Sonic Chronicles The Dark Brotherhood

Since the demise of the cult classic Dreamcast, Sonic the Hedgehog has suffered from exhaustion. He has been seen across nine different consoles in almost half as many years, and owing to such a brutal flogging by the Sonic Team and SEGA his quality has dropped to nearly nothing on many of is outings into our consoles. Fortunately, most of the handheld games have been of a decent quality, and we’ve seen a lot of Virtual Console action out of the blue hero. This time, Sonic rears his spiky blue head on the Nintendo DS, in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Developed by BioWare, the famous developer of Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, Sonic Chronicles needs to live up to the legacy of this developer's reputation.

The opening scenes are fully animated and show a fairly stressed Sonic running at an incredible speed towards the Green Hill Zone -- he’s just had a call from Tails who tells him that Knuckles has gone missing and the Chaos Emeralds have gone with him. On the way back to the Green Hill Zone Sonic bumps into a friend: she goes by the name of Amy and one of the first things that the player will learn is that Amy now has a boyfriend – apparently. And he's not Sonic, at that. So things have certainly moved on since Eggman was beaten.

Throughout Sonic Chronicles the storyline is developed and bits and pieces of information are slowly leaked to the player, and many welcome faces return, such as Tails, Rouge the Bat, Knuckles and a couple of other unlockable characters who shall remain a secret, attack from possible alien enemies and the talk of Eggman makes the storyline much more enjoyable. This attention to detail is really what makes Sonic Chronicles feel well developed – rather than any old RPG with the sprites changed around and a blue blur added.

Although a great story can easily be marred by a poor game play experience, as many a games which suffer from this have illustrated. Fortunately, Sonic Chronicles doesn’t fall into this sad category of videogame. Sonic Chronicles falls into the archetypal RPG genre - it’s a direct split of heavy investigation with turn based battles. One of the best parts about the fighting is that there’s very few random battles. It’s in the similar vein to Earthbound where it’s possible to avoid the enemy if they’re just hampering the gameplay.

Up to four characters can be played at any one time, with the other characters all sitting at home waiting for the battle roster to get switched -- and it does change, as only certain characters have the ability to get through certain areas of the zones, such as Knuckles with climbing and Sonic with running. The player is able to flip between characters at any time with a tap of the DS Stylus on the appropriate icon at the top left of the screen.

In fact, the stylus in Sonic Chronicles governs everything: movement is all where the player moves to the stylus to and whichever character is selected will simply run towards that point. At first this can feel a little off putting, especially for those in love with the d-Pad; however, after a while it becomes completely natural. The only big issue is when a player may try to make Sonic do a “loop the loop” at a high speed: rather than physically move the stylus in a circle, it requires a tap of a button. This may not sound like a big issue, but it makes the game feel a little less intuitive.

The battle system in Sonic Chronicles is unique, and fortunately it is brilliant. The battle system is speedy, yet expansive. Per round each character gets a number of turns depending upon which moves are selected, so if Items are selected, more than one item can be used in that one “turn”; however, if the player selects Attack first, then there’s the only option available, so planning moves is crucial. Experience is helpful as well, as the more experience the player has the more rounds per turn they get as well, so leveling up is fairly important as well.

As with all RPGs, it’s very stats based and there are various types of defence, offence, HP and POW metres to watch and keep topped up. POW is the special moves that are unique to each character, and they’re of vital importance. Some enemies are defeated much more quickly and easily using POW moves rather than a standard attack as they are designed to be more effective against that type of creature. Unlike in Pokémon where it’s a little obvious (fire kills grass) it’s more trial and error, which makes the game more fulfilling. The special moves are performed by doing a series of drag and tap movements on the touch screen, so it’s important to pay attention during the POW moves, otherwise they may not work at all. This is fun at first, but can easily become a little tedious on a more complex battle.

There's also an extensive Chao Garden, where the player is able to raise and play with their little Chaos. Each Chao is born from an egg, and these eggs are found across the world in easy and hard to reach places, and as such each Chao can either be very common or very rare. They're a great little add-on to the title and when used correctly can be used to help in game.

The graphics in Sonic Chronicles are crisp and colourful, there are very few graphic mix-ups and there are no glitches either. The levels and character designs are vibrant and distinct, as is the music, which is memorable and sounds great from the DS speakers. Further, there’s no voice acting, no cheesy American Sonic and no squeaky Cream. Although the character design is straight from Sonic X, thankfully none of the voices are.

Final Verdict - 9/10
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is a welcome return of a quality Sonic title that brings back memories of first playing Sonic 1 on the Sega Mega Drive. With great graphics, great gameplay and a developed storyline that’s not overly serious, Sonic’s a great addition to all gamers. The only downside is the somewhat odd battle system.