Sonic And The Ancient Romans

== Introduction ==
Sonic and the Ancient Romans is a brand new title in the storybook series that tries something different from the usual fairytale formula and experiments with history, thus being based on the history of the Roman Empire, and it's eventual downfall, with the gameplay style being more reminiscent of the Adventure style instead of the usual auto-runner inspired style the storybook games are known for.
== Story ==
=== Intro ===
The story follows Sonic the Hedgehog, as he goes inside an ancient archipelago nearby of the Mystic Ruins because Tails ordered him to find a book there that he wants to research, he goes inside a cave and finds the book which when he picks it up, it transports him into another world, which just happened to be Earth, 40 BC, in the city of Rome.
=== Chapter 1 ===
Sonic, while sleeping is then found by the Roman Dictator Julius Caesar, as he wakes up locked up in a prison cell somewhere in a colosseum as Julius Caesar greets Sonic and tells him about himself and his life with his soldiers, and asking him if he's related to him in any way, and Sonic responds by raising his eyebrows in confusion, but Caesar isn't pleased with the hedgehog's confusion, but he releases Sonic out of the prison, as the guards lock on him and Sonic realizes Caesar's trying to execute him, he runs out of the Colosseum only to be greeted by a young human girl called Lea, who hides him in safe area away from the guard, the two begin to talk to one another, as Sonic asks her why she wears differently from the rest of the romans, and she responds with the fact that she had time travelling abilities, but they were gone and she's stuck in the Roman Empire without the ability to go forward in time to the modern age, and Sonic wanted to help her find a way to travel forward in time to the modern age, so he rushed out of the place and into the forests of Rome, as the girl is left alone and captured by the Roman guards.
=== Chapter 2 ===
Sonic found a piece of modern technology which transports him and Lea in 10 AD before getting executed, but Lea is still far away from Sonic, while Sonic's Miles Electric is pinging and he accepts the call from Amy, who's asking Sonic about what has happened to him and where he is, and Sonic responds by telling her that he grabbed that book Tails was asking him to grab, and now he's transported in this weird world. But Sonic gets found by the Roman guards and is forced to end the call, who are different but some know him as the guy who escaped from Caesar's clutches, as Sonic tries to run away but is held by the guards, who actually support him, so they take him to the Roman Palace greeted by Augustus and his spouse Livia, which Sonic confuses for Knuckles/Tikal respectively, and they decide to recruit him for the army, but Sonic refuses doing so. He wants his own freedom, but the emperor convinces him by offering him more than enough time to explore the world and be free just to join only one battle in the deserts of western Africa, but Sonic wants to take an alternative shortcut, he was going to dive underwater to reach west Africa, which the emperor accepts. Amy tries to call him again and Sonic accepts the call, Amy wants to tell him that the cave in the archipelago is blocked off and that she couldn't get there but she can support him. The Roman emperor questions about who Sonic is communicating with and the tech that he is using, but Sonic refuses to answer and decides to end the call before Amy was going to tell him about something they had planned together. Before he leaves, Lea comes to him and asks if he's doing fine, which he responds by a yes, then the two head to the shore and Sonic takes a dive underwater, absorbing bubbles to keep himself alive, but he gets distracted by finding another time fragment which transports him to yet another timeline.
=== Chapter 3 ===
At this point, Sonic has had it with siding alongside the Romans, he goes out the water, in the shore, where he dismisses Lea and leaves her alone there, he tries to go somewhere else but is found by the barbarians, in the middle of what is now France. The barbarian leader, who resembles Eggman asks him if he wants to join their movement against the Roman Empire, but Sonic is a bit suspicious on him, because he looks like a villain he fights time and time, but the barbarian leader isn't sure about what bad things he's done to him and just tells him to join the movement regardless as long as he hates the Roman empire, which Sonic accepts but is met by Constantine the Great, who resembles Tails. Coincidentally, Amy calls Sonic that she, Tails and Knuckles need him to fight off Eggman, and telling him to get out of the world he's in as soon as possible, and Sonic responds to her with "Before I beat that Roman doofus" and just when Amy was going to ask him about who the Romans are, he ends the call and decides to talk with Constantine, who looks at him with anger and thinks he lied to the romans, but Sonic decides to knock him out and his horse, and fight off all the other guards.
