Sonic as an RPG is kind of a strange concept to me. It’s not the same as Mario starring in an RPG, I can deal with that. I guess my main problem is due to Sonic’s focus on speed. Sonic runs, that’s what he does. And that just goes against the very nature of Japanese role-playing games, where you interact with the world through menus that detail your every action. I like platformers and I totally dig RPGs, but I just don’t see a Sonic RPG. Yet, these two opposites have somehow combined into some sort of bizarre bastard child.

The latest Sonic games have been kind of iffy, at best. Fortunately, SEGA didn’t leave this huge task to their internal teams. Instead, Bioware, the developer of Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, was brought in to supervise Sonic’s transition from platformer to RPG. The resulting product has its problems, but it is ultimately a good first effort for Bioware’s handheld studio.

Dark Brotherhood marks a pretty radical departure from Bioware’s usual formula, taking more from Japanese RPGs than from its own previous titles. You run around the overworld with a party of four characters, almost all of which are from previous Sonic titles. Character customization is limited to choosing which stat to upgrade and which special attacks to learn. Also, the signature battles are turn-based menu-driven affairs. It doesn’t really sound like a Sonic game or a Bioware game, does it?

Yet, touches of Bioware are still clearly present, especially in the dialog trees. Conversations aren’t perfectly linear; you can respond with questions, by asking the other party members for advice, or with sarcasm. Of course, if you get bored, there’s the “impatient Sonic” option, which speeds you through the conversation. Dialog aside, the plot is pretty typical Sonic. The Dark Brotherhood, a group of twisted echidnas, is stealing the chaos emeralds in order to escape their prison in the Twilight Cage. Sonic and his plucky friends have to stop them from tearing this dimension apart. You shouldn’t expect the kind of tense, mature storylines that Bioware is known for, but it isn’t bad for a story about a bunch of furry animals saving the universe from robotic animals.

Players of older Sonic titles are, without a doubt, confused as to how they reconciled Sonic’s trademark speed with the turn-by-turn battles that are an RPG signature. The developers do this in two ways. First of all, “faster” characters get multiple moves per round. For instance, Big the Cat might only get one attack, but Sonic can pull off three. Second, and coolest, are the special moves. These specials, the equivalent of the magic spells in other games, are powerful moves that consume power points. To pull them off, you have to execute certain timing-based motions using the stylus. What is both cool and somewhat weird is that these moves were lifted right out of Elite Beat Agents. You time out taps, drag the stylus over a certain path, rapidly touch one spot, or some combination of these. It doesn’t exactly instill that feeling of speed, but it is pretty damn cool. Your enemies also have special moves, which you can counter by performing the same stylus motions. Basically, it means that the battles are awesome. It also means that you have to pay attention or you will get slaughtered.

While the RPG underpinnings are solid, Sonic Chronicles goes horribly wrong with its schizophrenic art direction. I’m pretty sure that either the art director was a madman or there were actually about sixteen of them (art directors, that is). Character art during conversations doesn’t match up at all with the art style used during the comic-book style cutscenes, which in turn doesn’t match up with the art style in the animated cutscenes or in the chapter titlecards. It’s actually incredibly confusing.

Sure, some of the art looks fine. The painted titlecards used in each of the game’s ten chapters look phenomenal. I wish that artist had been in charge of the rest of the art in the game. The cutscenes, however, looks horribly amateurish. It looks like something that a group of grade school kids would churn out. The bad art extends to the in-game 3D models, as well. The 2D environments look fantastic, but we’re talking about some seriously butt ugly character models. Regardless, I don’t think that bad art alone would normally have bugged me this much. What drives me crazy is that none of the art matches. Seriously, you’d think that would have occurred to them at some point in the development process.

The awkward art direction is indicative of a general problem with Sonic Chronicles — it just feels sloppy. There is a good game somewhere in here, even a great game; it just gets dragged down by these awkward design decisions. It starts with the character designs. The Dark Brotherhood look pretty cool. They have these stylish robotic suits and are pretty intimidating for a bunch of cartoon animals. The rest of the new alien races, however, all look like generic blob creatures. The touch-based menus work really well, but they get infuriating when you are put back into the game after using any one of them. What if you want to use an item, read a quest, and save the game? You have to open the menu, select the inventory icon, use that item, open the menu again, select the quest icon, read the quest description, open the menu again, and click the save icon. Every single other RPG lets you do everything that you want before forcing you back into the action. It makes everything you do take three times as long, and it gets irritating quickly. In battle, you select all of your actions at the beginning of a round. Accidentally choose the wrong action for a character? Too bad, you can’t step back one character at a time. You have to assign every action all over again. It’s like they had this cool idea and started to implement it, but just forgot something along the way. It basically reeks of a game that was rushed to retail when it could have used just a little more focus testing.

Despite my bitching, I really did enjoy Sonic Chronicles. If you can overlook some bad art and awkward design problems, it’s a solid DS RPG with a phenomenal battle system. I wasn’t convinced that a Sonic RPG would work, but now I’m a believer. Fix up some of my complaints about the first game and I’ll be the first in line for a sequel.

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