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.