Shadow the Hedgehog - The Very Cool, Kid-Friendly Game for HaRdc0r3 EDGEl0rdz [Geek Critique Video]

I'm glad you emphasized the ridiculous reveal trailer for this game. I honestly felt betrayed by Sonic Team when I first saw it all those years ago. I really respect Yuji Naka and think he is very talented, but how could he let this happen? Was it his doing? Who really decided this game needed to exist?

On another note, it seems like you prefer this game over Heroes, which I definitely can't get behind. Some Heroes has lots of issues, but at least the level design isnt garbage like most of Shadow's levels.

 

I think both Shadow and Heroes have their own forms of awful level designs, but I agree with Josh if only for the fact that Shadow was all around more focused than heroes. That and in heroes they all controlled like skating on butter.

Is this saying Shadow is good? God no. But despite what some think Heroes is shit.

Btw I still hate that to this day Shadow is the most focused 3D Sonic ever with maybe the exception of Lost World... somehow those 2 are the most focused 3D Sonic games.

Bizarre

 

I wish you had mentioned the soundtrack a little more--I know a lot of people don't like it, but damn I thought some tracks were good. Especially GUN Fortress, a track whose melancholic composition manages to evoke the intended sense of Shadow having become a soulless monster destroying the last desperate vestiges of humanity doomed to die horribly when the actual plot and writing are nowhere near strong enough to actually say that on their own, lmao

 

I felt so validated when you commented on the copypaste design. It's a problem I feel began with SA2 and would only get much, much worse.

 

I'm one of those who barely remembers SatAM and AoStH, having been more connected with the games themselves than the shows.
Sonic CD was a mirage to me, with only scarce magazine scans to say I knew about it, and Sonic 3 ended up being rarer to me to play than S&K. Of course, I only discovered S3K in full years later, when I started playing in emulators.
SA1&2 were well-received by me, my brother and a few friends of ours. They seemed great Sonic games to us, and we played them to exhaustion.
When Heroes came...utter disappointment. A tremendous far-cry from SA1&2.
Shadow didn't go much behind, to be honest. The amount of times I wrapped my head around the plot, trying to make sense of it continuity-wise.
Then came 06, and its (apparently) more realistic, mature character designs. I still love Eggman06's design (wish they'd return to it, or maybe adapt the live movie style, depending on how Eggman-like it may be), but the current modern design for Sonic & Pals seems like the right style to me (live movie Sonic's design seems quite nice as well).
All in all, the classic games, despite the crazy development cycles we kinda now know they had, ended up defining the franchise and its characters. SA1&2 still hold a special place in my heart and memories, but from there onwards... Not that much...unfortunately.

 

Shadow is a bad game and an awful idea but I can also understand where thet were coming from.

Aside from Mario, plarformers in the mid 2000s had shifted to gunplay, see Ratchet and Clank and Jak. In fact, Jak 2 is very similar to the extent that I think Shadow was modelled on it; that game also featured a cute series go dark and feature guns. The difference though is that Jak 2 is great.

Also, at this time, everything in gaming was going 'urban' and 'dark' because of the dominant influence of Grand Theft Auto. A really cute and colourful Sonic game is quite popular now, but I don't think it would have had as much resonance with kids and teens back then.

 

Heroes stinks despite it's good intentions. Shadow is kinda fun despite it's bad intentions. It's got great music, branching structure (aka probably the best idea for a Sonic game ever), stupid/quotable dialogue, and some really cool level tropes. Sonic with guns absolutely wasn't what I wanted at the time but it still managed to be way better than Heroes and that was good enough for me. I'd still replay it, even. I have no such desire for Heroes.

 

It's Shadow The Hedgehog Baby!

 

Yeah, I gotta admit Shadow is rather a guilty pleasure for me, even though I wouldn't actually defend it or recommend it to people. I think the two biggest reasons are:
1: I wanted more Adventure-esque play for my 3D Sonic, and Shadow felt closer to that than Heroes to me, and
2: SA2 came out when I was 13, exactly the right age for an angsty character like Shadow to be really appealing. Compare for example Mega Charizard X: he's the same idea of "take a popular character and make it black and edgy," but he came out when I was 25, and I despise him.

 

I appreciate the games use of squash and stretch animation, even if it was at odds with the tone. It might have even been overdone, but it's preferable to the stiff weightless animation that later games used (often inconsistently within in the same game).

Of course we now live in an era where any extreme pose will be taken out of context and turned into a meme. Pearls before swine.

 

For the record, I was born in 1995 and my first introduction to Sonic was SA2B on the gamecube, so yeah, Josh was right: there was absolutely a group of stupid tweens who totally ate this shit up. I know because I was one of them. I still remember getting it for my gamecube--I would have been about 10 or 11 at the time--and popping it in. I unironically thought this was THE COOLEST GAME EVER. I remember watching that incredibly goddamn stupid intro and thinking "MAN THIS IS JUST LIKE MY BIG BRO'S GTA HOLY SHIT SCREW THAT KIDDY SHIT I'M A MATURE MAN NOW". I thought that that scene of Sonic collapsing right behind Shadow was the sickest fucking thing ever. I really really did think that.

