Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is a role-playing video game made by BioWare and published by SEGA that was released on September 25, 2008 for the Nintendo DS. It is part of the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series and is the first, and to date, only RPG in the series.

The game centers around the Nocturnus Clan, a group of marauders from another dimension known as the Twilight Cage, who seek to escape their dimension by invading Sonic and friends' world to steal the Master Emerald. The game is a traditional RPG experience featuring turn-based combat, interactive overworld maps, and a large focus on story.

The game was released to initially warm critical reception overall. Many players and critics alike lauded it as a perfect entry-level game in the Turn-based RPG genre, citing its low difficulty and relatively simple story as being perfect for younger players to understand, while criticising the game's sound design and character models. However, as time went on, the game slowly began to develop a more mediocre reputation among players, with some describing it as more tedious than anything.

Around 10 years after the game's release, a group of fans had gotten together to produce an HD remake of the original game for PC known as Sonic Chronicles: Reimagined. No release date has been specified yet.

Gameplay
Main Article: Combat

Sonic Chronicles is different from its parent series in that it is a turn-based RPG game as opposed to a platformer. As such, certain aspects of the typical games have either been truncated, interpreted differently, or omitted entirely.

Much of the gameplay is divided into two portions: Overworld Exploration, and Turn-Based Combat, with much of the player's time being rather evenly divided between the two styles.

Overview
Players will assume the role of Sonic, alongside a party of up to three other characters, as they navigate a series of somewhat labyrinthine areas that are based both directly and indirectly on existing locations from the series, alongside a series of wholly original areas towards the end of the game. Within these various overworlds are various collectables, such as Rings, which are used as currency for shops, and Item Boxes which contain various items such as equipment and healing items, NPCs which can be spoken to or otherwise interacted with for the purposes of side quests and accessing shops, and various enemies roaming the overworld which, when collided with, will enter the player into a Combat Scenario (i.e. 'Battle'). Alongside these, there are various obstacles in each map that require specific field skills, known as Movement Abilities to surmount. Each character has their own set of Movement Abilities, with some characters having more inherent proficiency than others, as well as some abilities, such as Invulnerable, being exclusive to a single character. There are a total of 11 playable characters in the game.

Battling enemies will net players experience which will allow them to level up and get stronger, enabling them to take on stronger enemies for more experience. When a character levels up, they are granted Skill Points which can be spent on POW Moves to be used in Battles. Alongside this, reaching certain level thresholds will permanently upgrade characters' Movement Abilities, or even unlock new, secondary ones.

Additionally, Players can find a large assortment of items to use to make the characters stronger. Consumables are used to refill lost Health Points and Power Points, as well as modify stats momentarily via Status Effects, among other things. Equipment can be applied to characters to provide permanent stat buffs of various types. Every character has a specific selection of applicable equipment and one slot per applicable equipment type, in addition to a Chao slot.

Main Article: Chao

Chao are much like Equipment, and only one can be equipped per character. Unlike equipment, which strictly offer stat buffs, Chao usually offer some sort of perk befitting certain playstyles, such as allowing POW moves for the equipped character to be used without fail.

Synopsis
The story of Sonic Chronicles is told in chapters, focusing on an overarching plot involving several subsequent smaller stories involving the sudden disappearance of Knuckles, the invasion of a strange group of marauders from another dimension, the wildlife becoming erratic and aggressive, and Eggman's robots running amuck without any rhyme or reason for doing so. This ultimately culminates to reveal a massive plot by the Marauders' leader, Imperator Pir'Oth Ix to return to Sonic's world after millennia trapped within a dimension called the Twilight Cage. Sonic and friends are forced to travel there to stop him.

Development
Sonic Chronicles suffered quite a troubled production before it was released. It was made as something of a response to friendly rival franchise, Super Mario's rather successful tenure into the RPG genre multiple times. While SEGA had attempted a Sonic RPG in the past, the plans ultimately fell through.

It was developed by BioWare, a company that was well-known for their contributions to the RPG Genre. Development began in 2006 and was BioWare's first project being made on a handheld console, forcing their dev team to adjust to the smaller development cycle as compared to their much larger, Triple-A releases on home consoles. Most of the team were big fans of the Sonic franchise and sought to do their best translating the series into an RPG format, while also remaining faithful to the original. At the same time, they took extra care in making sure that their original ideas and characters slotted into the series easily and believably, while also feeling new and fresh at the same time.

The team had established a "four pillar" system for making the game, which ensured that the player had plenty of things to help them enjoy the game. Those "pillars" were Character and Story, Combat, Progression Customization, and Exploration. Aesthetically, they wanted to make the images look reminiscent of older games in the series, so most of the game's artwork was made with bright colours and hard, flat shading. Likewise, the game's environments have been hand-drawn with saturated colours and deep hues so as to compliment the character art. Composer Richard Jacques was brought on to handle some of the game's music tracks.

On October 11, 2007, BioWare was acquired by major publisher Electronic Arts as a subsidiary, the latter seeing financial potential in the company following their success on titles Jade Empire and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. While this acquisition in and of itself didn't affect Chronicles, EA's push towards then-upcoming title, Mass Effect would gradually strip resources from the Chronicles development cycle, resulting in portions of the game winding up rougher around the edges than anticipated.

In February of 2008, the development team held a poll for fans to vote for the name of one of the four alien races featured in the game, said race being the Zoah. The Zoah name itself a reference to a town from the Panzer Dragoon games.

Finally, the game went gold on September 5, 2008 and was subsequently released in Australia on September 25, Europe on the 26th, North America on the 30th, and almost a year later in Japan on August 6, 2009.

Critical Reception
Sonic Chronicles was met with mostly positive, if ultimately lukewarm reviews from critics upon release. Many cited its simplistic gameplay to be perfect for newer players to the Turn-Based RPG genre. The hand-drawn background art was also very pleasantly received. However the game received scrutiny for it's poor writing and predictable plot, Sonic's optional rudeness being one infamous case.

However, amidst the 2010s with the rise of critic videos and online reviews, the game began to fall under a much more mediocre light as players found the game to have aged quite poorly, with additional negativity directed at the game's graphics and sound design.

Despite this criticism, the game sold fairly well and a sequel was already in development before constraints brought on by other projects forced the team to drop it entirely, leaving The Dark Brotherhood as the only game in the Chronicles series.

Website
SEGA of Europe and America's official websites featured a Sonic Chronicles page that included a small browser micro-game. There, players could control Sonic with the mouse (in place of a stylus) in Green Hill Zone and Voxai Colony Beta, where they can roam around and collect rings for downloadable content. This granted access to two wallpapers and an assortment of icons every time a threshold of rings is met. The page no longer exists today.