BioWare is a byword for quality in RPGs, so you'd expect their much-anticipated Sonic Chronicles title to be one of the hottest things on the DS right now. Actually... it isn't. Right now with the early reviews in, Sonic Chronicles is sitting at a lowly 74% Metacritic average, which may make it the lowest-scored BioWare title ever. What went wrong? Or is this another case of Samba de Amigo, where there's reason to doubt most reviewers were really "getting" the game?
Certainly I didn't see anything terrible about the title when I played it at E3, though I can't say I was blown away. Combat involved playing timing games to get more damage even out of standard attacks, a gimmick that only ever worked right in Super Mario RPG and is incredibly offputting in other titles. Generally I play RPGs to zone out and relax, so I could tell it probably wouldn't be a game for me. Still, what could be so wrong with it that it's not getting a solid flood of 8-10 scores? Let's check out some reviews to see if a pattern forms.
The high score comes from Game Informer, which is something of a surprise. This is an outlet that's usually hard on RPGs, but maybe BioWare's tremendous PC/360 pedigree earned them a fairer shot than most Japanese-developed titles merit. That said, reviewer Bryan Vore really seemed to be stretching to find nice things to say about the title despite some obvious enthusiasm for the basic ideas at work, and the high score is still a relatively low 8.5 out of 10.
The story follows a standard plotline of Sonic mainstays joining together to take down a common enemy. But the characters so many gamers have grown to hate over the years are actually well written and likeable. Eggmans villain ego shows some amusing tarnish after constant defeat at the hands of Sonic, Big the Cat is satisfyingly stupid, and it turns out that Cream is one of the most useful party members. Fans are finally treated to dialogue suitable for someone over five years old, and haters will love having the option to be a total prick to all of Sonics friends.
The turn-based combat maintains a nice level of difficulty, and the Elite Beat Agents-inspired inputs keep you on your toes and create some great tension as they become more and more complex. Sonics speedy pacing is on display here with several quick action options per party member for every battle round. However, if you get distracted during one of these rounds it can seriously screw you over, since theres no way to pause the action. Character skills play off each other well and the team-up moves stir up Chrono Trigger memories. Enemies are decently varied, but robots especially fall prey to too much palette swapping.
A slightly lower score is from Nintendo Power, which awarded the game an 8 out of 10 and gave it a full-page review. Reviewer Casey Loe spent most of that space discussing the game's battle system, which he seemed to find brilliant and irritating all at once. He also picked up on the Elite Beat Agents comparison that Game Informer did.
You'll find enemies crawling all over these maps, and when you touch one, your party of four heroes will battle it in a 3-D arena. At first glance, it looks like a typical turn-based RPG battle system, but the screen soon fills up with blue circles and arcs, and you'll need to use your stylus to tap, slide, and hammer away, Elite Beat Agents-style. These little rhythm games are triggered wheneer you use a special POW movie or whenever an enemy uses its own POW move against you. Unlike other RPGs that involve timed button presses, the reward for successfully tapping your way through a POW movie routine isn't a few points of damage - it's the difference between success and failure when you're on the offense, and the difference between a potentially fatal hit and a graceful evasion when you're on defense. The system adds a level of excitement that you don't often see in RPGs, especially when you esperately need to pull off a healing move and you know that one slip of your fingers could lead to the Game Oer screen. Unfortunately, not every fight is worthy of such drama, and the stylus-tapping becomes a tedious bother in run-of-the-mill encounters with weaker foes. It desn't help that the battle system forces you to use POW moves constantly, with normal attacks doing no damage against many foes and missing often against even the vulnerable ones.
To go a notch lower on the scale, we come to GamePro and their 3.5 out of 5 score. Reviewer Emily Balistrieri is quick to admit the game isn't going to impress fans of BioWare's more mature RPGs, but still seems to think Sonic Chronicles has merit as a kid's game. I'm not sure how I feel about that, honestly, the RPGs I played as a kid were the RPGs everyone else played. More to the point, being for kids is never an excuse for a game being in any way bad.
The game does feature the usual RPG trappings, though, meaning you can level up your characters-in a nice touch, any character not in your immediate party still gains experience, so they don't fall behind-and hatch Chao eggs for mascots who give you elemental attacks and stat bonuses. Dark Chronicles also makes good use of the DS hardware-moving your characters around is done by simply dragging the stylus across the screen, for instance-but the graphics aren't exactly dazzling, especially when compared to the visually sharp cut-scenes. The audio also leaves a lot to be desired, with a primitive sounding soundtrack and poor sound effects.
The low score comes from IGN, who award the game a wince-inducing 6.5 out of 10. Reviewer Mark Bozon was clearly expecting a lot more than Sonic Chronicles delivered, and doesn't think "it's a kids' game" is any sort of excuse for what he got instead. The combat system is savaged, the plot trashed, and even BioWare's trademark dialogue trees bashed for adding basically nothing to the gameplay.
Unfortunately, the characters and interactions are really the only actual Sonic-like aspects of the game. It still feels like a generic, point-to-point quest, and what little that was added (you can escape from battles with a quick race mini-game, for example) feels tacked on and thin. Even the classic Bioware expandable dialogue trees aren't effective, with various options not really impacting the game in any way. You can be a jerk to one character the whole time, for example, and never get a long-term effect from it. One such example of this occurred with Tails and his save recommendations. Since the game is more of a starter RPG, Tails is constantly reminding the player to save. One of the options is "Tails, stop telling me to save all the time," which he quickly responds by saying "Ok." to Sonic. Sure enough, a few minutes down the line and Tails will again remind you before a boss fight or main story sequence. This occurs again when Eggman joins your team, as you have the option to be mean, and basically say that you don't want him in your group, but it's inevitable. Even generic "jerk" moments available result in nothing more than one quick response from the character, and then the storyline as usual. We weren't expecting a Mass Effect level of branching dialogue or anything, but for what little characterization there is at all in the game, the moments of open-endedness should at least feel, well, open-ended.
