Sonic Heroes
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| ♥ | This article is dedicated to Deem Bristow (April 11, 1947 - January 15, 2005), the voice actor of Dr. Eggman in the English version, who died from a heart failure at the age of 57. |
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 "Ah yeah! Our next adventure awaits us, so there's no time to waste! Yeah, we're Sonic Heroes!"
Sonic the Hedgehog | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Sonic Heroes is a 2003 action-adventure platformer video game developed by Sonic Team USA and published by Sega, as part of their Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Sonic Heroes is best known for being the first Sonic game to release on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox as well as the first mainline game to not be released on a Sega console after the discontinuation of the Dreamcast in 2001 and Sega transitioning to third party developers. Players control twelve characters in their own seperate teams and gameplay: Team Sonic, Team Dark, Team Rose, and Team Chaotix as they go through several zones to defeat the antagonist Doctor Eggman, and the unknown threat of Metal Sonic looming.
Sonic Heroes is known for playing in style similar to the original Genesis games (1991-1994). Sonic Team USA used the software RenderWare to develop the game, later using it for Shadow the Hedgehog (2005). It is also one of the last Sonic games to feature the original game cast that started with Sonic Adventure (1998) before they were replaced with the 4Kids cast a year earlier in the anime Sonic X (2003-2005). Sonic Heroes was released in December 2003 in Japan and released on January 6, 2004 in North America, the latter being one day after Sonic Battle (2003). Shadow the Hedgehog, who was supposed to die in his debut game, was bought back because of popularity amongst fans.
Gameplay
The plot is divided into several stories. Sonic Heroes consists of four different stories, during which the player takes on the role of one of four teams of three. The goals of each team are different, but the levels and boss fights are common to all of them. After completing the game with each team and obtaining the seven Chaos Emeralds, the player will unlock the Last Story, which is the epilogue of the entire game and shows its true ending.
Each character has an individual ability: speed for fast stages, power for breaking objects, or flight for reaching high platforms, and the player must use these abilities to traverse the fourteen stages.Each stage has a different layout for each team, providing different challenges for each story. Each team also has a Team Blast skill, which can be performed when the Team Blast Gauge is full. This can be achieved by performing such actions as destroying enemies or collecting many Rings.
Why It's Heroic
- To start off, the idea of using teamwork and switching between characters during a game is great, and it helps the characters have new mechanics that we have never seen before such as Team Rose Big's umbrella that he uses to levitate and Team Chaotix's "Chaotix Recital." The team mechanics add a wide variety of moves that allow different paths. Speaking of Team Chaotix, it marks the return of Vector the Crocodile, Charmy Bee, and Espio the Chameleon since Knuckles Chaotix, and for Espio, Sonic the Fighters. This is mainly because Sonic Team USA thought that they were unique and had never used them before, considering that Chaotix was the only game that both Charmy and Vector had appeared in at the time.[1]
- The writing and dialouge, while it can be cheesy or goofy at times, can be pretty fun to listen to at times, especially with the voice actors. Shiro Maekawa did a great job writing the script, just like he did in Sonic Adventure 2, and while its story may not be as good as Adventure 2, it still has good stuff to say about it. The dynamic between the characters in their teams is really interesting, including Team Dark as Shadow is trying to regain his memory and becomes friends with Rouge and Omega along the way and it really is just nice to see. It's great how everyone has their own motives: Team Sonic wants to stop Eggman from ruling the world in three days, Team Dark wants to find Eggman's treasure, kill him, and find out about Shadow's past, Team Rose wants to find Chocola and Froggy, and Team Chaotix just wants to pay rent.
- The animation may be a slight downgrade from the previous Adventure games, but it has its good stuff about it. While the models may look too shiny and the pre-rendered cutscenes can look stiff, it is definitely better then the laughably awkward motion-capture that was used in Adventure 2. Plus, the render of Sonic in Heroes is just iconic. One look at it and you can definitely tell that its from this game.
- The controls are easy to learn and comfortable to use, being able to consistently change characters within the levels and take advantage of the abilities that the characters have very well, the speed training gives you good mobility, being able to move in different directions in a natural way in a three-dimensional environment and actions like Triangle Jump and Homing Attack are responsive, you can also get used to the speed of speed characters with practice, using jumps to moderate your speed.
