Doomed by its development. As the first handheld Bioware title, experienced director Mark Darrah was to lead a team of newbies. EA's acquisition of the company lead them to poach Darrah to direct Dragon Age: Origins, leaving the team leaderless. Additionally, EA likely refused any extensions on the project, as it was to Sega's benefit, not theirs.

Reportedly, a mere week before going gold, award-winning composer Richard Jacques was told that legal contracts meant that Sonic 1 and 2 tracks could only be remixed in-house by Sega or by their original composer, not by another development studio in contract with Sega. In a mad dash, Jacques grabbed fan-made MIDIs of Sonic tracks from the internet and attempted to run them on the DS, to infamously limited success.

The result is a cookie-cutter RPG created from an honestly fairly decent design document. Using your turns well is genuinely engaging and interesting. Doing things like pulling team-members moves forward using combos to get in before an enemy puts up a shield, or spacing out turns with consumables to wait for buffs from other party members to kick in, it's great.

Sadly, mashing your face against the enemies is enough to get you through the entire game, and the pace of combat is killed by excessive and repetitive touch-screen minigames. The lack of variety in the execution of your own moves is really what hurts it most. A better system would be that unlocking higher levels for PP moves provided an option to do a more complicated set of inputs for greater rewards. More moves also would have been greatly appreciated to reduce tedium and encourage more creative team-building.

Jank seeps into every corner of this game. If party members have equal speed, it rolls first to show which will go first on the top screen, and then does another role to determine who actually goes first, which makes trusting the game hard. The run away mechanic is another indication of the design issues,because you can tell that the original intention was to run upwards, seeing obstacles coming from the top screen. This likely functioned poorly on real hardware and had to be changed to awkwardly moving sideways.

The 'quests' are cookie-cuttter filler to a tee. Party member balance is pretty bad, Cream breaks the game over her knee while Rouge and Tails can't do anything. The 'Attack' and 'Defense' stats actually govern accuracy and evasion, respectively, with the real attack and defense stats coined 'Damage' and 'Armor'. You cannot check your current total of those stats, bafflingly.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the game in retrospect is the writing. It was Ian Flynn's first time writing for a game, and in many ways serves as a manual for how Flynn would go on to write for non-Archie Sonic in general, which will soon include Sonic Frontiers. It's fairly entertaining, if sometimes bland when dealing with the quests.

Sonic Chronicles has some promise, but it never got the chance to achieve it. I'd love to see more RPGs with a combat style reminiscent of it, in theory it's a system I like about as much as Shin Megami Tensei's Press Turns, and anyone who understands that knows it's high praise. Still, it's attached to a cold, depressing, almost hostile experience. I wish it could be worth checking out, but it's probably not.

Baba Is You has a creative premise, but it's a front. Once the initial shine of rebuilding the game in front of me wore off, I became plainly aware that all I was doing was playing the puzzle game beneath it. One about tediously interacting with a restrictive and confusing sentence processor through cumbersome and sluggish grid-based movement. Forced to work on exactly its terms by piles of immovable rules in each and every level past the first quarter. Making no progress until I stumbled upon the exact combination required to proceed, over and over again.

By stripping down certain mechanics, it made what couldn't be altered all that actually mattered. It's a sliding block puzzle fused with a '70s text adventure, and neither are the height of good design to me. It's an adequate brainteaser, but its novelty is truly just surface level. The game I wanted to like isn't even there.