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.

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Life Is Strange is everything wrong with the modern adventure game; but I still recommend you play it

"Rachael's Bracelet".

This phrase will probably trigger me for the next seven years. There's a point in Life Is Strange where one of your four dialogue options is "Rachael's Bracelet", whilst speaking to a man wearing the bracelet of missing local teen, Rachael something or other, it just occurred to me that I hadn't bothered learning her last name. Honestly, I had tuned a lot of the game out at this point. It had made me sit through obnoxiously lengthy set pieces and everyone's terribly acted out and terribly written dialogue combined with the stiff expressionless faces the models had plastered onto the the front of their heads now pushed me to the point of simply tolerating playing the game, not being actively invested in it;

And then I chose to bring up the rather factual point that the man in front of me was wearing the bracelet of a missing girl.

And that prompted main character Max Caufield to fly off then handle and accuse a known drug dealer carrying both a switchblade and a loaded gun of murder and keeping secrets, when in reality, I just wanted to point out the man's fucking choice in jewelry. 

This was the moment where all disbelief could be suspended no more, when the immersion broke, where the glass ceiling shattered and I saw the game as it truly was; kind of a garbage fire.

You could see developer Dontnod had only the most basic grasp on some of the things Telltale managed to perfect years before.

Mention Bioware and a lot of players will groan and think of dialogue trees where the on screen text prompts say one thing, and then the words that fly out of your avatar's mouth are completely different. It's honestly a little unforgivable. Imagine other games did this? Imagine Dark Souls said, press Circle to dodge, but then you do and instead your character starts doing the Cha Cha real smooth whilst a three headed dog demon barrels towards you and you've now committed to standing there and allowing your last moments to be of you shaking dat ass before it's swiftly introduced to the pavement.

But this is just the beginning. There are invisible walls everywhere. This wouldn't be a problem if the game didn't hide beer bottles in fucking obscure locations while Max walks with the urgency of a pensioner taking a sunday stroll and barks out vocal ques that are too vague to actually help you.

I'd say those are the games worst offenses, but I'd be leaving out one really large one; Life Is Strange just has no fucking respect for your time; yes, you can fast foward through dialogue you've already heard; But you can't skip a lengthy conversation you know is dull and meaningless, especially if you just want to get on with whatever bullshit meaningless fetch quest the game has sent you on and this is the fourth NPC you're talking to. It's just unwelcome at that point. And let me not forget to spread a circle of fucking salt around that clusterfuck of a bottle hunt that I swear even the fucking developers hated.

There's padding, poor lip synch, awkward animations... The list goes on. I could fill this post with nothing but criticisms and nitpicks and we'd be here until next Wednesday.

But I think let me address one more thing that honestly bugs me about the game probably to the greatest extent. Now the most of the problems I've mentioned were either technical issues or nitpicks, but one of the things grating on the back of my skull was just Chloe.

The cringe fest that is Chloe's dialogue aside (I'm not sure if it's supposed to be some form of ironic patronising millennial speak or if she's supposed to be the hip alternative indie girl of your dreams but I spent the majority of her time on screen looking into my own eye sockets and wondering if somewhere an ex-Disney screenwriter was silently contracted to speed up production by copy pasting from the worst of their sitcom line up) the immediate first thing that came to my mind was Cosima Niehaus from Orphan Black who had that bad ass moment where she firmly declares

And trust me, Cosima is a bad ass queer icon who makes me happy I didn't bleed out at that one twenty first I went to where I got exorcised and banged my head on a corner table.

However, the most interesting thing about Chloe however is that her hair is blue.

I mean, yeah , she has a tragic backstory and all, and she probably likes vaguely the same music your dad liked in his punk phase while high on cocaine under a nearby bridge living with his parents in the suburbs and yeah she wears a beanie and probably skates and reads manga and curses like a sailor and graffitis the walls of her room... I'm not sure I'm perfectly articulating what I'm trying to say.

Chloe is punk waifu bait.

