MODERN GAMING
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Developer:  BioWare
Publisher:  Sega
Year:  2008
Genre:  RPG
System:  Nintendo DS

Serious gamers over the age of 15 will perhaps have watched the glorious rise and tragic fall of a legendary gaming mascot.  A mascot whom was once equal to the greatest and most famous videogame character of all time.  A mascot whose reputation and gaming history was in more recent times ruined by a company who tried to go too fast and dealt with many a greivous marketing error.  However now comes a new game out of the rather good selection of games he has enjoyed on the handheld Nintendo systems.  Will this game be worthy enough to keep him alive?  Let's find out.


Story - The story begins with Sonic taking a vacation as he always seems to do when there's no evil robot inventing genius around to spindash into, when an urgent call from Tails comes in about Knuckles being kidnapped by a mysterious group called The Marauders, as well as the Chaos Emeralds being stolen, again, possibly by the return of Dr. Eggman (or Robotnik if you prefer, which I do).  So Sonic has to cut his vacation short and join his friends in another battle to save their world, and eventually into another.  It's rather surprising that both Sonic and Mario have plots just as shallow as the other, with one handling magic and the other handling science, both in childish gloss-over ways.  Not that we mind, we can ignore a shallow story for the sake of good gameplay which this game does have, and at the very least, this game does have a better deeper story than the other Sonic games....which is like saying one particular puddle is less shallow than another particular puddle.

Gameplay - As with every RPG, you have your field gameplay and battle gameplay.  Field gameplay works by wandering around talking to people mindlessly and taking on their missions ranging from finding some little stupid item to defeating particularly unique enemies.
You can also interact with people with a series of topic tabs ranging in their tone, similar to that of Mass Effect.  Depending on what tone you use on each topic, you either get more or less info as well as improve relations with other people or not.  These range from:
Party-friendly, where you ask your team members how they're doing and what they think of the situation.
Positive, which is self-explanatory.
Negative, again obvious, you dumbass.
And Sonic's Way, which is essentially "YOU'RE TOO SLOW" and run off to the next mission, which is rather funny sometimes when you can make Sonic look an absolute dick.  Especially with Amy, because anything that is fully pink and not human or elephant, is just plain wrong.


Moving into more RPG perspectives, every character is of a certain class, in either the Power, Shifter or Support Class.  Each character has a range of skills called POW moves that they can utilise when you obtain them after gaining POW points from levelling up.  The attacks vary depending on what class your character is, so Support Classes have no attacking moves and rather just give out healing and status effects.  Power and Shifter Classes can involve themselves or other characters into attacks for more damage by using up their PP.
It's rather similar to the Mario & Luigi RPG games' Power Bros attacks, except this time everyone involved in the attack has to use up the same amount of PP, so it's a greedier system.  Also, characters have different skills to navigate around the field.  Sonic has his Dash which allows him to navigate tricky sections while Tails can Fly across areas and Knuckles can Climb certain walls, all of which can be easily used by swapping to whichever character has the ability.

Now moving into battle, the main meat of the game and easily the most enjoyable part.  Let's not beat around the green hill bush, it's very like Elite Beat Agents almost to the point of copyright infringing if there's such a thing in this case.  Normal attacks require no input other than selecting the enemy to attack which will make every turn of that character ONLY attack.  Defence is the same manner, but with Defence you can also regain 1 PP for every turn your character uses in a battle, as the battles are measured in Rounds, where as many as three or four turns for each character can be done.  Items and POW Moves only cost one turn each and can be utilised multiple times in a single Round.


The POW Moves require the EBA-esque input, of which there are three forms.  Tapping the stylus onto a blue target at the right time (which is when the outer circle of the target goes green), sliding the stylus along the indicated path with the button, and tapping a block repeatedly to make all its lights go green (which is certainly the easiest one to do).  The POW Moves when used feel also similar to Mario & Luigi's RPG game attacks, in that you can bring in as many as four characters into one attack for more power, but that power shall only work more if you follow the commands precisely.  The same method is also used in defending yourself against special enemy attacks.  And for those who couldn't do Elite Beat Agents, fear not, for this is a simplified version and far easier to cope with.

