E3 2003 New Sonic Battle Videos and Gameplay Details Revealed!

[Dreadknux]

Some fresh gameplay videos and previews of Sonic Battle have surfaced following the GBA fighting game's appearance at E3 2003, giving us all a bit more detail on how the mechanics work and how blindingly fast it runs.

The following videos are from IGN, who recently posted three short clips from direct feed gameplay, along with a longer, more official SEGA promotional video. And a new report from Kikizo outlines the objective of this Super Smash Bros-looking spinoff.

According to Kikizo, in Sonic Battle you "battle it out in an almost isometric style playing field against three opponents at the same time. The object of the game being that the first 10 KOs in two minutes wins, so you'll have to focus on knocking down your opponents as much as possible in this all out brawl and avoid being knocked off your feet as much as possible."

As if that time limit wasn't fast enough, you can see that the game itself runs at mach speed. Each character appears to have their own combo punch and kick attacks, along with special aerial moves that can either lift, juggle or slam down your opponents. Sonic has his homing dash and a spin attack that can send foes upward, while Knuckles can perform a move that can close a gap quickly on the ground while punching their enemies to oblivion.

We already know of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy and Shadow forming part of the character roster, but these videos also showcase some new faces. Cream the Rabbit can use Cheese the Chao to direct attack commands, and we can see Rouge the Bat performing roundhouse kicks alongside E-102 Gamma launching electric attacks. There's also a new robot character that we haven't yet seen before...

The arenas all pull from the usual library of Sonic environments, from a colourful beach stage to a cityscape and a pinball table. To mix up the play, it appears there will also be loadouts that can be configured every time you spawn, which could help you keep your opponents on their toes.

Kikizo's preview overall wasn't very positive - the writer called the action "very fast, sometimes a bit too annoyingly fast that it makes it difficult to keep track of the tiny sized characters and the moves they perform. Even with the image blown up on a decent sized TV screen the characters were still quite small, making a need to play the Gameboy Advance with a microscope."

"The character move set seemed to be quite limited to just a few overly simplistic moves that could be easily triggered by repeatedly tapping a single button to victory... The graphics were average at best and the sounds were pretty simplistic and generic sounding for the most part."

We'll hold judgement until we play it for ourselves, but from the videos we've seen here we can say we're very intrigued. The more we learn and understand about how Sonic Battle plays, the better!

For more images and information, check out our previous news story here.

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