Like there's always this neon sign above her head that says "I'm so fucking counter-culture" and along with the other groan worthy things in the game, it just never goes away. It makes me think of Poochie from The Simpsons and I'm almost certain Chloe was created with a similar thought pattern. There isn't really any sense nuance or originality to the character, hell, we already have a Ramona Flowers, and at least Ramona swings around a cool smiley hammer and Bryan Lee O'Malley at least wrote the word bi-curious in the panels. Hell, if someone at least said the words gay, lesbian or bi then it wouldn't feel so damn queer baity but it does. It's like you're supposed to love this character on the superficial things about her like her taste in music and the colour of her hair and her generic ass sobstory instead of the one thing that Life Is Strange actually does half decent, and that's an organic same sex love story between two girls caught up in a time travelling adventure. You learn to really care for Chloe through her interactions with Max, like that moment she photobombs one of Max's selfies in bed, and when she intervenes when Nathan starts picking a fight... Your interactions with Chloe count for so much more than her too cool for school attitude and vague liking of things you may also like, but like, in a cool, hip way. Chloe isn't entirely unbearable but why the hell is the game trying so damn hard to make me dislike her?

Okay, now that I have drawn my circle of salt and positioned myself firmly in the middle of it, I guess this is the part where I say, despite all that, you should play Life Is Strange.

So, despite all that, you should probably play Life Is Strange.

The reason is because it doesn't do anything related to the adventure genre very well, but the things it adds it does do very well. The over the shoulder camera comes to mind.

Telltale has a habit of using very static, planned shots in their scenes. You view from one angle, usually with a little wiggle room, but it's all very cinematic.

Life Is Strange, for the most part, let's you move the camera around when not in dialogue or QTEs. You can move Max and move the camera, and this let's it the game feel a lot more like a game than an interactive film. Which feels really great. The camera itself just swings in a really nice way and I spent the first five minutes just wiggling it around and looking at all the interactable items in the room.

The HUD is really quirky. It's got that Chalkboard drawn feel to it, so along with the folk/indie soundtrack the game feels super grounded. It never feels like some huge Triple A production but more like something aiming to be it's own. And this is the closest it actually gets to relating to the market its aiming for, by using game feel to communicate with the player. It's easier to get into the frame of mind the game wants you to be in because the HUD combined with the soundtrack draws you into it.

And the soundtrack is really amazing. The Indie/Folk stuff is the best, it's moody and a lot of the time just fills up all the space in the air, and you always feel like you're a moment away from some life changing introspective thought and that's really nice. It really conveys that coming of age, finding your way in the world story every teenager goes through. And it's not just some generic blend of 90s punk and grunge, which would have been the easy pick. 

There are lots of moments where you can just sit around and let Max think. I love when games let you organically modulate your own pace. This is a fantastic one. Just letting Max think, and recap her day, or the week, and ask questions, mull over events, just sitting down and doing nothing is an idea that games could use way more of. Pacing especially is everything in a good, emotionally connecting story and Life Is Strange absolutely nails that much.

The game itself is really pretty. There's some chromatic aberration, the scenes always feel soft, I have to congratulate the colourist on making everything just pop. The game does fulfill as a sense pleasure, and that is one of it's biggest strengths.

And Max and Chloe do have a great, organic relationship dynamic which I never felt regrets about going through. Chloe could be a little one note at times and honestly I found myself questioning over and over again if she's even a good person, hell, a person worth going through half the trouble you do go through for her. But you can't help but get attached, especially during this one scene in Chloe's bedroom and sure, there's another option, but it just feels so satisfying to make Max take that leap of faith. It's a great emotional pay off marred only by some awkward performances from the characters, but that you can chalk down to the low fidelity of the game's models in general.

This is where I'd usually find more to complain about but I'll definitely just leave it at, go play Life Is Strange, if only just the first episode, which is free. But really, if you get to the bottle hunt in episode two, look up a guide, it was designed against you and it's not worth the fucking time it takes to complete it.

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