Capsule Review: Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
An RPG that brings Sonic the Hedgehog and friends into the world of turn-based battles, dungeon-diving, and dialog menus. The characterization is solid, with strong dialog that allows every personality to shine. If you like these characters, it might be enough to keep you going despite the game’s significant problems.
While the visuals are fine, the music sounds like bad MIDI from an early-nineties PC game. The plot is shallow and spends a frustrating amount of time world-building with new and uninteresting characters instead of focusing on Sonic and friends. Combat is tedious and dungeons are annoying. And if you do suffer through it all, you’ll probably regret it - the game has no ending. There’s no closure after beating the final boss - instead, a cliffhanger appears out of nowhere and the game restarts itself. And there is no sequel to wrap things up.
I’ve read that the game was released unfinished because BioWare dropped it to work on Dragon Age, having technically fulfilled their contractual obligation to Sega. I haven’t been able to find a source to confirm this, but the game is clearly incomplete. As it stands, I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
I Stopped Playing When: I finished the game and immediately regretted it. I even wrote an article about how annoyed I was by the game’s ending.
Zero Stars: Garbage. Flaws outweigh strengths to the point where I cannot possibly recommend the game to anyone.