A Rumination on Sonic Heroes; It's Kind of Underrated.

Not often does a game come by that makes you stop, pause and think, “Huh, you know what, that’s actually a pretty clever.”

And Sonic Heroes is somehow, against all the odds, one of those games.

Sonic Heroes is a 2003 PS2, Dreamcast and Gamecube game (with a lost Australian PC port that is very hard to get one's hands one, believe me) that sold reasonably well and was on release received very well, but as it aged more and more people started just hating the game, roasting it as if it were a 12 year old beauty vlogger posting her first video and utterly failing on camera.

Now it's not hard to spot that the game hasn't aged very well and truthfully it's a little unfair on the completionists (and may Segata Sanshiro have mercy on whichever poor fool attempts a 100% on a Sonic The Hedgehog game) but I haven't played the game since I was a wide eyed child and it wasn't until recently that I picked up a copy of the game that I could truly see it for what it was;

A rough around the edges masterpiece that deserves more love then we give it.

I will admit to my own bias here. I'm in love with the idea behind the game more than the game itself. On paper, this is the most well designed, conceptually brilliant action-platformer I have ever had the pleasure of just swirling about in my brain. And if it weren't for this game solidifying Sonic The Hedgehog as the cornerstone of my childhood gaming experiences, I'd probably be a very different person today. But if you'll allow me to gush for just a second, I promise, I do eventually get to talking about the great game design in Sonic Heroes.

Trying to articulate the plethora of thoughts I have about it is almost impossible. Every time I try, a new idea pops into my head. While the final product may barely be worth an IGN approved 7/10, teetering dangerously close to 6 or maybe even a 5, and while Railway Canyon munched through my lives faster than any of the teams could blast through with Sonic speed, I have put this game down, picked it up, put it down, sat up thinking about it at night and picked it up again in a vicious cycle.

As a kid, this was only the second or third Sonic game I actually played. I remember being wholly nonplussed by having to play as Sonic’s shitty friends and kinda just wanted, well, a Sonic game. And whilst I didn’t hate the game, when I received the PC port of Sonic Adventure DX, I had a much better time with Adventure, owing much to the fact that I never bothered finishing anyone’s campaign other than Sonic’s in Adventure and thereby preserving the mirror polished sheen of nostalgia I have for the game. I finished Team Rose, 70% finished Team Sonic, 40% finished Team Dark and barely touched Team Chaotix. I’d never really had much of a drive to return to Sonic Heroes but once my PS2 died and I had gotten better at playing videogames and learnt more about game design, I thought that I definitely owed it to myself to revisit it. But I still delayed playing it. I don’t really understand why but I wanted something new. And it wasn’t until I had picked up and dropped Sonic Unleashed, purchased Sonic Adventure 2 off the PSN and gotten the Sonic Humble Bundle and finished Sonic CD that I thought, now is the time.

So a funny thing happened when I booted it up. I’d always had a gigantic soft spot for Sonic Heroes’ theme song. It’s cheesy, wasn’t very well mixed and definitely dated, often called straight up garbage by many fans but somehow, I knew all the lyrics to that fucking song. All of them. And is the intro cinematic played out I screamed them along.

Okay, so maybe I liked the game more than I thought. But I mean, this game just aged poorly, it's definitely not as great as I remember it being as a kid. Hell, I didn't even like it that much as a kid, I liked Shadow The Hedgehog more because I was an edgelord shucklefuck with bad opinions.

But then I went into Seaside Hill WHICH IS STILL ONE OF THE BEST DESIGNED SONIC LEVELS OF ALL MOTHERFUCKING TIME HOW IN THE HELL CAN ANYONE EVEN HATE THIS GAME (more on this in just a moment).

And then Ocean Palace came, and still. Sure, some control and physics issues popped up but nothing game breaking. The water looked gorgeous and the world was vibrant and all these bright colours were on the screen and Sonic Heroes was hitting all the right notes in a scarily tight rhythm.

And that's when it hit me.

It's not just my nostalgia.

I've gone back to games before and hated them, even if I loved them as a kid. I've gone back and recognized my own biases many times before and still loved games that I knew were utter filth (looking at you, Sonic Adventure DX). But this, this wasn't bad. This was great. This was amazing. This was, dare I say it... Perfect. Of course I did have to face reality when I managed to remove the nostalgia facehugger impregnating me with sparkling eyes and an inability to notice genuine flaws, and it wasn't perfect, and of course, I eventually did manage to get an less biased and better thought out view of the game, but the first three levels is just honestly fantastic. I can't gush enough. But anyway, I'm going to move away from the nostalgia boner hardening in my pants as I write this because Seaside Hill, and maybe Seaside Hill alone, subverts the Sonic level design formula in such a brilliant way that it still blows my mind to this day and I need to meet Yuji Naka and hug the man for his wonderful contribution to the world.

So for those of you who don't know, the rule for any given Sonic game is high path is best path and low path is death path. You're encouraged to stay on the higher, faster path and rewarded for the skill you display by managing to stay on it, but punished for bad play in the slower, much more "platformy" lower path. The bottom of the stage usually has the most spikes, pitfalls, long stretches of slow and tedious platforming, water, enemies. While I do appreciate the nuance of the logic, where you're forced to get better at the game by having to do more challenging sections in the bottom of the level that teach you more about the game's mechanics and intricacies of controlling a meth addict blue hedgehog, it's almost a guaranteed trap for newbies. You will fall into the bottom, and because it's so easy to fall to the bottom, it feels like the game is subtly corralling you towards the lower path but in truth the game is trying to challenge you to stay high, the route which guarantees the fastest clear time and most secrets.

