SONIC HEROES: The Icon's Decline | GEEK CRITIQUE

in a statement that would be largely forgotten by public memory Yuji naka the head of Sonic Team declared that 2003 would be the year of Sonic now considering how 2004-2005 and especially 2006 were gonna go it's easy to see why nobody remembers this but by that same token it may be hard to believe that at the time this kind of optimism did not seem misplaced after all Sonic Adventure 2 battle had just become one of the game teams killer apps and in its success made a whole new generation of Sonic fans Sega wasn't about to let that momentum go to waste within a year they would flood Nintendo's platforms with the character that once rivaled Mario pumping out a compilation of every last one of his Genesis classics a pair of GBA titles that harken back to his 2d roots a questionable at best port of adventure one and even a couple of genre defying spin-offs and as if this downpour of games wasn't enough Sega also got the franchise back on Saturday mornings with Sonic X and even secured the holy grail of marketing to children with the McDonald's Happy Meal time as a brand Sonic the Hedgehog had not been so well positioned or so relevant since his glory days a decade earlier Sega seemed to be as tenacious as ever determined to turn their mascot from an icon of the one niche console back into an icon of gaming itself as a lifelong fan of the series it was awesome to see even if all the ports and compilations kind of little repetitive and Sonic X seemed a little too Thorndyke E but hey I got it you do need to appeal to kids and after all my finiman started with this stuff like this was easy to shrug off when I knew that all of this effort was building to something that was sure to be tremendous Sonic Heroes it would be the first Sonic game built from the ground up for the next generation to be released simultaneously across all three major platforms to say I was excited would be an understatement this is what my desktop looked like in the summer of 2003 Sonic Heroes looked for all the world like the perfect capstone for the year of Sonic like it would be the moment the franchise would truly return to prominence and so on January 6th 2004 Sonic Heroes was finally released and I bought it I bought it it was the first game that I had ever purchased with money I'd earned myself and I remember thinking there was something really serendipitous about that after all from counting down the days to Sonic and Knuckles in 1994 to pre-ordering a Dreamcast in 1999 to waking up early for Sonic Adventure 2 in 2001 every single time my hype and anticipation had been rewarded with a game that was evergreen to me a game that I would and to this day still do go back to a year after year once again this is hard to believe now but at that time Sonic Team was one of the most respected and revered developers in the world and they had never ever let me down as excited as I was I took the time to swing by my best friend's place on the way home to invite him over to experience the glory with me but he already had plans and said he was going on a first date with some random crush his loss I got home I thumbed through the instruction manual I put in that disc and I took a breath it had been two and a half years since the last big Sonic game but I had absolutely no doubt that heroes would be more than worth the wait well I sure played it I finished it one time and 14 years later I have never played it again in contrast to every single game that came before and plenty that would come after I have never gone back to Sonic Heroes until now I've waited a long time to say this let's get critique [Music] the entire promise of the premise here repeated an interview after interview after interview before the game came out was that Sonic Heroes would mark a return to the series roots so I think it's only fair to examine how Sonic Heroes delivered on that the most immediately noticeable difference between this game and the adventure series is the aesthetic any attempt at a realistic cohesive environment back with pop rod guitar is out and what's in its place I can admit with hindsight is the primary reason I was so dang hiked in the first place hills valleys and plateaus highlighted by trippy checkerboard patterns and stretching as far as the eye can see a series of bright colorful very gorgeous zones each one tied to its own unique gimmicks and enhanced by a melody driven soundtrack seeing these characters I'd grown up with Daffy through scenery likeness again welled up you're a nostalgia fer well for memories that weren't even a decade old yet alas great games are not born from nostalgia alone that's something sonic team sure struggled with over the years but I don't want that to color my impressions here Sonic Heroes was and is still aesthetically delightful in a way that manages to be an iteration on the classic design principles and not just a pandering carbon copy of them but that's just a look at the levels if I'm praising the visual design there is one major exception and it's pretty glaring these character models are flat ugly look if they were just a little off model I could kind of excuse it you know like having three playable characters on screen probably meant they didn't have as many polygons to work with that would have been fine but the real problem is the uncanny weight of these models are textured and the way the lighting reflects off of them big the cat is especially harrowing like this and this unque effect is made even worse with this strange animation imposing like characters seem to visibly struggle the whole big awkward poses and their victory