Graphics - The graphics bring to mind that of an early DS game, in that they're not terribly impressive but do the job fine enough.  The characters all look like they should be, the scenery is half-nostalgic but pleasing and cutscenes play out like a kid's comic book, which to be honest isn't that badly done.  For a start, for a non-Sega company making a Sonic game, the characters look unchanged especially in the dialogue and cutscenes, and the pointiness of the DS graphics is rather nostalgic to that of the early 3D Sonic games.  And I don't mean Sonic Adventure, I mean Sonic R or Sonic Jam.  Thankfully the graphics here, unlike Sonic R, do not look like care bear vomit.


Battle is another matter when it is entirely 3D, but don't fret because it actually looks fine.  The DS has never fully been right with 3D without everything looking rather pointy, and if anything it works even more in Sonic's favour when their character designs are rather pointy (he IS a hedgehog after all).  Character attacks always look fun, especially when they team up for brutal attacks, not that you'll really see them unless you fuck up your timing and the flashy touch points all go away so you watch your attack take away a pathetic amount of HP from your enemies.  So tough choice, at one point you will fuck up and you get to watch your attack.  After that you can imagine what is happening under your stylus and fat pasty hand covering the screen for every 3 seconds.

Music/Sound - This is the only game everyone's gonna hate.  The music is terrible and muzaky like fuck.  They did a great work with the gameplay, made a decent story but could not even bother with good music.  And you know the DS can make good music when we have evidence with The World Ends With You or Pokemon Diamond/Pearl.  But no, they decide to have this bad music throwaway typical of the very same guy who does the music for Sonic R, which everyone remembers as having truly horrendous music, and just like muzak in a mall, it is fucking EVERYWHERE.
The field music sounds like the kind of muzak you only get in furniture stores, passive, neutered, soothing, the kind of muzak that you'll blame for falling asleep on the unclingfoiled bed and leaving your ass groove on, while the battle music sounds like the kind of muzak in department stores which sounds vaguely like 50 rock songs you know of (and yes there is a difference folks), and while some might be able to just blot it out and carry on with it sounding mundanely peaceful, the music just sounds really lazy and like something from a mediocre SNES game.  Seriously.  And where the FUCK is Green Hill Zone's music?  Why am I getting this crappy MIDI beat from a Yamaha keyboard?
I'll tell you why, some ass called Richard Jacques who pretty much makes the worst music of any Sonic game.  He's like the Elton John of videogame music, respectable in his own field but nobody actually likes what he does.  This game instead of being bearable becomes a little bit more irritating by this alone.
Sound effects are slightly better for having the original Sonic sound effects of jumping, spindashing and spring-jumping all bringing back that aural twinkle of familiarity but this is marred by the stupid sound effects including the odd cartoony sound effect of when an enemy or ally is defeated, which sounds more at home in Looney Toons than in Sonic.


The real problem here is that while this is a good game to play, it is a slightly-above average game to experience.  The story is fine, the gameplay is great, the graphics are okay but the music is terrible.  Perhaps this falls a little short of people's expectations, or it fits well into its possibly intended audience of younger gamers who want to have a break from Pokemon.
And that is the problem with Sonic.  He has ever since he went into 3D, kept falling short of expectations.  Sonic Adventure was a fantastic first step, Sonic Adventure 2 held itself up well for its time, but all his 3D games after that have failed pathetically.
However here we have a good game, which is unfortunately judged as good because of all the shit games before it, so it's being given a sympathy vote in that it is playable, far more than the other games of Sonic in the past few years, but in any other time it would be deemed as a little above average by some.
As it stands, if you love Sonic and if you lament his fall to mediocrity and if you becry the fate of Sega itself in being unable to handle their own licenses well, get this game and feel a little better.  It's a band-aid over the wounded career of one of videogames' greatest mascots.

Fun and Innovation - 3
Replayability - 2
Gameplay - 4
Presentation - 3

I think I'll pick this up. I was never a huge Sonic fan, but this game seems cool