Shadow The Hedgehog (Video Game)

 I updated my Alan Wake II post recently to include a section for The Lake House DLC. Go check it out.

 
Unrelated to the whole "Fearless Year Of Shadow" thing goin' on this year, back in June I became curious on the Shadow The Hedgehog video game. It was the only "mainline" title I wasn't very familiar with, but I didn't have a way to play it back in June though, so I just watched a let's play, and some other videos about it instead. I actually considered making a Twitter thread about my thoughts on this game despite not playing it, but I ultimately decided against it. But hey, I now have a Steam Deck, so I just played it on that.

Edgy

This game above all else (I think) is known for being edgy (derogatory). I doubt I would've found it cool as a kid, but nowadays, while it's far from my favorite aesthetic, I do earnestly enjoy it.
 
One part I particularly enjoy is the music. I think it's really cool just how different it is from other Sonic games. Something melodramatic like Lost Impact isn't really something I'd expect to hear in a Sonic game, but I think it's fit into this game quite well. Some themes I like are Westopolis, Prison Island, Sky Troops, and The Ark. My absolute favorite level theme is Final Haunt, because it's just so triumphant and catchy.
 
The vocal themes are also pretty good. I like all of them, except Almost Dead. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd either go with All Hail Shadow or Never Turn Back, depending on how I'm feeling at the moment. Right now, I'm feeling All Hail Shadow. Like Final Haunt, it's triumphant and catchy. I also wanna shout out the unused songs, Who I Am and Broken, since I think they're also pretty good. I've heard people claim some other songs were also planned to be put into the game, but I haven't seen anyone mention official sources when discussing the unused music, so I'ma just blindly trust what Sega Retro says because that website is epic.


Story

Usually with choose your own adventure stories, I generally expect their most prominent flaw to be that individual events just don't tie together in a satisfying way. This game has that problem I believe, but to so much worse of an extent than I normally expect, because a ton of things just don't tie together at all. To discuss an example, in the route Beyond One's Own Power...
 

The climax involves Eggman showing up out of nowhere, demanding the Chaos Emeralds from Shadow, and Shadow beats him up and dramatically karate-chops him (presumably killing him). Before this point, Eggman had never appeared or (I think) even been mentioned during this route. What does Shadow do after dramatically karate-chopping this guy who was largely irrelevant to this route's plot? How does the alien warfare end? Well that's never elaborated on in this route's ending. It just ends.

It's not all bad though. Some routes such as A Missive From 50 Years Ago work alright, and there's a lot of interesting bits and pieces to the story. The alien warfare premise is one of the more interesting high-stakes setups a Sonic game's had I think, and the all over the place execution of the narrative does kinda fit the spontaneity of the premise. I also think the game's overarching theme of choice works pretty well as an ending to Shadow's character arc (even though it totally would've worked perfectly fine to end his arc off in Sonic Adventure 2). Some pieces are dumb regardless though. How did Cream and Cheese get stuck behind the walls of some random Eggman castle?

For anyone curious, these were all the routes I completed.
 
Unfortunately, I think the choose your own adventure structure of the narrative does undercut this game's existence within the Sonic series's overall narrative, because from an overarching perspective, a whole lotta "nothing in particular" happens in this game. To be fair though, if you're just trying to have fun with the story, it does provide a very loose framework for you to headcannon your own story, and I think that's kinda fun and unique so I do have some respect for that.

This game gets a lot of flack for its cheesy writing, but I don't personally mind it. Everything's played pretty straight, so moments that are silly on paper, like Shadow karate-chopping a computer to gain access to its cyberspace, don't really ruin the tone in my eyes. It's hard to say much of the game has particularly good writing though, since it stretches itself way too thin with the choose your own adventure structure. The Last Story was pretty good though; as I said before, Shadow's character arc is capped off quite nicely.


Character Gameplay

Shadow's moveset is pretty solid. He has a lot of standard (for the time) Sonic stuff, Homing Attack, Spin Dash, Light-Speed Dash, but he also has the Wallrunning + Walljumps from Sonic Heroes which I think is cool to see. Most infamously though is that Shadow can pick up and use guns. The guns feel good to use though, so I like 'em. Enemies in Sonic games around this time tended to take multiple hits to kill which I'm not generally a fan of in platformers, but I think the guns bounce off this design choice pretty well, because they take out enemies pretty quickly, while also adding a somewhat interesting element of ammo management.
 
Oh yeah also Shadow has a basic 3-hit melee combo, and he can strafe, both of which were pretty unremarkable but mildly amusing I guess. I did use the strafe once though because it allows you to jump while carrying certain objects.

Something pretty refreshing about this game though is that it sticks to one gameplay style relatively adamantly for a 3D Sonic game. Sure there's some vehicle segments shake things up, but I'd say they overall make up less than 1/5th of the game. It's nice that I just got to just play as "the fun character" the entire time.


Missions + Structure

Something I feel like people talk about very little relative to its actual prominence in the Sonic series is the side missions. Tons of games throughout the series are loaded with so many side missions that they make up a majority of the games' contents, but for the most part, people just kinda don't care. Granted, a ton of side missions aren't as fun as just beating stages normally so I see why people don't care, but regardless it sticks out as a little odd to me. 
 
