Sonic Heroes/YMMV


 * And the Fandom Rejoiced - The return of and the Chaotix caused legions of fans to cream in their pants. And to some, Shadow.
 * Awesome Music - Most of the stage music, "This Machine" and especially "What I'm Made Of." And TEAM! KAY! OH! TIX!'
 * How about the main theme?
 * This is Sonic after all.
 * Base Breaker - This game was pretty much the catalyst for Shadow's Base Breaker status (his self-titled game would break it even further): did bringing Shadow back cheapen, thus turning him into a Creators Pet or was it good just to see Shadow make a reappearance?
 * Character Rerailment - The Sonic Adventure series turned Knuckles into a dead-serious guardian, in sharp contrast to his Sonic 3 and Knuckles portrayal of laughing at Sonic at every turn. This game was able to reconcile the two portrayals into a deceptively stoic Lancer who gets smug at getting one over Sonic.
 * Excuse Plot - Done in this game to soothe complaints about the Kudzu Plot the Adventure games were growing. Unfortunately, people found other things to complain about instead.
 * Fridge Brilliance - Metal Sonic copies Chaos's data from Chocola and Froggy. Chao are very closely connected with Chaos, and Froggy was once possessed by Chaos. When Metal Sonic enters his One Winged Angel transformation, he does so by merging with one of Eggman's battleships. This is because he copied Chaos's shapeshifting powers. however, while Chaos is made of water, and thus merged with Station Square's reservoirs, Metal Sonic is made of metal, so he used a battleship to gain mass.
 * Metal Sonic's One Winged Angel form is ridiculously easy because his ego is three times larger than his size.
 * Goddamned Bats - In the Hang Castle and Mystic Mansion stages, the ghosts that pop up everywhere.
 * 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. Three years later out-of-universe, Metal Sonic does it again in Super Mario Bros Z, only it ends up being far worse than before, where he (presumably) murdered Eggman while backstabbing him, decimated a large percentage of the planet's ecosystem, and also murdered all of Sonic's and Shadow's friends.
 * It Was His Sled - Metal Sonic was 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.
 * Mondegreen - Several gamers thought that Knuckles said "Shit!" during the first of his combo punches.
 * Thus making his entire set of combo punches "SHIT ROCKS YYEEEEAAAAHHHHH!!!". Knuckles sure loves his feces!
 * Most Annoying Sound - "Here we go!"
 * That doesn't even cover that annoying "WHEEE!" noise that Tails makes when you boost through the air. Still, you have to give the kid a break; the boy who voiced Tails (taking over from the VA in the Adventure series, who had hit puberty) was about 11 or 12 at the time.
 * "MUST BE MY LUCKY DAY!!!"
 * "Take this! Take this! Take this! Take this! Take this! Take this! CHARGE!!!"
 * Anyone who is the point man when you go into the cannon in the train stages. The team is shot out of the cannon and can pick up item balloons as they go through the air, subjecting the player to the snippet they say over and over.
 * Scrappy Mechanic - Rails, which began to be overused and often have Bottomless Pits under them. This game was also the first in the series to have the characters talk about the scenery and their current situations, a source of many annoying sounds, Captain Obvious and Narm, which people often complained about.
 * The level system was considered highly annoying to many as well.
 * 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 life bars were 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.
 * That One Level - FINAL FORTRESS. And Mystic Mansion, which is also a Marathon Level.
 * The Special Stages, too, especially where you have to catch the flying emerald.
 * This especially jarring as there's a sudden and unexpected Difficulty Spike between the 2nd and 3rd Emeralds. The Yellow Emerald somehow manages to be harder to obtain than all other Chaos Emeralds in the game barring the final one.
 * 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.