Sonic Battle – Wins the First Battle, But Loses the War
Written: Aug 02 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: addictive at first, harmless fighter, will satisfy Sonic fans
Cons: becomes repetitive, improving Emerl looses initial luster, lack of tracking system
The Bottom Line: Sonic Battle tries to become a handheld version of Super Smash Bros. and fails. It’s entertaining for a while but then lost its appeal.
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| vadimio's Full Review: Sonic Battle for Game Boy Advance (GBA) |
No one ever thought that cute Nintendo characters and fighting would ever make a good fusion, until Super Smash Bros. for the N64 hit the scene. That game, along with its sequel for the GameCube turned out to be instant classics. Now the developers of the Sonic games have decided to make a Sonic game that loosely follows in the same formula. What they have managed to create is a game like no other for the GameBoy Advance, titled Sonic Battle.
The main story behind the main mode is somewhat intricate for a Sonic game. Eggman is struggling to get his Chaos Emerald back from a robot, and soon calls him worthless and makes a superior clone. The evil Eggman throws away the robot, only to be found on the beach one day by Sonic. He picks it up and as he is looking for Tails (who turns out to be the technology guru of the Sonic universe), he meets up with Shadow and Rouge along the way, who want the robot as well. Soon we learn that contrary to Eggman’s beliefs, this is not a useless robot, it is actually a robot that learns from others and can become very powerful. Sonic learns that giving the robot Chaos Emeralds will make it a bit more powerful. You now set out on a quest to gain the other 7 Chaos Emeralds and to give them to the robot, thus making him the ultimate fighting machine. Sonic even names the robot “Emerl” (no relation to the chef robot on Futurama).
Sonic Battle has a Story Mode, a Battle Mode, a Challenge Mode, a Training Mode, Mini-Games and Battle Record. The Story Mode is the main part of the game, as it is where you follow a story in hopes of making Emerl a great fighter. In Story Mode, there are eight chapters for the eight characters that you must use to obtain a Chaos Emerald. In each chapter you walk around a map and talk to characters, who will challenge you to a fight. On several occasions you will have to face the same characters twice to advance, which is silly but part of the game.
The fighting engine is nothing too advanced. Prior to each match and every time that you are knocked out, you will have to designate your Ground, Aerial and Defense tactics with your three special attacks – Power, Mine Blast and Long-Range Projectile. At first this seemed weird, but soon you realize this is where most of the strategy kicks in. For example, if you are fighting one-on-one against a powerful character, then obviously setting your Defense tactic to Power will be the right choice (thus powerful attacks will not hurt you). But then you step into the arena and the fight begins.
The controls are fairly simple. The A button is for jumping while B takes care of all of the fighting. Pressing B will execute one attack, pressing B and the directional pad will execute various other attacks, tapping B three times will execute a combo, combining the taps with the directional pad give you different combos, and then you can add in the shoulder buttons for even more combo action. Pressing the L button by itself is useful as it is used for not only defending oneself, yet it also refills your health bar. The R button by itself is used to execute special attacks. Finally, your best attack is executed when you fill up your Ichikoro bar, and unleashing all of the power will result in clearing all of the enemies close to you instantly.
As you progress in the Story Mode, your Emerl will become stronger and stronger. At first, he is virtually useless, as all that he can do is block. However, by watching or participating in a fight, he has the ability to learn moves that he sees other characters perform, thus he will get better by learning more and more moves as you play the game. The only bad thing is that in order to use most of his new abilities, Emerl needs a set amount of skill points, and earning the set amount usually takes a very, very long time. And although this may seem like a good thing because this means that Sonic Battle has a lot of replay value, this is not the case because the fighting action becomes repetitive and even boring after a few hours. Continuosly fighting other characters isn’t as fun as you thought it would be.
Battle Mode is the other main mode in this game. Here you can pick out a character, the difficulty level and simply duke it out against 1-3 other characters. In Battle Mode, you have the option of fighting for a certain amount of time and the person with the most knock-outs win, fighting until someone reaches a certain amount of knock-outs or fighting until only one more character is left. The good thing is that you can also link up with 1-3 other human players and battle as much as you wish. You can even use the Emerl that you have created thus far via your Story Mode, and this allows you to see who is strongest. Unfortuantely, finding three other people who each own a GameBoy Advance and a copy of Sonic Battle is near impossible, therefore it takes away from some of the potential fun.
