Revisiting Sonic Heroes: janky, but still a boatload of fun

This game was such a huge disappointment for me. I remember being really excited for it coming out, because I had disliked the direction SA2 went, and the geometric bright worlds of Sonic Heroes was supposed to be a return to the old art style. But man... maybe the first couple of levels are fun, but it falls apart so fast, the last levels are awful. And while the level art was cool, the player models were hideous, with all that shine on them. And the story, not really something I care about too much in sonic games, was so crappy, with Metal Sonic's redesign being probably the single worst design in the franchise as far as I'm concerned. I *HATE* the arm cuffs, they're so stupid. Even as far as music goes, while nearly all the game's tracks are great, the theme song is pain to my ears. The most saccharine bland mid-2000's era pop you can imagine. What I'm Made Of is a way, waaaaay better song and should have been the theme for the game. This is also the game where focus on combat became a thing, which I detest. This is where blocking you off in little rooms until you kill all the badguys who have health bars started. Sonic enemies should NOT have health bars, and sonic levels should NOT have gates. This one goes very low on my list of sonic games, definitely one I consider one of the bad ones.

 

Sonic Adventure 2 had lots of points where you were blocked off in little rooms until you killed all the enemies, especially when playing as Tails/Eggman. But I agree, the healthbars make it so much worse and drag the pacing down to an absolute crawl.

Level visuals and music are great though. Shame about the gameplay.

 

Sonic heroes was initially a huge disappointment for me. After coming off of the high of SA1 and SA2 (character driven stories, emotional endings, Chao Gardens etc.) Sonic Heroes was a major letdown. The story was half-baked and never really resolved itself. The engine was lackluster compared to SA2 in that it killed the spindash and made flying a chore. Also the janky controls and camera angles combined with most of the levels having a multitude of bottomless pits made it not fun. I beat Metal Overlord then went back to playing SA2B.

As time went on my opinion of Sonic Heroes changed drastically. coming off of beating Final hazard and listening to "Live and Learn", the music in Sonic Heroes never felt like it had that needed punch, until reaching the final boss. "What I'm Made of" is so good. And since putting the soundtrack on my phone and listening to it over the years I've come to love all of the songs.

I also love the level design in Sonic Heroes. I had some gripes with it in the past, but after a decade or more of sub-2 minute levels that were essentially hallway zone, a larger than life level that took 10 minutes to complete feels amazing. The art and layout was over the top and surreal, the way the genesis games always felt. I was just telling my 3-year-old yesterday that Sonic Heroes has a level with a mushroom that's bigger than the biggest tree in the world. He thought that sounded awesome. Vibrant colors and locales that feel almost real, but overly grandiose in some way are very Sonic-y. At least to me.

Sonic Heroes has some major issues, but it's one of the few that I keep coming back to because it's really grown on me over the decades. Also I didn't play the crap out of it when it first came out so it's not old and stale like SA2 can feel sometimes.

 

This is unfortunately a game I simply have no interest in ever playing.
The constant talking, the combat, the mandatory replaying to get to the final boss, the special stages, all of this annoys the hell out of me.
I like the soundtrack and the art style of the levels though.

 

I remember playing the Heroes demo as a kid and liking the visuals and music but hating how it controlled compared to Adventure 2 and how many useless mechanics there were. I did play the full game later in life, but my opinion on the game hasn't shifted much. Level design is good I guess?

 

Every now and then I replay Heroes, all four stories plus last.

It's something of an acquired taste; when you're playing well and not succumbing to shit like homing attacks randomly missing or combat launching you unexpectedly off whatever structure you're fighting on, it's loads of fun. And when it's not fun, it's wretched.

But the art direction, mainly the environments, and the soundtrack keep me going. The love/hate relationship of all time.

 

The stink of not having a Chao Garden will never truly disappear from my feelings on Heroes, but I can at least look at the game in isolation from that. Every time I start to replay it, I'm reminded that the core gameplay loop is honestly pretty solid. I consistently have a good time playing the first "Zone". Music and environments are great. Most of SA2's English voice cast is still there.

But as enemies start becoming more tedious to kill, the pace slows to a crawl and its mind-numbingly shallow combat becomes too much of a focus; slippery characters too easily slide off into bottomless pits while you're fighting, and there's a lot of waiting around for the later-game enemies to be damageable again in a way that only Superstars' bosses thought they should try to one-up. I dislike that I can't just play as flying characters, without looking like 3 dorks in a trench coat who lost their trench coat (unless the other two team members get incapacitated somehow). I dislike Tails' new voice. I hate how glossy every character model looks. The Special Stages are fucking trash.

But I still can't really bring myself to hate the game. It's alright. A C-tier 3D Sonic game if there ever was one. In many ways, the Sonic Forces of the 00's.

 

Almost everything about the game disappointed me. The game feel, most of all, is awful. The levels are boring and rely on the same tasks. The introduction of health meters and kill rooms. Even most of the music’s kind of boring.
The only thing I liked was the per-level themes/visuals, but the shiny character models and lighting were really ugly to me.

I really tried liking it, but bla.

SA1 was so much better.

 

Sonic Heroes was the first Sonic game I didn't like enough to bother trying to beat it.

 

Just like Sonic CD is my flawed 2D favourite, Sonic Heroes is my flawed favourite out of all of the 3D games I've played, so I agree with the more positive takes.

I have not revisited it in a long time (planning to at some point), but despite putting down the game constantly at points when it got frustrating, I kept going back to it over and over again. When I played it, I played it just as much as any of the other 3D Sonic games I put hours upon hours into, even if I confidently preferred them over Heroes.

The glitches were especially frustrating because I think they were the one true issue that caused failure out of the player's control.

