YMMV / Sonic Heroes

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Did Metal Sonic really "betray" Eggman? Considering that he locked Eggman away safely in a room when he could have done much worse, and his goal was to defeat Sonic (what Eggman created him to do) and build a robot empire (Eggman's goal), it's possible that he simply deemed his creator to be unable to accomplish their goals himself and took matters into his own hands.
  • The final boss theme, "What I'm Made Of", is pretty vague on whose viewpoint the song is supposed to be focused on. The singer dares their persistent opponent to not hold back during their fight while also promising to show their foe how powerful they truly are. The song can be viewed as a Badass Boast from Sonic's perspective, but can just as easily be seen as Metal Sonic finally reaching his breaking point and going to extremes he normally wouldn't go to. Some listeners have even come to the conclusion that the song is being sung from both perspectives, in line with Metal's apparent identity crisis.
  • Team Chaotix's client gives them a lot of stealth missions that encourage them to sneak past enemies rather than smashing them up. Is Eggman trying to keep the Chaotix from being discovered by Metal Sonic, or is he trying to subtly dissuade them from destroying his own robots? Or is it both?
  • In a similar vein, during Robot Carnival and Robot Storm, Eggman (really Metal Sonic in disguise) regularly yells "Smash them all!" Is he cheering on the robots, or is he cheering on the heroes, encouraging them to smash Eggman's inferior creations?
• Angst? What Angst?: For how much his sacrifice hit hard in Sonic Adventure 2, none of Team Sonic seems that concerned over the fact that Shadow is somehow still alive and has amnesia, with Sonic's first instinct being to engage in the same kind of banter he had with Shadow in the last game. Even Rouge, despite showing concern over whether or not Shadow is an android, doesn't sound all too surprised when she releases Shadow from his stasis pod and calms Omega down.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Metal Overlord. While Metal Madness is mildly challenging due to having one instant-kill attack, Overlord is one of the easiest bosses in the game — you can't even be directly harmed by him, and the only danger is running out of rings, which can be periodically refilled during the fight. Granted, you can't hurt him either unless you use a Team Blast, and it takes five Team Blasts to defeat him, but this simply turns the fight into a waiting game of countering projectiles to build up the gauge while watching your rings.
• Awesome Ego: Metal Sonic is so egomaniacal here that he makes the very hedgehog he's based on seem downright modest in comparison.
• Awesome Music: This game has its own section on this page.
• Base-Breaking Character: On the more upward end of the trope, Big managed to ascend out of The Scrappy status for some fans due to being boosted into an impressive Power type with the same speed and capability as the standard characters. His dopey Manchild personality still remains to polarise the others, though.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Many players hold Egg Fleet as the favorite, not only for the sheer sense of vertigo of being high up in the air (even compared to other airship levels in the series), but for the challenge offered by having to constantly dodge gunfire from the ships, and the sheer amount of alternate paths available. To put the cherry on top, the level features the playable trio creating a chain reaction that destroys an entire battleship with Rocket Accel. And Team Dark's version allows you to do it three times, with the third time standing in for the Goal Ring. Quite expectedly, there are a number of fans who were disappointed that Seaside Hill, essentially the Green Hill Zone throwback of the game, was picked to represent Heroes in Sonic Generations over Egg Fleet when, one, the Green Hill Zone was already in the game, and two, Seaside Hill had already made countless appearances in many spin-offs.
  • Hang Castle is fondly remembered for its Big Boo's Haunt setting, creepy and awesome music, and unique gimmick of flipping the level upside down to access new areas. Like the above, there's a number of fans that were disappointed that Seaside Hill was picked over this level in Sonic Generations, especially since Hang Castle's gimmick could have made for a lot of interesting and creative level design. To a lesser extent, Mystic Mansion, despite being That One Level, is also considered this by some fans for combining the haunted setting with Underground Level, its creative level design, and emphasis on puzzle-solving that's a rarity in the franchise.
• Breather Boss: Robot Carnival and Robot Storm for Team Chaotix. Their Team Blast gives you rings for each enemy it kills. Collecting rings fills the Team Blast meter. These fights throw a lot of enemies at you. Do the math.