animations oh I am look at that squid hand by the way this is not something I'm just criticizing with hindsight I had a problem with this even at a time it was pretty invoke in this era for games to try for a cartoony look in a way that ended up making their characters resemble shiny plasticky action figures and sonic heroes was one of the worst offenders the return to the roots came with a return to Sonics classic progression structure seaside hill is the first stage and the second level is a thematic free mixin first which then gives way to a boss fight that's also still in the same archetype the whole game follows this pattern two acts of one's own capture the boss fight and yet weirdly enough this state is not called seaside hill act 2 it's ocean palace and I don't really get why why is this old-school progression present and everything but name even a story replay only lets you start from what would be active one of a level and I mean like bingo highway is a great name for a stage but what would be wrong with just having two acts of casino park zone every three but we'll get there oh god I've spent several minutes whining about character models and what the levels are called but the real quality of the game comes down to how well it plays so here we go the concept sounded so freakin awesome play as Sonic Tails and Knuckles all together swapping between them with the press of a button with full access to all of their moves and abilities imagine the way that could open up level decide how climbing gliding flying and speed could all blend together quite frankly it seemed like a perfect answer for what the adventure series was missing what we actually got was this slippery disjointed mess of a game that constantly has to justify its dull boring mechanics via repetitive arbitrary set pieces and oh by the way you'll be lucky if those mechanics even work at a time so I guess there's your spoiler alert it's all downhill from here the gameplay is broken into three distinct styles you control one character at a time and a full half of the face buttons are dedicated to swapping to either of the other two since the whole structural makeup of the team pages depending on who's in the lead the game calls these formations speed formation is on the surface similar to Sonic's game played from the adventure series but what may be surprising especially given how tight the controls were in the last game how slippery heroes's and that's something you always hear about it but why does it feel this way I asked a few prolific members of Masonic hacking community and according to them heroes has actually built on the same foundation as the adventure series with quite a bit of code shared between them however in heroes Sonic's max speed and acceleration have both been quite arbitrarily doubled but he can't slow down any faster than he did before obviously this makes it much trickier to move the characters where you need them to go with any sort of precision now maybe this was done to give the speed sections more spectacle and your intended to swap to the other characters to do anything else that's fair enough but without accurate reliable movement for Sonic the player controlled tempo that Sonic Adventure 2 embodied so well is no longer feasible instead heroes has to rely on wide-open corridors where you just get to watch the characters run fast and look I'll say this over and over speedy set-pieces where you don't really have to do much of anything was always a part of the appeal to Sonic but until now those moments were just moments the real depth of the series was defined by a skill mastery as becoming skillful would allow a player to use the character super power to blast ever more impressively through its stages sometimes the game might be focused on using the speed to uncover alternate pathways or find secrets sometimes it'll be more of a spectacle platformer even going forward sometimes the game would be designed well and other times it would be a complete disaster but either way even the nadir of the series can at least feel pretty impressive when you know what you're doing because the gameplay is still that reliance on you because next time you'll be faster next time you'll be better you can sharpen your skill in 1991 sonic team set out to make a game that was specifically designed to reward a player for replaying it this was the principle the series was founded on and to me it is what defines a sonic game anyway instead of any of that Sonic Heroes has a never ending complicated moves assigned to two buttons that will allow our heroes to automatically traverse the same kind of obstacles over and over over and over and over again throughout the whole game look that Sonic carrying a tornado never you mind that using this move brings his momentum to a dead halt and it doesn't even transition into anything else the important thing is that now stages can be filled with polls press the a button and then press the B button the sit back and watch the characters spin around and even delete between polls no player input needed here because then you might accidentally mess up and that want to be fun for over a decade at this point we had dreamed of a game that would let us play Sonic CDs intro sequence skillfully leaping from obstacle to obstacle and 3G well if I got good news for you you see those two walls close together there's literally only one reason that ever happens triangle jump yep this is what we waited for and because it's mapped to the same button as the homing attack you even get to use it accidentally when you don't mean to oh and look how about that there's not really any momentum