Sonic Heroes takes on the trend from the Adventure of having many playable characters and ups the amount to a whopping 12. They’re all set into teams of three: Team Sonic (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles), Team Dark (Shadow, Rogue, Omega), Team Rose (Amy, Cream, Big) and Team Chaotix (Epsio, Charmy and Vector).

The most notable thing about Sonic Heroes is that you play as a whole team at once, with you changing the “leader” at will. Each team has three kinds of characters: Speed, Flight and Power, each with a different formation. In Speed, the characters will line up behind the leader, with power they will be at the leader’s sides and in flight you have the hilarious image of them standing on top of each other.

Unfortunately, each team doesn’t feel that different to each other, and some abilities are a bit strange. Knuckles, for example, uses his glide to get height from fans, but Vector and Big also have this ability, even though it’s a bit odd. A bit more variety in the powers would be nice, but the levels would have to be designed with the different powers in mind. Instead, the main portion of each level is built for all teams.

To reach the ending, you have to play the game as all four teams (and collect the chaos emeralds). You play on slightly different versions of the same levels, so you effectively have to beat the game four times. Teams Sonic and Dark are versions of the main levels where you just have to get to the end, Team Rose has shorter and easier versions, and Team Chaotix has to complete boring tasks (like collecting 10 things), so has flowers that can be used to warp back to the start if you miss anything.

So you’ll be replaying each stage a lot. On top of this, the way to access the special stage is rather difficult: you need to find a key in act 2 and make it through the rest of the stage without falling or getting hit, which is easier set and done.

For the most part, I quite like the stages. There’s a good variety, all with their unique looks and feelings. Casino Park is the main exception, it felt really out of place as most levels feel like part of a world, while Casino Park doesn’t feel like it’s connected to anything else as it’s very abstract, and the pinball segments are a nightmare due to the physics of Sonic Heroes.

Those physics are pretty much broken. Nothing feels consistent in Sonic Heroes, and it feels you can make the same jumps with different outcomes. One one segment of Lost Jungle, there was a grind rail that drops you on a vine. I had to re-do this bit many times due to later sections, but occasionally Sonic would just miss the vine and shoot off in a different direction. And this is a part where you just hold B. The homing attack is a lot less reliable than the Adventure games, and while moving between grind rails is much better, jumping onto them is very hit-and-miss. I also encountered a strange issue where Tails became unavailable during Casino Park during a pinball segment, and I had to jump to my doom because there was no way to progress.

Making matters worse is the camera angles, especially during the fly stages. The camera pretty much points upwards, so you can’t see where you’re landing half the time. Sometimes the bottom character even dangles at the bottom of the screen, leaving no space to see the platforms you’re supposed to be landing on. Another issue are that some ramps are designed for the speed character, and if you use the fly character you can overshoot the platform you’re supposed to automatically land on.

It’s a big shame because without these issues, Sonic Heroes would be a lot of fun (even with the repetition). The buggy nature of the game just leads to many unfair deaths, made worse by the low amount of lives in the game and some checkpoints that are very far apart. Whenever I finished a difficult level, I just felt relieved that nothing glitchy happened more than a feeling of satisfaction that you would get from a fair difficulty. I’d love to see a remastered version, as with some bug fixes and extra checkpoints, Sonic Heroes could be a really good game.

One thing I do have to give credit for is the soundtrack. The stage music is great (except for Casino’s Park out of tune music), and the songs are great, especially the final boss music “What I’m Made Of”.

This game is great up until the 6th act. Then all of a sudden satan became a sonic developer and created the worst sonic act ever, zone 6 act 1 where it is basically 3 acts in one. which is then proceeded by an okay act which is then followed by 2 shitty boss fights. I genuinely don't know what happened. Probably a skill issue, but I had to use save states for the last 3 acts in order for them to be bearable for me. Despite the horrific ending, the first 5 zones are a lot of fun and I was surprised with how much fun I was having. 6/10

Look, I love this series like crazy, so it’s hard for these games to disappoint, but even I know this whole series is just loaded with exposition. The world-building is arguably, uh, terrible because it is purposefully made so convoluted as most of the mystery and drama of most of these games’ story scenarios comes from characters unfolding and connecting passages from their respective world’s Book of Genesis, until the cast of characters find themselves twisted into their world’s Book of Revelations. Tales of Berseria’s scenario does well, though, in pacing out their discoveries and exposition so it never feels like you’re being given important information so late into the game. There are plenty of moments of characters going “Ah yes, of course, it’s just like the earth synergy.” “Earth synergy? What’s that?” but it’s never to a point where it feels like it’s too overbearing, or lazy, or goofy. I played a lot of this game spaced out over the last seven months and never forgot the important details of how this world works, as it was given to me, and I think that’s a pretty good testament to how this game doesn’t overload you. Even in the last section, where other ‘Tales’ games might dump a lot of last minute stuff on you, this one feels like it’s trying to stay linear.

