Sonic Shuffle

Sonic Shuffle

If you're gonna re-brand a Mario Party franchise as a Sonic title, at least have something that stands out from the others.

Genre(s):	Party
Platform(s):	Dreamcast
Release Date:	NA: November 14, 2000 JP: December 21, 2000 EU: March 9, 2001
Developer(s):	Sega^[1]
Publisher(s):	Sega
Country:	Japan
Series:	Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic Shuffle is a 2000 party game for the Dreamcast developed and published by Sega. The game is a spin-off of the Sonic series.

Bad Qualities

The story is very clichéd and unoriginal. It takes place inside the four main characters' dreams, a trope done to death many times before and since.
You can steal your opponent's cards at any time. Eliminating any kind of challenge.
The A.I in this game is brutally difficult. Even on Easy difficulty they are still hard. For example, Charriii5 had to restart many boards because of this when recording for his Everything Wrong With video of this game.
The game seems to disregard that the four main characters are working as a team in the main story because if you lose at the end of the game, You can not continue until you get first place.
The game treats the one in last place like a punching bag.
Some of Eggman's inventions are insanely overpowered and broken: One of them only allows you to move one space for a few turns.
Boards can last for too long due to the inability to choose how many turns you want to play; all Precioustones (this game's equivalent to Mario Party's Stars) must be collected for the game to end. Because of this it can take over an hour to finish a single round.
The sound-mixing in cutscenes are possibly worse than the ones in Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2. You can barely hear the voices in some cutscenes due to the very loud music.
Void is rather a pathetic villain, and his voice does not fit his character design, sounding more like a little boy rather than a Dream Guardian gone rogue.
Some of the premises of the minigames make no sense. One minigame begins with the four characters running away from an Egg-Walker, the one in the back gets captured by it and takes control of the Walker. Now he/she will willingly attack his/her friends in the Egg-Walker they were running away from.
You don't play Minigames at the end of each round. You have to land on minigame spaces to trigger them, which again punishes you for being or not being in possession of a particular card. Also unlike the Mario Party games released from 2012 to 2017 (which also feature this trend), even when you land on a Minigame space, it might trigger a Mini-event instead. It's easy to go over 15 minutes without playing a single Minigame! Because of this you'll spend most of the game on the board.
You must land on the exact space the Precioustone is on in order to get it, which essentially punishes you for having a specific set of cards.To earn a Precioustone, you must battle a boss using your cards. If your card does not match or surpass the enemy's card, you won't get it. You must then wait for someone else to get it or return later on with new cards, which cause the boards to drag on longer than needed. This also punishes you for not having a specific card to beat the boss. So many features in the game that punish you for not having the correct cards.
One minigame has the characters wielding guns. Sonic can also wield a gun in this minigame. This goes against what he said in Shadow the Hedgehog claiming that he "Wouldn't be caught dead using one of those things." That basically means that Sonic is a complete hypocrite.
The story is filled with plotholes that are never explained. How was Void once part of Illumina, How did Lumina get into the real world at the end of the game?
Each board has a board event that can be extremely annoying. Sometimes, if you don't get to the event within the number of turns, then the game will end.
There are RPG-like battles thrown into the game. They rely on plain luck so the battles are just RNG events.
The unlockable characters are rather questionable. The first two are Big and E-102 Gamma from Sonic Adventure. While the other two are a Chao and Super Sonic. The latter two are pretty sucky for unlockable characters since the last one is just a reskin.
Some memory book entrys make no sense: One has Tails saying "What a dream to be able to fly with Sonic!", even though he has carried Sonic across gaps and rode with him in his plane numerous times.
While cel-shading is fine, the models were just ripped straight from Sonic Adventure. Many fans points out too polygonal designs during the cutscene, and the most indicated of this is Sonic's mouth and his fangs when he talks.

Good Qualities

Nice soundtrack, on par with most Sonic games.
The graphics and character models are okay, despite the latter being very polygonal.
Passable voice acting.
Like Sonic '06, it has nice little references to Sonic Adventure.
Some of the minigames can be fun.
Dr. Eggman tormenting the characters (a la Bowser) is entertaining to watch.

Reception

"What were they thinking?"The Shit Scale

Games that are debatably bad	High level of shit contamination	The very high category	The severe zone	Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	Major code red
👆

This product belongs to the "Games That Are Debatably Bad" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.

Sonic Shuffle has recieved mixed-to-negative reviews from critics and gamers. Critics immediately noticed that is a Mario Party ripoff. They found the minigames to be overly complex, poorly explained, and generally not as enjoyable as those in Nintendo's flagship party series. The Angry Video Game Nerd briefly reviewed this in his "Wish List Part 1" video, he was bored of this and said to stick to Mario Party instead. Charriii5 was very frustrated with this game, he had to repeat the boards many times because of the brutal A.I difficulty.

Trivia

This isn't the last time Sonic was thrown into a party game. This idea was revisited 7 years later with the Party Games Mode in Sonic and the Secret Rings.
This is the only Sonic game where Amy is voiced by someone other than Taeko Kawata in Japanese. This is also the only Sonic game where Sonic and Knuckles share the same voice actor in the English dub.

Videos

Notes

↑ Additional work by Hudson Soft.

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[1] Additional work by Hudson Soft.

[1]

Sonic Shuffle

Contents

Bad Qualities

Good Qualities

Reception

Trivia

Videos

Notes

Comments

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Sonic Shuffle

Bad Qualities

Good Qualities

Reception

Trivia

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Notes

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