coming out of that either but let's say that you fought through all this and managed to enter something resembling a flow state are you ready to really punch it up to 11 you can gain even more speed with rocket excel I said gain even more speed with with rocket hop back see there it is you uh you just need both knuckles and Tails to be in position to do the move and that raises an interesting question if you're controlling Sonic who is controlling his teammates why they follow you automatically of course and did another lovely evolution on the old Sonic and Tails gameplay your AI teammates love nothing more than to phase in and out of position in all that the very most ideal circumstances limiting what moves you have access to through no fault of your own but wait oh oh it's yet another gargantuan better switch to knuckles and use triangle dies a gimped version of the glide where you move so slowly that it's utterly useless in any other context oh man I've been at this for five paragraphs I think that sarcasm might be my best defense against this game so in power formation everyone lines up side by side which is supposed to let you spread out and take multiple it wants to nab goodies but almost never works out that way because the AI can't stay where it's supposed to with a press of the B button in this form Sonic and Tails well they curl up and attach themselves to Knuckles fists or you can Punk things with them honest fists you can also make justice rating from above because there is a vastly increased focus on combat in Sonic Heroes I go so far as to say that fighting enemies is kind of the main point of power formation so remember Sonic Heroes is supposed to be a return to the roots of the series and Once Upon a 90's dream every zone was complimented with its own set of unique thematically cohesive badniks in Sonic Heroes every zone is filled with n pawns what oh my mistake they're actually called Eggman's robots they're called that regardless of whether or not doing so makes any sense now the game does introduce enemy variants as it goes on but any of them that are more complicated than in advanced robots also tend to require one of those oh so spectacular moves to defeat look a turtle make a tornado look a shield make tornado so you fight the same handful of repetitive enemies of competitive solutions stage after stage and look yes games are kind of about justifying mechanics through level design but sonic games at their core had always been so simple to understand a button to jump maybe a button to roll and yet there was still so much depth that could be mined out of that in Sonic Heroes figuring out what the B button does in one of your three formations depends on whether or not you're holding up on the stick whether or not knuckles teammates are currently attacked to his fists whether or not he's in the air and even what RPG like level knuckles is that because what this game was really missing was another layer of complexity see those little pits on the display characters level up throughout of stage by collecting these colorful ball things are just hitting checkpoints and that determines how powerful their abilities are to justify that enemies now have to have hit points a via this eyesore of a UI element oh and if you happen to die in a stage everybody gets knocked back down to level zero which hurts way worse than losing a life ever did up until now you got through levels faster by getting better at the game Sonic Heroes design just want to incentivize anything like that so this level up system ends up being the answer to a question that never should have been asked in the first place and yes staying level up does still let you beat stages faster but it's not because of anything you have to do differently the enemies just take more damage to their hit points in a Sonic game this is once again completely counter to the roots as much as anything else though combat is let down by a lack of crunch it's not at all satisfying to whale away on enemies in fact they don't even make a sound effect while you whittle away at their hit points combat is boiled down to yet another arbitrary chore that you need to overcome before you can move on and now let's talk about tails Sonic Adventure 2 garnered controversy by putting tails in a meth completely ignoring the characters defining traits well not to worry Sonic Heroes over corrects this by returning the world's most famous kitsune to the role he was born to play the top rung of a cheerleading pyramid tails is going to fly high because he absolutely refuses to do anything else this not only looks stupid it controls even worse heroes here is that it's slippy dubious a problem that's only exacerbated since this is the one formation where you don't stop at a lick oh and by the way that whole mechanic which was such a feather in Sonic Adventure two's cap has now turned into yet another clunky momentum stopper there are plenty of sections where rails or platforms weren't quite welded to the level geometry this even happens very consistently during semi scripted set pieces anyway how about those flight controls in Sonic Adventure 1 tails this flight was used to great effect to open up level design but heroes makes no such allowances while the team can hover in place forever they're only allowed a tiny bit of horizontal momentum before they plummet down like rocks see that bar that pops up on the HUD that is all the movement that you ever get this combines with the team's airspeed being a busy slow manages to turn flying which stands to be sucker Joe in a platform game into another clunky drawer that you'll only want to make use