=== The Finale ===
After Sonic helps the barbarians defeat the Roman soliders, who retreat to their home city, Lea comes running up to him in anger and asking him why he left her, and Sonic doesn't answer. Then, Lea reveals her darker side and transports him into another world where all the Roman emperors he met are trapped in a cube as she flies up and grows into her final form, as all hope seems lost and she's ready to fire at Sonic, Amy calls him on the miles electric yet again and tells him that they got all 7 chaos emeralds and are ready to fight off Eggman, and Sonic ends the call there, but then he gets an idea. He realizes the book was actually still with him, he decides to open it and finds a page that he needs to put the two time fragments in. After he puts them in the book, the book begins to float and enter Sonic's body to transform him into Ultrahyper Sonic, with a red aura to fight off the Distorted Lea. After he fights and defeats her, all the roman emperors fall down in the white space and congratulate him as they slowly fade out to continue their timelines. Sonic also is fading out, and he leaves one final goodbye to Lea, who looks at him with a smile. Then, he wakes up in Tails' workshop, greeted by Tails and Amy who fought off Eggman with the 7 chaos emeralds, and Sonic decides to tell them the adventure he had along the way, ending the story.
== Gameplay ==
This time, compared to the rest of the storybook games, Sonic controls more reminiscent of his Sonic Adventure counterpart than his boost counterpart. The game uses a linear level format like in SA2, where Sonic needs to get from point A to point B. The gameplay also has more combat elements which is apparent in the final levels. The game also features full momentum which the game is the first of it's kind to include that, but the gameplay does not focus on momentum, and the enemies are mostly glitchy cyberspace-like enemies with roman defense suits (flying enemies are dark cyberspace with roman helmets, etc...)
Here's how the controls function (PlayStation button prompts:
* Pressing Square lets you spindash which functions the same way as in Sonic Adventure, as you can manipulate the gravity in the stages to reach certain areas
* Pressing circle makes you somersault, but pressing circle while moving makes you slide
* Pressing X makes you jump and airdash, but pressing X with circle makes you release a Sonic wind
* Pressing Triangle makes you light-speed dash and gives you a short-timed boost, kind of like how it functions in Secret Rings and Black Knight, but there's no boost meter on the screen.
* Pressing the shoulder buttons can make you use the parkour system from Sonic Lost World
=== Levels ===
The levels in this game in order are:
* Troubling Colosseum, takes around 3-ish minutes to complete if you're good at it
* Silent Forest (Act 1-2), the 1st act takes 3 minutes and 50 seconds if you're good at it and the second act takes 4 minutes and 10 seconds if you're good at it
* Busy Shore (Act 1), takes around 4 minutes and 30 seconds if you're good at it
* Pirate-Free Seas!, takes around 7 minutes and 50 seconds if you're good at it
* Busy Shore (Act 2), takes around 6 minutes and 30 seconds if you're good at it
* Silent Forest (Act 3), takes around 8 minutes and 10 seconds if you're good at it
* The Great Fight, takes around 2 minutes and 10 seconds if you're good at it, but it is difficult
* White Void, takes around 9 minutes if you're good at it, the hardest and longest stage in the game.
