DS RPG Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood from BioWare was always intended to be the first entry in a series, however, the sequel never came out due to a number of reasons, including BioWare being bought by Electronic Arts.
now, however, Do you know games It revealed some previously undisclosed story details about Sonic Chronicles 2. In a conversation with former BioWare lead designer Miles Holmes (who now works at Warp Digital), new details were shared about the Mass Effect studio’s plans for the second game.
Sonic Chronicles – which launched on the DS in 2008 – ended infamously on a cliffhanger that saw Eggman take over the world and rebuild it in his image. I’ve been letting these strands dangle for over 15 years, and the follow-up was meant to pick up the loose strands right on and go straight from there.
Holmes (in the video below the article) talks about some of the 80’s movie inspirations, from Back to the future 2 – “And now it’s Eggman’s world, right? That’s a bit of a Back to the Future 2 kind of vibe” – to Terminator 2, such as “When you see [where] Kyle Reese from”. With all the citizens captured by Eggman and his robots, Sonic and his friends will need to navigate this recreated world:
“Part of that would have been the fun of going to world famous landmarks and seeing them recreated in Eggman style, so going to Paris and seeing Eggman gear all over the Eiffel Tower, kind of watching with big eyes or something…”
In the beginning, the sequel will start with Sonic and his friends crashing into the Earth after the events of the first game and being separated from each other. Each party will then need to build their ranks by finding and rescuing the others when everyone is finally reunited and working as a team. Your goal was to build an army big enough to storm Eggman’s base.
Things don’t go smoothly, of course, with the appearance of Argus – the massive deity mentioned only in the Sonic Chronicles. This forces Sonic and Eggman to join forces. Defeating the Argus Rifts opens the Twilight Cage, freeing everyone trapped there for generations. Argus has been trapping these powerful tribes in the Twilight Cage because of a prophecy he was told – although this was a hoax. Holmes says:
“It was basically manipulation — so we’re left with an idea: Who is this revelation, this trickster god that made him do this in the first place?
Because obviously he wanted all of this to happen, he wanted Argos defeated, and now with him away, the longest question that could have been used in the series is: OK, so we defeated this one God, but now there’s this other God who made all this stuff happen. Why did he do that, what was that for, and is he going to threaten us in the end? “
So this ending was less of a thriller and more of a teaser for the future, an ending that would have been more fan-pleasing. BioWare could have made use of a couple of games, leaving the torch behind for another studio to pick up. But no second game was made.
We’ve mentioned that EA’s purchase of BioWare may have affected things, but Ken Benders — a former Archie Comics writer who worked on Sonic Comics — thinks many of the characters in the RPG look a lot like the Dark Legion echidna in the comics, from among other things for which he had claimed copyright. Penders has stated that if Sega wanted to pay him for the rights to those characters, he would be happy to discuss it with the company.
So we may never see another Sonic Chronicles game, or even a re-release, but this new information sheds light on what could have been. Hey, now that Sega has bought Atlus, maybe we can get a brand new Sonic RPG sometime in the future…
You can watch the full trailer for Did You Know Gaming below, and let us know if you’d like to see a sequel in the comments!