Bioware's bad JRPG.
| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Nintendo DS | 5.90 |
| Overall | 5.90 |
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Sonic Chronicles is the creation one of weirdest team ups in recent gaming history. Bioware making a Sonic RPG, ok, that sounds like a bad idea. Well, unsurprisingly it was. This game feels like Bioware's attempt at making a JRPG which is missing many of the elements that make a JRPG great and missing almost everything that makes Bioware RPGs great. The best Bioware RPGs have deep interesting characters with rich backstories that the player explores throughout the game. Sonic is an annoying talking hedgehog with attitude who has the character depth of a tiny puddle. You all know his friends, they are even worse. Sonic and story have never mixed well, the best Sonic games are the ones with no story. Mario was able to translate well into the RPG scene but that was because Nintendo found a way to treat the Mario RPGs like a parody of Mario games, they were basically light hearted comedies. Sadly Bioware does not take that route, nope instead you get a super serious story involving space Echidnas that invade from an alternate dimension who are starting an interstellar war as revenge on some higher being who sent them to space prison. What? Gone are the moral choices that influence the story of the game, in its stead you get the choice to have Sonic answer normally or like an asshole. Sadly that doesn't change the outcome of the game, wouldn't it be great if you only choose to be an ass the whole game that one of his friends finally calls him out on it. Somehow Bioware does kind of manage to fit the Sonic cast of character's into Bioware's usual cast of archetypes. Thankfully there are no sex scenes. Character development is non-existent, the story is not good and the large engrossing worlds their games are known for is nowhere to be seen. The game structure has you moving from map to map each with a few goals to complete. Each map has rings and chao eggs to grab. You navigate the map on the touch screen and each character has different abilities which allow access to certain areas. Like Tails can fly across gaps, Knuckles can climb walls, etc. If you don't have the right teammate with the right ability you either need to wait to change teammates or return later. Each map has a few NPCs which give you your mission. The side missions are usually simple fetch quests. The main quests lead you into battles and progress the story further. Some maps have a puzzle you need to solve which usually involves hitting switches in a certain order. The maps are all covered with enemies and it is your choice if you want to fight them or not. Problem is that many are too hard to get around so you will get into battles if you are exploring the map. These fights take long, like an average of 3-5 minutes. Instead of creating some type of combat style that embraces the core elements of Sonic games, like speed, this game has very slow battles. Fights are broken up into rounds. At the start of the round you choose what actions each character are going to take. How many turns they get and what order they go in is determined by the characters speed. Sonic gets to go many times a round, Big gets to only go once. You can tell what order your characters are going in from this bar much like in FFX. You do not get to see the order of the enemies or how many times they get to go. Each characters have the basic option to do a simple attack, defend, use an item or perform a special attack. The special attacks cost PP, basically your magic. Each character has about 6 moves they can learn and upgrade from the level up screen. Some moves are team based like you have a power move that involves both Sonic and Tails. Some moves are for attacks, some stun, some heal, basically the majority of the strategy of each battle comes from these attacks. Once you pick everyone's action for the round the fighting begins. Here you basically sit back and watch the battle unfold. Your characters will attack using what you set them to attack and the enemies will attack you many times in the round as well. You cannot change any actions in the middle of a round, you must wait till all actions are completed to start the next round. So if you character is dying, too bad, no healing until the round is over. I feel this removes most of the quick thinking on the fly strategy that the best RPGs have. At the same time though it makes every choice you make before the round very important so you better pay close attention and learn the enemies tenancies quickly. All the special moves in the game require touch screen button presses to perform. So you want to do some area attack with Sonic. When that action comes up points on the touch screen will appear and you need to touch them at the right moment, think Elite Beat Agents. There are also points where you need to drag the stylus across the screen and one where you need to tap a spot quickly. If you fail at any point in the sequence the attack will either be lessened or miss entirely. Enemies who use special attacks will also bring up button prompts, if you complete the sequence you will dodge the attack. In a strange twist this makes enemies who use special attacks more favorable to fight than when they do a normal attack. A normal attack will hit unless you have the stats to dodge it, it is not in your control. Those normal attacks do a lot of damage as well. But if they do a special attack just complete the sequence and you are spared, so much easier to handle. There are so many special attacks in battles, it slows everything down. Plus each move is always the same series of button presses so you get bored of doing the same motions a million times. But again it makes you pay attention, many times life and death comes down to nailing a sequence, one screw up and your are dead. Combat is the only aspect of the game that kept me going. Each new area brings in a whole new cast of enemies which have unique strengths and weaknesses. Finding out which team of heroes to go with for which enemy is part of strategy to go with. Toward the middle of the game I was getting beat up. I had no healer and completely ran out of healing items, each battle was like a boss fight. I embraced the challenge and thought the rest of the game would require great planning and execution. Sadly as the game went on it got easier, especially once I got a healer on the team. By the end I was overpowering all enemies including bosses. The boss battles themselves were many times easier the normal battles. Sadly the difficulty balance was not there, it spikes up and down randomly throughout the game. Chronicles has the menus you would normally find in a Bioware game. You find equipment that increase base stats. Each character can be given a chao which gives them a special ability, like make their attacks an elemental attack. As you level up you get points to spend on different attributes and you get to learn or upgrade a new skill. As with most RPGs you will end the game with a bunch of useless items you never use, one day someone will make an RPG where the items matter. The game uses a cell shaded kind of art style which isn't ugly nor pretty, it just is. The backgrounds are all 2D painted maps, nothing spectacular. I don't even know why the went for the Sonic license because most of the locations have nothing to do with old Sonic games, it's almost all original. A series with such a rich history of quality music would provide lots of tracks that could be remixed, sadly none of it is used. The score is horrendous, terrible boring music that has nothing to do with Sonic. Sonic Chronicles is an experiment gone bad. None of the elements that make Sonic games special are used in this game. Nothing that makes Bioware games memorable is included. All you get is an average RPG with familiar characters. The combat isn't horrible and the pacing of the story isn't bad either. Other than the repetitive nature of the fights the game is rather painless to play. I got through it in just over 20 hours, any more would have been overkill. It was simply a strange experience that wasn't horrible, it just wasn't good either. |
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Posted by Dvader Thu, 04 Nov 2010 03:31:02
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robio (1m)
Another well written review Vade. I gave up on this game when I realized it was stylus only. That's not how I play hand-holds.