• Broken Base:
  • The game itself caused a sizable rift in the fandom. Depending on whom you ask, it's either a fun and engaging platformer with a nice variety of characters and the last good game before the franchise's Audience-Alienating Era, or an unplayable mess with awful controls and the very game that started the Audience-Alienating Era.
  • Team Chaotix's missions are heavily criticized, particularly the ones that involve searching for and collecting things. Taking the already divisive Treasure Hunting gameplay and trading its more open-ended levels for the usual linear setup this game has makes them even more tedious for many, and it doesn't help that you have to teleport all the way to the beginning of the level just to search for them again. To others, though, while they're certainly not perfect, that doesn't make them immediately worthy of revulsion. In fact, defenders have gone so far as to claim them as one of the highlights of the story, mainly for being the only gameplay style to actually differ. The Sonic fandom admittedly has a... shaky relationship with any gameplay that diverges from the standard "run to the goal" formula, but besides them, every other team in the game has slightly longer or shorter variants of the exact same lengthy series of levels with little to distinguish them from one another bar difficulty, and you have to play every single one in order to get the last story. With the big picture of the game in mind, they're a breath of fresh air surrounded by Fake Longevity and an incentive to actually look around in and explore the levels rather than blaze through them.
  • This game was pretty much the catalyst for Shadow's status as a Base-Breaking Character. Did bringing Shadow back cheapen his Heroic Sacrifice in Adventure 2, thus turning him into a Creator's Pet, or was it good just to see the Ultimate Life Form make a reappearance? Unfortunately, Shadow's self-titled game, a direct continuation of his arc in Heroes, would only further divide fans. ^note For a measure of irony, SHtH did away with Shadow's Identity Amnesia by endgame and provided closure for the Story Arc that began with SA2 by having him move on from his dark past.
  • Amy's portrayal in the game. Some fans like how she became the leader of Team Rose, continuing her Character Development into becoming more independent. However, some other fans were put off by her and felt she was put through Flanderization into a Stalker with a Crush who is obsessed with Sonic to the point of getting into a fight with his team just to get him to marry her.
  • Metal Sonic's portrayal has received differing opinions; while some liked him becoming a threat in his own right wthout being a minion of Eggman, others found it wildly out of character and prefer the idea of Metal Sonic's character being like the original, only coldly loyal to Eggman. For what it's worth, all future appearances of Metal reverted him to his original personality, though Free Riders shows he retained the cunning demonstrated during his stint as the Big Bad despite being purged of any traitorous impulses.
  • Then there's the matter of Metal's upgraded forms exclusive to this game, Neo Metal Sonic and Metal Madness/Metal Overlord. They're either seen as badass upgrades and the embodiment of Evil Is Cool or unnecessary and stupid designs that take away from the simple appeal of his original form. Not helping matters is that Neo Metal Sonic goes completely unfought, only briefly surfacing for the Last Story and using a lightning strike to destroy part of the Egg Fleet so that he can begin his transformation into Metal Madness.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • There wasn't really any effort to hide the fact that Metal Sonic is the real villain; he makes several, albeit brief appearances throughout the game, including the opening cutscene. Yet when he finally introduces himself, it's still treated as a shocking revelation.
  • It's also pretty damn obvious that Eggman is the Chaotix's client. If Vector tricking him into blowing his cover before the Robot Storm fight doesn't give it away for you, nothing will.
• Character Rerailment: The Sonic Adventure series turned Knuckles into a dead-serious guardian ("Unlike Sonic, I don't chuckle, I'd rather flex my muscles!") in sharp contrast to what the artwork for the first game showed, and to his Sonic 3 & Knuckles portrayal of laughing at Sonic at every turn. This game was able to reconcile the two portrayals into a deceptively stoic yet laid-back Lancer who gets smug at getting one over Sonic.
• Cliché Storm: The dialogue and characters' portrayals in this game are so shonen anime it hurts. For some players, at least.