I also think expositional dialog works here because each of the main cast are of different backgrounds. Demons, priests, witches, pirates! Everyone has lived a different life and, thus, can bring different knowledge to a discussion about the world! This makes what could be heavy-handed expository dialog a little lighter as the cast converses like a bunch of strangers of different strokes coming together to play ancient history detective. Then, of course, we learn more about these characters that we like as we learn about the world and its mystery.

The characters are all great. The party of six are each hits, all of them just endeared themselves to me so fast and easy, and the perfectly consistent writing of their personalities and how they clash and interact just had me giddy during some scenes. Sometimes a family isn’t a nuclear family of parent and children, sometimes it’s a gay samurai and a gay pirate and a mean lesbian and a closeted youth group lesbian and a quirky trans girl and the cute little kid they all see as a little brother! And the mean lesbian herself, Velvet freakin’ Crowe, is such a great, great protagonist. She and this game’s villain are perfect opposite extremes of what this whole game is about: what is the point of hurting?

This isn’t the first text to tackle this subject matter, of course, we all know what the point of hurting is! It means we’re human! It means we’re alive! It is a quintessential part of the human experience to be met with pain, the hard part is processing it. The antagonist of this game (light spoilers) wants to rid the world of pain; it should be something that no one should experience, as it is only borne from faults that mankind are saddled with. Velvet wants revenge for her pain, it drives an all-consuming (pun intended, as the connection is made obvious in subtext) rage that she plans to use to remove anything in her path. Velvet’s costume, at first glance, seems a bit much; a very revealing mess of tattered clothing that someone might wear to a nightclub’s goth-themed event. Though, I think it serves a purpose. Velvet is also a daemon (sic), a blight on the world, seen as ugly and broken by the church that runs the entire world. Her outfit is just a reflection of how the enemy sees her, and any objectification made towards her revealing outfit just helps the metaphor that not only is the church disgusted by her, but they also see her as a tool.

Her arc is spectacular, and, like most JRPGs, the solution is friends. As a writer, though, I’ve grown less sensitive to the same kinda of stories, especially in games, and to me, what’s important is not whether your message is new, or even if the story beats aren’t familiar, it’s how you write characters and how you take them to where they need to be taken to. The path that Velvet goes on to see her friends clearly as they are is so great and so fulfilling, and so clear and beautiful, and in tandem, Laphicet’s arc and growth is so good. Ugh! I cried folks, I really did. This entire story had me in chains the whole time, and the ending was truly something else, and still has me thinking about it with a massive amount of emotion. I don’t think I’ll ever forget about Velvet Crowe. She’s up there with Guts and Maka Albarn as characters I will cherish forever.

“Your despair… how is it gone?”

Now, the video game part of this game was, well, less spectacular than the story, relatively. The combat in this game is maybe my favorite of the ‘Tales’ games I’ve played. It replaces mana points with a stamina meter made up of five points that get spent during your moves. It, for me, led to a much fluid style of play. High-hit combos are pretty easy, but still fun to land, the system was never too convoluted to the point where I found myself struggling to execute something, or was ignoring entire mechanics because I felt there was no need. The thing was, there were moments where I felt like I could just kind of brute-force a lot of situations. While I think this could be chalked up to the game being well-balanced to the point where, without me ever needing to grind, and I was the level I should’ve been throughout the entire game, I did feel like there wasn’t a whole lot of struggle, or strategizing. I just mapped artes to my buttons well, used the mystic artes when I could, and made it through pretty unscathed.

The struggle in this game, really, is dungeon design. When it’s not boring, it’s annoying, and the fucking two-hour-long final dungeon was plenty more enough for me! The dungeon “puzzles” basically come down to you walking from end-to-end hitting the right switches. I feel like, at least in exploration-rewarding JRPGs with encounters like this, the fun of dungeons can just be figuring out where to go. The final dungeon being this big fucking thing that was so annoying to navigate because of how the in-game map presents itself just drove me crazy, I cannot stress this enough. I detest the idea that the final boss needs this kind of carpet laid out for them, that you need to go through one final challenge leading up to the final battle. Buddy, the entire game was the lead up! Having already stayed up a couple of hours extra to finish the job, only to go to the location where I expected to fight the final boss and see a teleporter that took me to this huge complex with orbs and switches and bridges and doors and switches and warps and the most annoying monsters ever!!! It was a long night.

Though, the dungeons were my only gripe, and the very last one was the only one that was long enough to be a drag, to be fair. This is definitely my favorite tale that the ‘Tales’ series has ever told, though the video game itself didn’t exactly stand out next to other installments that I’ve completed.