Sonic's not by himself this time! (Sonic Heroes in review)

     Hey there, friends, after a few weeks off schedule, I'm gonna talk about Sonic for a bit longer. Sonic has always been known for his own strength, not relying on his friends. It makes for a strange idea with Sonic Team's next idea, Sonic Heroes. This game was weird for many reasons, and not just because we had the triumphant return of Big the Cat, but there were four different campaigns that use the same stages with different objectives. Also we have the return of Team Chaotix from way back in the day in Knuckles Chaotix. Anyways, grab two of your friends and we'll head into this post full speed ahead!

Sonic Team makes a Team Sonic game!

    The big draw of this game, and the reason that it's called Sonic Heroes, is because you control three characters at a time instead of just one. There are four different teams, Team Sonic, Dark, Rose, and Chaotix. Each team has three different types of character, Speed, Fly, and Power. Just for one example, in Team Sonic, Sonic is Speed, Tails is Fly, and Knuckles is Power. In addition to all of them having different characters that you control, all of them go through stages in different ways. Team Sonic is like the standard experience, I guess you could say, Team Dark is hard mode, Team Rose is easy mode, and Team Chaotix is a mission mode of sorts, where you have to complete different objectives with every level, instead of just getting to the end of the stage. Chaotix levels are always weird and I remember as a kid I never got to the end of that campaign because I just didn't understand the concept of going through and finding various things. I'm proud to announce however, that as of last year, I did actually go back and beat all four of the story modes which I was never able to do as a kid. I know I beat Team Rose, which was by far the easiest, and also the only one to feature a tutorial level, which seemed weird to me. Rose was the third team listed on the character list, after Team Sonic and Team Dark, so as a kid, I definitely dove right into Sonic's game, which also did a pretty good job of explaining the mechanics even without a crazy easy tutorial level. It seems weird that they put the level in at all, but it seems even weirder that it doesn't mention that it's the only one with a tutorial on the menu or anything.

    As previously stated, The characters are split into three different categories with different advantages and disadvantages for each. Speed gives the ability to do the standard Sonic Homing Jump move, as well as a little tornado attack which spun everyone around and gave the team the momentum to swing up a pole, as well as make robots get dizzy. The "Fly" characters allow the party to fly, by stacking up like a totem pole and allowing the flying characters to boost them up through boost rings, and allowing them to shoot their other two teammates at different enemies as a projectile attack with a lightning effect. "Power" characters have lunging punch attacks, with every third attack making some kind of more powerful attack depending on what level your character was, and what character you were playing as. We'll get back to the leveling mechanic in a moment, but one final move completed their sets, the Team Blast. Team Blasts worked like ultimate attacks, all of the teams had different animations that would play, and then create all kinds of chaos on the stage which would take out all of the enemies on screen. Team Dark's Team Blast was my favorite, because in addition to decimating all of the enemies around you, Shadow used Chaos Control and froze all the enemies, and even the stage hazards, which was a neat effect, even if it wasn't always the most helpful. 

    The leveling mechanic was interesting, to get back to this point that I mentioned earlier. In every level, all three characters had a chance of getting up to Level 3 by picking up different colored balls or passing through a checkpoint as that character. Speed was blue, Fly was yellow, and Power was red, coinciding with the colors of Team Sonic's characters. The higher level they got, the more damage each character did against enemies. This made it so Level 3 Fly was by far the easiest way to take out most bosses, with each projectile shot doing a lot of damage. Power level three was also pretty amazing, with a pretty sizable AoE attack coming out of each third punch, and Speed level 3 applied the tornado effect even to just normal homing attacks, which made most encounters far easier than they would have been otherwise. All of the combat was actually not too bad, and kind of a cool change up from what Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 had set up 3D Sonic to become, taking some of the variety out and focusing more on just classic 3D platforming with a twist. The physics of the platforming wasn't always great, but it was doable for the most part.

The Story is... there...

    I've focused pretty heavily on the story in the first two 3D Sonic games, but there isn't nearly as much to write about here. All four storylines are interesting enough in their own ways, and intersect for some weird interactions and unconventional boss battles. Team Sonic is up first, with their basic plot being just to stop Eggman again, big surprise. He sends Tails a letter saying, "Guess what, Sonic Heroes?" which was always the funniest thing to me, considering he addresses them by the title of the game for some reason. Eggman tells them through his weird video letter thing that he's gonna blow up the world in three days unless they stop him, so they go and do that. They beat him a couple times, and discover more than once that the Eggman that they're fighting isn't the real one, but a robot with a prerecorded message, which then turns to goop the second that they look away. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but eventually does as you play more of the campaigns. That's the majority of the Team Sonic campaign, but I do remember at the end, Sonic yells, "Yeah! We're Sonic Heroes!" Which again just makes me laugh because they're trying to make us believe that they've always called themselves that for some reason. Team Dark is more interesting because it starts out with Rouge the Bat looking for some treasure/working on a top secret assignment, where she stumbles across Shadow, the character who died in the last game, in a glass tube, seemingly in cryo-sleep, and she drains the fluid from the tube, which sets off security robot, Omega, who begins shooting around the room. Shadow wakes up and teleports and is getting ready to fight Omega, but Rouge smooth talks both of them into going to get revenge on Eggman. Shadow can't remember anything (because of course he can't) and Omega is a robot who is angry at his creator I guess. Rouge promises to help them both out, and so the adventure begins. They also have a bunch of close calls with Eggman, which then turns out to be a robot which dissolves into goop. In the end, it turns out that Shadow is a clone of the original Shadow who died at the end of Sonic Adventure 2. They all promise to stay together as a team and the story ends with a mysterious shadowy figure watching them from the shadows.

