1) The only clever things the game did in combat were the "running away" minigame, and the team-up skills (which crono trigger did better, but whatever, I'll let it slide). And I GUESS the Chaos. ...Ok, maybe that's enough, but it realy suffered in terms of how it executed the concepts.
2) Yeah, it was neat that they showed what happened with the Echidnas. But after you hit that spaceship, all the interesting dialogue about it vanishes until you hit the final dungeon. :s I really do take issue that the sonic characters dialogue takes a backseat in the second half.
3) Good sound design? What? Half the songs were either bad quality, badly remixed chiptune, or didn't fit right. The sound was easily the worst part of the game.
4) I actually LIKE Sonic Colors. Yes, it had problems, but the game was totally playable. In fact, outside of the fact you can't manually drift or sidestep, and the flow-stopping Blue Cube power, the game was fantastic. It had issues, yes, but they didn't ruin the core experience. The flaws in Chronicles really do drag down the core experience, IMO. Turn based RPGs live on two things. The story and the battles. The story fell apart and became really dull almost entirely after the halfway point, and the gameplay got worse over time as well.
5) I think I misworded that argument about skill spamming. I actually don't MIND a game that relies heavily on skill use (my games certainly do), but what irritates me is that the only way to fuel those skills are to take Tails or Cream along to restore your MP, or keep Rouge along to keep stealing MP items for you, even though I really felt with the amount of Armored enemies, she stopped being useful after the halfway point. I just really feel that for how central skills were, it was too annoying to replenish the points needed to use them. In my own games, I make MP restore slwoly over time in battle, and restore (either over time, or instantly) between battles, because I know the player will be using lots of skills, and I want them to be able to do so freely. MP restore items in my games are mostly there to make you scramble to restore MP for one or two turns during the longer boss fights, and to put a limit on how much the player can spam their much more powerful skills.
6) I don't like interacting during the battle phase, unless it's incredibly quick and snappy and failing it doesn't totally ruin the turn (like how the Mario RPGs do it!). However, Chronicles makes you do a 5 second minigame for each skill, and if you fail it, the move is totally worthless (or does so little damage that it IS worthless). And when you have something like 6-8 actions per turn, that means there are about 30-40 seconds where you need to focus on making sure you don't screw up the special move you're depending on. And that's also 30-40 seconds of extra time tacked on to every single turn, making the battles drag on and on.
Personally, I like my battles turns quick and snappy. I want to input my moves, and have the turn end in under 10 seconds. I want to evaluate my situation, punch in the strategy I want to commit to that turn, and see how it plays out immediately so I can again evaluate what I need to do on the next turn. To me, the core thing I enjoy about RPGs is planning and executing a strategy. Adding additional busywork between turns to make that strategy work at all tends to make the regular battles feel like they're dragging on forever. And for an RPG about sonic, having a battle system that feels super slow is a horrible thing.