*Boss fights include fighting the Rouge romanian general, the Silver romanian general, Constantine the Great and the final boss
== Cast ==
* Roger Craig Smith as Sonic the Hedgehog
* Colleen O'Shaughnessy as Miles "Tails" Prower and Lea (Constantine the Great) (Communicates with Sonic via Miles Electric)
* Travis Willingham as Knuckles the Echidna (Emperor Augustus)
*Rebecca Honig as Tikal the Echidna (Livia, Augustus' Spouse)
* Cindy Robinson as Amy Rose (Communicates with Sonic via Miles Electric)
* Kirk Thornton as Shadow the Hedgehog (Julius Caesar)
* Mike Pollock as Dr. Eggman (Unnamed Barbarian Leader)
*Kathleen Delaney as Rouge the Bat (Roman Military General, 40 BC)
*Pete Capella as Silver the Hedgehog (Roman Military General, 312)
== Development ==
The game started development around late 2017, where Sonic Team was tasked to make a new spin-off side project to co-exist with the mainline Sonic game. While they were trying to figure out concepts for the main game, they immediately found a concept for the new game that was accepted by SEGA and started full production in February 2018. SEGA saw the project's similarity to the storybook games, so they decided to tie it in with that series of games. Sometime in 2019, when they finished 60% of the game, they started working on the new main sonic game after landing with a concept of what it could be like and decided to shift their focus on the main Sonic game while only a few people at Sonic Team work on the game, which explained why there wasn't that many levels, as they were having huge crunch by SEGA, but after 4 years of development, the game finally was finished and was ready to be released, but then the playtesters testing the final build still noticed a lot of bugs in the game, so they delayed the game from March 2022 all the way to July 2022 to polish the game up.
== Marketing ==
In 2021, a new storybook game was teased by the Official Sonic YouTube accounts in one of their messages left in the live chat of the Sonic symphony, telling people if they like the Sonic storybook series. People just dismissed it as a question, but later in December 2021, the game finally got revealed and was slated to release in only 3 months, but March came and nothing dropped about the new game. People were confused, SEGA didn't announce a delay for the game or anything. Then, in early June, they dropped a full overview trailer and announced that the game would be coming out July 2022, and in Japan it was promoted as a tie-in to the Sonic Movie 2, since you can get a copy of the game after watching Sonic 2 in Japan. Then, the day finally came and the game was fully released for everyone to play.
== Reception ==
The game got mostly positive to mixed reviews and is the highest-rated storybook game as it got it got a 77% critic score on metacritic and an 8.5 user score.
IGN gave the game an 8/10 score, calling it a must-buy for Sonic fans, and praised it for it's new tone and story, and the return to the adventure gameplay as the reviewer described it as "nostalgic", "fun" and "challenging" but complained about the length of the game, as he said it was "too short", Gamespot gave the game a 9/10 because of it's darker tone and the fun and creative gameplay while comparing it to the Sonic Adventure games and stated it was "better than all the past 2010's games except Sonic Colors". TheGamer gave the game a 6/10, because he thought the controls were "outdated" and the boss fights were "frustrating", but still was amused by the level design and it's complexity as well as the multiplayer option. The fans also loved the game, especially those who adore the storybook series, and the battle mode from SA2
== Trivia ==
* The game's battle mode is similar to SA2 and features all the main Sonic characters (Shadow, Rouge, Silver and Blaze included as well)
* The cyberspace tech robots made the fans think that the game has some sort of connection to Sonic Frontiers, as we see Sonic, Tails and Amy hanging out in the ending, but Iizuka later contradicted that theory by saying the game has "nothing to do with Sonic Frontiers"
* The story was actually supposed to be much bigger, even covering the fall of the Byzantium, but due to the small amount of developers, they decided to shorten the game and add an act structure to some levels
* Speed Highway is an unlockable and fully playable stage in the gam
* This is the only other time Tikal appeared in a mainline Sonic game since Sonic Adventure in 1998, even if it isn't directly her
** Some people were angry by the fact that the version of Tikal in this game is supposedly married to the version of Knuckles in this game as it might've been incest, but Iizuka also responded to that claim by "They're not the same Tikal and Knuckles and are not related to eachother in their families in any way."
* Idris Elba was actually supposed to be the voice of Knuckles in this game, but the devs thought it was too expensive and brought back Travis Willingham as Knuckles.
Category:Video Games