- The art direction in Sonic Heroes is really good. Each of the stages that you play as is absolutely packed with vibrant colors and themes that is pleasant to look at, even to this day. Compared to the realism of Adventure 1 & 2, Heroes has a more cartoony art style which some fans perfer, but both of the realism for the those games are equally great, with the latter having several great set pieces all around. The wacky color environments feel like something you'd find on another planet like Mobius from American Sonic media, and not Earth like other games.
- You can't praise a Sonic game without talking about its music. The music is outstanding, just like the previous games. Jun Senoue returns from the previous games as lead composer along with several other composers and the music absolutely slaps so hard. The main theme "Sonic Heroes" provided with vocals by Johnny Gioeli is a great song that signifys Team Sonic's sense of freedom and carefree. Team Sonic's main theme song We Can may have some lyrics where people consider to be cheesy like "The secret is sharing your dreams" but the main focus of the song is that you're stronger with the power of teamwork and friends. The theme when you fight the final boss Metal Overlord is titled "What I'm Made Of" and it is one of the best songs in the entire game. Not only does the lyrics focus on Sonic, but it also focuses on Metal Sonic as well, like a duet between the two with lyrics like: "Cuz what I have in my two hands is enough to set me free" (signifying Tails and Knuckles), "Try to reach inside of me, try to drain my energy, let me show you just what I'm made of" signifying Metal Sonic showing off his true powers. What makes it even better is the amazing vocals from Johnny Gioeli.
- The other music such as Egg Fleet go absolutely wild with its music, such as in Egg Fleet, the drums and beat in Egg Fleet's theme is just having a wild time and is a banger to listen to. The themes for the other teams are catchy and nice to listen to, especially Team Dark and Team Chaotix's themes. The ending theme "Finale: Adventure Must Go On" is a pretty sad song to listen to, as an adventure that you have grown attached to for so long has finally ended, and on a good note as Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles have defeated Metal Sonic. It even makes this sadder to the extent of The Last Scene from Sonic Adventure 2 is that this is one of the last Sonic games (and last mainline game) to feature the original cast that started with Adventure 1, as they would get replaced by the 4Kids cast starting with Shadow the Hedgehog in 2005.
- There are melodies with happy music such as Seaside Hill or Grand Metropolis, Casino Park and Bingo Highway have electronic music that fits with the atmosphere of a casino, while the music of the castle levels has a gloomy tone, fitting in very well with the terrifying atmosphere that the aesthetics of the level want to convey, and the vocal themes are very good, such as the Team Dark and Team Chaotix vocal songs and the main theme.
- The idea of extra missions taken from Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 are fun and add replayability to the game, extra missions include the extra missions of Team Rose where you have to collect two hundred rings where you have to explore the level to find rings and you must be agile to get some rings, Team Sonic extra missions where you have to pass levels in a time limit, which requires you to take advantage of Sonic's speed while using teamwork, Team Dark extra missions where you must destroy a number of enemies, which requires you to have good agility in combat and Team Chaotix's extra missions.
- One of the few times Metal Sonic can talk and it's cool to see him as the main antagonist of the game. It's something that hasn't been done along with Metal Sonic's character arc. Metal Sonic in this game has broken free from Eggman's programming controls. Not only does he want to destroy Sonic, but he also betrays Eggman and tries to rule the world for himself, even going so far as to shapeshift into Eggman and battle the four teams all at once. Metal Sonic is not playing around, he's tired of everything: Eggman bossing him around, him getting neglected, beaten by Sonic over and over again, he's going freelance now. This is even shown in Metal Sonic/Metal Overlord's dialogue in the final battle: "I can never defeat you, which is why I transformed my own body with just my bare hands." And him being neglected kind of makes sense, considering that he hadn't appeared in a mainline Sonic title since Sonic CD, and that was a decade ago at the time. Ryan Drummond, who voices Sonic, also voices Metal Sonic in the game and his voice performance is great, made better with the robotic filter put on.
- This game takes the best concepts and mechanics of the Sonic Adventure series, making them better with the concept of teamwork, with larger and more varied levels with different routes and puzzles, a phenomenal soundtrack and gameplay takes advantage of the mechanics of teamwork.
- Although it doesn't seem like it, teams have different difficulties which helps a little bit to repeat levels in each team:
- Team Rose is the easy mode for beginners, which introduces you in a clearer way the mechanics and the levels are shorter and include some changes in the level design.