• Common Knowledge: Some fans' interpretation of how Neo Metal Sonic came to be is that Eggman tried upgrading Metal Sonic's A.I. and was promptly Hoist by His Own Petard as a result. This is in contrast to how the Boss Banter for the Metal Overlord fight indicates that Metal "transformed [his] own body with [his] own hands" in response to all the defeats received from Sonic. For anyone that might assume his words were only referring to his One-Winged Angel form, material from Sonic Channel clears up that Metal himself was indeed personally responsible for upgrading himself into his "Neo" form, without any noted input from Eggman.
• Contested Sequel: Heroes tends to get less love from the fandom when compared to Sonic Adventure and especially Adventure 2, with criticism aimed at the slippery controls, glitches, and repetitive gameplay. However, the game has still amassed a devoted fanbase in the years following its release, with many praising the unique level theming and team mechanics, even if the overall package isn't quite as solid as its predecessors.
• Continuity Lockout:
  • Unless you had already played Sonic CD (or some of the obscure spin-offs) before or assumed the Mecha Sonics from the original Genesis games were the same character (which they aren't), a new player would have no clue where Metal Sonic had even come from in the series or that the game was his major return.
  • Considering the game was meant to be a jump-on point for new fans of the series, Shadow's presence and large role in the plot can be somewhat confusing to those who hadn't played Sonic Adventure 2 beforehand.
  • A major plot point is that Metal Sonic gains the ability to shapeshift due to copying the DNA of Chaos from the Chao he kidnapped from Cream, which would make no sense at all to anyone who hadn't played the first Sonic Adventure and knew of Chaos and his connection to the Chao. ^note And even there, a biological connection between Chaos and the Chao was only implied and never overtly stated, since only supplemental material makes it clear that Chaos was a Chao mutated by the energy of the Chaos Emeralds.
  • Considering how niche the Sega 32X was, many new players would have no idea that Team Chaotix debuted in Knuckles Chaotix rather than this game, nor would they realize that Mighty, Heavy, and Bomb were even characters from that game who were left out here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Team Chaotix has the smallest role in the story, but are far more popular than most of the other teams storywise. Gameplay-wise, however, their "search mission" gameplay tends to be much more divisive.
  • E-123 Omega is pretty popular as well, both for his amazing power and his awesomely hammy quotes.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Though he only appears in the transformation for a few seconds, Neo Metal Sonic's design is the butt of many jokes, with some comparing him to a starfish in a butt-skirt. Even those who like the wizard-esque design think giving him pointy elf shoes was going a bit too far.
• Franchise Original Sin: Listed on the franchise page.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Team Blast mechanic makes it a bit too easy to deal with enemies. Frustrated with having to use the Speed characters to tip the armored mooks over? Just Homing Attack them for a minute and watch as your meter fills up, letting a team wipe out an entire room of enemies with ease. With a little patience, you can brute-force your way through the levels. Team Rose takes this to hilariously awesome extremes, as Flower Festival gives Barrier and Invincible power-ups while granting a free Level Up to each character along with the usual room's worth of destruction from the animation itself. Even better is Team Chaotix's, as Chaotix Recital provides the team with rings for every enemy killed... which makes it a cakewalk to get another Team Blast.
  • The character battles are completely trivialized by the Speed characters' Tornado Jump, turning the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors aspect they're supposed to have into a farce.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Hang Castle and Mystic Mansion stages feature the return of the ghosts from Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic Adventure 2, and they aren't any easier to deal with here. They pop up everywhere and can easily mess with the flow of speed. Given the latter is a very long stage, this'll get frustrating.
  • Egg Bishops/Egg Magicians, one enemy with two different forms distinguishable by color. Egg Bishops (orange) have the ability to heal themselves and any enemy nearby. Egg Magicians (purple) can cast a spell that steals all your rings. And the worst part is if you use a tornado attack on them, it just flips them over to the opposite form, making a bad situation potentially even worse.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The infamous "Team Blast glitch." Switch to Flight Formation, then hold a Formation Change button and the Attack button at the same time. If you do it right, your Flight character will attempt to perform a Thunder Shoot, but with no ally to shoot, the Flight character will shoot "nothing" for a brief period of time, causing your Team Blast Gauge to accumulate at an insane rate. Perform this glitch thrice to get instant Team Blasts on command.
