When I was a kid I had terrible teeth. I was one of those kids with a smile only a mother could love. You know those kids, with teeth sticking out every which way like Predator. That was me. It wasn’t long before I was whisked away to see the local orthodontists to get braces. In the waiting room in his office he had a faux arcade machine with a Sega Genesis inside. It played about six different games but I only remember playing two, Sonic The Hedgehog and Home Alone 2, and I enjoyed the latter much more. Since then my life has been relatively hedgehog free and, suffice to say, I’ve never been a big Sonic fan. But being UGTV’s resident RPG fanboy, I was intrigued at the prospect of reviewing Sonic’s first foray into the genre.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, developed by Bioware and published by Sega, is non-traditional RPG with two major attractions: characters and environments from the Sonic universe and touch screen based fighting mechanics (but more on that later). The premise is pretty simple, Sonic shows up after a long hiatus and bands together with old friends and enemies to fight a new evil. Previous Sonic games haven’t been known for their stellar stories and Sonic Chronicles is no different. The characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is uninspired and the plot is rather plain.

But the game’s real selling point is the use of the Sonic universe. The characters and environments look authentic and the developers did a good job of translating the look from previous games. Unfortunately, the other aspects of the game’s presentation fall flat. The music is nothing special, and the sound effects are wacky and cheap. The interface is unorganized and clunky, especially the equipment management screen.

The game’s other major feature is the combat mechanics. In battle all special moves, called POWs, require you to use the stylus to touch targets or follow moving circles to successfully use them. Ditto for dodging enemy specials. The mechanic is a near exact copy of the one employed in Elite Beat Agents only less complicated. The problem is that you’ll have to use POW moves a lot and the mechanic becomes irritating very quickly. It’s not so bad when you screw up an attack skill, as they will only be less effective, but when you screw up while using healing or revive specials it’ll miss completely. And quite frankly, the whole mess just feels unnecessary and tacked on leaving me wishing they just left this feature out entirely.

There are also quite a few odd quirks to the game’s mechanics. When your characters level up you can skew their development by allocating bonus points to the stat of your choosing, too bad those stats don’t really do anything. You’d think your characters’ “attack” stats affected how much damage their attacks do in battle but they doesn’t. Instead, it only affects their chance to successfully hit and the damage they do is based on an invisible “damage” stat. Similar strangeness for the “defense” stat.

Money too is handled in bizarre ways. Those ubiquitous rings from all the Sonic games function as the games’ currency. Rather than getting them as a reward for defeating enemies they are scattered about the explorable areas much like they would be in the Sonic platformers, a nice touch. But they never refresh, ever. And there are only 50-100 or so in each area, of which there are a total of less than 20 in the entire game. Money is so limited that the handful of shops that are around are almost useless.

Okay, that’s a lot of stuff so far, and there’s actually more than that. But basically, the developers made a lot of changes to the traditional RPG formula, some good but mostly bad. And often it’s the kind of bad that makes you wish they didn’t do it at all, because it either becomes are real chore very quickly (like the touch screen gimmicks) or just makes the whole mechanic pointless. I have to give them credit for trying, because some of their ideas are interesting, but change shouldn’t be made for change’s sake. The real bright spot in this game is the use of creative material from the Sonic universe. Which is why I’d really only recommend this game to a total Sonic fanboy as they’re the only ones that will appreciate all the hard work put into the character models, environments and little nuances. While I could be clever and tie everything back to my introductory anecdote by saying that, for us non-Sonic fanatics, playing Sonic Chronicles would be as painful as a trip to the orthodontists, but that would be kinda unfair. The game’s not that bad, it’s just not very fun.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is out for the Nintendo DS now for $34.99 (CDN/USD). Published by Sega, developed by Bioware. Game played for 25+ hours to completion.