Sonic Heroes takes that formula and says fuck you, here's how we do it.

So Sonic has always had a very natural difficulty select built in. Tails is easy mode because flight let's you get back to the top. Knuckles is intermediate mode, because he glides and can climb walls, so he's how you get to know the levels the best and explore without being burdened by tail's flight limit. Sonic is 'hard' mode, since he takes the most skill to use, is the fastest, but he offers the most rewarding gameplay. 

Sonic Heroes then took that concept and threw it right into the very level design of the game. 

So you control Sonic, Tails and Knuckles all at the same time, or rather you control one of the three at any given time and the other two are delegated to being two AI nincompoops who for the most part stay out of your way and sometimes even help you get shit done faster, and you switch out who is the "leader" aka, the character you control. Each character comes with their own unique team formation. When Sonic leads, everyone gather behind him in a straight line and runs in his slipstream. This is the fastest way to get around and is dubbed Speed Formation. When Tails is the leader, the team forms in a totem pole formation to make it easier for Tails to take off at a moments notice. This is called Flight Formation. When Knuckles is the leader, he literally uses his best friends as either fucking boxing gloves to pound everything from the environment to enemies, or he curls them up into balls and hurtles them as hard as he goddamn can into the ground. This is Power Formation. You can also glide in Power Formation, by performing a "Triangle Dive", but unfortunately you can't climb.

Got all that?

Now the whole level is designed to modulate the difficulty, pace and aesthetic of play to which formation you end up playing in most.

Like speed running and fast paced platforming challenges? Play in Speed Formation and you'll get taken through super hazardous super fast routes with loops and twists like the rollercoaster a Sonic game should be. Need to take it slow and explore the level? Play in flight formation and you'll do more platforming but it's slower and easier to navigate. Like brawling? Play in power formation and you'll have plenty of enemies and destructables to abuse like Michael Jackson's dad abused his kids. 

So instead of High Paths and Low Paths, you have Speed, Flight and Power paths. You can easily change from one to the other and you can play as any formation on any path, and often certain sections demand a quick change in order to progress. The greatest thing about this fluidity is that it asks the player to use the game's mechanic's creatively to find the optimal route through the stage. There's a whole lot of replay value because your runs don't ever look the same as you take different turns and change to different formations. The mechanic of formations create a fluid dynamic of path finding and platforming challenges but create three entirely different aesthetics. I think I jizzed in my pants a little writing that sentence. 

I lie awake in bed at night thinking to myself "Fuck me, who ever designed Sonic Heroes is just really fucking brilliant." The complex dynamics the mechanics form, the nuanced gameplay, the variety, the creativity, I just swirl it around my mind and wonder how anyone can so easily write this game off.

And I think now would be the best time to talk about my criticisms of Sonic Heroes, or rather, everyones criticisms. Because these are huge errors, and it says so much that I can honestly call this game a rough around the edges masterpiece knowing full and well how bad some of these are;

The physics is garbage.

For one, Sonic moves just a little too fucking fast. Or rather, he accelerates too quickly, you shove the analogue in any direction and he goes and rockets off without consent, blasting through with Sonic speed when a brisk walk would have done just fine. The problem is as much with the acceleration as it is with the deceleration. You have to run in a tiny little circle once you've asked permission from the board to stop and filed the proper paperwork because there's no real way to stop yourself dead in your tracks. But at least Sonic will stop when he reaches the edge and do a little edge pose.

Power characters will slide right the fuck off.

Ground combat is also for the most part worthless, considering that you could slide right off the edge midway though a combo and if you don't like a power character (I'm fucking glaring at you, Big the obnoxiously voiced Cat) too fucking bad. You need him. Every member of your team is vital because some obstacles can only be overcome by certain members. Since only the power characters can glide, they're the only ones who can use the fans to rise to higher platforms. 

Other than that, the major criticism and missed opportunity I must bring up is that you can't change formation mid air.

I dream of the day where my team all homing attacks in unison onto an enemy, we change mid-air so that tails can fly us up, and from as high as we can, we use the triangle dive to reach a far off platform safely.

I understand that the scope of the levels would be changed and the size of some of these levels are already fucking huge, some taking well over ten minutes to finish.

But damn if it isn't a nice dream.

Sonic Heroes isn't just a great game, it's a proof of concept, a show that unlike his contemporaries, Sonic doesn't only work well in a team, that's where he works best. The team formations create interesting platforming scenarios and if we just had better spaces to play in and slightly better physics, I honestly think Sonic Heroes could have been one of the greatest games of all time, it might even have put Sega back into a place where they were a dominating force in the gaming industry.

But alas, it is not so, and Sega hasn't voiced any plans to make a sequel or a reboot of the the game, which is a crying shame. 

All in all, the soundtrack is phenomenal, it's a Sonic game, that's a given at this point, the levels are well designed even if they get more linear as the game goes on and while I miss hubworlds and the chao garden from Sonic Adventure, they aren't necessary.

All in all, I do find it tough to recommend just because it is a Sonic game, but if you can stand the roughness, honestly, it's a great fucking game.

But play it in sessions.

Because they shitty physics will kill you dead, and even I rage quit no less than six times.