a 20 year late Sonic Heroes review, because i'm gonna do whatever i want forever!!

-SPOILER WARNING FOR SONIC HEROES-

hellohello !! its been a few days since i beat Heroes, and i was like. fuck it. i wanna talk about it. so here i am !

do wanna quickly note that i am aware that heroes is both beloved and controversial, and i'm not trying to shit on anyone's favorite game here-- this is just totally off the cuff and just for funsies. i emulated the GameCube version of the game on Dolphin, as well :]

ok enough fluff lets fucking GOO

Music

i wanted to start with something positive, and i literally couldn't imagine a better W for this game than it's soundtrack. granted, a banger ost comes standard with a sonic game, regardless of the game's actual quality (with a view exceptions... cough cough Sonic 4 COUGH COUGH SONIC JAM FOR THE GAMECOM wait does that one count if its just a shitty port?) with that being said though, heroes drops some absolute bangers that are just too good to be legal. seriously, mow your lawn while listening to "What I'm Made Of." it'll feel like you're waging war on dandelions.

as well as that, the theme music for the teams are all bangers with some pretty good lyrics! 

This Machine has a grungy, edgy sound to it that really fits Team Dark because let's be honest, while it isn't his entire character, Shadow and his team have always been the cool, edgy ones. gotta appeal to the angsty teen demographic somehow (its me, i'm the angsty teen demographic.) the lyrics themselves aren't groundbreaking songwriting by any means, they're very literal and mostly just give the jist of Team Dark's story and characters, and the deepest they delve into some real symbolism is in the chorus:

As the Eggman watches

which, i should add, is COOL AS FUCK and i'm totally not biased because i eat up anything that relates fighting and dancing like it's fucking Christmas dinner. imo though, the lyrics don't really need to be anything more than what they are. just the beat would've been serviceable enough, especially since we never really hear any of the lyrics in game. what we got is super cool in and of itself, tbh, they did not need to go that hard for a sonic game. it's catchy, it fits the theme, and the chorus has been stuck in my head for months girl HELP.

Team Chaotix for, you'll never guess, Team Chaotix is similarly fucking awesome. its got this funky, Scooby Doo ass synth that sounds really rad paired with the gratuitous use of that electric guitar. it's just the right amount of cool and goofy, and it fits the Chaotix wonderfully. these three are a very close second to Team Dark in the running for "himbim's favorite trio in the sonic series" so I am most certainly biased in this regard, but they make me smile and i'm so glad they got such a banger for their debut in the modern era.

Level Design

why yes, i do think i'm clever.

i LOVE LOVE LOVE this game's level aesthetics. say what you want about the animation (i know i will) but for the most part, the graphics have aged beautifully. apparently this change was made following some complaints of how the settings looked in the adventure games, and while i personally enjoyed how they looked, i can see how real world San Francisco and one time, the actual literal sewers could rub someone the wrong way. either way, i cant complain about the end result. in spite of the burning hatred of a thousand suns this series has steadily made me develop for pinball (more on that later), the casino levels look absolutely gorgeous.

if my memory serves me right, the level design for this game was based on the classic games, and you can really tell. especially coming off of sa2, the colors in this game are so bright and colorful, everything is so PRETTY UGH.... i luv it. highlights are for sure the seaside levels and the haunted mansion, plus Final Fortress taking place on a dark and stormy night really adds some welcome atmosphere, and really helps it feels like a final test of your abilities before you fight Egg Emperor.

the actual gameplay, however, is a different story. while i praised the rail levels for their atmosphere and music, in the actual game it feels very tedious and finicky. sadly after Power Plant, the levels have a pretty noticeable dip in quality. now, this isn't at all surprising if you look into the games troubled development and find out that, i shit you not, ONE GUY did almost all of the level design for Heroes. Takashi Iizuka and one other dude were tasked with doing the level design for the game, which is insane enough as is, but then the other guy had to leave because of i believe health issues? so Iizuka had to do pretty much all of it. the poor guy lost 20 lbs working on the game, and even developed insomnia. 

