Sonic Heroes Remake in UE5 Rumored, So Who Knows If It'll Happen

Any news on a DMCA from SEGA on it?

 

It's weird how internally I went from 'Oh. A Heroes remake?' to 'Oh. A Heroes remake! Yeah! I'd actually like that!' in my head. It's a really fun title I had some fun with as a kid bogged down by some odd choices when compared to it's predecessors.

This was touched upon in posts before me, but really my biggest criticism with Heroes' gameplay loop is how much more limited the characters feel coming from Adventure 1 and 2. As a kid, it felt weird going from Adventure 1's Tails and then going to Heroes. It felt like there was 'less' I could do with the character. Knuckles was great mindless visual fun the further I leveled him up, but something also felt like it was missing. I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Now, I absolutely understand why the characters are so limited - Sonic Classic Heroes is a phenomenal hack, but having all the characters and their abilities available at any point trivializes a lot of the level challenge. Combine trying to do something like that with trying to translate that sort of gameplay into a 3D environment. That's no small task! I commend Sega/Sonic Team for trying out a style that worked as something to introduce a new crowd to Sonic's friends while also creating something more unified compared to what the Adventure titles offered.

That being said, while the 'trio' gameplay concept is neat, the characters kinda end up feeling like glorified 'switches' with how limited the context of their new abilities are. It feels like outside of combat (which the game begins to force on the player more and more as the game continues), you can't really experiment with them in any ways that feel meaningful. Flight characters prior to reaching Level 3 are a fun example. They can't really do a whole lot outside of lowering targets in fight sections, and the control is a bit awkward in some of the game's 'hallways' designated for Speed characters, so the player kinda learns to just only really use them for reaching out to platforms they otherwise couldn't get to, and the platforming stops dead in it's tracks to allow that to happen. There's never a moment where a more skilled player can revisit the level and go 'oh no wait I can do this with a Flight character here and skip this Speed/Power section here' or find an alternative route for noticing a visual cue. I understand not wanting SA1 Tails levels of skipping, but it feels like mastering gameplay never really allows you to do anything 'cool' by changing the way you approach a section, is what I'm trying to say. The closest the game comes to the latter is with the cannon setups.

To it's credit, the system does encourage careful partner usage so all 3 are maxed out level-wise (which is handy for A-Ranking), but prior to that? You can only really play as the characters 'one way', and it's the way the game kinda shoves in your face with the bright ability type signs (which if memory serves are still present very late into the game on all 4 campaigns). It kinda feels like the game is always hand-holding you into the correct solution in a way as a result rather than letting players just experiment. I think it limits a lot of the fun of being able to control 3 characters at once, even if a new player doesn't immediately realize what the game is doing.

Combine that with the game forcing you to play 4 nearly identical, fairly long campaigns (well okay 3 Chaotix is pretty different) before you're given a more satisfactory conclusion, and the monotony sets in quick. I think it's always the reason I can never quite bring myself to finish the title properly even though I always find myself initially being really surprised how much nicer it feels to play since I last touched it (and I usually end up beating one of the campaigns). I have never properly unlocked or played the Last Story whereas I did in Adventure 1 and 2. It's great fun initially if the flow does end up clicking, but it's eh if you just want to get to the end or aren't going for all A ranks. It kinda ends up alienating the casual audience that I think it partially tries to cater to as a result (Team Rose being the third option and the tutorial stage being playable with Team Sonic anyways also adds to that confusion - I'm really not sure why it wasn't a prompt that the player could just yes/no out of before properly starting a story).

My ideal Heroes remake would probably be a bit more of a re-imagining to kinda address the more slippery controls and rebalances the characters to have less context-heavy moves so it feels more like the player has unrestricted freedom when playing as a character. I still think a trick system or the Leveling system can encourage that a player tries to balance using their entire party for a stage, less they be locked out of an A Rank. Change the Last Story requirements so either all 4 Stories or all Emeralds with 1 Story cleared unlocks it. Bam. I think you'd then have a considerably more enjoyable arcade action platformer.

So uh yeah I actually would be pretty excited for a Heroes remake. It comes very close to surpassing the Adventure titles in terms of being good fun, but a lot of weird little design choices with limited freedom bog the game down a peg for me. Something that addresses that and gets a more general audience familiar with Sonic's friends again would be rad.

I should also point out the modding scene for the PC release picked up in the last few years and there are some physic adjustment/story pacing mods that do help some of my big issues with it. Assuming a remake/re-imagining never materializes and this is all rubbish, then it's a great way to re-experience the game. The only thing I really miss from the console versions at that point is the cheatsy way to clear the Team boss fights a bit quicker due to very slight physic differences.

 

https://x.com/sonicas0/status/1841035576415252483
according to this random person (who apparently leaked stuff from the Movies and Sonic x Shadow stuff) the Heroes Remake is well in development and will release in autumn next year? idk make of this what you will

 

Fascinating. Surely there are a bunch more readily viable games than Heroes? People are champing at the bit for Adventure remakes, the Advance games would be solid options I think. Heroes is uhhhh...not great on balance, given three quarters of it is filler. I really hope there's a thorough approach taken to improving the game's weakspots.