  • It's tough, but if you perform an action in a Story Mode team battle and restart the fight, it's possible to force the hitbox of said action to stay active through the restart. You can hit the other team through their opening animation and send them all off the edge and kill them instantly.
  • It's possible to use Flight Formation to get a team member stuck inside a slot machine at Casino Park, allowing you to gather an arbitrarily large number of rings (and, by extension, extra lives). Speedruns are particularly fond of this one for cheesing Team Chaotix's version of the level in record time.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In this game, Metal Sonic ends up backstabbing Eggman and trying to defeat Sonic himself by gaining more abilities with implied modifications. In Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II, Eggman rescues and fixes Metal Sonic. Knowing how little the scientist cares for his creations, that says a lot. Makes you a little sad for the doctor.
  • Team Sonic's theme song "We Can" singing about how much stronger Sonic, Tails and Knuckles are when they work together hits different with Tails becoming a non-playable character and Knuckles often being Demoted to Extra after Sonic the Hedgehog (2006).
  • Similarly, the final scene became a bit of a Tear Jerker in a meta sense for fans of the English voice cast introduced in Adventure and Adventure 2, as this game would be the last mainline title to feature them, thereby marking one of the last times Ryan Drummond would officially portray Sonic. ^note The last game to feature any of the Adventure series' VAs was Sonic Advance 3, which released about half a year later in June 2004.
    Sonic: Alright!! Our next adventure awaits us so there's no time to waste! Yeah! We're SONIC HEROES!
  • 2-Player Mode has an Easter Egg that allows players to play as a reskinned "metal" version of the team they pick, making the characters monochromatic and reflective, along with giving them Metal Sonic-esque Black Eyes of Crazy. A pretty harmless little bonus... that would later be used as the design basis for victims of the Metal Virus in the IDW comics.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: One may not have expected Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) to give this game anything but a few token nods, but the climax plays out like a homage to it. Team Sonic formed to take down Robotnik with the REAL SUPER POWER of TEAM WORK!, and they even use combination moves from this game. A very welcome inversion of the previously mentioned Harsher in Hindsight entry.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • It's hard to hear Shadow saying "Space... Did you say SPACE???" nowadays without thinking of Portal 2.
  • During one of the Team Rose boss battles with Eggman's robots, Amy says "I think you underestimate our power!", which can be hard to listen to without thinking of a very similar line from Revenge of the Sith.
  • When defeated by Team Sonic, Metal Sonic laments how he can't defeat his nemesis with "It's no use." A few years later, Sonic would hear these same words from Silver as a memetically recurring annoyance in one of his toughest fights in the series. ^note Charmy also says "It's no use!" in an unused line of audio, delivered in a manner eerily similar to Silver's, but it's unrelated to Sonic himself.
  • Tommy Tallarico, a composer, former host of Reviews on the Run and a huge Sonic fan, gave a scathing review of the game and criticized the game's music for being "cheesy 80's rock music" (which Tommy's co-host cited to give him an aneurysm). Later on, he got to do the music for Sonic and the Black Knight.
  • When the game was still in development, there was a list of supposed teams that never came into fruition. One of the teams was going to involve these three members: Mighty, Ray, and Metal Sonic. While Metal Sonic himself ended up being the Big Bad and Final Boss of the game, Mighty and Ray were unfortunately left in the dust. Fittingly enough, 15 years later, Sonic Mania Adventures features Mighty, Ray, and Metal Sonic as the proper main characters in the fourth episode, albeit on opposite sides (with Metal Sonic targeting both Ray and Mighty as the latter had a Chaos Emerald in his possession which Eggman deviously needed for himself).
• It Was His Sled: Metal Sonic is the real villain of the game, while Eggman was locked up the whole time. The trailers didn't even try to hide that Metal was making a comeback. His Trophy description in the fourth Super Smash Bros. doesn't help.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many fans only bother to play Heroes for Team Dark and Shadow's subplot, as any other team has an Excuse Plot of a story. The main exception to this is Team Sonic, due to the draw of being able to play as all three members of the series' premier Power Trio at once.
