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BioWare’s DS RPG Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was always intended to be the first entry in a series, however, the sequel never came to light due to a number of reasons, including BioWare being purchased by Electronic Arts.
Now, however, Did You Know Gaming has uncovered some never-before-revealed story details about the planned Sonic Chronicles 2. In a chat with former lead designer at BioWare Miles Holmes (who is now at Warp Digital), new details have been shared about what the Mass Effect studio’s plans were for the second game.
Sonic Chronicles — which launched on the DS in 2008 — infamously ended on a cliffhanger which sees Eggman having taken over the world and rebuilding it in his image. These threads have been left dangling for over 15 years, and the follow-up was intended to directly pick up the loose threads and go straight from there.
Holmes (in the video at the bottom of the article) talks about some of the ’80s movie inspirations, from Back to the Future 2 — “and it’s now Eggman’s world, right? So that’s a little of a Back to the Future 2 kinda vibe” — to Terminator 2, like “when you get to see [where] Kyle Reece is from”. With all of the citizens captured by Eggman and his robots, Sonic and his friends would need to navigate this recreated world:
“Part of that would’ve been the fun of getting to go to famous world landmarks and seeing them remade in this Eggman-style, so going to Paris and seeing Eggman’s gear all over the Eiffel Tower, sort of watching down with a big eye or something like that…”
Initially, the sequel would start with Sonic and his friends crashing onto Earth after the events of the first game and being separated from one another. Each party would then need to build up its ranks by finding and saving others when eventually everyone would be reunited and team up. Your goal was to build up a big enough army to storm Eggman’s base.
Things don’t go smoothly, of course, with Argus — the mega god only mentioned in Sonic Chronicles — showing up. This forces Sonic and Eggman to join forces. Defeating Argus cracks open the Twilight Cage and frees everyone who has been trapped inside there for generations. Argus had been trapping these all-powerful tribes in the Twilight Cage because of a prophecy he was told — although this turned out to be a trick. Holmes says:
“It was basically a manipulation — so we’re left with this notion of: Who’s this oracle, this trickster god that got him to do this in the first place?
Because obviously, he wanted all this to happen, he wanted Argus defeated, and now with him out of the way, the longer question that could’ve been used over the series is: okay, so we’ve defeated this one god, but now there’s this other god that’s made all these things happen. Why did he do that, what was it for, and will it eventually threaten us?”
So this ending was less of a cliffhanger and more of a teaser for the future, an ending that would’ve been more satisfactory for fans. BioWare would’ve tapped out at two games, leaving the torch behind for another studio to pick up. But not even a second game was made.
We’ve mentioned that EA’s purchase of BioWare may have affected things, but Ken Penders — a former writer over at Archie Comics who worked on the Sonic Comics — believed many characters in the RPG closely resembled the Dark Legion echidna characters in the comics, among other things, which he had claimed copyright for. Penders has stated that if Sega want to pay him for the rights to those characters, he’s happy to discuss it with the company.
So we may never see another Sonic Chronicles game, or even a rerelease, but this new information sheds a light on what could’ve been. And hey, now that Sega has bought Atlus, perhaps we can get a brand new Sonic RPG at some point in the future…
You can watch Did You Know Gaming’s full video below, and let us know whether you wanted to see a sequel in the comments!