of when the level design explicitly demands it tails also gets one of the game's most inconsistent offensive abilities in Thunder suit where he launches his partner's enemies but because this is the game's wonky AI there's no guarantee of what they'll hit maybe they launch off get stuck in a boss and drop it down in seconds or maybe don't go on a completely different trajectory and get wedged in a spring fling around in circles and not hit anything or collide with an attack and get stunned yeah your AI partners who once again your move set depends on can get stun locked when this happens you killing the swap to them until they get up imagine if Donkey Kong Country worked like this and did he can just get walloped by an enemy when you don't even have control of him would that be fun would that be good game design Oh sonic heroes isn't really that bad that's what they always say right right this is fine on the bright side tails might actually get to stay grounded for a little bit while this happens oh and look he throws dummy ring bombs oh let's hope that move comes back in a future installment flight formation might not be quite as repetitive as the others but it makes up for that by still managing to be the worst of the three taken as a whole Sonic Heroes is the most egregious example I've ever seen of a game being less than the sum of its parts even though many of these abilities are only needed in very specific situations they're not context-sensitive there's way too much complexity crammed into just two buttons and none of these disjointed abilities flow into each other so in trying to clumsily justify the gimmick of the entire game Sonic Heroes ends up being over designed full of mind-numbing ly repetitive gameplay lacking anything that even resembles a Sonic game lacking any kind of flow and rhythm or momentum speed sections are all the same spinning what a wild ride tower sections are all the same I'll take care of them flying sections are all the same let's leave this to tails and as if you haven't noticed nobody in this game ever shuts off the trio chatters incessantly throughout every single part of every single zone and you know look I shouldn't compare it against such a distance equal like this but I'm just gonna say it this is something that even sonic courses did better horses has plenty of talkative characters too but the dialogue is often about the situation and serves to highlight who the characters are and how they relate to each other oh don't get me wrong the actual plot of forces is dumb bad baby dumb bad bad but as a fan of these characters I think their dialogue and voice acting is at least on point oh and most importantly forces actually lets you turn off the voices now to be fair to heroes it does have a handful of moments that show such potential characters make occasional references to earlier events in a series and this exchange in particular always got a huge smile out of me we're not going there are we yes we are but these moments are just too few and far between no most of hero's chatter is dedicated to tutorial lives like there's a big group of Eggman's robots enough promoting neon red power sign on top of a barrier that forces you to swap to power formation I wonder what the game wants me to do here but if you can't figure it out the characters will just explicitly tell you that this is a knuckle section I'll remind you exactly how to take out that great or hit those switches or take out flying enemies or just press the jump button each and every time the situation presents itself in the PC version it's been found that you can actually disable some of the chatter by adding this string to one of the settings files I'm no game designer but if you feel the need to code a flag that makes the characters shut up then maybe at the very least you should offer the same kindness to your players because like this the core trio of the series turns out to be more annoying than Omochao was because Sonic Heroes doesn't seem to have any confidence in a player's ability to know what to do in a video game it would be a little easier to put up with this if the state is at least presented you with fun challenges but throwing dole drawers in your way is one of the biggest problems with the level design stages tend to be a lot longer than what we got in either adventure game and that's no problem in and of itself but the issue arises in what they do to get their even level specific set pieces are all but guaranteed to repeat themselves two or three times whether you're getting shot out of a cannon breaking into a train tunnel are destroying an airship seen these things gets to be both thrilling and nostalgic when you see them again just a few minutes later and isn't it odd how despite the fact that this game was built for more powerful Hardware these spectacle set pieces never reach the heights of even the first game on the Dreamcast although I guess to really make the comparison we're gonna need to watch that whale chase another two or three times the whole structure of the levels is just built to waste your time rail Canyon is one of the more awful examples there are rails that you grind on and it's like they just stop designing a right then grinding is another one of those things that worked well enough in essay 2 that is bizarrely nerfed in heroes and it leads to a bevy of ridiculous deaths but don't really feel like they could be avoided but oh man rail canyon is as well-designed and fun and intuitive as a green hill itself in comparison to casino park and you know what this stage is basically sonic heroes incarnate it's a perfect representation of everything