Sonic Heroes

Egg Emperor is the last boss of the normal story mode for all teams. Where Eggman's in a mech carrying a lance and shield. That's what I was talking about.

Team Super's boss is Metal Overlord, and the object there is to use Team Blast. That's done by building the gauge by countering Metal Sonic's attacks. Five Team Blasts take him down.

I didn't even fight Metal Overlord when I first got to him. No, I promptly exited and went to the sound test to listen to "What I'm Made Of..." Then I went back and played it. It was easier than I initially thought, too. The fight with Teams Rose, Dark and Chaotix is actually more difficult.

EDIT: Holy Hannah, JakeyBoy! 22 seconds? That's friggin' insane! Now I feel like such a novice...

 

Sonic Heroes is pretty good. They were trying to do something different, and I'm thankful that they tried to up the difficulty from previous games. I mean, I breezed through Sonic Adventure 2 in about a week. At the first Cult:UK meeting in 2003, we played the game at the Playstation Experience show and remarked upon the length of the levels as well as the fact that the enemies were tougher than before. Of course, with three teams being used as difficulty settings, two design flaws emerge. Firstly, the tutorial prior to a Team Rose run is forced, no matter what else you've done. Secondly, you have to beat the lower difficulty settings if you want to access the final boss. Maddening!

Attempting to circumvent the frustration of playing stages in a style you didn't like by mixing things up was nice, but what works for me is that the game has more satisfying combat than any other 3D Sonic game, without resorting to out-of-character gimmickry such as the Werehog. Sonic does as he ever did, with some neat new tricks. Tails provides an anti-air strategy, and Knuckles provides the all-out muscle. I personally loved slamming Sonic and Tails at enemies! In fact, I don't think any game before or since has had Knuckles portrayed as such an effective combatant. There was also your super attack (in the form of the Team Blast) and some small experience-based play to make sure you balanced things up. The irony of all this is that Shadow the Hedgehog was far less competent and satisfying in this regard, despite being a combat-focused game.

The concessions to classic series fans were plain to see all round. If it wasn't the number of past characters revived, it was the return to a more stylised world, or the dropping of Chao Gardens in favour of special stages. The game was marketed on the basis of nostalgia in the UK, and that's not much of a coincidence. Speaking of the stylised game world, some of the stages in the game were really quite imaginative (I enjoyed grinding down a growing vine), though this occasionally came at the cost of technical competence.

Sonic Heroes has never been all that bad, though it most certainly has problems. After Sonic Adventure, Sonic Heroes is probably the most ambitious of any 3D Sonic game - it considerably ramped up control complexity, refocused the game design, and attempted stages that we've not really seen since. To me, it seems like many of Sonic Heroes' problems are simply a case of the designers having a further reach than the programmers, though there are some which are most definitely attributable to poor design and planning. Still, it was always worth playing, and remains so today.

 

Heroes isn't some abomination by any means, but goddammit, the structure of the stages is just so disjointed and frustrating.

The levels look great and the music is great as well, but the stage design is serverely hindered by the team concept. You're constantly switching back and forth to fight mandatory enemies, cross large chasms, activate some gimmick, pull a switch, etc. This routine hardly changes between the stages.

 

Here's the sad truth, I really did like the game. Gameplay wise, but the whole TEAMWORK thing and "Sonic look here! There's access to the secret section of the level!" along with "THE POWER OF TEAMWORK!" really put me off the game, and I never completed the game because I had to complete the game with every team, sure this was acceptable with SA2 because it was different, but in a game like this it was just identical.

 

Yeah, it is condescending. They cheezed-up the dialog and idiot-proofed the puzzles, which I'll bet put off a lot of potential customers older than thirteen.

 

I liked it. Not as much as some other games, but I liked it. Although I don't know how you could bring back the Chaotix without even a mention of Mighty .