Then the first level is this cool as fuck city getting blown to pieces with EXPLOSIONS and FIRE and I CAN USE GUNS? Tween me was ecstatic. Man. What was I thinking.

(I still hold a weird fondness for this game and absolutely do find it to be better than heroes. At least Shadow has fun guns to use and is absurdly stupid in a memey way and not a braindead saturday morning cartoon way. Also like Aerosol, outside of levels like Lost Impact, which I will gladly admit is an absolutely atrocious failure of level design in every single sense possible, I didn't find the scavenger hunts to be too annoying. The levels are just not that wide-open that you can miss stuff, they're really all just linear routes with few exceptions.

The problem Chaos Blast--and I'm surprised Josh didn't mention this as it's super obvious--is that the infinite ammo you get from having a full meter is exponentionally more powerful than the actual attack you get (especially if you have a machine gun) and you don't bring the game to a halt. As Josh said, the two chaos abilities are so blatantly tacked on it's clear Sonic Team really had no idea how to actually give you a moral choices a gameplay benefit.

 

So back in 2007, I tried defending this game on a Teen Titans forum. I can't believe I did that, I wasn't even part of the damn age demographic that this game was targeted at, because I was 15 when it came out and 17 when I tried defending it. After seeing this video, it definitely shows just how full of cringe this game is. Plus the whole having to revisit Westopolis so many damn times would definitely get tiresome. Honestly I don't think I ever even completed one storyline of this game. Why I even tried to defend it is beyond me, but I think it just stems from me loving the franchise so much and I hated seeing the negativity and criticisms from other people outside the Sonic fandom. I like it better than Heroes, because screw the Chaotix missions in Heroes! However it's definitely far from one of my favorite games in the series. This truly was a dark time for the franchise and from here it only got worse... until Colors came out IMO. Then it went to shit again with Sonic 4 Episode 1. Thank god we have Mania now!

 

I remember getting Shadow the Hedgehog for Christmas of 2005. I felt so much disappointment upon receiving it.

Just because I was the target demographic that was 13 years old, doesn't mean I would actually enjoy it. I'm not going to lie - I felt a lot of disappointment upon my parents for my decision that day.
This probably isn't helped that, compounding their decision to waste money on that game - when it would've still been $70-80AUD, mind, that they also got me a Nintendo DS, and... no games for it.

Even though I really really wanted Sonic Rush at the time.

It later turns out that they got the Nintendo DS as a last minute rush present, but were planning on Shadow the Hedgehog months in advance, and budgeted my Christmas toward it - we weren't exactly swimming in money as a family at the time.


So, yeah.
Fuck Shadow the Hedgehog. It's a shitty game, it ruined my fucking Christmas, and I never even grew up with any of the other 3D era Sonic games so its contextual addition to the broader world's story didn't even fucking work for me.
Also it played like complete shit.

Sonic Rush was a much better and cheaper game, too.

 

I'm actually really enjoying both sides of this dialogue. So many parts of the internet are built around bandwagoning that it's nice to see honest opinions, both in the "I don't care if it's objectively bad, I enjoyed it" sense, and in the "I don't care if it's popular to hate on, I actually genuinely hate it for my own reasons" sense.

 

Let me hit you with the ryuusei sound
This is how it goes down
We back again in the lab now
To turn it out
We gon get you out your seats now
Y'all know what's it all 'bout
Ooooh
IT'S SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG, BABY
3... 2... 1...

 

I got a lot further into Shadow and enjoyed it a lot more than Heroes. That's not saying a lot, I know, but given the caliber of Sonic games at the time, it was practically a diamond in the rough.

It probably helped that I was living the very edgiest part of my life, with a spiked choker and wrist bands, New Rocks and a billion cheap metal necklaces and bracelets that turned my skin green as my daily attire.

Also, the opening and ending themes all absolutely slap, I won't hear otherwise.

Crap, I'm even thinking of downloading it onto my Xbox RIGHT NOW (I have two discs but I have no idea which one stopped working, maybe both).

 

I think it's a game that's fun in short spurts but it quickly wears on me. There's barely enough variety to sustain a single level in its entirety, much less an entire game. The fundamentals at least feel a bit better than Heroes did, with snappier combat that can be spammy fun without really getting in my nerves due to the abundance of weapons and ammunition.
The ridiculous presentation is always what I remember the most: the gunshots in the menus, the color scheme, the sometimes-strange music, some of the strange locations, and the cutscenes/dialogue that come off to me as truly "so bad it's good" instead of 06's "immensely boring but with many one or two highlights".