• Like You Would Really Do It: The Team Dark storyline makes the suggestion that Shadow is actually an android after the Egg Albatross battle and then immediately destroys the plausibility of it by having Neo Metal Sonic announce, quite plainly, that he's just copied the Ultimate Life Form data, which a robot fake would not have.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Rouge the Bat is a government agent with a hobby of thieving, whose skills are unmatched. Upon once again meeting Shadow the Hedgehog, she mediates an alliance between Shadow and the robotic E-123 Omega, forming and leading Team Dark against whatever foes cross their path. Rouge proves brilliant time and again, whether serving the government or committing crimes for her own entertainment. Never truly on any side but her own, Rouge always follows her belief that all the world's gems are hers to keep, no matter the challenge in taking them.
  • Metal Sonic gains enough sentience to overthrow Dr. Eggman and graduate into a much more serious threat. Flawlessly impersonating his creator, Metal Sonic issues a challenge to Team Sonic that would either end in him obtaining their data in their counterattack or conquering the world to start a "robot kingdom." Disguising himself as the real Sonic, Metal Sonic kidnaps Chocola Chao and Froggy to gain the data of Chaos and its shapeshifting abilities. He also lures Team Sonic with the Egg Albatross in Bullet Station to buy time for the Egg Fleet to deploy. Despite the involvement of four different capable teams, Metal Sonic takes everything in stride under the radar, acquiring more data than initially planned and playing them all until Dr. Eggman's real location is discovered. Although his statements as Metal Overlord bring his sanity to question, Metal Sonic remains one of Sonic's most dangerous foes. Even after being reprogrammed to be obedient, Metal Sonic showed his penchant for undercover gambiteering remains intact when he copied the data of all World Grand Prix participants for one final Extreme Gear race.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Look at all of those Eggman's robots!" "Blind Idiot" Translation in the subtitling and Welcome to Corneria (and, depending on the player, poor voice acting from Tails) combined to create a very enduring meme.
  • Lost Jungle has black frogs whose rain kills plants and typically makes areas more hazardous, leading to the characters usually saying lines about staying away from those "black frogs." (Here's one such example, courtesy of Tails.) Cue "Why the frogs gotta be black?" and similar jokes.
  • The English manual infamously claims that Eggman is a feminist, which has inspired plenty of jokes, either about how even a villain like him respects women, or turning him into a Straw Feminist.
• Narm:
  • In general, the game's juvenile dialogue and cheesy English dub has enough corn in it to feed a third world country, with lines like "We'll show that creep the REAL SUPER POWER of TEAM WORK!" and many others delivered without any hint of irony. However, given that Heroes is a tonal shift from its two predecessors and has teamwork as a major theme of the game, a lot of fans are willing to put up with it.
  • The inexplicable decision in Team Sonic's story and the final cutscene of the Secret Final Campaign to use a Title Drop as a way to refer to the main characters as "Sonic Heroes." Yes, even Sonic himself does it for some reason.
  • Metal Sonic's voice is so overdramatic and overbearing that it's hard for certain fans to take him seriously. To them, Metal sounds more like a hotheaded teenager in a high school play than the dark imposing villain he's supposed to be. Hearing Ryan Drummond's voice without the reverb and pitch lowered just makes the effect worse (as it's basically Sonic's voice, but delivered in a monotone), and his goofy-looking Neo Metal Sonic form doesn't help either.
• Narm Charm:
  • The game has quite a bit of charm, but most notably the team songs are what make it. "Team Chaotix" is especially fun.
    TEAM CHAOTIX! They're detectives you want on your side!
  • Similarly, Team Rose's anthem "Follow Me" is so peppy and rocking it's hard to hate.
    Follow me inside, outside, through the stratosphere!
    The moon is shining for you, it knows that I adore you!
