but for the moment I’m just hoping people stop being so harsh.

But I understand where it comes from. There was no credits screen. A handful of names were shoved in about five text boxes and framed as an out of nowhere conversation between Sonic and Tails during the cliffhanger ending, and that was it.

Cutting corners is an understatement. They have made a circle.