Also I really wish these remakes would lean on HE2 more, it's an engine capable of some really beautiful looking graphics and I'd really like there to be more consistency between remakes/remasters and new games.

 

If they truly remade Heroes with new level design and better controls, it could actually be a fun game. Hopefully if this is true, that’s the plan because it could be solid if done right. I feel like there’s no way they put that level of effort into it though, lmao

 

Heroes introduced large health bars and lock-down rooms. ugh

 

Heroes getting a revisit before the Adventure games sounds like a really dumb idea. A bad game that introduced and exuberated a lot of the series's worst recurring issues (combat, enemy rooms, clumsy physics, stop and go gameplay, abandoning the Spin Dash, poorly-written stories, excess padding, etc). There's not even a Chao Garden!

But it sold a lot of copies. Which is why this is absolutely, 100% happening.

 

Seaside Hill assets from Generations/racing games, Metropolis assets from forces, rail canyon assets from shadow generations, neo metal sonic also from the same game, Egg Fleet from either Shadow generations-technically forces assets- or racing games, final fortress assets from Team Sonic Racing , casino levels assets are dime a dozen, frog forest assets from any green place in frontiers

and suddenly it seems really easy to picture why they would pick Hereos for a remake treatment, could be done in HE2 like that, assuming the rumor is accurate of course

 

Remember when Sega remade Monkey Ball Banana Blitz before 1, 2 and Deluxe even though nobody asked for it just because BB sold the most in the series, not realizing it only did because it was on the Wii? Sega is good at gauging what fans want!

 

I'm just happy that this means that Team Dark is back.

 

If I had to say anything it would mostly just be a repeat of this. Heroes is the runner up to "the game people will probably buy if we put it put again" Sonic Colors.

 

team sonic racing even had bingo highway-- er, party in this one, as a level, with a remix of the Heroes' level music. I haven't played TSR so I dunno if it actually looks similar tho.

 

I consider SA1 & 2 to be just as dubiously accessible to non-PC users. Having to use PS3 or 360 ports two generations later, neither of which are brought attention to by Sega themselves, makes them pretty obscured to the public eye. And the most successful console right now (Switch) has no means of accessing SA1/2 at all, with Nintendo's last availability for them being to buy backwards compatible GameCube games to play on Wii.

Heroes just gets priority because it sold the most (and it only sold the most because it came out on PS2). But it's all good! Sega put SA1/2 on Steam in Japan; that's a rerelease.. right?

 

I see no harm in prioritizing Heroes now, it just means the eventual SA1/2 remakes will be even better

Imagine just swapping Generations remaster with Colors remaster, they would turn out veeeeeery differently, that’s also why Super Monkey Ball 1&2 having a later remaster was actually in their favor, it’s a blessing in disguise really

 

Bringing me back to the 2010's when I'd read people suggesting ideas for new heroes-team combinations.
Give me the Silver/Blaze/Marine team sega and my life is yours.

 

The level art is probably the most redeeming aspect of Heroes.

 

Sonic Heroes actually is BC on Xbox 360. And there was that weird Europe only psn download of Sonic Heroes, but your point still stands.

 

I think heroes could be a pretty good game overall if they just patched up the level design in later stages and fixed bugginess like the rail switching. So I'm excited to see what theyd do with this, and if the visuals for rail canyon in sonadow generations are any indication of quality then I'd be really excited to see modernized versions of levels like frog forest or bingo highway

 

There are a lot of easy, obvious things to point to in Heroes that, if you fixed them, would make it a perfectly fun game, albeit probably still not better than SA1 and SA2. Making the characters more versatile and less context-sensitive is just a matter of buffing and normalizing their stats. Don't make the flight characters lug around the other two. Don't lock me in rooms to fight enemies (or, hey, just make the player stronger). Remove lives. Make the special stages not shit (or at least give me the emeralds for boss fights instead). Fix rail switching (especially since the grinding is otherwise better than SA2!) and keep the homing attack functioning consistent. Don't make me play all four campaigns to fight Metal overlord, I'll probably check them out on my own just out of curiosity to see what the rest of the story is like. Do all of these things and you have a game that is worthy of being put alongside the others, and modders are getting some of them. I've even seen some people working on modding in the Adventure-style spindash.

I have a theory that there's like a minimum-limit scale of acceptability that a Sonic game can straddle to still be viewed as good or even great within in the mainstream, even if it falls apart under heavier scrutiny, and a lot of "bad" Sonic games could be made very palatable to the masses with some not-so-huge tweaks in this manner. As much as people like shitting on the 2010s for Sonic now, there's a reason they don't have the same knee-jerk disgust response that stuff in the mid-late 2000s did, and it's because Colors, Generations, Lost World, Forces and even both Sonic 4 games manage to keep afloat in terms of basic playability and not feeling like an embarrassing mess the way 06 or Secret Rings did (plus not having what felt like obvious gimmicks in Black Knight and Unleashed helps). This is a mark that SEGA could absolutely hit with Heroes if they wanted to, and doesn't require radically redesigning the levels.