YMMV / Sonic Battle

• Awesome Music: The game, perhaps unsurprisingly, has good music. See for yourself.
  • There's lots of especially notable tracks from different areas and stages in the game:
    • Battle Highway has an intense and fast-paced beat. Being Shadow's Home Stage, it really works well to encapsulate his in-game personality.
    • Chao Ruins has more of a silly and upbeat theme, which goes nicely with some of the less serious characters in the game such as Knuckles.
    • Emerald Beach is the first stage you fight on in Sonic Battle. It's got a nice mix of silly fun and a seriously good beat, which sets the stage for the rest of the game.
    • The electronic style of Emerl's configuration screen really gives you an idea of what you're doing: modifying his moveset and tailoring it to your liking.
    • Metal Depot has a grindy, electronic beat with sinister undertones. It helps that it's the main training area to fight E-102 towards the end of the game, and has a few battles which serve as major turning points for the plot.
    • Tails' Lab is another fun track. It has the same fun and upbeat style of Emerald Beach, but has a few nice twists including a really infectious rhythm.
    • The ambient theme for Central City has a suave, City Noir-esque feel to it. Much of the story that takes place here involves the likes of the female characters, like Rouge and Amy, making it mesh well with their personality.
    • During the Final Battle music, you really get a feel for what's going down. This one is probably the coolest of them all.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: During Rouge's chapter, Amy, following her initial defeat by Rouge, apparently hallucinates Sonic coming to her aid. Rouge must fight Amy and this clone of Sonic. This is never brought up again.
• Broken Base: The story and its quality/execution. Some consider it to be well-written mainly because of the character interactions and Emerl's story arc while some find it to be annoying due to the Flanderization of some characters, the long dialogue in the cutscenes, and the plot where characters fight each other to train Emerl.
• Character Tiers: Two tiers in particular are such outliers that it basically becomes:
  1. Emerl at the end of the game^note the character combos and instant kills are Game-Breakers, as is Ultimate Emerl, who has all the Ultimate skills when there is no way to get that many points as a regular player
  2. A couple of tiers of everyone else, depending on their healing skill.
  3. Emerl at the beginning of the game.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The gameplay is decent but considered to be too repetitive and nothing spectacular. The game's main draw arguably comes from Emerl and his character arc throughout the game.
• Fanon:
  • The Club Rouge arena looks like a casino. Many fans have pegged it as a "cabaret" club.
  • The fandom has generally accepted that Battle takes place after Shadow the Hedgehog even though it came out roughly two years earlier in 2003. The game doesn't contradict this theory and helps fix the inconsistency of Shadow knowing who he is, despite Heroes showing he has amnesia.
• Game-Breaker: So many it has its own page.
• Good Bad Bugs: Quitting a Story Mode battle ends the battle and acts as if you'd lost...except for two specific mandatory fights, where quitting instead acts as if you'd won, essentially letting you skip those battles.
• Inferred Holocaust: In order to supersede Sonic's claim over Emerl, due to the Gizoid's core systems defining that he will obey the strongest, Eggman fires his flagship's Final Egg Blaster onto a star system, which erases them all.
• Iron Woobie: Emerl. After going through a game-long arc of developing as his own person and growing beyond his origins as a tool of war, he's forced into a berserk rampage by Eggman that's only ended when he sustains fatal damage at the hands of Sonic, the guy Emerl saw as a father figure. Even so, Emerl only briefly spends his final moments lamenting his inevitable destruction and pondering if it was right for a weapon like him to have been born, instead reminiscing and monologuing about the happy memories he made with all his friends.
• It Was His Sled: Due to how it's near required to explain the existence of Gemerl in Advance 3 and later material, pretty much everyone in the fandom knows that the game ends in Sonic having to kill a berserk Emerl.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Aside from the obvious skillless Emerl, the Mighty Glacier characters (Knuckles, Gamma, Chaos) struggle heavily against the rest of the cast, since speed is the name of the game, whether in movement or attacks. The battle system is so fast-paced that one bad interaction can lead to an instant KO, so having the easiest attacks to block/avoid and moving slowly enough for opponents to effortlessly chase/retreat from you won't be winning any battles. Knuckles is usually seen as the worst of the three, having mostly Awesome, but Impractical specials, an awkward basic combo that has him step forward while attacking (meaning opponents can escape it more easily), and lacking in the raw offense needed to make up for such crippling flaws. A large part of the reason the triple-Guard Robo fight in Knuckles' chapter is so hard is because you're playing as him.