- Team Sonic is the normal mode, which stages have a longer length.
- Team Dark is the hard mode for experts, which have the longest length of stages.
- Team Chaotix is mission-based, where you have to collect a certain amount of collectibles to complete the stage. If you reach the Goal Ring, you begin at the start of an act.
- Clever integration of the 12 playable characters; there are four teams with three characters in each one. Since every team is roughly identical in structure, go through the same amount of levels, and have their own reasons for pursuing Eggman, the game manages to give each team a purpose without having to create multiple gameplay styles.
- On that note, there are three character types; Speed, Flight, and Power. Speed characters run the fastest and can perform the Homing Attack and form whirlwinds to climb poles, Flight characters can attack airborne enemies and temporarily fly in the air, which makes them ideal for precision platforming, and Power characters can glide on air fans and are the most versatile in combat.
- Team Chaotix have different objectives, for example, collect items, destroy objects or enemies, pass the level without being detected, among others, to be a variation of the other teams, it is a good implementation to the game, to vary the formula of levels linear of the other teams, the team offers a good variety of missions, the search for objects is simple and it is a good exploration implementation, the dialogue of the characters helps you to know where some objectives are. It helps the characters stick out from the others, like Team Chaotix's dynamic and tagline of never turning down work that pays.
- Lighthearted story that captures the fun tone the Sonic The Hedgehog series is known for.
- The characters all have different attitudes that make them stand out. We all know Sonic who has his cocky, carefree but caring attitude, Knuckles with his strong demeanor and protective instincts, and Tails with his inventiveness and brains, but we also have the other characters.
- Team Dark: Shadow, Rouge, and Omega. One of the best teams in the game because of their dynamic. Shadow is serious, especially with his amnesia and coping with whether he is real or not after encountering a Shadow Android. Shadow also has a rivalry with Omega, the first time they interacted they tried to kill each other and were going to if Rouge hadn't stopped them. But Shadow also has signs of cockiness like Sonic that manage to make him more three-dimensional with him saying lines like "Hmph, well then, it'll be a date to die for!" and "Some things never change, do they?" and even smirking when he's about to charge at Sonic. Even though Shadow thinks he isn't real, it doesn't matter to him because he is the ultimate lifeform no matter what, with him saying in the Egg Fleet level: "You'll regret this, doctor. I may not be real, but I'm still the ultimate lifeform, Shadow the Hedgehog!" Rouge we already saw her back in Adventure 2. Rouge is a treasure hunter, spy, and jewel thief who usually seduces people before taking jewels, mainly Knuckles. It's shown throughout the game that Rouge cares for Shadow, asking him if he's alright when he encounters the Shadow Android, and constantly reassuring Shadow of where they're going. Omega has a very serious demeanor even with his rivalry with Shadow. Omega wants to straight-up destroy Eggman, he doesn't even hide it. He was sealed away in a room to watch Shadow in the pod, and now hates Eggman because he was neglected by him (if I had a nickel for a robot who hates their creator and turn against him, I'd have two).
- It is so nice to see Cream the Rabbit and Cheese the Chao as playable characters after Sonic Advance 2 and them appearing in Sonic X.
- Unlike in Sonic Adventure, Big the Cat actually has a purpose and it's nice to see him be helpful to more characters other than Froggy.
- The ranking system which gives a grade after completing the levels is great, it serves its purpose of evaluating the agility of the player in the levels as in Sonic Adventure 2, taking mainly into account the time, the number of rings earned and the combat, depending on your agility of the mechanics and how fast you can pass the levels you can get the highest note, this system also rewards the performance of the team characters and the points obtained when fighting robots as bonuses, so the combats can be useful to obtain points, in exchange for the effort invested in them.
- The level design is comparable to Sonic Adventure 2, but featuring larger levels where there are too many routes to explore where you can find shortcuts or secrets depending on your skills and the way you use the characters favoring the value of repetition and the game takes advantage of teamwork by having routes for a specific character, it also has a good balance between speed and silverforming, with a considerable number of platforms on which you have to jump precisely using a flight character keeping the speed in mind, they also include a different concept depending on the level.
- Each character can collect special orbs that upgrade their attributes, and they can level up three times in every stage.
- Each team has a unique special attack called Team Blast, which has unique aftereffects such as temporarily granting you invincibility and stopping time (which unfortunately includes level progression; thankfully you can press the Team Blast button again to cancel the effect), you should use it at important times with large hordes of enemies.
