Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
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 Ladies and gentleman, behold the game that caused a former writer on a comic book adaption to sue the house of Sonic.
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"This can't suck, it has to be good, because if this game isn't good, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with myself!! Come on, Sonic Chronicles, come on!"
— ClementJ64, moments before he is devastated by the game's quality
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is a 2008 role-playing video game developed by BioWare and published by Sega for the Nintendo DS. It is a part of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, and is its only RPG entry. Sonic Chronicles initially focuses on the events surrounding the kidnapping of Knuckles and the disappearance of the Chaos Emeralds after the defeat of Doctor Eggman, before moving on to follow the cast of characters across two dimensions as they encounter a new ally, Shade the Echidna, and seek to stop the invasion of their world by Ix, the leader of Shade's tribe, the Nocturnus. The game is mainly played using the DS stylus, with players either exploring the overworld, or attacking with multiple characters in combat.
Development began in 2006 as BioWare's first handheld project, who were normally used to the long development cycles of video games; the game eventually transitioned to a Sonic project with over 30 people involved, with many of BioWare's developers being big fans of the series and wanting to further expand on its world. The design progress for gameplay was based on four "activity pillars", while the graphical style was primarily based on the earlier Sonic games, being colorful and anime-like. It released in Australia, Europe, and North America in September 2008, and then in Japan the following year as Invaders from the Dark Dimension.
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was met with mixed reviews from critics, who appreciated both the graphics and environments, as well as Sonic's overall transition to the role-playing genre, while the music and story were received with mixed reactions, as were some gameplay elements such as the combat system.
The game also garnered controversy after former Archie Comics writer Ken Penders sued Sega and BioWare for alleged copyright infringement, claiming that the Nocturnus Clan were too similar to his Dark Legion echidna characters (which consist of Lien-Da, Julie-Su, Dimitri and others), whom he had claimed copyright for. Although intended as the first in a series of Sonic RPGs, plans were scrapped after Electronic Arts acquired BioWare shortly after its release, and Chronicles became a one-off game.
Plot
The entire story can be summed up like this:
"A lost tribe of Echidnas have appeared from another dimension and they're trying to conquer everything, Sonic stops them....And then a plot twist at the end!! And that's it."
— ClementJ64
Bad Qualities
- The main RPG gameplay is broken beyond belief. Sometimes touch commands won't register or it won't matter at all, some enemies and bosses are extremely overpowered and other times your characters will get randomly ambushed.
- Very uncanny, off-looking and expressionless character models. They look blocky to the point they resemble peeled potatoes or dollar store bootleg figurines. It makes the infamous Pakistan McDonalds versions of the characters look like Final Fantasy VII's in-game overworld models by comparison.
- Horrible controls, the controls are broken to the point of being unresponsive and they also are clunky, also it is in touch gameplay only, and while the Zelda DS games did the same thing, here it is much worse.
- The music is grating and extremely unpleasant to listen to. Most of the soundtrack consists of poorly remixed tracks from other games. It’s explained by a former developer that the actual soundtrack was made for it, but due to the still unnamed legal issues, they where forced to use MIDI songs of old games instead.
- On top of that, the sound effects are also horrendous. They are mostly a bunch of loud, cartoony and non-human sounds, or are recycled from the Genesis games. One of the worst sound effects is the robot sound (which sounds like a drunk Q*Bert), and the grunts the characters make when getting hit. Rumor has it that BioWare downloaded stock sound effects off the internet.
- The art style is inconsistent: as Chariii5 and ClementJ64 pointed out, the animated cutscenes look like either cheap animations you would find on Newgrounds or PBS comic books, the chapter title cards and intro sequence have both cool and unique art, and the character portraits in-game look like ripped stills from Sonic X.
- The story is filled with a ton of plot-holes and confusing elements, some of which can really twists your head like this:
- Why do the Nocturnus Clan want to rule over everything?
- Why did time fly by when the gang was in the Twilight Realm?
- Why can’t Shade be a descendant of the Nocturnus Clan instead of being ancient herself?
- The Nocturnus Clan are a very poorly written villain group. According to Ken Penders, they are rip-offs of his Dark Legion echidnas (which he had claimed copyright for) from the Archie Sonic comics. Notably Shade the Echidna and Ix are both too similar to that of Julie-Su and Lien-Da (for Shade) and Dimitri (for Ix) respectively.
- The main cast has been extremely dumbed down in this game, with everyone of them coming off as clueless idiots. Nobody forced Eggman to come with them when they were about to go to the Twilight Realm when it was obvious that Eggman was being suspicious.
- You can’t change your characters on the fly, you have to get back at Central City. Also some of the characters are suck in combat but are necessary in order to make progress in the overworld maps (particularly Big).
- Tails constantly tells you to save your game, which gets annoying after a while.
- The game tries to connect its plot with games like Sonic Battle with the appearance of Emerl's species, the Gizoids, and the SwatBots from Sonic SatAM, but it ended being up non-canon, so its comes off as desperate attempt to cater to hardcore fans of the series.
- Very poor boss selection with some of the fights dragging on and on due to their high health.
- The final battle is pathetic as you only need to land the majority of the attacks against Imperator Ix, since Super Sonic deals very high damage. It's the final battle with General Scales from Star Fox Adventures all over again.
- The game ends on a cliffhanger which not only means you just wasted your time, but also that the game as a whole ended on a sour note. Although there is reason for that...
- The game was planned to have a sequel, hence the title Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, like this was intended to be the first of a series of Sonic RPGs, which also would've been developed by BioWare as well, but plans for the RPGs and the sequel were permanently killed off due to Electronic Arts' purchase of BioWare, and the lawsuit. Basically, BioWare put that cliffhanger there just so they could have made another game (which would probably be very short in length) for a quick money grab. They clearly possibly had time to program and code a final dungeon segment and the battle with Eggman. Because of the numinous amount of confusing plot-holes, the lame final boss and its cliffhanger ending, this possibly means that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was potentially rushed.
Good Qualities
- Nice overworld maps.
- The Genesis sound effects are nice to listen to.
- It does give us some insight on the Ancient Echidna tribes from Sonic Adventure.
- While on topic, it has more callbacks to previous games than Sonic Generations and Sonic Mania combined.
- It introduces an actually good and likable character; Shade the Echidna, who went on to become a fan-favorite in the franchise.
- You can make the characters stronger or gain new abilities by equipping them with Chao, which is a pretty creative feature.
- Also the Chao Garden returns (although in a different way).
- Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood as a game had some fantastic ideas that could have work, but its' execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Reception
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood received mixed reviews from critics. It however got mostly negative reviews from gamers for its clunky touch-only gameplay, the hideous in-game models, poor story, and the lack of magic that pre-EA BioWare is known for. Somecallmejohnny used to think this was a good game, but he heavily regretted saying that years later. AntDude criticized the awful sound design and overall gameplay, Gillythekid simply refused to play past the beginning because it was so bad, and Chariii5 really hates the game because it was so poorly made and written, and stated that pretty much nothing matters in this game.
Trivia
- In May of 2011, former head writer of The Sonic Archie Comics, Ken Penders, sued both BioWare-owner Electronic Arts, and Sega for "taking concepts from the comic" in their game. The lawsuit is part of the reason why it never got a sequel. It is also why Shade, Ix and the Nocturnus have never made an appearance since (not counting their return in the fan-animation Sonic Rebound), outside of their headquarters being used surprisingly for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games as one of the event courses. More info on this lawsuit can be found here.
- The game was delisted from retailers, along with several other bad Sonic games in 2010.
- In the trailer, there is a 4-second scene from the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog pilot.
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