Sonic Battle: Story Mode Part 1: Sonic Episode Part 1: Extensible Emerl
8Sometime after Sonic Advance 2 on the Game Boy Advance and Sonic Heroes on home consoles, SEGA and Sonic Team made and released a very unique spinoff game for the GBA.
And isometric 3D fighting game! A much different song and dance from Sonic the Fighters, Sonic Battle lets 4 players fight each other in arenas!
But I'm mostly going to focus on the Story Mode of this game, which focuses on the game's brand new character and how it interacts with all of the others.
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Story Mode is played by character, and you can only start out with one: Sonic, himself.
It starts out with Eggman getting angry at a robot that he found not working or obeying his commands. He decides to throw it away after deciding just to make an army of clones of it.
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Sonic eventually finds this robot washed up on Emerald Beach. When it sees him, it requests Sonic to show it his power.
A brilliant flash went off from the robot, and Sonic decided he needed to take it to Tails to see if he could fix it up. However, Sonic was not the only character curious about what mysterious robot...
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Trying to reach Tails' house, Sonic ends up encountering Shadow. He wants to destroy the robot, but Sonic fought him off due to Shadow not regaining his full power.
(Somehow, this game takes place after Adventure 2 and Heroes. Shadow is back alive, but from a different cause. If there is a continuity here, the way he is written in it clashes with the rest of the series involving him.)
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You have three kinds of Special Attacks: Shot, Pow, and Set. On each Stock, you decide which of each of these will either be an Ground Special, and Aerial Special, and an Auto-Defend, which automatically makes you guard against that Special no matter what.
Characters can also guard manually. If you keep holding the Guard button, you'll Heal. This recovers both your Health and you Ichikoro Gauge.
When the Ichikoro Gauge is full, your character will glow, and their next landing Special will be a one-hit KO. If guarded, however, the guarding character fills THEIR gauge all the way up, instead.
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After Shadow leaves, Sonic is able to bring the robot to Tails, and then Tails brought it to his Lab while Sonic went back to the beach to fend off Rouge, who also wanted the robot. From her, Sonic learned that even Eggman tampered with it, before.
On the way to the lab, Sonic had to fight off a fake clone of the robot he found on the beach, one that was robbing jewelery stores, then checked with Tails at his Lab, where he found some amazing things about the robot.
First, the robot is powered by Chaos Emeralds. As it takes in more, it becomes smarter and stronger.
Second, and most importantly, this robot can copy any and all fighting skills and use them for itself. As a test run, you have Sonic teach it to use the full version of his Heavy Attack and Upper Attack.
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The robot, which Sonic eventually dubs Emerl, has his own menu where you can set all of his skill gained by other fighters. At default, he has very weak, very lame versions of Sonic's entire moveset. You can tweak this up as you get more skills, but Emerl runs on Skill Points with how many he has at a time. You can take breaks from the plot to play as Emerl in matches with his current part to get more Skills and Skill Points, though some of these ARE a part of the plot, such as when Sonic & Tails take him to train at Emerald Beach, though in this case, you'll be using Sonic, instead.
On a Skill Card, for each Star at its top-left corner, that's 5 Skill Points. Emerl caps at 500. You will often get a Skill from each character that was in the match with Emerl, but occasionally, you will get one Rare Skill that may or may not involve Emerl's current opponents and allies and will often change other things about him, such as giving him different colors, or boosting his Offense and Defense.
Emerl does not have his own voice. If you hear one from him, that's just him copying someone else's.
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After the beach training, Sonic decides to start searching for Chaos Emeralds to power Emerl up with, starting with the one Knuckles has with him at his house at the Holy Summit.
But then, the trio spot a fake Emerl at Tails' house and decides to let Emerl take it on by himself. In that case, Emerl can't copy its abilities, but then again, it had nothing to copy to begin with.
In short, Emerl starts out pretty weak and not so fun to play as, but over time, as he collects more good Skills and Skill Points, he can potentially become even stronger and funner than any of the regular characters!