Sonic Heroes Review

I might have reviewed this game long ago, probably sucked, consider this to be the current definitive review.

2001 marked a major turning point for SEGA. Console production became a money sink for the company (I personally blame it on the 32X and SEGA CD since they were cornerstones of SEGA's console flooding) and they became a third-party publisher from then on. Their games took a noticeable dip in quality and it seems SEGA gave up, relying on appealing to their louder fans by releasing a rom hack with a price tag and making OC creation possible. By saying that I'm just begging to get sent to the guillotine.

Background

I might've said this in older entries, but here's a refresher. While I wasn't alive in the generation of the blur's heyday, my first exposure to him was through Sonic 2. My dad had a SEGA Genesis lying around. As for my exposure to the 3D Sonic, it was through Sonic Heroes. While the game managed to get slightly better reviews than others that followed, the tides have turned. Sonic Heroes barely held up and now its worst flaws are coming back to haunt them.

Sonic Heroes came out in 2003, this being SEGA's first Sonic game to not be on a SEGA console. This would be the last Sonic game to have something close to the aesthetics of Sonic Adventure, and I'm not saying that out of nostalgic bias, a lot has changed in the Sonic series after this game came out.

Plot

The game is divided into four different stories, shared between four different teams but wrapped together through them finding and fighting Eggman, and ultimately Metal Sonic once you beat all four stories. That's it summary wise.

The team stories consist of Team Sonic (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles), Team Dark (Shadow, Rouge and Omega (in his debut)), Team Rose (Amy, Cream, Big) and Team Chaotix (Vector, Espio and Charmy). The stories are set by difficulty, Sonic's story being the normal difficulty, Team Rose being the easy mode, even having a tutorial which will give you a reason to hate Omochao because he stops you dead in your tracks to tell you info that you'd figure out by mashing buttons, Team Dark being the hard difficulty, with much longer levels and more to traverse and Team Chaotix being its own level of normal by having different missions, amounting mostly to finding stuff.

Sonic's story could be summed up as "Stop the bad man." Seriously, that's how it's introduced and how it carries on throughout their story.

Team Rose's story involves her and her team attempting to find Chocola, a chao companion to Cheese, and Froggy, Big's friend. Throughout they assume the teams they come across have both.

Team Dark's story involves Rouge attempting to find Eggman's secret treasure, only to awaken Shadow and Omega, the latter of which was left behind to guard the room Shadow was in. Each team up to get revenge and find the aforementioned treasure.

Team Chaotix are sent on a mission by a mysterious caller, which they follow to obtain a generous payout. This involves finding stuff and killing enemies mostly.
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Of all these, Sonic's story is the most lacking, which is a bit disappointing since he's the main attraction and ultimately one who stops Metal Sonic at the end.

Gameplay

This is the first Sonic game to employ a gimmick that, in the long run, was foreign to the Sonic formula. It's a team-based game where you control three characters at once. Their skills are divided into speed, flight and power, and do I really need to explain how these work? This could be livened up with some problem solving, where you could try and figure out what power-ups work better than others. Or... you could leave little signs telling you what power-ups to use, have gates that automatically switch you to those specific characters and why don't we top it off by having the characters outright tell you which characters would be appropriate to use.

It all boils down to making it to the end, while hopefully getting enough points and leveling up your character (which involves collecting color-coded orbs, three in total for each level) to obtain A ranks. Completing each level, preferably above average, earns you an emblem, collect enough and you could unlock additional modes.

Oh, lets not forget the special stages. Throughout the levels, there're cages that contain keys. Get the keys and at the end of the level, you'll be sent to the special zone where you could get a chaos emerald. This amounts to you running into colored balls, dashing at the right moments and avoiding spiky balls. You could also get some extra lives depending on how quickly you get the emerald.

Graphics

I have the feeling this game wasn't completed anywhere in 2003. The graphics didn't hold up very well. The game, at least the versions I've seen, look like they'd be a late Dreamcast release at best. There were better looking games at this time, even before. Maybe it's down to the engine they used. This was the first Sonic game to utilize the RenderWare engine so that might have something to do with it.

A little bit of trivia, the cutscenes (not the ones directly in the levels mind you) in the game were done by Vision Scape Interactive. They were working on a Sonic game of their own at the time (Sonic Extreme for the XBOX) which never came through. Would you believe me if I told you the graphics in their prototype for the game looked a hair better than what was used in Sonic Heroes?

Etc.

Years ago, here's where I'd shit on the Sonic cast from this era. Now I'm over it and I will give a more cohesive critique. The cast admittedly improved from their Sonic Adventure days, back when they had the mentality to just provide a voice and call it a day, but a lot of the voices didn't go so well.
Cream sounds a bit apathetic, like she wants to show she cares about what's happening but it doesn't shine through.

Knuckles is mostly the same, and it's a bit grating. It's sorta why I preferred his successor actors, regardless of what they did to the character, it just sounded more lively.

Espio's voice sounds a bit out of place, it could've easily passed for Shadow's voice in the 4Kids era.

Jon St. John's portrayal of Big compliments the actor's current mentality. Seriously fuck that guy.

Lastly, Tails's voice is the worst offender of them all. Tails's previous actors sounded ok in the Sonic Adventure titles, but here, it sucks big time. Sorta why SEGA went with female actors from then-on. Only positive is that it shows hiring kids to voice your characters is not only a money sink, but a recipe for a bad turnout.

I focus on the acting because in this game, nobody ever shuts the fuck up. There're audio cues whenever you switch to the characters, again, they tell you which characters would be most appropriate to use, they give analogies for whatever's happening to them, if you took a shot every time someone spoke, I doubt you'd be able to speak English anymore. But on the upside, they don't talk about the wonders of rings and stating the obvious isn't as common. Take a wild guess what I'm comparing Heroes to.

Now, I could forgive this because this is a teammate oriented game, and I can't imagine what it'd be like if everyone just did what they had to in pure silence, but I don't know, the dialogue needed work. The only team that didn't bug me with the constant dialogue was Team Dark, as they had a much clearer dynamic, and I could forgive the fact that Omega talks the most because it's in his nature, I guess. I could forgive Team Rose's dialogue since they are part of the easy mode and people playing it may need to sharpen up on the game mechanics for the later levels, Team Chaotix is closer to Team Sonic's in terms of more counter-intuitive dialogue, but Chaotix doesn't have Tails yammering on, and that's good enough for me.

Music

One thing that prevents me from taking a power drill to the ears is the soundtrack. There's not a single bad song in the game (well except for the title track which doesn't work well for me), they fit the atmosphere and give gamers the right attitude when playing them. My particular favorites are the ones in both casino levels, the power plant stage and both Egg Fleet stages.

Overall

I know I've been negative. Yes, those flaws define the game and it really didn't hold up well at all, but by the end of it, there's worse. Characters aren't spewing profanity just to try and make the game more adult, it wasn't rushed for a Christmas release and console launch, it wasn't bogged down by broken motion controls, especially the Kinect, it's not protected by some hidden law where if you say something mean about it you'd be worse than Hitler, it has some charm.

It's a bit like a messy room, it's an eyesore, but you still have room to move. Still very flawed though.