I finished Sonic Chronicles last night

January 25, 2022

It was okay! A lot of game reviewers make it up to be the absolute worst Sonic game ever made along with Forces, but I’ve had a decently okay time with both. With this more than Forces, admittedly, but the latter still holds a special place in my heart.

It really feels like the team at Bioware were trying to go for something unique, despite the horrendously rushed development time. They went out of their way to make intentionally misleading promotional art so as to not spoil that there were going to be new echidnas introduced. They even had a website that took secret codes from the game! That… no one seems to have archived (there’s the Wayback Machine, but the snapshots from there didn’t capture the site’s style).

I think my favorite part of it was the story. A rival echidna clan to Knuckles’ that had advanced technology and fighter robots suddenly returning to Earth to finish their world domination sounds like a Ken Penders storyline (derogatory), but when put in practice it’s much less convoluted than it could have been. The cliffhanger ending was very unfortunate, but it didn’t ruin the experience for me.

This game honestly has some of the better characterization I’ve seen so far. I can single out a couple negatives, such as Rouge being weirdly rude and Big being more stupid than usual, and Shadow being on a very fine line between his modern “all edge no substance” character, but they’re minor blemishes for me. They really nailed Knuckles’ dilemma of not wanting to defeat the big bad Echidna in fear of never seeing other members of his race again, making him hesitant without putting a Penders-shaped spotlight over him at all times.

Reformed Eggman was pretty well done while it lasted. There’s one particular dialogue box where Tails gets excited to talk about a scientific discovery with him (and Sonic can reprimand him for it), and it was cute to imagine what kind of father-son or colleague-kindergartner relationship these two could have had in another universe.

I didn’t really like the graphics all that much. I think the models are cute, especially after enabling anti-aliasing, but something about the art style of the 2D environments doesn’t do it for me. The comic book style animatics could have worked nicely, but they were cheapened by the weird choice of music (which I will talk about later). The human NPCs in particular feel like they were supposed to match Sonic Unleashed’s humans in style, but they ended up looking like something I’d see on Jetix when that was still around.

The alien NPCs are the complete opposite though, I’m very fond of how they turned out. Their 2D portraits benefit from the unfamiliar cartoony style, and their 3D models are honestly fantastic. Their animations are a mixed bag, but some highlights are the Kron Warrior rock spinning and throwing animation, and the Voxai knocked down and getting back up animation. They take a solid chunk of the battle time, but they’re nice to look at.

Speaking of battles, I’ve found the whole RPG gameplay quite nice actually! The battles have GBA Mario RPG (what a string of words) style button prompts — or rather, Elite Beat Agent/Osu! style touch screen prompts that show up when performing or defending from a skill. For defending, they get surprisingly more lenient as you level up, allowing you to miss almost half of them and still get a perfect evade. But for attacking, you still need to execute them perfectly, which was quite annoying at some points. I can understand why that was a thing, most likely to add some stakes to the use of strong skills such as Cream’s Refresh (infinite MP/PP restoration), but I’d still enjoy a middle ground or at least some transparency that I’m about to fail miserably.

And finally, the soundtrack. Oh boy.

It’s a well known fact at this point that half of it consists of MIDIs stolen from fansites, but I don’t feel good calling those bad. They were definitely not pleasant to listen to for the most part, oh no, but what made them bad was the misplaced and sometimes entirely missing MIDI instruments and not the songs themselves. I don’t want to insult a fan’s MIDI remix when the developers are at fault, they got their songs stolen and misrepresented and are already going to be bashed for all of time. Granted, they’re unrecognizable from their originals at this point, but still.

The other half of the soundtrack, the one that didn’t get affected by the legal troubles that made them hastily steal MIDIs, is bizarre to say the least. From hard rock to electronic, none of it sounds too fitting nor too misplaced at the same time. It’s a weird middle ground where you can get used to it but you’re not sure if you should.

Someone made a reimagining of the soundtrack that you can find here, and I highly recommend you give it a listen. It’s amazing and it would have made the game feel much more polished than it ended up, although I’m not so sure if the DS’ technical limitations would allow it. I like the inclusion of the theremin, it’s cheesy but it fits the mood very well.

I am confident in saying I did not like the sound effects. The sound for when you KO an enemy is a stock boing sound. When you win a battle, there's a stock kids cheering sound. The sounds from getting hit are a random combination of grunts that don’t sound like a character getting hit at all plus robotic sounds that play even for the organic characters.

This game could have been more polished. This game deserved way more development time than it got. It’s a miracle they managed to make something passable with all these missteps. I would be hopeful for a sequel if not for the whole Ken Penders fiasco, and I’m slowly leaning towards it since the game’s mention in the newest Sonic official book, but for the moment I’m just hoping people stop being so harsh.

But I understand where it comes from. There was no credits screen. A handful of names were shoved in about five text boxes and framed as an out of nowhere conversation between Sonic and Tails during the cliffhanger ending, and that was it.

Cutting corners is an understatement. They have made a circle.