The other modes are simply filler material. For example, Practice Mode is good for practice your attacks, combos and blocking skills, yet you will have plenty of practice by simply playing through the Story Mode. Challenge Mode is just as fun as Battle Mode, yet for some reason I rarely played this mode. In Challenge Mode, you select your character and difficulty, and will then have to fight through 5 stages. Each stage consists of an arena with 1-3 other characters, all of whom will attempt to reach 10 knockouts first. You also get points depending on what attacks you used or didn’t use, how fast you won, your hitting percentages, etc.
The mini-games, which are Speed Demon, Treasure Island, Fly & Get, Soniclash and Knuckles’ Mine Hunt, had potential to be fun. However, the mini-games turned out to be a disappointed because only Mine Hunt (a near copy of Mine Sweeper) can be played by oneself, while all of the others can be played only via system link. Although only one copy of Sonic Battle is necessary, convincing anyone to play a mini-game just doesn’t work out. The Battle Record is fairly cool, and this is where all of your statistics are tracked. You can see everything – from how long you’ve played the game to what character you used the most to how many special knockouts you performed. More useless information to devour – excellent.
There are two things that plague Sonic Battle – the characters themselves and the camera. The reason as to why I dislike the characters is because they are all extremely unbalanced. What’s great about games like Mario Kart, is that if one character is very fast, then he will also be very frail; thus everything is balanced out. This is not the case in Sonic Battle, as some characters are flat out amazing while others just stink up the competition. To explain this with ease, I will describe Amy Rose and Tails. Amy Rose has a hammer, which is so powerful and inflicts so much damage with hardly any effort, it makes her nearly indomitable. On the other hand, Tails (my favorite character) is horrible in this game, mainly because her special attack takes forever to charge. This is simply unfair to all of the Tails fans around the world!
Graphically, Sonic Battle has its ups and downs. The character models have been taken straight out of Sonic Advance 2, therefore all of the characters look gorgeous and perfect. Their animations are also fairly fluid and all of the special effects that they create whilst performing attacks are fairly advanced for the GameBoy Advance. The environments and arenas are also three-dimensional, which usually turns out to be a bad decision yet works fairly well in this case. However, the camera makes this game suffer. First of all, your character can simply disappear off the screen when they are behind an object, and this certainly isn’t pleasing during a battle. Yet my main grievance is the fact that the arenas are so big and a GameBoy Advance screen is so small. Therefore, when enemies go off the screen, the developers decided to simply let them disappear and you have no idea where they are as they didn’t even include small arrows to show in which direction they are headed.
The audio department did an above average job with this game. All of the sound effects are pretty good for a fighting game targeted at little kids. All of the high-pitched grunts heard during battles enhance the experience. The character voicing is splendid for a GameBoy game, as rumor is some of the voicing was taken from the console games. The background music is highly repetitive, bland and not the most engaging fighting music. However, at times I simply didn’t notice the music at all and it wasn’t too bad. However when you focus on it, you will want to turn down the volume.
Overall, Sonic Battle turned out to be a game that simply did not appeal to me. Although it is fairly innovative and many younger kids will enjoy this one, it became too repetitive for me too quickly. When I learned that my favorite Tails is a weakling and that the camera detracted from my experience, I felt even less of an urge to play this game. Also, spending countless hours just to make my robot learn moves was not even to motivate me to keep on playing. I learned that what made the Super Smash Bros. games such a great experience was the multi-player aspect, and this aspect cannot be recreated to its fullest extent on a GameBoy. I have decided that if I wish to play a fighting game, I’ll go play some Soul Calibur II. If I get an urge for a Sonic game, I’ll stick with the Sonic Advance series. Therefore, I can only recommend this average game to avid Sonic fans and to those that are looking for a harmless fighting game for their little ones.
Recommended:
No
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vadimio
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