The game follows the adventures of the Sporeling and Zarkhator, two polar-opposite creatures who crash on an unnamed planet in crystalline meteors associated with them, inadvertently spreading shards of them all around the planet. Whereas Sporeling's blue meteors cause beneficial evolutions in other creatures, Zarkhator's red ones spread corruption wherever they go, which the latter plans to invoke on the entire planet. With Sporeling under your control, it's up to you to stop him by evolving them into a capable fighter using new parts you find, helping out various tribes of other creatures along the way.
This work provides examples of:
- Actionized Sequel: Unlike the Creature Stage of Spore, which had no plot of its own, being nothing but a struggle for your creature to evolve and survive by interacting with other animals, Spore Hero is a full-blown action-adventure where you navigate prebuilt open-world areas and initiate one-on-one fighting matches with other creatures in the name of saving the world from corruption.
- And I Must Scream: A literal example at the beginning of the game; Sporeling hatches from their egg without a mouth, and the first mission of the game is to attach one at a Nest, enabling the basic Bite attack and the ability to eat fruit.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The complexity meter from the original game returns in Hero, limiting the amount of parts a creature can have for the sake of both performance and balance. It's even more limited here unfortunately, no doubt due to the Wii's weak hardware.
- Big Bad: Zarkhator, who's responsible for spreading corruption across the galaxy via red meteors.
- The Corruption: What Zarkhator's red meteors do to other creatures. With the game being E10, it's certainly a tame example, but it's still there; the afflicted have their normal voice replaced with shrill chittering and become territorial, viciously defending whatever nearby red meteor's "infected" them. Fortunately, it can be immediately cured by destroying it, though getting to it isn't always easy.
- Cooking Duel: Dance, Sing, and Pose are optional minigames now, as opposed to inherent abilities your creature can have, wherein you try to dance, sing or pose better than your opponent. Charm is nowhere to be found.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Just like the original Spore. If you "die," you're just sent back to the last Nest you used, no strings attached.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Defeating every member of a species in combat causes them to let you use their Nest freely, giving you another place to stop and edit your Sporeling. Some do this as an explicit sign of respect, while others seem to immediately forget the intense smackdown you just gave them.
- Doomed Hometown: Doomed planet in this case. Or as you actually find out, multiple planets, since Zarkhator and Sporeling have been doing this for a long time, with Zarkhator winning each time until now.
- Evil Is Bigger: From the moment they both come out of their respective comets, Zarkhator is physically larger than the Sporeling each time they meet. This is most easily visible in the final battle; even if you've made Sporeling's final form as big, broad and heroically-built as possible within the editor's limits, Zarkhator's final form is still taller, even if only by a little.
- Forced Transformation: Unlike Sporeling, who mostly uses their evolution-based powers to improve other creatures, Zarkhator uses his to devolve certain creatures into more humiliating forms, either to render them a non-threat to him or just to humiliate them. Naturally, after defeating him in the final battle, you get to do this to him, editing him however you see fit, thus making him harmless.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- Characters alternate in and out of being walking videogame tutorials and actually being grounded in the world. The most egregious example is at the very beginning of the game; after Meejee realizes Sporeling can't eat due to lacking a mouth, he robotically instructs the player to go over to his nest and attach a mouth part. Right after you do that, if you talk to him, he'll express amazement and confusion at how you just walked over to his Nest and suddenly grew a mouth (in addition to any other changes you made) despite what he just said.
- A lot of creatures or characters featured in cutscenes don't appear exactly the same they do in gameplay, using parts that are either entirely incorrect or just loose imitations in the former.
- Just like the original Spore, a creature's abilities are more or less measured purely by what parts they have (and in some cases, how many), not where you put them; for example, even though logic dictates you should put mouths on the front of a creature, they function just the same on their rear, sides, knees, etc. You can thusly make Sporeling as ridiculous-looking as you want while still being fully functional, and nobody will ever comment on it.
