Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (Nintendo DS) Review

Sonic Chronicles begins in a gorgeous, hand-drawn reimagining of the Sonic franchise's best known locale — the Green Hill Zone. Forgoing a conventional tutorial section, players are given a few tips and simply set free to explore to their heart's content. Character movement is handled exclusively with the touch screen, with players able to simply point at a location with the stylus and have a character move in that direction. Although the game is party-based, only one member of the party will appear on-screen at any given time. It is, however, possible to swap between characters on the fly. Doing so becomes essential when navigating to certain areas, including those that can only reached by flying characters (Tails, Cream) or climbing characters (Knuckles).

Certain objects — loop-the-loops and climbable rock faces, for example — can be interacted with by tapping the touch screen or by pressing one of the DS' shoulder buttons. While the former will suffice at first, the latter becomes far more intuitive after time and helps to keep the pace of exploration fluid. Said interactions are crucial to finding every hidden ring (the game's currency), item and Chao egg in each location. Chao eggs eventually hatch into one of 40 Chao breeds and become usable in battle. Each character can be equipped with one Chao, making them more powerful, harder to hit, faster, luckier, and so on. It's a neat system that encourages exploration, but due to the ease of finding "Rare" Chao eggs early on, the majority of the Chao on offer are all but useless.

Despite the fact that enemy encounters are not random and can be avoided with careful manoeuvring, battles still constitute the bulk of Sonic Chronicles. Once a conflict has been initiated, players are given access to a selection of standard role-playing commands: attack, use item, flee, and so on. Battles are turn-based, so there is plenty of time to plan ahead, even if the action is fairly fast paced once it gets going. Certain characters, namely Sonic and other speedy characters, can perform multiple actions in a single turn, ensuring that players aren't forced to navigate the same few menus over and over again during a single battle. The battle system's real hook, though, is the incorporation of rhythm game-esque touch screen interactions when performing and defending from POW moves.

These interactions come in three distinct, reflex testing flavours: dragging, tapping, and frantic tapping. Let's take Sonic's "Whirlwind" attack as an example — once initiated, players are required to drag the stylus along a predefined arc for a set time before tapping the screen at a certain location and then repeating the process. If this is done successfully the move will initiate at full power, otherwise it will either fail or cause less than full damage. It's an enjoyable system that, at least initially, helps to prevent battles from becoming the monotonous, grind-centric affairs that they often boil down to in other role-playing games. Unfortunately, performing the same actions over and over again eventually becomes just as a repetitive as using a menu, except it takes far longer and requires more attention.

The problems presented by a repetitive battle system are somewhat nullified by the length of the game itself. We spent around eighteen hours completing the game with every ring and Chao egg (but only 37/40 breeds of Chao), and it was only towards the end that battles really started to drag on. This was largely because Sonic Chronicles isn't particularly challenging, with the exception of a few difficulty spikes. In fact, as the game progress, it actually becomes easier due to the player becoming more accustomed to its mechanics. The complete lack of a need for grinding is most welcome, but BioWare has clearly developed Sonic Chronicles with a young audience in mind, so while the low difficulty may be warranted, the result is an experience that is going to be a little too light for genre veterans.

In terms of plot development, Sonic Chronicles is entirely linear. The game is broken down into distinct chapters, most of which take place in a single or small handful of locations. Plot advancements take place during cut-scenes and discussions between key characters and foes. While there are a number of NPCs littered about the world, they only serve to initiate side-quests — most of which are uninspired 'go here, kill this, fetch that' affairs — and rarely if ever say anything worthy of note. It's a shame, because the dialogue system is well designed to reflect the various facets of Sonic's personality. During discussions with key characters (who also have access to a respectable repertoire of well-written retorts), players can choose from responses that range from friendly and inquisitive to plain rude.

If dialogue really isn't your thing, though, it's possible to get through conversations extremely quickly by picking the default response from Sonic in order to get back to the action as quickly as possible. We found this to be of particular use when playing through the game for a second time with characters in the same levelled-up state they were in when we finished it the first time. Alas, this is the only reward for completing the game (collecting every Chao egg and ring doesn't change anything) and it's a mostly superficial option because a fully levelled team can whiz through the entire game in a matter of hours. The ability to reassign POW abilities and try out those that weren't utilised the first time round is nice, but the novelty soon wears thin without any challenging opponents.