What is your Chronicles Quartet?

I am curious and I know this should probably go in the Chronicles thread but I am just interested. I won't get to play Chronicles or Unleashed until around my birthday or Christmas (which both fall in December) but I am just interested to know what four characters you find yourself using the most. With any party based JRPG everyone has certain characters they like to use and God knows this game has plenty to choose from and I find it even more interesting that you don't even have to have Sonic in your fighting party. In Super Mario RPG, you had to have Mario at all times though many said in that one the best trio was Mario, Peach and Geno and in Paper Mario 2 I liked using Vivian or Bobbery as my partner in battle. Of course I liked Blue Dragon (360) because you had five and ONLY five characters to play with. You just had to figure out what skills to assign them.

But with all the characters to choose from in Chronicles, which ones would you say are best for fighting? Of course I'm sure bonding Chao make all the difference as well.

Also I am still surprised no one's showed up here complaining they couldn't play as Silver or (insert Sonic character here).

Well, you have to use Sonic all of the time, (except on some occasions) but apart from him I usually use Tails, Knuckles and Amy.

Hyper is right. While some parts have you split into two teams, and Sonic can only be in one place, Sonic MUST be in your team because, well, he IS the main character. My team is ever changing. Sometimes I'll use Sonic, Knuckles, Shadow, and Shade, other times I'll pair up Sonic with Team Dark, and on special occasions I'll use Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy (for Hail Storm). There's 11 characters, and they are all useful just about.

quote from game: "Why don't we get Big some ice cream?" -Big

And BioWare wanted to concentrate on the most important Sonic characters. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Eggman are all vital to the plot, and need to be in every Sonic game. Shadow is a very popular character, and as a rival to Sonic, he is understandably in the game. Rouge has a lot to do with GUN, which they popped into the game, so it's only natural for her to be in it. Omega is Shadow's closest friend, so I guess he'd work well in the game (he also has a funny moment as he reads the credits). Big and Cream may not've been necessary, but them and Amy form Team Amy, so I guess it's take them or leave them. Cream is actually very useful as the team's cleric. Finally, the new character, Shade, was a major character of the game. I personally like the edition of Emerl as a fightable enemy (Gizoid).

Don't be surprised if (spoiler alert) in the obviously upcoming 2nd game they add in Team Chaotix, Silver, Blaze, or anyone else for that matter.

My team was usually sonic, shadow, Shade and tails, but Shade was switched out for Knuckles pretty often.

I found Shadow to be my most useful character overall. His pow moveset offered something for just about every fight. Chaos spear is armor piercing, while atomic strike is a very strong AOE move. 3 moves and lots of speed was just icing on the cake. I can't really think of a time when I didn't find him useful in battle. Oh, and that reminds me. Shadow the Hedgehog gave something positive back to the Sonic universe afterall! Shadow's regular attack came from the opening scene where he's chaos controlling + spin-kicking aliens. At least that looks good, right? Yays.

As for picking between Shade and Knuckles. I found that Shade's single target attack, blade rush was my team's most powerful move. It was hitting for 179x3 at the end there. Her lack of an AOE move, though, made Knuckles more desireable in situations with many enemies. Quake punch is just nasty. My most memorable use of Knuckles was on the three Voxai bosses. That was pure slaighter, with quake punche's stun rate so high. :D

I prefered Tails over Cream just because... well... I feel dirty using Cream. Refresh is just too overpowered. Additionally, I liked having Tail's debuffs and adrenaline rush for when PP wasn't a problem. Making Sonic and Shadow both hyper and just letting them just use regular attacks over and over is very amusing.

I have mixed feelings about Amy. Her blow Kiss move is amazing. Empowered Shade can pretty much kill anything with one hit. However, I felt like Amy was too delicate for situations outside boss battles. Low blow doesn't do much damage compared to the power ****s, and she had very little health and armor... and was slow as hell.

I was very, very surprised over Big's usefulness. A strong single target move, a taunt, self heal, and an AOE. Before I got the game I was very adamant about using Big as little as humanly possible, since I was sure he'd be the same pile of lard that he always was. After playing with him though, I saw that he was actaully pretty useful and versitile after all. I think that of all the characters, he had the widest variety of moves, which definetly has some merit, though I didn't feel like using a "meatshield" ****like him was very helpful in most situations, or I would have used him more. When battles typiclly only last two or three rounds and your characters are at full health, a tank like him would just slow things down. I prefered to take everything out as quickly as possible.

One thing's for sure, I can tell you who I didn't use. Rouge. Tornado kick's damage was negligibe, especially since so many enemies were resistant to wind. And jewel storm did such little damage it wasn't even useful as an AOE. I didn't find her other distracting debuffs and such helpful either, when battles are so short. She had low armor, health and PP too. I was disapointed that I didn't choose to use Rouge hardly at all, since I really do like Rouge as a character, even though I feel that she was coming off as waaay too high-matinece in this game.

Overall, I think the variety of characters was what really made this game. Every character had something different to offer, and they were all very fun to use. Having shared experience across all the characters really made this game a lot easier to enjoy. Before I bought it, I was sure that I'd come to a point in the game where I'd need to use Big's (or some other neglected character's) ability to get past something, and since I wouldn't have used him more than I needed to, Id have to go back and level him to move on. Or, I figured that I'd pick an "A team" group and just stick with them and no one elese, in order to make them as strong as possible. I was surprised and so happy not to see either of these happen. The RPG experience here was definetly pretty easy, but that was really a good thing. It was the least stressful or annoying combat system of any RPG that I've ever played, and for that Bioware gets some serious props.