Sonny wastes no time throwing you into the action with a scripted tutorial battle. For anyone who played Sinjid, the structure of the battles--and indeed, of the game itself--should be pretty familiar. You spend the whole game fighting a series of turn-based, Final Fantasy-style battles. You can recover and upgrade equipment in between these battles, and if you gain a level, you will have a point or two to spend upping your stats and progressing through a detailed skill tree. Other than this, there's very little to do outside of combat.
There are some major improvements here over Sinjid, however, that help make up for the limitations of the game's extremely linear format. For one thing, battles are much more engaging. This is so in part because the engine is slicker, with support for multiple characters on each side of the battle and a neat camera system that follows each character as it attacks. The vastly improved graphics and music certainly don't hurt things, either.
Also, the abilities seem more well-balanced, with a good variety to choose from right from the very beginning that make a real difference in terms of your combat strategy. More powerful abilities have a longer "reload" time and cost you more "focus" (magic points, essentially--in spite of the similar name, focus in Sonny doesn't work the way it does in Telepath RPG. You can skip turns till you're blue in the face and you won't regenerate any focus).
Ultimately, the thing that keeps Sonny engaging in spite of its linear structure and repetitive gameplay is the sheer amount of scripted dialog and plot events that occur during combat. We get all of the plot development we need sandwiched right into the nonstop battling format, and it actually works fairly well. The voice acting is great and the dialog is reasonably well-written, both of which keep it believable. Just as importantly, however, is that the format itself allows us to get the juicy tidbits of the story without sacrificing the instant gratification of constant, unending action. Just don't expect very good character development out of the equation.
In some ways, the linear nature of the game itself is a plus--we don't have to figure anything out. We just have to beat the battles while the story is spoon-fed to us. If trudging around a world map, talking to townspeople to trigger quests, and being attacked randomly could all be evaporated out of the Final Fantasy series, we'd probably be left with a crisp residue very much like Sonny. And while it's hardly the deepest RPG around, there's a reason Sonny is so popular: it's really fun, and easy to play casually. If you haven't played Sonny yet, do yourself a favor and go do so!