i note all of this just to say that it is a fucking miracle that the game turned out as good as it did, but there were some inevitable cracks in the foundation that become apparent as the game went on. enemies will sometimes spawn out of literal nowhere, its incredibly easy to fall off the edges of narrow platforms that just exacerbate the issue of slippery controls, there can be bizarre difficulty spikes, and the game overall has a tendency to just be very, very frustrating, especially considering the jank.

that being said though, i still found myself enjoying these levels and coming back to them. except Bingo Highway. fuck Bingo Highway. the Dark and Chaotix runs of that level are a nightmare i never want to revisit as long as i shall live. 

i feel like the game's worst enemy is how it forces you to play every campaign to unlock the final story. as you probably know, this game is structured into 4 campaigns, or teams: Team Sonic, Team Dark, Team Rose, and Team Chaotix. Team Rose is easy mode, Team Sonic is normal, Team Dark is a more combat-focused hard mode, and Team Chaotix is mission-based. I played them in order of Rose, Sonic, Chaotix, and Dark so i could have a feeling of steadily increasing difficulty. here's the thing though: the game doesn't properly communicate this to the player aside from if you click the little Omochao button for more information. 

they're ordered like this on the title screen, and while this wasn't a problem for me because i looked into the game beforehand, i can totally see someone being frustrated because they decided to play Team Sonic first, then afterward switched to Team Rose and were immediately thrust into not Seaside Hill, but a hand-holdy tutorial level.

which leads me into my second point: every campaign plays slightly altered versions of the same level. the only difference between Team Sonic and Team Rose's Seaside Hill is that Rose has less enemies, and a shorter stage. the same goes with Team Dark for the opposite sentiment-- longer levels and stronger enemies. Team Chaotix is the only outlier to this, because instead of speeding through the level at mach 2 and platforming you're. finding hermit crabs and blowing out torches. yeah, we'll get to the Chaotix soon enough, dw.

if you play every team in full to reach the Final Story, as the developers intended, that means you are playing every level a minimum of 4 times. now for levels with a lot of replayability like (wait for it) Seaside Hill, it's a non issue, but for large, sprawling levels that can take upwards of 20 minutes to complete on a first attempt like Mystic Mansion and Bullet Station it quickly begins to grate your nerves. combine that with game jank, asshole enemy placement, and constantly falling off the edge because you decided to throw a punch as Omega, and i wouldn't blame someone at all for just deciding to rage quit. 

i feel the best example of this is one of my own experiences playing Team Dark's Bullet Station, wherein i died 3 times in a row because of glitches. twice was to a sequence break during a rail grinding segment that i later wound up jumping off of a platform early just to skip, and once was because of the glitch where the Light Speed Dash simply decides to not work. while this makes Heroes sound like a glitchy mess, it's also important to note that i went through my Team Rose campaign without any of these issues! the only time i had anything remotely similar to this was when i got stuck on the cannon segment of Seaside Hill, but thats just because i'm stupid and didn't figure out how to use the damn things until Metal Madness.

the problem is that, because you're replaying what is essentially the same game 4 times over, the game's flaws become more apparent. this is especially true considering that certain characters' controls clearly had more time in the oven than others. a good example is how Big only moves slightly forward with his attacks, whereas Knuckles and Omega lunge forward a pretty significant amount, often causing the player to fall off of small platforms during enemy encounters.

on top of that, Team Chaotix's mission based levels don't really shake things up much at all. oftentimes, the missions are tedious at best and absolutely ridiculous at worst. hell, the Rail Canyon mission is just to beat the level. not even joking !! the missions feel very slapped on and not well thought out, and that's no doubt a result of the rushed development cycle.

i truly believe all of these levels could've been amazing if Sonic Team were given more manpower and development time, but sadly, that didn't happen. in fact, this trend plagues Sonic games to this very day, the only real exceptions to my knowledge being Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice and Sonic Frontiers. 

(so.... i don't think you can save on here, and i don't have time to write this all in one sitting like i thought-- this was much longer than i anticipated. i'm gonna stop here for now and come back to it later on today or tomorrow. whew. i did not think I had this much to say about Sonic Heroes... anyway, if you read all this you are an absolute chad and ily. part 2 coming soon, probably !!)