- The combat is fast-paced and strategic; some enemies have attributes that make one character more suitable for defeating it. For example, if an enemy has a shield, you can use the Speed character's whirlwind attack to blow it away then switch to the Power character to quickly dispatch the enemy (the enemies, in general, go down quickly if you use the Power characters).
- Enemies are stronger compared to the Sonic Adventure series, they have more life and some enemies need you to change characters to defeat them, taking advantage of the concept of the game, teamwork.
- The graphics look very nice with beautiful and colorful scenarios, the landscape and the water also look good on the first two levels (Seaside Hill and Ocean Palace), the Casino Park and Bingo Highway themes have a beautiful lighting and vivid colors demonstrating in a good way the environment of a casino and the enemies are well designed, with good lighting and textures.
- Decent voice acting in Japanese and English. Also, the audio mixing is much better than Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 with the movement of the mouths of the characters being well synchronized with the dialogue. And the music finally doesn't drown out the characters voices, unlike the Adventure games.
- By completing missions, you get emblems, if you have a certain amount of emblems, you unlock multiplayer minigames, which is quite entertaining due to the variety of minigames, if you get all the emblems with rank A, you can unlock the Super Hard mode, which it is designed for expert players, putting your skills and the mechanics learned during the game to the maximum, passing all the levels with an increased difficulty, although one problem is that you do not get a continue after losing all your lives, but at least the game has a system save mode temporary to resume any saved level.
- The game's CG cutscenes are, at least visually, of good quality and the Xbox version features better quality FMVs.
- The game has decent replay value, despite being repetitive.
Bad Qualities
- The game's quality is extremely inconsistent between the consoles because Sega had little experience making games for the sixth generation of consoles at that time (it makes sense considering they had left the console market and were dealing with making games on different platforms), making it hard to pick which is the best one.
- The PlayStation 2 version does not support progressive scan, suffers from downgraded graphics, longer loading times, runs at 30fps with some major instances of slowdown, low quality and heavily compressed sound effects, blurry water textures, and collision detection problems due to Sonic Team not using RenderWare correctly. However, this allows the player to change the voice line language to Japanese.
- The Xbox version is missing some level animations, glitched water textures, occasional button lag, and has very heavy framerate drops throughout the game. However, this port has faster loading times, and it uses Dolby Digital 5.1 for both gameplay and FMV cutscenes.
- The GameCube version lacks the option to switch to Japanese voiceovers. However, this port is able to maintain a decent framerate of 60 frames per second, and has a unique Anti Flicker option.
- The PC version is hard to run, has issues with the voice lines, audio-balancing issues with Knuckles' voice lines, some missing voice clips for each character (especially for Amy and Cream), confusing keyboard controls, incorrect texture mappings for characters like Metal Sonic, and loses the option to select the Japanese character voices but it allows you to enter "Charmy_Shutup 1" into the configurations to disable the character's attack clips, includes higher-resolutions and slightly better quality HUD textures, comes with bonus mouse pointers and wallpapers for your computer, and supports modding.
- The level design is sloppy, often throwing in to the mix gimmicks that don’t work well, such as relying on rail grinding and pinball mechanics, pulling switches to open doors, and using the light dash.
- Bingo Highway and Casino Park are the worst stages in the entire game since they control poorly, rely too much on pinball mechanics, and because of the pinball tables glitch mentioned in the 8th pointer.
- Bingo Highway is arguably worse because of the fact that there are holes on the pinball tables, meaning that due to the poor controls, it's easy to lose a life in.
- Rail Canyon has a lazy design that consists mainly of moving on rails, which is quite awkward mainly due to the poor polishing of the rails, which makes you lose easily and has uninteresting combat sections. Overall, the level feels very flat, boring, and takes too long.
- Speaking of combat, the boss battles come along short since they are easy and can be beaten by just spamming the homing attack over and over again. The same can be said for the team battles since one can just spam the tornado attack in order to get a quick victory.
- Some of the extra missions are frustrating, like Team Sonic's extra mission in Bingo Highway, which requires getting to the Goal Ring in 6 minutes. Simply put, it's next to impossible to get to the Goal Ring in time, let alone getting an A rank, also the extra missions of Team Dark consist of eliminating 100 enemies of the level, so you must search in all places, this takes a lot of time and you can easily miss an enemy, this would also be a main problem of the next game.