wrong with this game I know I'm pretty subtle about this so this may really surprise a lot of you but I love casino levels the neon lights the bouncy music and the pinball elements that would only work in a game like this it's probably my favorite archetype in the entire series and man bringing that old-school aesthetic to 3d casino park on a surface seems like it knocks it out of the park the visuals hold up and stand out to this day the music is just perfect and the casino gimmick seems to be pushed far beyond the boundaries of what the classics could have pulled off unfortunately then you have to start playing it and when you do you'll discover the decentral gimmick of the stage where the characters have to navigate this series of giant pinball tables manages to have worse physics than literally anything else in the game you do still maintain some control over your characters but it's incredibly inconsistent and jerky so here again sonic heroes has taken something that worked well enough six years ago and essentially done it worse I mean sonic adventures pinball physics one perfect dirty thing but they got the job done the things casino park wants you to do are just far too ambitious for such imprecise physics and it's not like this is just a bonus area you don't just bounce up into these sections voluntarily these are an integral part of progression through this stage and you'll be stuck in them until you manage to navigate to specific sections on each board and even when you do you may be beset by another problem in any other situation in this game swapping characters makes whoever you're now controlling snapped for the same position your previous hero was in and for the sake of playability that's the way it should be that makes sense but here in casino park swapping to a character who is on a pinball table will snap the camera back to wherever that character happens to be even if that character is on a pinball table and yours is not so look at this I finally escaped from the pinball section and I see okay I'm gonna want to be Sonic for this next part but when I swap characters which remember is the whole mechanic the entire game is built around this is what it's trained me to do I just get sent all the way back to the bottom level of pinball hell oh and even once you do get out don't worry this level like all the others is just lousy with dole switch puzzles unsatisfying combat and slippery platforming so even in a state like this for the visuals are so appealing and the music is so on point by the time I reached the end I was positively sick of even looking at it sick of hearing the same song loop over and over and over again and even once I did finally drag myself through it the very next level bingo highway is even worse that Sonic Heroes in a nutshell back in 2004 I think start to realize on some level that Sonic Heroes was not going to be able to live up to expectations still I persevered because I couldn't just not like a Sonic game right that had never happened before I thought maybe it was my fault maybe I'm just not playing it right maybe if I just get the right perspective on it and get a little better at it it really will be a glorious return to the roots of the series back then every zone was tapped for the unique matically appropriate boss fight against one of Robotnik's devious machines so it was in the classics so it must be in heroes except of course that heroes only actually has four unique boss fights and the second of those ends with a rehashed of the first every other level ends with either a fight against another team which are poorly justified plot wise and confounding in general or an encounter where Eggman Sion's wave after wave of those oh so generic enemies of the heroes and you know it seems almost like Eggman ran up against some kind of deadline and ran out of time to produce better boss fights hmm one more classic element heroes drags out of mothballs is the special stage because yeah this is what the adventure games were missing look the special stages in the classics range from hey that's pretty fun too oops oh man let me get back to the real game they did make use of some impressive programming tricks but that was the issue right there the reason they existed was so Sega could tell things like Oh in their marketing that's the very thing that made them special and that's exactly why they stopped having a point when the whole game was gonna be 3d anyway the Chaos Emeralds were still there and still a critical part of a series iconography but designing a totally different mode would have ran the risk of being redundant well until now I guess but hey I naively thought maybe this could be cool I mean the Sega Saturn version of 3d blast had some of the best spectral stages the series had ever seen with some really cool ideas obstacles and even platforms and like this is a whole generation later and this isn't even a surprise at this point and heroes you just chased the chaos and rolled down a tube then collect colorful balls to build up a batch later and sometimes she'll show up and drop bonuses I'm not surprised it is a degree of missed potential but as far as special stages go I guess it gets the job done it's all right all right what beat if only getting into the special stage didn't require you to find a key which you must hold on to until the end of the level but if you get hit a single time it's just gone with absolutely no way to pick it back up so if you take a hit into the end of the level then too bad you get to do the whole awful thing from the beginning because games just apparently have to take dozens of hours to be any