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

I think a lot of Heroes' problems come from the game failing to justify why the player needs the three characters, or even just the two. The speed character is so clearly, obnoxiously faster than the others that the engine itself can hardly keep up, meanwhile the flying character can't fly but can fight enemies better than the fighting character who is also required to fly. So very excessive even to gradeschool me who loved all these characters! I think going with two-person teams instead would've solved SO many of the problems the game's stuck with, and probably still would now. If a Heroes remake is seriously being considered then I hope we get Frontiers 2 first and that it at least tries to get two characters working in 3D before they bother attempting three again.
Limiting a character to a button, even if well done, would maybe take away more fun for me than vanilla Heroes. I just want a Heroes where each HERO is capable on their own and that you'd swap characters because you want to swap characters. Hitting B to punch with Knuckles without having to switch to him first doesn't make the 'YOU MUST USE KNUCKLES' roadblocks any less boring or patronizing to punch out. As far as I'm concerned the character switching itself isn't the problem at all.

 

Some of Heroes's quirks are inherent to it's design. I think it would need a "down to the roots" remake to be any good because it's formula, conceptually is pretty flawed. It is hard to justify putting three Sonic characters on the same team when they're all so functionally similar in their respective games. Gliding isn't that different from flying, and outside of that Tails and Knuckles do a lot of the same things Sonic does. The game tries to justify that by hyperspecializing each character and nerfing large parts of their kit to compensate but it just ends up ruining the fun of playing as them in the first place. You'd have to retool the characters to be more like their classic selves while making the level design more expansive to justify the kind of power trip having all of their abilities on deck grants the player. In a series that couldn't even design involved levels around flying and gliding in the previous titles.

If you're going to keep it's snappy, color matching gameplay and most of it's core design intact, and focus instead on QOL improvements, then I don't think there's a lot to actually do here aside from peeling more actions away from the action button and tackling the unwieldy collision/controls. A lot of fuss is made over the leveling system, but I'm actually going to be the odd man out and argue that it has a place. Temporary powerups per stage are common in the arcade games Sonic finds it's roots in and giving Sonic the ability to one shot every enemy from the very start of the game makes the power class worthless outside of the rare giant enemy. You can make it more consistent, so that leveling up the class you want in a given stage is actually a meaningful decision and not just happenstance outside of checkpoints, but ripping it out entirely without making some core changes sounds problematic. If you want a "frictionless" Heroes that doesn't encourage swapping in any meaningful way or even allows you to bypass the gimmick entirely you're not asking for Sonic Heroes. You're asking for Sonic Adventure 2 with a light partner gimmick.

There's the elephant of the room of the level design, and I think just about every stage could do with being a bit shorter with more routes to pick. The team swapping mechanic probably wouldn't be so dire as an avenue to decide where to go instead of the entire game being a straight line where you choose where you want to go. Remove some of those gaudy signs and allow players to reason for themselves what the best course of action is, more often. It wouldn't technically be all that different but it'll feel better from an intrinsic pov.

I guess the best thing to do would be to focus on making every class fun to play with their paramaters and weaknesses in check. Some depth could be added to Knuckles's kit int he power formation to make it more than a braindead mashathon with more aggressive enemies to match. I think one of the biggest problems with it is that a leveled up Sonic and Tails actually have more utility in combat so shoring that up could be a priority. I never understood why the tornado abilities were tied to the speed class anyway. It's mostly a crowd control tool, and since power has glide they aren't against it having some mobility. I'm kind of at a loss for the flight class though. There are some obvious QOL changes to make but it always seemed like a bit of a dead end, mechanically speaking.

 

Wouldn’t that almost entirely remove the reason for having a power character, though?

 

Heroes is a fan favorite.

It needs a world map, emphasize character differences more, emphasize team differences more, each team should only be allowed to find 2 chaos emeralds a piece and all 4 teams should be confined to a single campaign.

 

If I was a fan of Heroes the way it is, I would probably be pretty annoyed if we got a "remake" that was actually just a radical reimagining the way a lot of these suggested fixes come across. At that point either just port the game as is so the fans of it can be happy, or make a sequel that fixes a lot of the problems so people who like the concept of a Sonic Heroes can get one that doesn't suck ass.

 

I feel like a good solution to this is to have an "original mode" with untouched gameplay & a "remake mode" with new mechanics.

 

A game so conceptually flawed probably should have been more like its not-so-conceptually-flawed predecessor. Leaning away from what already worked in SA1/2 was foolish to begin with if you ask me.

 

Why though

 

I think it made more sense back then to go hard making sequels feel really different than it does now. SA1 and 2 were still on the shelf right next to it back then and they weren't that far apart in terms of release.