- The controls are inconsistent: the homing attack and light dash are unresponsive, jumping carries little momentum, the fly and power characters are absurdly slow and the characters reach top speed in 2 seconds.
- Team Chaotix’s team blast is overpowered as you get a big load of rings every time you use it which makes it an easily spammable move.
- The collision detection is faulty: enemy projectiles can go through the edges of walls, the light dash won’t work unless you’re perfectly lined up with the trail of rings, the switches are pretty difficult to pull since you must stand in an exact spot and in Bingo Highway it’s sometimes possible to clip through the pinball tables.
- Rail grinding is just as awkward as it was in SA2. While it is nice to have that extra move to pick up speed, switching is still unresponsive and it can be the cause of many cheap deaths.
- The way to get the Chaos Emeralds is very problematic:
- To access them, you need to break a cage in a level to unlock a key (there are 3 cages per level, but you only need one key), then take it to the end of the level and complete it. If you get hit or fall into a pit, you lose the key, which is hard to avoid given the frequency of the enemy and the length of the stages.
- The special stages themselves are worse: the controls are even more slippery and spinning around the pipe is very jittery. Later stages are also littered with bombs in tricky patterns that become frustrating to avoid, and touching a bomb stuns you for 1 second and stops all your speed, which when chasing a Chaos Emerald, gives it enough time to travel a ridiculous distance in front of you.
- To unlock the last story, you have to play through the game four times (one as each team) and collect the Chaos Emeralds (luckily, you only have to collect them once), in addition, the teams have few differences, you will be playing 4 times with a similar design (although Team Chaotix is a mission mode), which extends the duration of the game artificially.
- There are few checkpoints and dying could result in you losing a lot of progress in particularly long stages.
- The camera has a tendency to do anything but offer the right perspective, leading to lots of mistakes, and it usually gets stuck on walls and other times struggles to keep up with the characters.
- While most voices aren't terrible in this game, there are some issues with them.
Tips
- Although it may not look like it each of the teams function as difficulty settings, and it goes as follows:
- Team Rose is the easy difficulty, with shorter levels and a tutorial in the first level.
- Team Sonic is the normal difficulty.
- Team Dark is the hard difficulty, with longer levels.
- Team Chaotix is a wild card in regards to difficulty.
- To get an A Rank, it's recommended to do the following:
- Don't lose a life.
- Defeat as many enemies as possible.
- Collect many Rings for points.
- Try to beat the stage really fast.
- If you're going to play through the special stages, get them with Team Rose, as their stages are shorter. Additionally, always use the Power character on your team when navigating them as they have the better control. Hold down the boost button rather than mashing it.
- There is an easy way to beat the two enemy rush boss fight, and that's with Team Chaotix as their supers can easily mop the floors with them as they will gain enough rings to replenish their super bar.
- If you are going to play it, either choose the GameCube version for the best experience.
Reception
Critical reception to Sonic Heroes was mixed, with the GameCube and Xbox respectively scoring 72 and 73 on Metacritic and both versions have scores of 75% on GameRankings. Reviews for the PS2 and PC ports were also mixed, with their respective Metacritic scores being 64 and 66 and their GameRankings scores being 60% and 71%. But Sonic Heroes has received more positive reception from Sonic fans, mainly LS Mark, J's Reviews, and more.
Trivia
- At the end of all stages & bosses in the game the characters respond with quotes based on the rank achieved, it has been reported that in some versions of the game (the PC port are always missing the voice line) that Cream stays silent if you achieve an A rank.
- In NTSC-J versions of the games, Team Chaotix' team blast takes a longer amount of time to finish in an identical fashion to the 8th of October prototype, a comparison can be seen here.
- This game marks the first appearance of the Chaotix since 1995's Knuckles' Chaotix. Vector and Charmy's return was 8 years in the making, while Espio's brief appearance in Sonic the Fighters made his absence only 7 years long, while unfortunately, Mighty was dropped from the Chaotix, and he wouldn't appear in the series for 23 years until 2018's Sonic Mania Plus, alongside Ray, whose absence was 25 years long.
- The game spawned the "Wow, my head's spinning!" and "Shit, Rock, Shit!" memes.
- It was the second Sonic game to have a McDonald’s promotion, the first is Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
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