good now it is and we have to Pat it out to get there oh and even if you do go to the trouble of getting them all you still won't be using super forms outside of the final battle I can understand this when the series was Mewtwo 3d but if you're gonna bring that special stages and not bring back super sonic it's a lot harder to overlook that it's going to sound like faint praise at this point but heroes does get a little better toward the end it never stops holding your hand but it does at least loosen its grip han castle and mystic mansion have a lot of creativity and surprises and frog forest is positively gorgeous these two levels are probably the strongest the game ever gets like in frog forest act one introduces minis frogs which are blatantly just froggy from alpha Sonic Adventure but whatever when you get near the frogs they make it rain and I've just realized how much nonsense that is but whatever it's a video game the magic rain makes the wildlife grow this gives the stage a cool dynamic quality with vines and platforms sprouting out everywhere and then act two flips the whole idea on its head introducing evil frogs that makes evil rain which some would say does the reverse and like I've said the look of the levels and their art and directioner atmosphere are never the problem that stuff is absolutely on point and it's why the game looks so spectacular and screenshots even a lot of the unique stage elements tend to be flawed more in execution than in concept and yet even at its best Heroes is still right with repetition prosperous might have some strong elements features boring puzzles physics bugs dull set pieces and oh so much adding on a sleep fling through all of this again has been eye-opening I didn't think I'd change my mind on it but it was a lot of mists potential here that I couldn't have even quantified when I was 15 but simply Sonic Heroes has been somehow even worse than I remembered but at last just as I did back in 2004 I have finally put up with it long enough to make it to the end except of course no I freaking haven't I met Kelly only one-fourth of the way there because to truly finish heroes I'll have to play through the entire game three more times and it's not like it was an adventure one where the gameplay and layout is different no three of Heroes four teams are very very slight variations on the exact same mechanics and all four of them go through the same set of repetitive garbage stages in the exact same order team dark is hard mode which basically means that every few I have when the combat gets amplified hordes of enemies make already padded out stages take even longer but on the bright side this is the only team where nobody's voice is too bad and here at shadow Babel out edgy tutorials is actually pretty entertaining while jumping in power formation team rose then is easy mode and that means that you get to play the tutorial stage even if you've already finished the game twice and even if you played it before but at least stages do trim a lot of a fat here this is probably the least painful way to play heroes it's just not saying much this is also a good place to highlight the awkward way they had to adapt Sonic Tails and Knuckles abilities onto other characters gliding is always been knuckle Singh why should a bulky metallic robot or an enormous but lovable cat be able to do these things and I don't even know what vector is supposed to be doing here but hey it is pretty sweet that vector even is here team chaotix is mission mode I was one of the poor saps who owned a Sega 32x and it was a really cool surprise to see such obscure characters brought back their theme song in particular is dangerous [Music] Gracie's probably my favorite part of the whole game but in terms of gameplay the first level has you scouring every nook and cranny of seaside hill looking for hermit crabs so si1 gave you a radar essay to nerf that radar and now sonic heroes just makes you find everything yourself the next stage isn't as bad just make me look for one lost child maybe this will work out after all onto level 3 nope nope nope nope nope and that is why the only way I ever made it through this game was to keep through the chaotic levels with a Code Breaker the team blasts are one part of the gameplay pie but I'll say is not entirely spoiled I mean you could say they announced a little more than a non-interactive cutscene where the enemies blow up but it is cool just how much is done to distinguish each team's abilities and showcase their personalities for instance enemies outside of the blast radius are still frozen by shadows chaos control team roses blast grants to a field a level up and invincibility making it an Opie ASEC ability fitting for easy mode and team chaotix you saw the start of the episode you know it's perfect but with so many characters it seems to me that Sonic team learned the wrong lesson from Sonic Adventure two's tails debacle the people cried out for tails in a game where we already knew we had Sonic and Knuckles the lesson should have been the fans wanted the core trio to be playable these three characters and the variety that they brought to the game design had become a critical appeal of the series but the West and Sonic team learned instead by their own admission by the way was the players loved nothing more than having lots and lots of playable characters and that we would beat you for it if nearly every single playable character in the series history were all in one game and the worst thing about that is that Sonic Heroes would not have been nearly as agonizing if I only had to play it once I still would've loved it or anything