  • Likewise, "We Can" for Team Sonic could be written off as a cheesy, early 2000s rock ballad espousing The Power of Friendship, but it's performed so earnestly and with such an infectiously happy energy that few seem to mind. Cue multiple comments from Heroes fans about the song legitimately helping them through bouts of depression thanks to its uplifting feel and message.
    We can make it if we all stick together!
    We won't give up, not ever, and everything's gonna be all right!
  • Metal Sonic's performance, as noted above, can definitely come across as comically exaggerated, but considering how loopy and megalomaniacal he is here and all the fan discussion it's invited, this adds a (possibly unintentional) layer of Nightmare Fuel to the character. Metal manages to serve as an effective Knight of Cerebus despite being a Card-Carrying Villain and his Villainous Breakdown upon defeat, where he furiously screams he's the "real" Sonic, is rather chilling.
• Never Live It Down: A single throwaway line from the English manual referring to Dr. Eggman as a feminist has stuck with him, inspiring much Alternative Character Interpretation from the fandom. ^note This does not appear in the Japanese manual, where Eggman is instead characterized as a womanizer. In the Japanese language, "feminist" is a loanword that has a meaning closer to that of a Chivalrous Pervert instead of what Westerners would think of when they see the word.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The later Team Dark stages, which are teeming with the game's strongest enemies and feature more difficult platforming challenges than the other teams.
  • The optional Super Hard Mode, which is ironically less difficult than the requirement for unlocking it: all A-Ranks.
  • Even the Sonic stages (which is what a lot of newcomers are going to play automatically, this being a Sonic game) are rather difficult when they rely mostly on rails. The broken camera and controls brought over from the Sonic Adventure series don't really help either.
• Padding:
  • This game is infamous for its absurd requirements for unlocking the final boss fight. Not only do you have to collect all seven chaos emeralds (which requires finding one of a few keys located in every even-numbered stage and getting to the end of the level without getting hit afterward, and then completing a somewhat challenging and clunky minigame to nab the emeralds), you also need to play through the game with all four teams, meaning four playthroughs of the same 14 stages and 7 boss fights in the same order. With the exception of Team Chaotix, the only differences between stories are minor enemy/obstacle adjustments and stage length, so it comes across as Fake Longevity while also trying to appeal to the Adventure games' style of requiring every story to be completed to access the final boss fight.
  • A particularly jarring example is with Team Rose, who are required to play through the tutorial stage at the beginning of their story. Since Team Rose is meant to be the easy mode, this would be fine for the most part, except there's already an option to play the tutorial stage on the main menu, plus the fact that most new players are likely going to pick Team Sonic first anyway, making the tutorial redundant at that point. This is also a problem on repeat playthroughs since the game requires playing through with all four teams, meaning veteran players have to sit through a forced tutorial before they can start Team Rose's story proper.
• Porting Disaster: The PS2 version. It's not unplayable, but it suffers from low-resolution textures, clipping, frame-rate drops (not to mention it runs at 30 FPS while the GameCube and Xbox versions run at 60 FPS), and a part of the audio clip when selecting Team Sonic being cut off.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Big at the very least ascended to more a Base-Breaking Character status due to having Took a Level in Badass and gaining a more conventional move set compared to his Adventure gameplay.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Rails, which began to be overused in the second half of the game, utilize a somewhat wonky control scheme, and often have Bottomless Pits under them.
  • When hit by an enemy, a character gets stunned for a second, giving you less time than usual to collect your rings before getting hit again.
  • Enemies having lifebars was a constant early complaint, since they messed up the flow of the game (especially if your characters weren't leveled, which meant that only Power-type characters could reduce their HP without additional effort, and later enemies carried HUGE life bars AND barred progress until defeat), and turned parts of the game into a crude Beat 'em Up instead of a traditional speed-based puzzle/platformer.
  • Flight Formation can be a pain, as you're forced to carry your teammates and speed is reduced greatly in this formation. And if your fly meter depletes fully (which it can do so very quickly), you sink like a rock, which can be frustrating if there's a Bottomless Pit below you, which is to say, quite often in fly-specific areas. Also, there's an inexplicable height cap when you attempt to fly that is all too easy to reach, which really ruins the point of a "Flight" formation. Attacking in Flight Formation can also be rather tricky, as it can be hard to aim with Thunder Shoot. Its sole saving grace is that turning to fire in this formation does not affect the flight meter, and with two power-ups collected, it actually does decent damage from a safe distance, which can make a few difficult enemies easier. Plus, teammates shot this way are homing projectiles to help with the aiming issue.