- Crossing over with the above, any time in the game you're asked to edit another creature, you don't have to do anything besides the bare minimum; no matter how else you change them, they'll carry on as normal. This reaches its most ridiculous point during the game's ending, where you get to edit Zarkhator; the game obviously expects you to change him in such a way that humiliates him and makes him a total non-threat, but the following cutscene will always show Sporeling and company laughing at him before he runs off crying, which still happens if you don't edit him at all or even make him look more imposing than he was.
- Genius Loci: The planet the game takes place on is revealed to be an interesting example of this. Once you reach Creature Beach, it's revealed the area is named after the titanic creature whose tentacle-y body runs throughout the whole planet. Its heart is Zarkhator's ultimate objective, which he plans to take, letting him corrupt the whole planet in one go.
- Green Rocks: Blue meteors cause good things to those around them like beneficial evolution, whereas red meteors cause bad things through corruption. Within those parameters, they can do basically anything.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The Spor-O-Mega, the one part exclusive to Spore Hero not ported from Spore. It's a special max-level Spit part that fires explosive shards of blue meteor; it's usually just as good as the other three max-level Spit parts, but during the final battle with Zarkhator, it deals much higher damage, but has to be charged by dealing damage with your other attacks first.
- Karmic Death: Karmic defeat, since nobody dies in this game, but you ultimately render Zarkhator permanently harmless by doing the same thing he's done to so many others throughout your journey.
- Lighter and Softer: Spore itself had barely any edge to speak of, player-created content aside, other than an occasionally dark sense of humor; despite this, Spore Hero manages to be even more kid-friendly. The narrative and presentation are very lightweight and whimsical on all fronts, premade creatures are either appealingly cute or cartoonishly evil, creatures defeated in combat are only knocked out for a second instead of killed, and the game never gets anywhere near as difficult as Spore could be on Normal or Hard.
- Living Statue: The Ancient Idol you've been working on throughout the game turns out to be this once it's time for the finale, becoming the Ancient Guardian. He helps you throughout Creature Beach, capping off with him gifting you the Spor-O-Mega.
- Macross Missile Massacre: The Spor-O-Mega functions this way. As opposed to the other Spit parts, which lets you fire spikes, poison or organic bombs directly at your target, the Spor-O-Mega fires a barrage of blue meteor missiles into the air, which then rain down on your opponent.
- Morphic Resonance: No matter what form Zarkhator takes, he has "Wareye" eyes. Even when he disguises himself as a Krikot, which in this case also includes having more "evil," but vaguely similar-looking parts replacing some of a Krikot's normal ones. Whether Sporeling plays it straight or averts it is entirely up to the player.
- Recurring Boss: Zarkhator is fought three times throughout the game, including your final confrontation with him in the heart of the planet.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: Zarkhator is a textbook example of this, almost always being some form of black and red, with each of his evolutions using Spore's more menacing parts. Also applies to the red meteors he's associated with, which (in addition to their colors) have sharp and pointy crystals with patterns resembling cracks, as opposed to how Sporeling's blue meteors look more like smooth quartz with patterns resembling wind lines or budding plants.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Zarkhator and Sporeling, respectively.
- Shmuck Bait: Early in the game, attacking a certain creature, the Babbit, will make him attempt to give you a rather suspicious fruit. Happens again in a later area, with Zarkhator disguised as a Krikat trying to give you a similarly-unsafe fruit to eat.
- Super Drowning Skills: If your creature doesn't have fins of some kind, you will drown immediately when touching a body of water.
- Sword of Plot Advancement: The Spor-o-Mega. Once the Ancient Guardian gives it to you, you cannot initiate the final boss fight without first attaching it to Sporeling.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Some quests involve evolving some creatures for them. Naturally, you're free to completely screw up how they look as long as you also meet the bare minimum requirement set by the mission. Encouraged against Zarkhator after you defeat him the final time, where you're given the ability to edit him, and encouraged to make him as feeble, messed-up looking, or otherwise harmless as possible, both to neutralize him and to finally get back at him for everything he's done.
- Womb Level: Sporeling and Zarkhator both enter the body of the colossal Creature Beach creature twice; once to race to its brain, and then again for the final duel in its heart. Random teeth and organs are everywhere like you'd expect, and the race during your first visit even replaces the usual boulders with huge synapse charges as obstacles.
