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Gotta Go Fast

  • Addit
  • 07/27/2015 10:00 AM
  • 3477 views


A Game Made By: KJzero9
Created Using: RPG Tsukuru 2003
It's A: RPG Game
That Roughly Takes Around: 5 - 7 Hours To Complete
And It's A... COMPLETED GAME!!!


*sigh* I was worried that this day would possibly come… Oh yes… Something that I was dreading to do for a long time but never got around to do it until just now… The very day that I would have to download this “masterful” piece of gaming onto on my crappy PC to experience truly the magnificent essence that defines the all of us within; the very definition of perfection that we all strife for but never can fully achieve in our entire lifetimes… This…is it: the most complete package…

AND IT’S ONE OF THE MOST SHITTEST F**KING GAMES THAT I’VE EVER PLAYED ON HERE!!! F**K!!!


*deep breath* Okay… Let’s just…calm down a little bit and start all over again… Yeah…let’s just…continue to take deep breaths and calm…calm…calm… *breathes* Okay...we’re calm now…

So back in February of 2009, a user by the name of “KJzero9” happened to stumble across our little slice of heaven that is god’s country and submitted perhaps one of the most controversial, if not one of the most widely panned games in all of RPG Maker history in Sonic and The Chaos Dragons – but it originally didn’t entirely start out that way! At the time of its release, it was pretty much mostly an unknown due to fact that there was already an abundance of Sonic The Hedgehog fan-games on here and across most of the other indie gaming making sites. And I guess another primary reason that this was originally ignored that this was clearly something that was more targeted towards the fans of the series and not for the many casual onlookers like myself. Either way, the game was merely just an afterthought at first, surrounded in a sea of other discarded broken dreams…

But then its true destiny was finally set into motion, thanks in no large part to ex-moderator and former #shump member, Magi, who must have been driven batshit insane enough after playing this game to go absolutely S4D on everyone’s asses and feature the beloved children’s classic before eventually creating one of the most darkest periods in all of RMN’s short year history: the #shump fallout. (We lost a lot of good people that day…)

Naturally, after ordered had been restored, other members soon began to get word of Magi’s shenanigans and began to flock to this…“Sonic Fangame”. And that’s when its legacy had been implemented in action as one of the most shittest games to ever embrace this site.

But the true question in all of this is this: “Is this game really as bad as other people say it is?”

(No, really, it is; it’s pretty f**king bad…)

But, “wait a minute,” you say… “But Addit? You’re not a Sanic the Headgeman fan!? Why u be playing this when you can be playing and reviewing my game instead of this one? Have you finally gone absolutely mad?”

(You’re right; what the f**k am I even doing playing this?)

True, I’m not much of a Sonic The Hedgehog fan as much as I am, say, a Mario and a Nintendo fan, but let’s just say that over the years that I’ve learned to respect the little blue b*stard for what he’s done for gaming. I mean, if it wasn’t for him, we…



Wouldn’t have…such stuff…like…this…???



...Okay, so his more recent endeavourers may have not garnished as much positive influence on society as much as his past endeavourers have – but the man is still a living, breathing legend, people. And I for one respect him for that.

Plus, I guess the main reason that I decided to look at this game, finally, as that we recently had a topic discussion about who was the more popular character in their own opinion between Mario or Sonic. And although the majority went along with Mario, like myself, Sonic still got some much needed love here or there. Besides, even though Mario games may be more of a commercialize success compared to Sonic’s more recent outings, there’s just something so unbelievably charming and amusing about seeing and watching all these different Sonic memes, and games, and all these different, creative wacky pieces of fanart that, in my opinion, is kind of keeping the character alive through all his recent struggles as of late… With Mario, because of his difference in personality and demeanour, I don’t think you can do the same type of stuff that Sonic can get away with. It’s just his differences in his character.

Besides, I do have such fond memories of playing Sonic 1, 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles at my neighbourhood friend’s house all those years ago when he let me try out the Genesis at his place. Since I had a SNES and he had a Genesis, we would often swap meeting at each other’s houses and try out the other console that we didn’t own. The Genesis actually had some pretty good games on it that I remember, such as, of course, Sonic, Shining Force, Streets Of Rage, Phantasy Star and Road Rash – so it wasn’t all that bad! I guess I was a bit fortunate enough back then to try out both consoles and see that the grass can be greener on the other side of the lake if I just looked.