 

After thinking about it myself, I think Sonic Heroes was probably the last Sonic game I really did enjoy all the way. I think Yuji Naka did his best to make sure it was like a combination of the past mixed with the present, since he brought back many elements of the older games. I can't remember the last time a Sonic game used two acts, both with the same music but with different arrangements (sound familiar?) in each act. It's also the last time the Sonic Adventure 2 cast did the voices (except for Tails), and either way you feel about them, it was a shame to have them go. The level design was probably the best thing about the game, since the first level had those checkerboard walls like they always used to do, and the first level being a beach/forest/whatever zone. The storyline was also very basic, just like the older Sonic games, and it doesn't really introduce new characters either (besides Omega, but who cares about him).

I don't know how you feel about Yuji Naka, but I think if he stayed long enough, he would've made some good Sonic games again. In fact, everything that he had a strong hand in was good - except for Sonic Next, but I think he left before that really got off the ground. In a sense, even Shadow the Hedgehog was okay - and that's probably saying a lot.

I miss him. :\

 

I didn't enjoy heroes at all. They looked like someone peed on them, and they played like they were running on butter. I kept going through the floor (by running on slopes) and the loops were horrible. The zones themselves were great, but the physics, no. I STILL can't grasp them, and I got sonic 06' in a week.

 

I played Sonic Heroes for the Gamecube, and I found it quite nice. It certainly had nothing on the Genesis games, but it was still very fun, and it was one that I could play through to the end on all of the teams.

The zones were probably the highlight of it for me. There really wasn't a single zone that I disliked (except the first two, but they were your basic intro stages I guess). Some of the zones were just absolutely fantastic, and challenging (see: Bingo Highway, Mystic Mansion). I guess I was mostly looking for stuff that would make it unique as a Sonic game, and it seemed to deal a fair share of stuff that filled that criteria.

I also liked how the stage layout varied depending on which team you picked. While some of the changes were minor, some of the stages ended up having all new puzzles and designs. Mystic Mansion in particular (which happened to be my favorite stage as well) felt almost entirely different on every team. This concept alone was great.

Eh. I can see why some people would dislike the game, but I was one of the fans. It was an enjoyable experience for me overall.

 

Mighty is much of a Chaotix than Knuckles or Bomb. And we all know that Knuckles isn't a Chaotix, and Bomb is a badnik from Starlight Zone.
I feel like there's a bit of bandwagoning around here, but all that I know was that my first impression was good but it felt like "...Damn, the Adventures are so much better" and I had many problems due to the game's many many bugs and flaws. Still, I enjoyed it.
A few months ago I got my hands on it again, and I truly hated it. Sonic is not like that, Izuka. I hate the fact that I've got to change formations to go forward, in previous Sonic games, if you were skilled, you would get past through stages without stoping, only for a few, really creative gimmicks that requires you to stop a bit to go forward. Now, you can't really do that, you have to stop every 10 seconds to change through formations to destroy enemies/walls or any kind of useless shit that requires too much time for something that could have been a whole lot better by, you know, just going forward, without that stupid obstacle on the way. You waste 10 to 20 seconds with those boring obstacles. Imagine how nice it would be that you're zipping through Green Hill in Sonic the Hedgehog for the Genesis, and then you come to one of those breakable walls. No problem, just gain some speed and press down right? Now imagine that this method won't work. You have to press a second button two times to change to another character and press a certain button that would make him break the walls, one by one, instead of dashing and breaking it faster and not losing your momentum at all, you have to stop, change to a character, break the walls one by one, and then change back to the previous character to move on.
Not only that, but changing to the flight formation to paralyze enemies, and then changing back to Speed or Power to finally destroy them, just so that platforms appear and only then you move forward is pretty much shit.
Oh but that's not the main reason why I hated it. Okay, you could presence many bugs at Sonic Adventure, and really few ones at its sequel, but you could avoid them. In Sonic Heroes, avoiding cheap deaths, those kind of deaths that were absolutely not the player's fault, is nearly impossible. And I hated the game's atmosphere, it felt like they were trying too hard to rescue the classic atmosphere, but knew batshit about it. I kid you not, but the only tracks that I actually liked it was the ones that Jun Senoue went crazy with his guitar riffs, like Egg Fleet, the only exception about it was the Special Stage song, that actually felt really nice.
Now, this isn't the whole review of the game, because last time I played, I just played until the fourth stage, that was that Metropolis/Factory thing with the lava rising part. And the time before that was too long ago for me to remember exacly how it was like, but yeah, I really hate Heroes.