Whether intentionally or not, Shadow The Hedgehog rectifies this by baking what would traditionally be side missions so deeply into the game's core structure that they're of equal importance to the "get to the goal" style missions. Unfortunately to many, this was for the worse because people just want to play the "get to the goal" style missions, and Shadow The Hedgehog makes that impossible if you wanna unlock the Last Story and "properly" beat the game.
 
I for one though didn't mind the missions so fundamentally. I actually enjoyed a lot of them, even a ton of the infamous "kill every X type of enemy" ones. I'm normally not a fan of games about looking for stuff, but this game oftentimes doesn't really hide the stuff you need, so as long as you're aware of your surroundings, a lot of missions can actually be quite the smooth experience. Admittedly though, because there's nothing to tell you, or even hint where remaining enemies are, missing stuff is way too punishing, and I did have to occasionally retrek through entire stages to find 1 or 2 things that I missed.

And to finally stop beating around the bush, when this game does hide stuff, it creates some of the worst missions I've ever played in the Sonic series. The biggest offender of this was The Doom's Hero mission, which took me over 2 hours.
 
The in-game timer only says 71 minutes because I died a few times, which subtracted huge chunks from the in-game time.

As I hope you can imagine, The Doom was not a fun 2+ hours. I killed nearly every enemy (not every since that would've finished the Dark mission which I wasn't aiming to do at the moment) and collected every single ring I saw somewhere around the 1 hour mark, so I spent roughly an hour just scowering back and forth through really samey, empty hallways as Maria would randomly try to gaslight me into thinking there were objectives nearby. Most of the followers are actually quite helpful when it comes to pointing out nearby objectives, but for some reason Maria seemingly can't tell the difference between completed and unfinished objectives, making a ton of her attempts to help a waste of my time. This isn't the only awful miserable mission by the way, there's a couple of others that spring up (not so coincidentally) in the other particularly non-linear stages, Mad Matrix, Lost Impact, and Central City.

I at one point during my playthrough I actually planned to play every mission, and maybe even get all A-Ranks. Recently though, I've been trying to get better at knowing when to stop and let go of games, as to prevent ruining my own fun. So I stopped playing. I don't have to play the Dark mission in Mad Matrix to feel fulfilled, let alone get an A-Rank on it. I believe I've seen enough of the stage to trust that mission probably isn't fun, because I didn't even like the Neutral or Hero missions on Mad Matrix.
 
Another huge talking point with this game is its repetitive structure. To unlock the Last Story, you need to play through at least 10 routes, which with how the level order is structured, requires a lot of repetition. I don't mind it as much as other people, since as long as I still had untapped missions to play in a stage, I generally wouldn't find it repetitive, but even I got tired of some stages. People tend to just point out that having to play Westopolis 10 times is egregious, but what really got on my nerves is that you'll run out of missions to do on Westopolis, Digital Circut, Glyphic Canyon, and Lethal Highway by the time you reach your 10th playthrough.
 
The boss fights became especially stale to me though, since they lack the variable mission structure of the normal levels, and most of them appear at least twice throughout the game, even when you don't account for retreking paths. There is a bit variation due to the boss arenas changing depending which area you fight them in, but the only bosses I'd say actually feel different depending on the arena are Egg Breaker and Black Bull.


Damn

I don't have a good place to mention some things, so here's a whole section for weird mentions, I played a bit of this game with the graphics screwed up. I considered playing through the entire game without fixing it, because I found the graphical bugs funny, but seemingly all of the GUN soldiers were invisible which I knew would've been a gameplay issue, so I fixed it (thankfully without much effort) after playing through only 1 route. Here's what those graphical bugs looked like though:
 

I also wanna mention that Knuckles is voiced by Dan Green in this game, which a few years ago I wouldn't have thought anything of, but nowadays as a Yu-Gi-Oh fan, I can't not think of Atem from that series when I hear Knuckles in this game because it's the same voice. It was quite amusing though, and it made Knuckles my favorite follower.

I also also wanna mention that Shadow is dark brown in this game instead of black which looks a little odd, especially when this game is also full of black aliens that are supposed to share visual similarities with Shadow.


Expert Mode

Something else that I don't see brought up very often is this game's Expert Mode. To be fair again, you normally have to get all 71 A-Ranks to unlock it which I agree is a pretty tall ask.
 
For anyone curious, I only got 40 of them.
 
Instead of properly unlocking Expert Mode, I just downloaded a save file from GameFAQ's to skip the process.

Anyways, Expert Mode is a lot of fun, since it's (for the most part) just a ton of back to back "get to the goal" style missions. Consider giving it a go if you don't care for Shadow The Hedgehog's weird mission and story structures.
 
As the name implies though, it's difficult. In the second to last stage for example, Cosmic Fall, I lost 20+ lives. I then clutched through Final Haunt on a single life 😎, but that's beside the point. I had skill due to beating the main game, but even I got a few Blackout (Game Overs) and had to restart a couple of times (since there's no continues on Expert Mode). I'd recommend using save states if you play on an emulator.
 
I was disappointed that there weren't any Ranks. It doesn't even show you your score at the end of stages, let alone calculate your Time and Ring bonuses, so you can't even reasonably keep track of scores yourself. Still though, Expert Mode is a pretty fun victory lap through (nearly) all of the stages.


Comments

Post a Comment