Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood [DS]

The great variety of different available characters continued beyond the playable stars, too, as the in-game Chao Garden was also overrun with a vast amount of different Chao creatures. Chao characters function as equippable items in Sonic Chronicles, as you're allowed to assign one of the Chaos to accompany each one of your playable fighters. Doing so provides a variety of bonuses – a plus to strength or defense, increased speed, or the chance that enemies will drop more items after you complete a battle. There will be over 40 different Chaos in the final retail edition of Chronicles, and it'll be another element of the game that individual players who enjoy character customization should be looking forward to.

Now, much has been said in our past previews about Chronicles not feeling quite like a Sonic game yet, and Craig and Bozon have both taken a turn at presenting their perspectives on the title's stylus-driven, rhythm-focused combat system. The update to offer on that front is that it feels like progress has been made. The touch-controlled mini-games that activate when you call upon a character's Power Moves are still a little bit off and hard to handle, but after a few different battles and trying out the gamut of every playable fighter's available moves, I was definitely getting the hang of it.

It helped that Chapter 7 features foes who come equipped with armored suits, demanding that you master your fighters' defense-breaking Power techniques. If you don't, your normal attacks will only do one hit point of damage every time. You're not going to win any battles that way, as these guys have over 300 HP that would be nearly impossible to whittle down one point at a time. So I was forced to adapt and get good at pulling off the stylus drags, Elite Beat rhythm taps and rapid-fire screen jabs that the game pulls together to form each special move and ultimately got good at each one. The armored foes were going down in one round of combat after I'd practiced, as compared to the four or five rounds it took me when I first picked up the game.

In the end, I walked away happy at having had the chance to play even just a small amount of Sonic Chronicles. It's always difficult to judge a role-playing game based on only a short play session, when this type of game almost always demands hours of investment to get a real sense of the experience. Gamers who've played past BioWare RPGs should be able to relate – would you have been able to recognize the genius of Knights of the Old Republic, if you only played for half an hour? What about just 20 minutes spent with Mass Effect?

My hope is that the final version of Sonic Chronicles, combined with adequate time to be able to truly get into it, will result in a deep and satisfying adventure for the Nintendo DS. And while I can't tell you definitively right now that that will be the case, the character variety, the depth of Chao customization, and the glance at the game's change of setting in its story's second Act have all come together to make me more encouraged about the game than I was when first walking through the E3 showroom doors.

And, really, you have to love Big the Cat.

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