Andrenn's Game Shelf

It’s another edition of Andrenn’s Game shelf! While I was planning to do a review, something just hit me…Sonic and the Black Knight, Unleashed and Chronicles…gotta talk about them.

First off, similar to Megaman and Mario, I’m a big Sonic Fan. Don’t worry; I’m not one of those ignorant fanboys who screams if you say that Sonic Sucks. I may have a large history with the blue dude with ‘tude (remember when that was his old slogan?) but I’m not ignorant to that most of his recent games have sucked.

I’d say the last really good Sonic Game was Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. At least…the last good console game. Meanwhile on the handhelds Sonic has been kicking all kinds of ass from Sonic Battle to Sonic Rush.

So now we’ve got an upcoming Sonic game for the Wii called Sonic and the Black Knight. From what I recall, it’s going to mix Sonic speed and the Wii-mote’s motion game play. I’m…skeptical, to say the least.

Now Sonic Wildfire was pretty good (before I go on, for those who may be confused. I refuse to call sonic Wildfire “Sonic and the Secret Rings” because that is a god awful name and it makes me hate Sega. So, I call it Sonic Wildfire. Just a little heads up for you.) But I’m not sure if Black Knight can capture that level of cool.

For one…it comes off as a cheap gimmick. I can understand how Sega wants to cater to the Wii fans and try and improve the lack of good 3^rd party games…but seriously, giving Sonic a sword? Why not make a new game where the character goes into the story book? Hell, use an older franchise if you want! Use that stupid living Star or something, but with Sonic, it just doesn’t work!

Though I may end up biting my tongue come Black Knight’s release. I’m a sucker for Sonic Games, so if I have a Wii by then, I’d probably still buy it regardless. I’m also only going off the press release of the game and an image in Nintendo Power. So far we’ve yet to see any game play or a trailer, so I’ll hold off anymore spite.

Now as for Unleashed…oh please…let this be the game I’m hoping for. Heroes was so awful and…well…Sonic 2006 was actually good on the PS3, but it didn’t come out until 2007 so it’s not technically Sonic 2006.

Unleashed looks stunning with great graphics (that much Sega can deliver on, I know) and incredibly fun game play. It seems to blend the greatness of Sonic Rush and Sonic Adventure 2. I can only hope that it plays as well as it looks.

Of course…there’s the Were-Sonic thing…where Sonic…transforms into a Wolf like hedgehog. Which is just confusing. But for safety’s safe, I’ll avoid bashing it, as the game play for it does look fun. It looks like the old hack and slash beat ‘em ups of my day, the days of the SNES and the Sega Genesis (My NES was a gift form my grandfather when I was very young).

Sonic looks fairly slow in this form, but I doubt speed will be much of a problem since from the looks of it Sonic will be fighting most of the time in this form and not going from place to place as much. I also liked the Were-Sonic trailer released a few months back, very funny.

The plot seems to start out simple enough, Eggman is up to shit, and Sonic has to stop him. It’s an easy and enjoyable form of plot that we’re all used to by now and I’m glad that Sega is taking things slow. Much as I enjoyed the storyline to Sonic ’06, the great story wasn’t worth the confusing twists and lack of everything else.

Sonic goes Super but gets captured, the emeralds are turned into negative energy which, instead of making sonic Super, turns him…Were. Huh. Anyway, Eggman breaks the world into pieces while he’s at it and it’s up to Sonic and pals to save the day again. While It’s no Mephiles from the future, it’s still very good.

I’m a big fan of the supporting cast…well…everyone by Amy and Cream…and Knuckles kind of annoys me. I was glad to hear that most of the supporting cast is still returning for this game, most notably my favorite, Shadow.

As I said earlier, the game play is a blend of Rush and Adventure, switching from side scrolling to somewhat 3D moments. It looks great, incredibly, hugely fast and a vast improvement over the week speed in Sonic ’06 and Heroes.

Now as for Dark Brotherhood…it seems to be the start of a new wave of Sonic games, much like what Wildfire was. Dark Brotherhood is an RPG, something no one would expect from Sonic. Though they did make it work with Mario, Paper Mario 2 being one of my all time favorite RPG’s.

I’m not a big fan of the RPG franchise. That would be a good friend of mine. He’s a major Final Fantasy fan and seems to have every game, guide, book, comic, movie and soundtrack he can get his hands on. He got me into the RPG franchise long ago with Final Fantasy 4, which at the time, for the SNES, we all thought was 2. Since then I’ve found myself enjoying, but not necessarily indulging myself on, the RPG franchise and series of games.

Really, I don’t care much for Final Fantasy. The only one I like is 4 of course, and 7 is all right. But I say this just to let you know that I’m in no way biased on either side of the “RPG’s suck, RPG’s Rule” battle that most fans seem to go on about. I think their all right, but that’s it.

Now the idea of a Sonic RPG is fairly ridiculous. As is a Sonic party game *cough* or a game about Sonic, in which he moves incredibly slow *second cough.* Now I enjoy big storylines when it comes to games, while I don’t’ mind simple stories, the big epic stories are the ones I really like and I enjoy being engrossed in whatever the story may be, even if it only offers a 5 minute window away from the stress of real life.

Again, the entire cast is here so I’ll of course look forward to see what they all do and if they have any good moments. The storyline itself, seems fine, I have a sneaking suspicion that the character Shade and Shadow have more in common than similar names. But this isn’t a fanfic and I’m not here to speculate you to death.

Overall, it looks good but I may wait a bit to check it out. See the reviews and all that and then when I have some extra cash I’ll give Dark Brotherhood a look-see.

So that’s it for our second edition of Andrenn’s Game Shelf. I chose to, again, do more of a speculation and thoughts than an actual review. I want to ease into this a little, not just jump into reviewing games. Reviewing games is a lot harder than comics, there’s a lot to cover, so I’m sticking to Opinion based posts for now. But expect some reviews of games like Megaman 9 and Sonic Unleashed in the future.

Week’s End will be here tomorrow for its first Sunday edition. Back to the first edition of that, I did say that it was Weekendly, meaning it would be on either Saturday or Sunday, so expect that tomorrow.