A great RPG from Bioware, in a very unusual choice of license. As a casual Sonic fan and an RPG fan, this impressed on both accounts.
The writing is really great for having been done by Bioware in terms of how it feels like it's from Sonic. As someone who loved Sonic Adventure 2, these characters felt like they jumped right out of that game into this one, and the numerous references to Sonic Battle were appreciated, as someone who likes that game too. In terms of mechanics, taking a page from the Mario & Luigi games, you do mini-games to execute your special moves, but instead of timed button presses, they're more like something out of Osu/Elite Beat Agents, which is actually really fun. Additinoally, you also dodge enemy special moves this way, which leads to my next paragraph.
In terms of flaws, the difficulty is really weird. Because the developers realized dodging enemy special attacks is basically 100% if you're good at the tapping games, enemies get really strong normal attacks, which in about chapter 3 you can start getting people 1-round killed by, when there's virtually nothing you could've done about it. Also, stats being explained a bit better would've helped a lot. Every character gets so many attacks per round, but their number is (with the exception of one special buff Tails can do) are totally set in stone. Sonic and Shadow have 3 attacks per round as soon as you get them, and they always will, while characters like Big and Cream only get 1 and are stuck like that. Granted that is built into the design, it'd be nice if they let you power-game it, considering there IS a stat called 'speed.' Other peeves with the design is that being able to assign an action to a specific turn in a round would be nice, as well as being able to go back to undo the last thing you told someone to do, instead of having to rewrite the whole round's commands to do so.
Overall, despite how long that flaws paragraph is, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone who likes quirky JRPG's and/or Sonic.
The writing is really great for having been done by Bioware in terms of how it feels like it's from Sonic. As someone who loved Sonic Adventure 2, these characters felt like they jumped right out of that game into this one, and the numerous references to Sonic Battle were appreciated, as someone who likes that game too. In terms of mechanics, taking a page from the Mario & Luigi games, you do mini-games to execute your special moves, but instead of timed button presses, they're more like something out of Osu/Elite Beat Agents, which is actually really fun. Additinoally, you also dodge enemy special moves this way, which leads to my next paragraph.
In terms of flaws, the difficulty is really weird. Because the developers realized dodging enemy special attacks is basically 100% if you're good at the tapping games, enemies get really strong normal attacks, which in about chapter 3 you can start getting people 1-round killed by, when there's virtually nothing you could've done about it. Also, stats being explained a bit better would've helped a lot. Every character gets so many attacks per round, but their number is (with the exception of one special buff Tails can do) are totally set in stone. Sonic and Shadow have 3 attacks per round as soon as you get them, and they always will, while characters like Big and Cream only get 1 and are stuck like that. Granted that is built into the design, it'd be nice if they let you power-game it, considering there IS a stat called 'speed.' Other peeves with the design is that being able to assign an action to a specific turn in a round would be nice, as well as being able to go back to undo the last thing you told someone to do, instead of having to rewrite the whole round's commands to do so.
Overall, despite how long that flaws paragraph is, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone who likes quirky JRPG's and/or Sonic.