• Moral Event Horizon: Eggman making Emerl go berserk at the end of the game, after Emerl was nice to him and thanked him for waking him up. Not mentioning the way he did it.
• Narm: "...and shall become Gizoid, the conqueror of all..." is hard to take seriously, due to having an Inherently Funny Word in the middle of it.
• Nightmare Fuel: Emerl's stated purpose when he finally obtains all the Chaos Emeralds.
• Paranoia Fuel: When in distress, or receiving an upgrade, Emerl sometimes looks directly at the player, gains a third eye that looks realistic and stares out of the screen, is shaded ominously, and speaks in a strange, stilted voice. Tails Doll's got nothing on this.
• Player Punch: After spending a huge amount of time learning about Emerl and training him to be an amazing fighter, Sonic has to destroy him.
• Robo Ship: There are some fans who ship Emerl and Cream.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The ridiculous number of storyline fights that are immediately followed by, essentially, the same fight but with twice the KOs. This may have been an attempt to increase the number of Skill Points available, but if so, there were better options.
  • Emerl's skill collection is randomized, which means you can beat the entire game several times over and still be missing certain attacks. There's a brief tutorial at the start of the game that implies that he copies whatever moves were used the most, but this seems to be entirely untrue - you could spend the whole fight spamming one attack and Emerl will copy a completely different one. What's worse is that you can obtain duplicates of attacks you've already copied, which do nothing for single player and only serve to make an arduous process take even longer.
• That One Attack:
  • For many it's Gamma's Recovery Mode. His voice clip does provide a fairly clear telegraph, however, and after just a little practice it should be easy enough to guard it, netting yourself a lot of meter in the process thanks to the high power of the explosion. Now, when a Guard Robo or a Phi with Gamma's moveset falls, avoiding it's a good bit trickier, because they don't go announcing it. Of course, your A.I. teammates or any A.I. opposition against the said "Recovery Mode" user won't do anything about trying to run away, meaning they'll suffer damage all the same just trying to pointlessly attack the corpse before it explodes. E-102 Style is probably the best Fighting Pose skill in the game because of this.
  • Eggman has a similar one, except it comes out immediately when he's K.O.ed; the upside, however, is that it doesn't have a big radius around himself and he'll suffer from a bit of knockback that at least gives you some distance when it happens.
• That One Boss:
  • The one-on-one fight between Emerl and Knuckles at the end of Sonic's story. This is the first time you're made to control the horrifically underpowered Emerl against anything stronger than a base Phi, and you're forced to face the decently strong Knuckles with only a handful of skill points and whatever attacks you've managed to cobble together from Sonic and Tails' movesets. If you haven't gotten the hang of this game by the time you go up against him, you will die horribly.
  • The fight between Rouge and Team Sonic at the end of the third chapter. Being forced to fight three against one is just torturous unless you stay in the air and pick them off slowly, or if they didn't set their auto-block to your Ground Power move.
  • The Guard Robots as Knuckles. At first it's not bad, with just one. Then you fight two. Then three. No breaks in between. If you're not good with Knuckles, this is a nightmare.
  • The fight with Rouge where Emerl has to get 10 KOs without using any special moves. It can be somewhat mitigated with a good setup however. If you have the Character Combos from the final chapter, the game will not count these certain ones as special moves.
  • Any Phis copying Gamma, especially late-game. If you have any allies you can't afford to have give free K.O.s to them, then for sure you'll be having trouble trying to keep them alive since they'll never move away from his suicidal explosion. Your best hope is usually a CPU-controlled Emerl with the highest defense setting possible if you managed to unlock it (Shadow Style + Shadow Strength Support). Ditto with the Guard robots. Since they don't talk, it's difficult to dodge Gamma's "Recovery" Mode with no audible cue.
  • The Sonic and Shadow fight before the final chapter. Sonic and Shadow, who have huge handicaps to make them competent fighters, against an Emerl player who's still trying to find the perfect moveset to stick with. Not even the unlockable combo attacks will guarantee a kill.
  • Eggman can be one given his missile spam and tendency to explode when knocked out.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Emerl is capable of unlocking alternate color palettes based on the other playable characters, but where the colors are assigned to can be a bit confusing. For example, the Amy palette makes him mostly red and yellow (with a similar color distribution to Iron Man), the Shadow palette uses white for the main body and black and red for the accents instead of vice versa, etc.
• The Woobie: Basically everything with Emerl after all of his growth and development across the entire game — only to have to be killed before he blows up the planet due to Eggman. Even with his revival as Gemerl, it's still the equivalent of Sonic having to put down a child-like figure he helped raise by their own request to make the pain stop.

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