I was 13 when it came out, one of my friends had Heroes but she was never really much of a Sonic fan so she didn't play it much. (She was more into RPGs.) I didn't get to experience heroes until the 2010's when I got a copy of the game for the Gamecube. I hate the Chaotix stages, I never bothered to really get too far in the game because their stages suck. I guess I'd be okay with a remake, as long as it's done right but you know Sega's track record with remakes. :P
For some reason I prefer the Chaotix stages over the Dark ones (Hang Castle or whatever took me absolutely forever though. To be blunt I don't think Heroes is on the upper half of quality regarding Sonic games heehee.....)
Yeah that was similar to my experience. I never played another 3D Sonic game since Heroes seemed like a "baby" game to me coming off of SA2 which really appealed to me at age 11. As an adult, going back, the slippery physics and moments of having to just stop and kill a ton of enemies and constantly switching game styles makes it not too appealing, but with some polish I would be willing to give it another chance.
To echo what I said earlier, the best fix would be to *remove* the required enemies or make them as quick as in Unleashed where it was more about using the dashpads and springs to knock all the enemies down quickly. But I don't know how that would work. Basically the only thing I'd even keep from Heroes would be the locations. I'll give the level design team for Generations credit: Seaside Hill/Ocean Palace's remake was probably my favorite level in the game. (But I know they're likely no longer around.)
Making everything die in one hit is a pretty fair solution. Ditto for the character levels. I played a Sonic 06 mod like that once and the stages felt a lot better-paced.
More walls only they can break through i guess idk flight characters are basically also just relegated to "do i need the extra height here" moments anyways
Pretty much how the cast are lined up. The Speed Characters are supposed to be for the actual platforming and travelling, the Flight characters are for getting to higher or distance ledges and secrets, and the Power characters are for fighting the enemies. I'd probably make it a bit more fluid in how things are done, maybe have a thing where a Speed character Homing Attacks an enemy, allowing you to transition into a Power character as they're bouncing up and let them perform a power drop that takes it out immediately?
I actually started replaying heroes in light of the rumors a couple days ago, and aside from being buggy and janky, i think that is actually one of the best changes they could make. The flow of swapping to get through level set pieces feels fine but its the enemies and enemy rooms that are total pace killers, and a big culprit is not being able to swap in the air, so dealing with enemies and keeping my flow going means either preemptively slowing down with power characters or having a maxed out sonic (or team blast which is its own 10 second cutscene) Tbh though this was only really becoming an issue by frog forest when they start introducing the hammer enemies, especially with helmets, that just take an obnoxious amount of time to kill and are really annoying to actually hit.
A fully leveled up thunder shoot with the flight characters is very useful in combat in Heroes. So flight characters are useful in combat when fully leveled up and the power characters are useful in combat until that point. This may be an unpopular opinion but I actually think Sonic Heroes combat is decent overall.
I don't see giving all three characters more fighting abilities as a problem, the same way I don't think making them all equally fast devalues Sonic. Heroes at its worst is a series of locks for whom swapping characters is the exact same key every single time, and adding redundancies to let the player tackle a given part of the level design with whichever character they see fit to do so would be a good thing. Other good changes include real gliding and climbing for power characters and real flight for flying characters. At a certain point all of this will probably make the game too easy, but for a jank game, that's a good problem to have.
It's less giving more moves, more flowing fluidly into their moves. Knuckles already has that drop attack when he slams the ground and, at level 3, launches fireballs all over the place. Just have them combo the homing attack with that for a strong opening move that lets you flow into fighting.
Heroes is probably the 3D game I've replayed the most back when it was out. It's fine up until Rail Canyon and then it just starts getting progressively less fun to play... I think it's a neat idea? Just not very well thought out or executed imo.
Heroes needs to steal the rail code from Frontiers. The original really, really sucked with all the levels that were rail-grinding over bottomless pits with the dodgiest collision ever devised by human hands.
Hey, perhaps there's a way to see if this remake is actually under consideration: someone begin making a fan remake and see if SEGA sends a DMCA
I don't know if I am able to revisit Heroes. It was my favorite childhood game, when it first released but it did not age well for me like other classic titles as time went on. I even played it more than both Adventures. It was one of the first two PC Sonic titles I bought. I guess I just stopped caring for it because of the same reasons everyone else did. I never understood why I couldn't play it anymore after I watched a few reviews about it, it started clicking. The level environments are different. I love Seaside Hill and Ocean Palace. They are probably two of my favorite 3d stages of all-time. I don't like any of the stages after that. I used to like the feature of playing with multiple characters but as time went on, I was annoyed on how the power and flight characters were limited with their abilities.
Heroes is a game I've wanted to like since it came out. Such fun environment concepts, great soundtrack (at least for the levels), just one gameplay style, building off characters following each other like Sonic & Tails in 2/3K, the return of the Chaotix, the return of Metal Sonic, the return of Special Stages.. on paper it's a lot of great ideas. Kid me was hype! With hindsight though it can't be any clearer that this was the drop-off point for the series. The Adventure games were flawed but most people both at the time and today would agree they were good-to-great. Heroes takes all of SA1/2's problems, adds it's own problems on top, and while it's at it feels jankier and less satisfying to play than the previous two combined. I remember kid me playing this game a lot and trying to get better at it, wondering why I was frustrated. It was Sonic! "I love Sonic! Why don't I like it? I must just need to get better at the game" were my thoughts. But slippery and unreliable controls, pits everywhere, the slow flight/power modes, the constant talking, the mashy combat, all of it was my awakening that maybe the game just wasn't that good. I feel like it really shouldn't be any surprise why Sonic got blasted so hard in the mid-00s, either; this was many people's first 3D Sonic. SA1 & 2 were exclusives to two systems very little had. But Heroes? That was Sonic's PS2 debut, and Shadow's game came tumbling after. If SADX and SA2B made their way to PS2, the general public may have been singing a different tune about 3D Sonic. It wouldn't have stopped the angry critics or the classic-faithful here at Retro and other kindred sites, sure, but it certainly would've let people who picked up 06 know that these games were much better just a few years earlier. lol If Sonic Team ever gets around to a remake, I kind of doubt they'll know how to fix Heroes's issues. It's hard to improve on level design or controls when your current team also likes pits, and would rather leave figuring out where and how the moveset works to the player via sliders. But idk. It'd really just be better to rerelease it as-is. Archive it's existence for the sake of the non-emulation crowd.
I think I understand what you mean but I think it's needed to differentiate from "realistic" and "fun". I don't mind not slowing down/getting propelled being used so the player is constantly moving and doesn't awkwardly stop. The problem is they use that as a band aid solution to try and fix the entire grinding system.