- Huh, “review?” What are you talking a…

…ah shit…I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Here I am babbling away, yet again, trying to stall out for some more precious time, not wanting to play the game and review it, thinking that I can just go on enough about my life story that I can still get the makerscore for it and not have to talk about the game any further…but I guess not.

*sigh* Okay… Let’s do it… Let’s review…Sonic and The Chaos Dragons…

The Story


Come on, everyone’s doing it.


So immediately upon start-up (that’s if you don’t manage to puke first), Sonic will be the middle of Station Square while getting himself a brief – as I use that term rather loosely – brief tutorial about how the play…the game. There’s no opening cutscene; there’s no explanation about who or what this world is or where it takes place or anything else of the sort; you’re just plastid down like you were just plopped onto this world for you to suffer through after your interdimensional space mother just gave birth to you.

Now imagine that you’ve never played a Sonic game before and you have no idea who – or what – the f**k is going on here? How confused would you be with an opening like that? Why couldn’t the game just start off with Sonic chasing Eggman, or starting the game off in Tails’ workshop out of all things? Why just plop him in the middle of nowhere? It’s stupid.

Anyway, when you do “eventually” find Tails, he’ll tell Sonic that he found a Chaos Emerald in the ruins just outside of his workshop. The pair then head on over to talk to Knuckles, who’s apparently been digging in the area, to know if there are any more of these things hidden underground… Well, apparently, after talking to Knuckles, he’s having a serious case of memory loss in the head and thinks that you two are up to no good again, and then proceeds to kick both of your asses. (I guess all those steroids that he’s been taking in the last game must have really done something to his head.)

Just then, suddenly out of the blue (and we’re talking, like, right out of the blue, because it just basically happens just like that within seconds), Dr. Eggman manages to steal the Chaos Emerald from you and breaks apart a piece of the Master Emerald while…somehow getting away. (What a d*ck!) The trio eventually follow him to the underground ruins where he’s managed to somehow collect all seven and is going to use the power of the Emeralds to finally build “Eggman Land.” But Sonic and company manage to stop him, yet again… But unlike the previous times, when Sonic goes to take back the Emeralds from Dr. Eggman, the good doctor apparently has managed to release seven mystical deities, in the form of ancient dragons, who are now on the rampage wreaking havoc across the world and Sonic is initially to blame for it because he didn’t heed Dr. Eggman’s initial warning about it earlier…??? (Wha…???)

So the townspeople blame Sonic because Eggman is at least trying to help protect Station Square from the dragons that he released and they immediately cast Sonic out of town because of it…?

(Gee, some friends, huh?)

Anyways, you know the drill: collect all seven Chaos Emeralds; find that Dr. Eggman is behind everything yet again; and then you got to go turn super saiyan 2 and take out the last dragon something… Yup.

If you’ve played or have followed any of Sonic’s recent adventures, you pretty much know what to expect from this and this sort of plot is no different. It’s predictable, plays it safe, and really doesn’t offer a whole lot in the originally department. It’s just…there. I mean, it’s not the worst story to any video game that I’ve ever played, or something; it’s just that it doesn’t do anything new or extremely unique enough that all the other story heavy driven Sonic games do already. At least try and mix things up a little. Maybe introduce a new character…have Dr. Eggman become playable and help the team out and maybe go into a little bit more backstory with him – ANYTHING!!!

Dialogue ranges from being just okay to downright putrid at times. At least the central main characters act the way that they should, but the rest of the NPC’s and dragon bosses are just downright boring or they have no soul to them…

The plot is basically just there to provide you with some minor incentive to go on an adventure for something. I’d actually would have preferred it if the creator did something unique to the story and introduced a new element – or a new character – and that would have been nice to see. But where it stands, the story does honor Sonic’s traditional narrative, but it’s just so dull to go through and witness that I rather see something else...

The Gameplay


- What the f*** is wrong with Tails, here…?


Oh boy, the gameplay… (Now where do I start…?)