  • Power Formation fighters, specifically Knuckles and Omega, slide everywhere when doing their ground combos. This proves hazardous when you're fighting on very perilous platforms because you can slide right off to your death just by fighting back.
  • The most contentious aspect of the game's controls is the occasional shot of momentum characters get upon landing. It's especially egregious with the Speed characters, since, well, they're fast. So fast, in fact, that this momentum boost often sends them rocketing into Bottomless Pits.
  • Inability to switch formations in mid-air can be annoying during long falls as you're forced to wait until you land before you can switch to whatever formation is required to proceed.
• Special Effect Failure: The CGI in the cutscenes is low budget and generally mediocre, even for the time of its release. It's tolerable for most of the game, but it still has its issues. For instance, the pre-rendered intro cutscene is visibly slowed down. It really takes a nosedive in quality in the final cutscenes compared to the others. Before the beginning fight with Metal Sonic, Amy's eyes glitch. In the final cutscene, Rouge floats across the ground when she's clearly supposed to be walking (her body moves before the legs do, which makes it look like she's skating on ice).
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The theme for the Egg Emperor boss sounds exactly like "Perfect Crime" by Guns N' Roses.
• Tear Jerker:
  • In the cutscene where Team Rose is tricked by an Eggman decoy, Big sadly utters out "Froggy, where are you? Let's go home." Even those who aren't big fans of Big have got to feel for him since he realizes that he's failed to rescue Froggy and is on the brink of giving up doing so in the process.
  • The Team Dark scene where Shadow spots a Shadow android, which gives him the thought that he may be an android as well. The shot where Rouge sympathetically looks at Shadow really tells the story.
  • Consider that Metal Sonic was apparently "reset" after the events of Heroes to end his insanity. If Metal's A.I. is more sophisticated than the Egg Pawns and comparable to the self-learning Gamma's, such a factory reset of his memory could be tantamount to a death or Mercy Kill. Free Riders dulls this by showing that while he was "reset", Metal has absolutely kept his cunning and personality.
• That One Boss: Robot Storm is a tremendous pain in the ass, regardless of which team you're using (unless it's Team Chaotix). Already coming off of Mystic Mansion, one of the most difficult levels in the game, the player now has to fight a huge gauntlet of just about every enemy that they have fought up to that point, including Egg Hammers and Egg Bishops — enemies that can only be destroyed by the Power character and enemies that can heal other Egg Pawns respectively. The platforms on which you fight them are also very small, leaving little room for error; a single miscalculation with a Homing Attack (which, as mentioned below, is pretty screwy this time around) or taking a hit too close to the edge will send you plummeting to your death, and there are enough enemies that spawn in each wave that make dodging their attacks difficult and make it easy to fall off trying to do so. To top it all off, the fight is actually pretty long — Team Dark's version can take over five minutes — and if you die at any point, you have to start over from the beginning. The only saving grace to this fight is that Egg Fleet follows it.
• That One Level: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Team Chaotix's second mission on BINGO Highway. Thought collecting ten casino chips was difficult when you are a pinball on a board riddled with instant death holes? You now have to collect all twenty of them! Mission 2 with Team Sonic is no cakewalk either if you're trying to get an A Rank due to the very tight time limit of six minutes combined with the tricky level design.
  • In Bullet Station, there is a segment where you control a trolley car through a Death Course with lasers and spiked balls. If you get hit once, your speed is drastically decreased and you lose the ability to control it. Twice and you lose the ability to steer, leaving the trolley to travel on a fixed path. Get hit a third time, and you die. This mechanic is especially annoying on Team Sonic's Mission 2, due to a combo of a tight time limit and having to kill enough enemies to get 40,000 points along the way. It also makes Team Chaotix's extra mission much more frustrating, as you have to break every single storage capsule on the stage, including a handful of them scattered on the trolley ride.
