All right I have only one chapter left in Sonic Chronicles. When I finish the game I will give my third impression. I know it’s been out for awhile now and I should probably be finished with it right now but in this game you really need to remember to level up, a fact I always forget to do. Like most RPGs it takes forever to level up. But that’s an RPG thing not a Sonic thing so I’m not going to hold that against Sonic Team or Bioware or this game. The story is solid. Anyone who says otherwise needs to have their head examined. Bioware did an excellent job with creating this storyline it’s easy to follow, very exciting, and makes you want to keep playing. It’s like crack. Bioware also did a good job with including elements from past games and to go out of their way to make sure these elements make sense and don’t contradict each other. There’s references to Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Battle, Sonic Advance 3, and probably some other games and they smoothed and connected all of these other games out perfectly and connected them to this game even more perfectly. There’s only one major flaw in this game, only one which is pretty good for a Sonic game if you look back to all the non-handheld games that have come out since Sonic Adventure 2. This flaw is that it is evident that the Bioware staff do not understand basic math. Usually when you subtract something and add what you subtracted to something else that number stays the same or it can be less. For example you have 200 of something, let’s say apples. You take 20 of these apples away and you can drop anywhere from 0 to 20 of these apples in another apple bushel. Well in Sonic Chronicles for some reason when you or an enemy take away 20 HP via an HP draining ability that character can be recovered by anywhere from 0% to 100%. In other words if a character has 200hp and 20 hp is drained from that character the character that drained the hp shouldn’t gain any more than 20 hp if we apply the rules of basic math. Apparently no one ever told the Bioware staff this as for some reason when a character drains 20 hp they can be restored by 200 hp. It’s great when it happens to one of your characters but it’s annoying as hell when you’ve been at a battle for five rounds and can’t KO an opponent because they’re down to 10 hp, drain 20 hp from your character, and are then fully healed by magically turning 20 into 300. And I had such high hopes for Canadians too *sigh* oh well. All and all this is a good game. Generally the newer handheld games have yet to disappoint and Chronicles defiantly keeps this up. I would have to say that this is now my second favorite Sonic game, the first of course being Sonic 2. Nothing could ever top Sonic 2 unless of course they reinvent the series and make a 3D version of the Death Egg Saga (Sonic2-Knuckles) and kept it EXACTLY as the Genesis games were. But that would never happen.
Tags: sonic & knuckles, sonic 2, sonic 3, sonic chronicles, sonic game review, sonic the hedgehog