but it probably would have been able to skate by for a single playthrough on its visual design alone it but no you absolutely have to finish all four campaigns and then get all the Chaos Emeralds in order to unlock the last part of a story and speaking of that I've gone this entire video without saying a single word about that story there's probably a good reason for that in the classics the story was decidedly in the background told mostly through environmental cues and subtext in the adventure series the story was a lot more prominent and what's the saint's erect and here we've got Sonic Heroes it's a little bit of both but not enough of either I think the game wants to have it both ways and at once again inevitably winds up being less than the sum of those parts like right at the beginning again we open with Sonic running aimlessly through a bland generic desert that makes no attempt to deal with a series theming until he encounters a plot point yo tails long time no see thanks for the heads up egghead of course no words we've got this one oh yeah knuckles we're gonna crack that egg man why don't wait knuckles what are you doing here shouldn't you be on Angel Island does this mean nobody's guarding the Master Emerald what's up Master meanwhile I guess Rouge breaks into Eggman's base and finds that somehow shadow was just magically alive he says exactly two words on his own in the entire scene and it's left to Rouge to expose it that he apparently can't remember anything yeah that sir clears everything up seriously though such a significant plot development might risk looking like a hasty retcon if the game can't answer some fundamental questions how did shadow survive the incident where has he been all this time how did he end up here and most intriguingly of all why does ruj later discover a whole army of shadow clones being kept in storage are we even playing as the real shadow those questions will be answered in two dead years with this spin-off game thumbs out Owen remember gamma the tragic hero who went on the slow-burning journey of self-discovery that led to him overcoming his programming writing Eggman's wrongs and sacrificing himself for the greater good he was a fan favorite and it'd be a real disservice to bring him back after all that so instead here's Omega he's met the closet man put him on guard duty do you know what I'm actually having a lot of fun with this but it's still a shame sonic heroes is the one and only game I've ever played where my first time through I would finish a stage and hope that I might get a cutscene hope that I might be grace for the brief respite where I could just enjoy the characters for a second and not have to play it alas story scenes are few and far between and what little is here is laughable the intro which remember as a pre-rendered zyne has slowed down and in another pre-rendered cutscenes in the game Amy's eyes Glick out how do you miss stuff like this when you have all the time in the world to pre render the video and the voice actors seem to be directed to like over play and over accentuate every line which alongside a much easier Kitty er script in general this gives the game the veneer of a bad Saturday morning cartoon it's another way the game seemingly talks down to the player okay that one's probably need projecting a bit I was at just the right age to cringe at dialogue like this but who am i insisting now sonic I'm too old immature for this but the point stands everything about this half-hearted attempt at a story is a disappointment and that really is a shame because this is the last 3d game in the series the features Sonic's original voice cast I really liked them to this point and I wish they could have gone out on a high note in the end I think the only thing that kept me going back in 2004 was this naive hope that the end might somehow be worth it yes the big twist that Metal Sonic was the true villain all along could be seen from 8 billion miles away but it was still intriguing to see how this long-lost rival might be brought back and they knew it Metal Sonic is dangled like a carrot throughout the whole game teased in almost every one of those sparse little CG cutscenes and Metal Sonic himself had always been such a perfect threatening villain this emotionless robotic mirror that was such a contrast to Sonic's carefree confidence so with that I was incentivized I was determined to put myself through the entire game four times even though I wasn't having fun well technically three and a half times cuz I didn't cheat past chaotix but who's counting it when I finally got there when I finally made it I was introduced to a Metal Sonic that's portrayed as a two-bit cartoon villain stabbing generic declarations of tyrannical II taking over the world and he almost immediately transforms into this monstrous beast form that barely even looks like Metal Sonic metal sonic see even he knows well well after all this focus on the triple character dynamic least we'll finally get to see Tails and Knuckles soo performs again yeah that's about right here it is the grand finale the climax of the entire game and it's all just predicated on dodging attacks until the teen blast meter fills up repeat this four times and you've won so tell me was this worth it Josh was this worth spending for precious days of your Christmas break painting an office so that you would have the money to buy this game was it worth spending months of your sophomore year of high school slogging through this entire horrible game over it over and over and over again the answer to all those questions is the same is the answer to the final request that