awesome game for the gba, which is a lot considering that handheld is definitely not my fave when it comes to its game library...anyway, the story mode is pretty good, you get to play as a ton of characters with their own episode as the story progresses. this game can get pretty hard/challenging at times, although you can sort of customize the difficulty when fighting against emerl as whatever skills you have loaded for him is what you will fight against when a battle against emerl comes up in the story. i noticed the dialogue in this game is a bit different than in other sonic games, its a lot more lax and natural, which give these characters and story a bit more life. if you're not too good at fighting games like me its best to grind in sonic's story since the battles are the easiest there.

El core gameplay como tal no es malo y pienso que el juego vale mucho la pena porque este es el que yo considero como el Sonic con la mejor historia de todos, incluso más buena que la de adventure 2
Quizá muy dramática para algunos pero mentiría si digo que el final y los personajes me llegaron bastante
El mayor pecado que le veo es tremendo grindeo que tienes que hacer con emerl en el modo historia, ese método de ir ganando de puntos en puntos para ponerle habilidades está muy mal hecho, sobretodo porque el juego rápido te pone con enemigos cabrones y tú emerl con un moveset bien madreado
Pero si sabes tolerarlo, créeme que vas a disfrutar la historia
Igual si bien el combate es muy simple es bastante entretenido y sobretodo el poder personalizar a emerl (mejor personalización que forces ekisde) sin embargo está bastante desbalanceado por parte de personajes como shadow y si no lo juegas con amigos se puede tornar repetitivo, sobretodo porque la IA es muy explotable
Con todo y todo creo es que es algo decente, aunque si te parece peor podría comprenderlo, pero es de esos juegos en los que el cariño que le tengo influye bastante en mi percepción

every day i wake up and think about playing sonic battle again. my friends have to avoid arguing with me over any aspect of the quality of this game because they know that if you told me to my face that you didn't like Sonic Battle (2003) for the Game Boy Advance i would tear your head off like a grape from the stem. so they have to be like "haha yeah that's so true sonic battle is one of the greatest works of art of our generation hahaha... can you untie us now and let us go!!" and the answer is no. the answer is you're going to sit here and talk about sonic battle with me until i say we're done

For the last 20 years, modders have been using the sprites from this game in all sorts of Sonic related media, and frankly the sprites are by far the best part of this game. This is an isometric 3D fighting game with 2D sprites, and it is a weird one where I liked the gameplay way more than it deserved. It is very jank and full of stunlocks and one hit kills. What really lets this game down is the campaign, which is both too short and yet incredibly repetitive at the same time. There's only 7 characters in the game, but they make you fight them dozens of times. Not only that, but after every single fight, they make you do the same fight again, but with twice as many lives. Every single fight. The story is also all over the place; I like the idea of Emerl and there are some interesting character dynamics with some characters like Shadow, but overall it's very poorly written and very confusing as to what, if anything, is actually going on. I'm also pretty sure the moral of Cream's story is "violence is necessary, don't be a pacifist".

I started Unleashed as my next big lunge into this series but I found myself really wanting to play some smaller shit here and there, Ive been wanting to take a stab at larger games less and less if i already have so much media im consuming already on my plate
So naturally that's why youll see bursts of me messing around with things such as 007 GoldenEye tiger electronics or the Home Improvement Game or peeking at the Postal series
Or even swinging into something that has a gnarly hook thats totally off base from anything else i've been doing :)
It's the spice of life, babes.. spice of life

With that being said, Sonic Battle is something Fiercly different.. it's an arena fighter on the fucking Gameboy Advance and it plays like it in every way youd expect
You get some fun combos and fine enough looking stages, though only a couple of them were really stand-out as visually interesting to me with others just kind of devolving into "Gee I hope I get to play on one that Doesnt have annoying terrain blocking my depth of field all the time"

This gameplay is very unique but the tedium here is so harsh it makes me grit my teeth in agony..the execution of it all is effective enough in short bursts but when youre playing this shit back to back to back to back against CPUs you start to notice little.. cracks in it all..
the depth of field misses, getting juggled, the guessing game of how strong you are against your opponent because you can't see their HP bar.. all of this and more really wears on you.

And thats all just shit you find in the multiplayer
I played all of the story mode stuff almost in one sitting and let me tell you

DONT. DO. THAT.. DONT DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

And ill explain Why

Sonic Battle's campaign presents itself as this sort of Sonic Adventure style story structuring at first glance
each character having a different perspective in the overall narrative with one consistent thread that ties them all together and unites all the perspectives in the final showdown of tearing some colossal threat's ass asunder(which rocks)

But the most baffling thing to me is that when you beat the first story you get booted out to the title screen for picking another one, and this is in a completely linear fashion too. You dont really get the whole "Oh i finished sonic now alll these are open" kind of feel, when the stories youre playing through are more conjoined like chapters of the overarching story than perspectives you can watch in any order
you can replay them as much as you want(not sure why you would)
but for the first time experience it's absolutely railed into the script

But.. it's a nice script im ngl
Apart from Amy's characterization of being flighty and nearly psychotically in love with sonic
( ermm, jodie you cant say that..,, god forbid women do ANYTHING jodie, what da heck.. loser. )
and yes u in the back youre right, i dont have a problem with Amy crushing on Sonic. I just think there's something cataclysmically ironic and funny about how Shadow has better characterization than her in this game

There is a moment in this game when Amy straight up hallucinates up a Sonic ghost to try to beat Rouge's ass
FOR SOME REASON and then hes gone and its like what just happened lmfaoooo
I love her though just pointing it out because the actual narrative of the game and interactions are kinda fun
I really like Emerl as a main character and how each character has something important to rub off on him with.

from sonic he gets that heroic kinda charisma and not giving up, tails that independency, knuckles the willpower to be tough for himself, rouge the quick thinking and kinda wound up makin him a bit zesty which was hilarious LMAO
amy reaffirmed his dedication to protecting but cream helped him have a reasoning for that protecting with genuine love and understanding
and that understanding is brought home with shadow's affirmations of existence and the pursuit of life

It's dope! It's aggravating being told it through a series of
"ok kill that guy 10 times maybe"
[dialogue inbetween]
"ok now kill that guy 10 More times.. maybe"
and then you do that and it just goes and goesss
The best thing about this game is by far the customization though and the sheer amount of characters you can play as is a double edged sword

On one hand, you have so many different kits to mess around with and apply to your Emerl build... on the Other Hand.. this game is too FUCKING L O N G!!!!!!!!!!!! oH MY G O D.
I enjoyed the narrative and the conclusion to it is actually really sad, one of the more bittersweet ones in the series actually that I don't think is talked about in how beautiful it is enough even though it's similar to SA2's ending in a handful of ways

final thoughts: this game can fucking SUCK a lot of the time, some fights got stupidly unfair for no reason at ALLLLLLLLLLLLL bleaugh. I almost wanna just give it 2/5 stars but I really do like a handful of things about it as a side game
the art is nice, the story is simple and sweet and i like how satisfying some of the ass kicking is for the characters
my favorites to play as were cream, rouge and shadow
im incredibly surprised this game is gamma's true final throes, its... confusing.. like why did they do him like that..
Oh well, atleast Omega is funny
Emerl fits right at home and exemplifies some of the best aspects about Shadow, Sonic and Gamma all rolled into one which is W E I R R RR RR RR D but hey it works for me, i like the little dude