10 Worst RPG Video Games Of All Time
4. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Sonic Chronicles, if you’re pessimistic, can be looked at as yet another example of Sonic Team saying “anything Mario does, we can also attempt”.
Considering that the core ideal of Sonic the Hedgehog is momentum, it may seem like the franchise and the turn-based JRPG system are at odds with each other. Thus developers BioWare did their best to create combat that tried some new things. Sadly, the end result is a messy, overbearing and hand-holding experience that quite simply was not fun.
The battle system requires intensive use of the DS’ touch screen which gets old fast but even worse is that you also have to use the touch screen to move Sonic around the world which is immediately cumbersome. Slap this on top of a bunch of empty and pretty uninspired settings that rarely make good use of Sonic’s established style and you’re on a fast track to a bad time.
Unlike Sonic platformers, being an RPG Dark Brotherhood is dialogue-heavy which has its ups and downs. The characters are well-written and we actually do get a few cool story moments that affect the lore of the Sonic universe (such as some info about Knuckles’ past).
Unfortunately, it’s too few and too infrequent for a 16 hour RPG and the story amounts to very little. This includes a cliff-hanger ending because the Chronicles series starts and ends with this one failed experiment.