Sonic Heroes makes of you after the credits no and you know what really kills me about all this now all these years later is that now I can see Sonic Heroes within the tapestry of the whole series before this game came out Sonic team really was honing in on a model for 3d Sonic that worked the adventure approach you didn't please everybody it wasn't perfect or even necessarily ideal but it was something there were always detractors but in 2001 hardly anybody considered this part of Sonic Adventure 2 to be the reason they didn't like it Sonic Heroes should have been an evolution of that taking the best aspects of what had worked in adventure speed stages and sprinkling it with more of what made the classics so magical the thrill of controlling three characters at once could have been realized if that's what you were actually doing so drop the formations and keep it simple say the a button jumps and each of the three buttons surrounding it execute moves for one of the three characters then a single set of physics could have been refined and polished instead of trying to balance the game between three incongruent gameplay styles and the maintain momentum those ability is needed to flow between each other instead of being completely segmented like this imagine speeding up a quarter pipe building forward air momentum with a glide boosting up to a higher platform tails and then landing into a spin - combined with level design that took advantage of everything the three characters can do sonic heroes could have been a crisp rhythmic spectacle of a game it could have been the next evolution of how the sonic formula was gonna work in 3d but know instead of that sonic team just tossed out two entire games of hard-working goodwill and went back to the drawing board and why well because this was the first ever multi-platform sauna game built from the ground up for something other than a Sega console for some reason they didn't have any confidence that the adventure approach was gonna appeal to anyone other than hardcore cycle oil lists which seems particularly insane given how well this game sold but regardless sonic team consciously tried to appeal to his wide of an audience as possible so all the bizarre dumbing down of the formula was actually intentional it was kind of the point it was exactly what they were going for and they co-opted the classic aesthetic not to actually take the series back to its roots but because that was what most people thought Sonic was supposed to look like they tossed out a proven formula not because it wasn't working but because they wanted to make a Sonic game for people who didn't like Sonic games for all I have ranted about it this is obviously not the worst game in the series but Sonic Heroes is was and hopefully always will be the game in this series that I like the least and yes that means I really would rather play a family mess of a Sonic game that ruin the reputation of the series forever over a subpar platformer that seems so terrified of its own identity and heritage I've never been able to understand why anybody would like Sonic Heroes ok that sounds a lot worse than it is but I'm not actually saying that to disparaging one of my favorite things about video game criticism is being able to understand and appreciate them there to the game it's not to my tastes or better understand the criticism of a game that I love and order the early I think I'm pretty good at past but with this game it's like I'm seeing it through the inverse of nostalgia Sonic Heroes was aiming to inexperienced gamers who never played Sonic before and I was at the perfect age to take it personally but I was no longer the target demographic so if maybe you were the target demographic and you are someone who genuinely likes this game and you somehow made it through all this Japan er II but I'd love to hear from you you're not gonna change my mind on it just as I'm sure this hasn't change viewers but I really do want to understand your perspective and hopefully if I've done my cub you have a better understanding as to where the detractors are coming from oh and by the way my best friend the one who chose to go on some date with a girl instead of playing Sonic Heroes with me ten years later he married that woman and just a few months ago they had their first baby so yeah he definitely made the right call he met the love of his life I got Sonic Heroes on January 6th 2004 Sonic's Renaissance was stopped dead in its tracks but this was not the event that would erase it from a timeline and next time we'll see just how cataclysmic it got as I critique Sonic 2006 you can see that episode a week early by backing me on patreon and if we hit a milestone there I'll also be covering Shadow the Hedgehog I also want to give a special thank you to my talented voice cast who helped bring my vision of Sonic Heroes story to life you can get links to their sites and projects in the description I'll see you then thank you for watching and until next time you keep Deccan I'll keep critiquing [Music]

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 510,231

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen, sonic heroes, nine playable characters, Sonic Heroes, sonic heroes gamecube, xbox, playstation 2, ps2, sonic ps2, review, analysis, retrospective, tails, knuckles, amy, amy rose, cream the rabbit, cream and cheese, cream, big, big the cat, omega, shadow, shadow the hedgehog, rouge, rouge the bat, vector the crocodile, espio, charmy bee, charmy, NOT mighty, sonic the hedgehog

Id: 57LQk--Py2U

Length: 45min 40sec (2740 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 15 2018