 

Nowadays, I believe we're ways away enough from most of the more historically significant releases that we sort of get to see the games in a different lens, and identify the legacy thus far with patterns. At the time it absolutely might have made more sense to make a sequel feel drastic enough, I suppose - But now from a distance, 'leaning away from concepts while magically also not learning anything from their fresher ideas' is almost Sonic Team's bread and butter, our own personal personal sentiment almost on par with 'Oblivion with guns'. A majority of Sonic games that do return with previous mechanics, schemes, literally any modus operandi have felt more like rehashes rather than a well-needed, sequel-deserving refresher.
Frontiers to SxSG feels like something rather than nothing to me, because at least they're taking a portion from the former title and observably working with it. Sonic Team even now is remembered as a group that rides the waves of gimmick induced novelty, and my bar is low enough that I'm happy they can get any foot off the ground without tumbling over. Some day within the next ten years though, we absolutely will get our Lost World 2 sequel, if not in name, then in sanctimonious spirit.

 

Because, in a better format...you'd actually want to see where these locations are in relation to eachother.

The characters would start from different stages, not the same ones.

 

I'd argue that Heroes isn't conceptually flawed; the game as a whole was just rough, unpolished and tedious, and SA2's handling of the characters was actually worse. I put the mech and treasure hunting levels on the same level of tedium as the Werehog levels.

Of course, I put the SA2 speed levels above Heroes' levels. But they made up only one third of the game.

So like Sonic Rush? I like it. Having a different level order per team would make the forced replays as the alt teams thing less tedious.

Of course, not forcing the replays would be even better.

 

You could just make their attacks have an AOE instead.

Or go the Classic route and give them the ability to break through walls that conceal alternate pathways.

 

I don't see what seeing where the locations are in relation to each other adds to the game? Even if they started in different stages, different level orders would be enough without adding a superfluous map.

 

Environmental Continuity can add to the feel of a game. SA1 has this most apparent, where you can fit previous and future stage locations into the background of hubs and vice-versa. Knowing that Sky Deck isn't just a disconnected air fortress level but specifically you destroying the right wing of the Egg Carrier is pretty cool! The way SA2's world map gradually shifts to the right before taking you into space has a nice vibe, though that game is less-consistent with it overall (and I suppose it doesn't take that pattern at all if you're playing the Dark Story). This is also why stage transition cutscenes are a surprisingly intense debate in the fandom, despite me not caring all that much.

That said, it doesn't make sense for Heroes, which obviously was never designed with any of this stuff in mind to begin with.

 

There's another interesting element about Heroes that's worth analizing: the formations.
Changing leader does not only give you access to different moves, it also changes the default positions of your partners relative to the leader character.

In the Power formation, the characters are far from each other, while in the Speed formation they are closer. The flight formation is that weird tower of characters apparently.

This is a very trivial mechanic that's often overlooked, but there's a little bit of level design built around it, and if a remake is done (one that's not just an ignorant port), they should address it as well.

Sometimes the road splits in 3 routes and if you manage to send each character to a differnt one with the Power formation, you might get more rewards (usually rings); other times the rings are placed in a way that they would be collected more easily if you are in Power formation. Offcourse the Power formation is the only one that you will need most of the times, but if you want to "go really fast" with a Speed type character, you will likely switch between Speed and Power formation a lot. The Flight formation is mostly useless unless required by a roadblock (pull/push switches that are above the ground, for example.

In case they make the Flight characters able to walk and jump on their own when not flying, they should replace the Flight formation with a new one... I think it should be a defensive one where the partners stay in front of you as a sort of shield (it would let you ram into things and block projectiles). The tower would still be accessible by starting to fly, just not as the default formation anymore.

The problem of this is that the bonus/special stages have some level design built around the tower formation, sometimes you need it in order to collect those colored balls.

My suggestion would be to (leave the stage layout as is, and instead) let the Flight characters float over the ground when they runs fast enough (and land back on the ground as they stop), so they would get those colored balls without having to be in tower mode; this might also allow you to dodge ground damage by floating over some hazards, or to float over the water like Gamma in SA1 as long as you don't stop completely (with a few new routes built around this new mechanic offcourse); when there's no safe ground below your feet, a small wind effect would lift the partners as well and make them float at the same height as the leader (but they wouldn't be able to ram into things and block projectiles anymore until back on land).

I would like if the formations were more useful, they are a neat gimmick but the original game involves them so little that you can easily not notice them at all, or forget about them even if you know that they exist.

 

I was playing SxSG. When I was playing Rail Canyon, a random thought hit me. If they actually remake this game, I hope they rewrite the story like they did with Generations. I also think they should redo the dialogue. It should not be the entire game, but only the part where Team Sonic does not remember Team Chaotix should be thrown in the trash because clearly they all interacted in Knuckles Chaotix.

 

I'd kill to have entire Heroes level good as Rail Canyon in Shadow Generations.