Sonic and The Chaos Dragons is sort of your traditional standard RPG with some minor Sonic The Hedgehog elements, such as 2D platforming stages, added in to the mix. These 2D platformer stages are optional for the most part – but we’ll get into that later…

Basically, right off the bat, you’ll notice that levelling up in this game doesn’t do a whole lot of jack squat other than teach your party members additional abilities that they can use in battle. Most of these abilities are just slightly stronger attack options than your regular attacks, but they’re not overall as useful as you might think, as the regular option is just as good enough in most situations. In fact, speaking of that regular attack option – you’ll be using that a lot here, because this game is one of “those” types of games, where you hammerly keep hitting the decision key until the battle is done. Oh sure, the battles get a lot tougher in some parts, but the regular attack option is all you need here to survive. The only real useful abilities that I found were quite helpful to speed up some of the fights were Knuckles’ “Enrage” and Amy’s “Hammer Time” ability that causes your stats to double up and can be used on multiple different characters making them hit a hell of a lot harder, and Chaos’ “Chaos Heal” which is a great replacement for your main healing strategy that I’m going to get to you in a second. For you see, since using items, for some strange reason, doesn’t happen to work in battle, your main healing strategy is going to come with the move called “Focus Body.” This move has no MP usage and every single playable character in the game has this ability at the start and it heals a large amount of HP once the next action is taken with the only drawback to this move being that you can’t control that character for at least one turn. So even though that you can’t use any healing items that you can purchase in shops or find throughout, the Focus Body ability will be enough to get you by. But it still makes me think: why program recovery items and healing to work like that? It’s very strange.

There’s not even any new armor or new weapons to equip or accessories to find – nothing. There is a shop that sells the default equipment in it that you can alter a little bit around with each character, but that’s basically it. So there’s no further customization that you can do in this game, making going out of your way to find any items completely pointless. Even the money that you can collect in this game is utterly useless other than using it to sleep at the Inn.

The game’s difficulty in regards to battles is pretty much laidback mostly throughout the game as long as you use the Focus Body technique and keep on constantly attacking the enemies at will. Hell, even the final boss can be a complete joke if you happen to take advantage of your party’s super moves. The only two bosses that gave me some trouble was the White Dragon, because his wind based attacks hurt like a b**ch, and the Shadow fight against Sonic, because Sonic isn’t fully healed up before you fight him and it just takes one of Shadow’s special attacks to kill you in a flash – which is just b*llshit. I hate it when a character leaves your team hurt for a while and then comes back for a battle that you can’t fully prepare yourself for with that said character and they’re not healed fully enough before you go and fight. It’s absolutely annoying! (Luckily, I was able to beat it, though.)

Nah, the only thing that seriously p*ssed me off difficulty wise wasn’t the high random encounter rate, or the Shadow fight, or the missing dungeon1 file that the game didn’t include that I had to include myself and all the other problems that I found along the way – it was the last 2D section in Angel Island that really grinded my gears.

Now these 2D sections are basically a mini side scrolling area where Sonic or Shadow can go only right while you, the player, can only press the decision key to make them jump through spikes, pits and what not. They were originally put in as optional parts where you can skip a huge portion of the level, but the last one you have go through is required to progress towards the next part. These 2D sections may sound and look rather impressive, especially for an RPG Maker game – and I’m sure the creator was absolutely gushing over what he was able to do here – but it just doesn’t correspond well in regards to the controls and the timing of some of these jumps. You have to be absolutely almost picture perfect in order to make some of these jumps. One wrong missed press or if you’re a split second too late or early, you’ll miss the entire jump entirely or smack into a wall of spikes and have to start all over again. Luckily, there are checkpoints midway through, so you don’t have to do all over again, but that last area can go suck my nards! For see, the last area has four different speed sections and two of those areas introduce speed panels to the mix. Combine the intense speed with the frustrating controls, and you’re going to fail these parts over and over again… The screen literally moves so god damn fast that I almost felt that I had vertigo while watching it to time my jumps correctly. I didn’t mind the first speed panel – but two of them at the last part!? Give me a break. I can honestly see around 90% of players just going into the editor and adding a teleport event so they don’t have to do all of that shit.

The Soundtrack


Oh, the irony.


It seems like with every single Sonic The Hedgehog game lately, whether it be fan game or not, that the music is usually the best thing about the game, and for this game that rings rather true.