  • Team Dark's second mission in Rail Canyon to destroy 100 enemies in 10 minutes. Though the time limit seems generous, the level design consists mostly of grinding down rails, with very few enemies to defeat. If you fail to meet the quota when you make it to the goal ring, it will send you back to the beginning of the level so that the enemies respawn.
  • Team Chaotix's second mission in Rail Canyon has a very tight time limit of six minutes. If you don't know the level inside and out and use every shortcut available, you're in for a world of pain.
  • Team Sonic's second mission in BINGO Highway. The six-minute time limit you're given is just barely enough even when taking shortcuts, and it doesn't help that most of the level is spent on pinball tables, which can easily waste most of your time thanks to the sloppy physics on them. This means you need to rush, and hope the pinball physics don't work against you.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many fans feel that the controls were made too loose and slippery compared to the Adventure games. While they help with speedy sections more, slower sections tend to be more frustrating than they need to be, particularly in the combat-heavy areas.
  • Some people were not fond of the designs for Tails' and Knuckles' super forms (more akin to a "Super Shield" than their actual transformations from S3&K) in this game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Metal Sonic. While making him the game's Big Bad was interesting, his obsession with defeating Sonic, betrayal of Dr. Eggman, and newfound desire to take over the world for himself weren't explored much. Some fans also felt that his Neo form would've made a good boss fight.
  • The Shadow Androids were hardly utilized by Neo Metal Sonic and could've made some interesting boss fights for Team Dark, and their only existence serves to give fans speculation that Shadow is an android which was debunked in the end of his spinoff.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some Sonic fans were a bit upset that, in an otherwise simple plot, there's a glaring problem with Shadow's amnesia subplot, which is quickly brushed off as soon as he, Rouge and Omega team up. Those fans would've liked to see Rouge (or anyone else, for that matter) address Shadow's past to see if he's an android or not, but they just kinda leave him to figure it out himself. Granted, Shadow's past gets addressed in his own game, but the point still stands.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Rocket Accel. It's supposed to be a quick way to build speed that allows the team to pass otherwise impassable obstacles such as slopes. However, the Speed characters' acceleration is fast enough already that the boost gained from Rocket Accel doesn't make much of a difference, and most levels later in the game are comprised of small platforms above bottomless pits, meaning boosting yourself is the last thing you want to do. Even worse, the only two points where the ability is "required" (the tutorial and conveyor belts in Egg Fleet as Team Sonic or Team Dark) can be bypassed by either simply running normally or repeatedly using the respective Speed character's Solo Attack (Kick, which sends Sonic/Shadow hurtling forward with a somersault), meaning you can easily beat the game without ever using it a single time.
• Vindicated by History: In comparison to the other Sonic titles released during this era of gaming, while it's still not at the level of Adventure 2 in the eyes of the fandom as a whole, Heroes has garnered a much more favorable reception in the years following its release, with some going as far as to hail it as the closest a 3D Sonic game has ever come to capturing the style of the Genesis era installments (a feat only rivaled by the later-released Sonic Lost World).
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Metal Sonic's One-Winged Angel, which involves a fast-paced sequence of parts of a blown apart tower assembling together into his new Metal Madness form, with Metal's head morphing into some... thing that completes his transformation, all lasting for circa 50 seconds.
  • The general art design and stage layout is very pretty. Colorful, expressive backgrounds with plenty of detail, smooth character models, and expansive views as you dash through stages gave the game the feel of a 3D conversion of the Genesis art.
• Woolseyism: In the original Japanese version, at the start of the True Final Boss, Metal Overlord refers to Sonic by saying, "Long time no see, Sonic! My imperfect self..." This was changed in the English version to "Long time no see, Sonic! My loathsome copy!" Considering that Metal later refers to himself as a robot based on and designed to defeat Sonic, then claims to be the real Sonic at the end of the fight, this change helps better sell the notion that Metal has lost his mind in his own anguish and desire to outdo Sonic.

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