The controls were awkward, the camera was a mess, later levels especially took forever and the enemies were frustrating sponges, but there was a certain consistency to them, which led to great fun when all went well, but when it didn't, you lost a 10-15 minute run to a glitch at the end.

But in hindsight I really do love the level design – substantially and aesthetically (with maybe the exception of the Casino Park levels, but that's also more of a bad gamefeel issue).

I think it's the closest we've gotten to the aesthetic of the Classic games being expressed in 3D.

(Even if I think the glossy character models don't look that good.)

Each level had its unique gimmicks and actually quite expansive level design, too.

The carts in Seaside Hill, the conveyerbelt lanes in Grand Metropolis, the cannons and trains in Rail Canyon, the switches in Hang Castle, the growing platforms and flower copters in Frog Forest and even the many ships in Egg Fleet. Even the forementioned hideous physics of Bingo Highway are part of the character of that level, just like the red stretchy dice.

Again, a bunch of it might be drowned in the length of the levels, but it has some really cool ideas.

And I didn't mind the more light-hearted/simple story, either.

I think it's the one game that would benefit from a remaster (or for a bigger project, remake) the most because all it needs is a few tweaks like removal of the leveling system (and general sponge enemy adjustments) and a clean-up of glitches to already be marginally more fun.

The controls and camera in particular would still be a problem, but I personally think this isn't a fundamentally flawed game, rather a solid game with a bunch of issues on top of it.

I actually also never 100% beat all stories legit because the Chaotix and Team Dark playthroughs really challenged me back then.

But when I had a good time, I had a very good time.

 

I just finally downloaded hedgemod manager since I'm playing through the Unleashed PC port. Are there any mods for Sonic Heroes PC that actually fix the physics. or make it more like the adventure games? Are there other mods you would recommend?

 

Sonic Heroes is a game I really desperately have wanted to like for a very long time. But to save my breath on saying the same reasons as everyone else, I will say the art, music and stage concepts are wonderful and are easily what keep me coming back.

GameBanana has mods that remove the gloss on the character models, shut the characters up, and give the characters physics closer to SA1/2 physics. They don't *fix* the game, but they do make it a lot more enjoyable for me. You will need a different mod loader than HedgeModManager, though.

 

If (and there's a heavy emphasis on if there tbh) I ever go back to give Heroes another shot, this will definitely be the way to go for me. The game just doesn't feel good to play for a litany of reasons and while I appreciate the music and art design, I don't think I like them enough to justify playing the game for very long.

With that said we absolutely need more haunted mansions in these games.

 

Every few years, I get really nostalgic for Heroes and go back to it. I'll pick a team, enjoy their dialogue and soak in the atmosphere as I blast through the first 3 or 4 acts. And then I'll try to convince myself I'm still having a great time as those same few lines of dialogue get repeated endless, the environments all rely on recycling the enemy rooms and gimmicks and characters careen into pits as they rewrite the laws of physics every 10 steps.

I have a lot of nostalgia for Heroes. It's the first game I ever followed online before it was released, and at ripe age of 10 I couldn't have been any more excited. It'll always be one of only a few games in the series that really manages to scratch my itch for having a range of characters both playable and interacting with each other. But it ain't good.

 

I remember liking Heroes when I played it, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would (even if there were a few annoying zones like Rail canyon or that disgusting final level), but I never did technically complete the game, I only ever played the sonic story. I've been told time and time again that my opinion would sour of it immensely if i played those other stories, which does kinda scare me off from ever wanting to play them.

 

I guess I meant when that stuff started being incorporated into the speedy, sonic-style gameplay. When Sonic Heroes was announced, my thought was that it was going to be more like bringing elements of Sonic's gameplay back to Tails and Knuckles. Like, it was going back to "everyone plays like sonic." Instead, what happened was one of the parts of the non-sonic SA2 gameplay I detested made it's way into my speedy sonic levels. Perhaps thats a reason why this game particularly annoyed and disappointed me, I didn't see that monkey paw twist coming.

 

Yeah. What Heroes does with enemy encounters isn't really the same as what SA2 does. SA2 limits those encounters to one of the alternative gameplay styles, specifically one that's focused on combo-shooting and still has enemies that go down in a single hit. Heroes on the other hand turns every single enemy into a damage sponge purely to justify the existence of power characters. And it'll lock you into rooms full of enemies wherein you just dance around mashing the attack button until they're all dead.

Heroes also introduced the idea of speed, flight and power attributes, stripping characters of a lot of their unique traits. It made prefect sense for Heroes (even if the gameplay wasn't brilliantly thought out) but it's left a kind of blemish ever since. Fans just got really obsessed with the idea of teams of three characters that each belong to one of the three types. It's so weirdly limiting for a series that's essentially about animals with super powers. Why would you want to box everyone in like that? Granted, this issue has affected fans works more than the official series, but it still cropped up here and there.

 

My problem with the game honestly is just that it doesn't have enough meat to justify its length. It feels like even though I've seen all the substantial content the game has to offer, it just keeps going and going. And that's not even counting playing other stories or going for 100%.

 

I think Sonic Heroes is maybe the worst game I unabashedly love, if that makes any sense. The game is busted, and underwritten, both to alternatingly hilarious and infuriating results. And I always hated those damn shiny models. Yet something is fun about the core gameplay loop and the levels, and the environmental art and music really sell it. It was the first game I ever got pre-release hyped up for, downloading E3 footage on my slow-ass dial-up. Even back when it came out, though, I remember oscillating between being obsessed with and turned off by it. It's clearly made with a ton of passion and has a ton of charm. It's not a good game but I love it.