The music in this game is all in MIDI form and it seems like they’re all taken from the various different Sonic The Hedgehog games from the past. I’m not sure if they’re all from the different Sonic The Hedgehog games, as I haven’t played all of them, but I do recognize some of the tracks, like Mystic Cave, Chemical Plant, Flying Battery and Ice Cap Zone’s music, and I’m pretty well certain that the rest of them are from the other games as well. Either way, I find that with MIDI’s that they’re usually either hit or miss when it comes to the overall sound quality, but most of them here seem to do their job quite well. I actually really like the Angel Island music with the organ piece that it has going for it and the boss battle theme verses the Master Dragon is pretty good too.

Sound effects aren’t really anything special to write home about – but at least the author included the classic spring sound when you hit a spring! (I love that sound.)

Although I’m a little disappointed that the author couldn’t use the classic Sonic Drowning music and had to go and use a MIDI based version of it instead that sounds rather terrible. (Come on, man.)

The Aesthetics


…I sure do love it when the game makes its own captions for me.


It’s ass. Plain and simple, this game look like utter ass... Not only do the maps looking horribly atrocious and have no sense of rhyme or reasoning to them, but they’re just too big and empty to navigate through... I think the only decent map that I thought was somewhat okayish was the second underground part where you fight the red dragon, but every other area in the game looks very dreadful in comparison. You can definitely tell that this was one of the author’s very first games and that his overall map making ability doesn’t quite have the basic functionalities yet of what you should do in a particular situation. You want your maps to be spacious enough for them not to be overly cluttered to navigate through but filled with enough content that it looks quite pleasing to the eye. You don’t have to have the most illustrated of map making abilities to make your maps look good, but as long as it looks decent enough to look at than it should be fine. The author definitely needs a bit more work on that…

The rest of the graphics here are a complete mismatch of everything in regards to sprites, tilesets, enemy files, etc. and they just look like a complete mess. I mean, you have a two dimensional sprite on a four directional overhead view where it can only face left or right but not down or up and you thought that was a good idea? I mean, even the rest of the townspeople and enemy sprites are taken straight from the RTP…mixed in with the Sonic stuff! Ugh…

Even the cutscenes taken straight from Sonic X aren’t compressed correctly enough and they look even more like ass! It’s like he converted these images in Paint instead of using something like IrfanView to do it. It just looks bad…

The End Result


Aw…f**k no.


- So what can I say that hasn’t already been said about this game already? Sonic and The Chaos Dragons is definitely a lackluster title with a predictable, if not a familiarized plot, dull gameplay mechanics and 2D running sections that are just poorly executed, mapping and strange graphical choices that just look like complete ass, and not to mention a boastful of glitches and some of them are even game breaking! This game deserves pretty much everything that has already been said before…

...However, despite all these different neglecting issues towards it, there is just something…strangely compelling about playing this game that I actually somewhat enjoyed… Now, now, don’t get me wrong, the game is still bad – unbelievably bad – but it’s a fun sort of bad, you know? I mean…I don’t think this is the worst game ever made on here or anything like that, because the creator did succeed doing the best that he could do trying to make a decent Sonic The Hedgehog fangame with the limited amount of experience that he had at the time, and I think for a beginner’s attempt at it that it could have been a lot worse. I mean, the entire game could have all been just 2D speed sections like Angel Island and then I would have really flipped.

Overall, believe it or not, I still think that Marie Goes To Space, Townlore, Saga Crusade and Castles – Masterpiece Set are even worse than this game. Those games had major flaws that prevented me from truly enjoying my experiences with them…whether they be its short length, having to play the game at a certain time, missing files and high random encounter rates, or b*llshit difficulty. At least Sonic and Chaos Dragons could be completed (although with a little bit luck) and somewhat enjoyed compared to all those other games. And this guy was just a lowly amateur at the time when he made this game, so you have to take that into a little bit of consideration.

So I recommend that if you to want experience the pain and the legend that is Sonic and The Chaos Dragons to do it at your own risk. You may find some enjoyment out of it like with myself or you may find yourself having to shoot yourself in the face after going through such a b*llshit experience.



OVERALL GRADE:
1.5 / 5 - D ~ Proceed With EXTREME Caution.