 

This sums up my primary problems with the game pretty well. It has the slower pacing of Sonic 1, but for all of the wrong reasons. It's still sort of fun anyway (though they really should have just added the bosses to Super Hard Mode and made that the only way to play) but the basic concept of switching characters was poorly executed.

 

TBH the only real flaw hereos had (aside from the teamplay and voice actor change, obv) was that they wrote it with renderware to be more portable. In doing so they threw away years of refinement on the adventure engine. IMO the project director should be ashamed of that decision. They should have just built the game off adventure 2.

 

Man, I honestly thought the team switching was great and went really smoothly for the most part -- even switching to fly formation worked pretty well on account of the fact that you retained some momentum from the formation you were in last.

I don't really think that the flow issues between parts of a level were all that bad -- I suppose it takes some practice but once you get good most formation switches and battle areas are really easy to get through.

There are bits that I like more than Sonic Adventure, though I do feel that the later levels could have used more depth. The first levels had more freedom in path choice -- Power Plant was rather good with that, in fact -- and it made them in some ways better than Adventure's, especially because the game was overall more stable.

Never suffered any major collision issues. Most were control issues with rail switching, fly formation, and the occasional error with ramps and springs in Power Plant and Grand Metropolis. There is one in each. Glitches suck when death means automatically forfeiting an A-rank.

Best US $2.50 I've ever spent.

 

I like Sonic Heroes.

The gameplay was fun (bar Team Chaotix and its pretty random requirements), and the comeback of Special Stages made me happy. It is very fun to play and it not as automatic as other 3D Sonic games. Its level design would be perfect in a normal, just-Sonic game. There's not a lot to complain about the gameplay IMO.

My only grip with the game is, of course, the storyline. And the characters. I was NOT amused by Shadow's comeback (setting the stage for Shadow's crap crap CRAP game), or

Spoiler

Metal Sonic's

. Or how corny it sounds sometimes. Not that I want the Adventures' seriousness all the time, it just looks silly of Tails and Knuckles foolishly following Sonic around forgetting any character development they used to have, for example.

Oh well. At least Egg Emperor was epic.

 

Stylistically? Heroes kicks ass.

However, repeated sections of level =/= challenge.

Teams were a brilliant feature... which they didn't even try to use. "Punch through walls!"

No. Why not use them to facilitate branching paths?

I'd like to see a level layout mod of PC Heroes which makes use of the team feature, if the tools become available.

Also, the soundtrack sucked.

Unleashed has good physics. Different, but good.

 

It's a rather above-average game in my book. It's fun, but it can be frustrating, thanks in part to the buttery controls. I'm also not a fan of the game's laughable cheesiness. The game also has a tendency to get worse as you progress-- the first few levels are pretty good, but it all goes downhill starting with Rail Canyon.

It was probably the first Sonic game I was really disappointed with.

 

I enjoyed playing Sonic Heroes, in fact that game was my "re-introduction" to the Sonic series.
Though I fucking hated the special stages with a passion so I never completed the game fully since I didn't get all the Chaos Emeralds (I only collected 3 IIRC).
Maybe I should get the PC version and play the game again.

 

Wasn't Sega's excuse for Shadow being so bad that they had no experience of making PS2/Xbox games? IDK, maybe it would have been better.

 

But Heroes was built with Renderware 'to be more portable', when Shadow was written... without it. I think. IIRC, the source of this info is Wikipedia, you decide if thats trustworthy or not.