Vital Stats

Genre: RPG
Players: 1
Online: Wifi Pet Trading

Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Sega
ESRB Rating: E
Release Date: 9/30/2008

Platforms

• DS

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood looked like it could have been Sonic’s salvation. However, a distinguished new developer and a new genre just weren’t enough to snap the hedgehog out of his deep blue funk.

The Quick and the Dead
Time hasn’t been kind to Sonic the Hedgehog. Since his 2D debut, he’s tried to drift away from the high velocity core that defined his franchise without completely leaving it behind. Hedging the game design among speed, 3D exploration, and eventually even pet simulation left each kind of gameplay feeling hollow. So each successive installment in the Sonic franchise has successively fallen shorter of critical acclaim.

However, it seems like Sega just doesn’t have the stomach for a total continuity restart, so we’ve been stuck with an increasingly diluted menagerie of gameplay and ancillary characters. That is, stuck until Sega decided to farm out Sonic to Bioware, notable developer of such RPGs as Knights of the Old Repulblic and Mass Effect. Bioware doesn’t normally tackle platformers, and it looks like they stuck with what they know. So today we have Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, a turn-based RPG set in the Sonic universe for the Nintendo DS.

It’s really the perfect opportunity to make a great game. Established characters, a novel genre, and an experienced development house gave us Super Mario RPG and a chain of critically acclaimed successors. So it’s outright tragic that The Dark Brotherhood turned out to be flawed and mediocre.

Fast Friends
The Dark Brotherhood follows Sonic’s adventures as he saves the franchise MacGuffin, Chaos Emeralds, from a megalomaniac. For once the megalomaniac in question isn’t Dr. Robotnic, but the Chaos Emeralds are stolen about as often as Princess Peach gets kidnapped, so you probably know how this goes by now.

That greyed-out badge is
how the game says, “I hate you.”

Along the way, Sonic meets most of the first string supporting characters from previous games, who fill traditional RPG roles and round out a good old fashioned adventuring party. These characters also supplement your ability to explore the game’s overhead-view world map using individual movement abilities. For example, Tails can fly, Amy Rose can smash obstacles with her hammer, and Knuckles can climb walls. It’s a nice touch that references the unique abilities that distinguished early Sonic games as excellent platformers without particularly subverting the RPG core.

There is a hitch, however. The travel mechanic uses popup badges on the world map that indicate which particular ability will get you to a new location. It’s a cinch to tap on the badge to bypass the obstacle with the right character leading your party, but absent that character you’ll have to make a trip to a safehouse where you can swap party members. It makes for a lot of backtracking, and frequently respawning enemies on the world map can make exploration drag to a crawl. The badges also only appear when you’re standing immediately adjacent to the obstacle, so it can be difficult to distinguish cliffs that are flight obstacles from cliffs that are just scenery.

Outside exploration, your allies are fully featured characters in the grandest tradition of RPGs. They use an experience-based leveling system and allocation of skill and stat points for character customization. The skills you buy are used exclusively in combat, and your stats underlie your battle efficacy. It’s all genre boilerplate, but competently executed nevertheless.

The Only Thing Gone in 60 Seconds is the Fun
Without any platforming, Sonic resorts to turn-based combat to settle his differences with the homicidal animals and robots that are indigenous to RPGs. Quick time events spice up the back and forth, but it doesn’t play as well for Sonic Chronicles as it did for Mario and Luigi.

In a misguided play for novel combat mechanics, The Dark Brotherhood borrows its quick time events from Elite Beat Agents. So instead of simple button presses, players are expected to perform timed taps and track moving circles on the DS touch screen. This sort of gameplay worked well for Elite Beat Agents because rhythm gameplay intrinsically scaffolds precision timing mechanics. That is, it’s easier to make a timed tap when it synchs up with music. However, RPG combat flows independently of the background music, so the scaffolding just isn’t there.

Actually, there are lots of
ways the game hates you.

Challenging quick time events aren’t a problem on their own, but critical abilities outright fail when you make small errors. For instance, healing can require eight timed taps, and missing even one causes the action to completely fail. This is partly mitigated by healing being extremely potent, but the combination of powerful abilities and touchy controls makes combat a capricious seesaw between extremes of low and high difficulty. The unpredictable swinging feels alternately boring and unfair.

Timing is Everything
Bioware is most famous for their conversation systems in RPGs, and they’ve taken this strength to The Dark Brotherhood as well. You can mock and coddle your allies as the plot proceeds, and the game keeps a silent tally of your behavior. Depending on how treat your friends, you can access optional branches in the game’s dialog flow. Sonic Chronicles isn’t as richly branched as some of Bioware’s other games, but it keeps the feel of the characters consistent with the rest of the franchise.

Unfortunately, the presentation of the storytelling doesn’t fare so well. The music in particular is a grating attempt at minimalist electronica that misses the mark and sounds incomplete instead. The overworld music sounds like a half-measure remix of classic sonic chiptunes. The combat music consists of sampled rock music, but that only serves to throw the overworld music into relief.

The graphics are a mix of 3D models for gameplay and 2D portraits for conversations. They fare better than the music, though they’re overly ambitious for the DS screen’s resolution. The 3D character models in particular lack detail and look underwhelming compared to the rich 2D character portraits. However, even those portraits are noticeably aliased, and it mars their otherwise excellent quality and expressiveness.

Quick and Dirty
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood continues Sega’s tradition of capitalizing on the blue hedgehog’s weaknesses at the expense of his strengths. This happened despite a new developer and a new genre, so it’s tempting to conclude that Sega’s apron strings strangled Bioware’s baby. However, a prosaic RPG marred by touchy combat and lackluster presentation makes for plenty of blame to go around. That said, there is a working RPG under all that cruft, so Sonic diehards will probably still find something to love. Everyone else is hereby warned.

What It Costs: $33

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $5 (skip)
•To The Genre Fan: $0 (skip)
•To The Casual: $0 (skip)