    Team Rose is a much happier campaign all around. Their initial cutscene is just setting up that Big the Cat, Cream the Rabbit (a character first shown in Sonic Advance 2 and best known for having a pet Chao, Cheese, who hits like a truck), and Amy Rose, all are hanging out. Cheese's brother, Chocola Chao has suddenly gone missing along with Big's Froggy (again), and Amy sees a picture in a paper of the two missing friends along with Sonic, so they decide to go find the group. They just kind of stumble across Eggman along the way, but they don't really care about him, except they think that he may have kidnapped Chocola and Froggy, which in the end, it turns out that he did for some reason. We don't really know why, but again, Eggman isn't really there, he dissolves into goop again. Team Chaotix is about what you'd expect, they're a freelance detective agency and they need money. A walkie talkie arrives, and the voice on the other end tells them that if they do all of the missions that he gives them, he'll make them rich. All of Team Chaotix's levels are just them following the orders of the person on the walkie talkie, which long story short, ends up being Eggman, who's been in a prison cell this whole time, which they release him from after beating him up for lying to them about the money. After this, I assumed that the final story would be unlocked and I would be able to do the final campaign to see how it ended. Unfortunately I was mistaken in this assumption. It turns out, in order to unlock the final story mode, you have to get the seven Chaos Emeralds, but to get those, you have to play the terrible bonus minigame and go fast enough to catch it by the end, which I certainly have not done since I don't hate myself that much. I do know though, that the shadowy goop character is actually Mecha Sonic, and he's the one who trapped Eggman in his cell. I assume the game just ends with the teams all teaming up and taking down Mecha Sonic and saving the day once again before going their separate ways once again, but again, I'm not sure exactly how this all plays out. Normally I would just look up the ending of the game so I can write about it here, but honestly, I feel like Sonic Heroes is a game that is much more about the experience than the story anyways, plus I may go and get all of those Emeralds someday. Until then, however, I'm afraid this will be a cliffhanger, though we can assume it will have to do with Super Sonic since we need the Chaos Emeralds. Since this is all about teamwork though, maybe the return of Hyper Tails and Hyper Knuckles will come along with Super Sonic fighting the true threat of this game.

Beginning of the Beginning of the End...

    Many people believe this game to be the last of the "good" Sonic games, but it's really hard to say. The controls here are pretty clunky from time to time, and apparently it's worse on the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game, which are more prone to glitches and bugs it seems. The Rail Canyon levels in this game especially frustrated me to no end as a kid, though that could just because I was a kid who wasn't very good at it, as when I came back last year and beat it all again, I didn't have much of an issue with it. The game as a whole is pretty interesting, and I really liked seeing the different teams interacting with each other, almost bringing the energy of a crossover, even though the fights were few and far between, and not even between all of the teams, as Team Sonic and Team Chaotix never cross paths, among a few other combinations. This game was a really cool idea, and though I feel like it could have been much better in execution if they tightened up the physics with the rails and the Power Plant level had just been erased entirely, I still enjoyed it a lot, and I remember playing a lot of it as a kid, even though I had a really hard time getting through it back then. The music is still just as catchy and wild as I remember it, and I will say time and time again that Sonic's soundtracks are always just as good (if not a lot better) than the games that they come from.

    Sonic Heroes is a game about relying on friends to save the day, and it succeeds in that a lot, to the point where as a kid in elementary school, I thought about what two friends I would want to be on my team if we suddenly had to save the world. It was a weird thought, but something that I really thought about for quite a while. Just goes to show you that this game really appealed to my imagination, and still does to a certain extent. I think people still think fondly about this game today for that very reason. There are so many different nuances to the different characters, it was really the best way to get a bunch of playable characters into the game... without adding a stupid fishing mechanic. Thank goodness for that.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! The 30th anniversary of Sonic is still upon us, so I may still do some more of these yet... but we're about to hit the point where I really fell off of the Sonic franchise for a while, so I may not. We'll see though! Do you still have fond memories of Sonic Heroes? I know I definitely do, even though it wasn't a perfect masterpiece, as there are truly very few games that could fit that description. I hope you're all doing well, and until next time, I've been your Self-Proclaimed Hero! Talk to you next week.