Jason Griffith: Shadow the Hedgehog was going to be M-rated, with F-bombs

Fuck the swears away, my rating's in ruins.

God I hope someone leaks these recordings.

 

Is this now the Sonic equivalent to the uncensored Sailor Mouth version?

On a more serious note, I'm not exactly sure that Sega would have greenlit a game that would have so heavily shut off the Sonic franchise's main target audience like this, assuming the franchise was meant to be child-oriented (a T rating would have fared better than an M rating, I would imagine). Although maybe this has to do with Japan handling offensive language differently than Western countries.

 

I hope that lines leak someday. This is everything I ever wanted from Shadow.

please sega, release the "shadow says fuck every five seconds" cut.

 

"Where's that fucking chaos emerald?" rolls off the tongue better though.

 

knowing how iconic the yakuza 1 dub is for how utterly hilarious the swearing is, I wish we saw what m rated shadow looked like.

 

I would say there is a modicum of truth to this. The whole idea of the Shadow game was to make a game for people who grew up with Sonic but were now adults.

I wish more developers would look to make a platform game made for adults, we've had Conkers and that's about it

 

We got that. It's called Sonic Mania.

Really though, while I've no hate for stuff like Conker, I don't see the need for games to be crude and foul-mouthed to be adult. Its like calling Family Guy adult animation - it's just a whole load of edgy jokes and it's aimed at 15 year olds more than anyone else.

 

yeah pretty much, Shadow wasn't aimed at adults at all, it was for edgy teenagers whose parents wouldn't let them play GTA III lol

 

I've a colleague at work who was like 7 years old when Shadow was released. He still thinks that the game was the coolest shit ever and it's disappointed that nowadays Shadow never has a gun.

 

Honestly, it's hilarious given how sanitized and mandated the franchise is nowadays, but Sega really were just doing anything in the 2000s. I can believe this because why the hell not? They literally released a game the following year that killed their iconic mascot by a guy named "Mephiles the Dark", nothing was off the table for the franchise back then.

Even with Sega going all in on the nostalgia for this era recently, they would never release a game like Shadow again, and I say this with the knowledge of Shadow Generations coming out this year. 2005 was the peak of insanity for Sonic, I can see why Shadow's game is still remembered to this day because it's such an utterly baffling concept for this franchise.

 

I was about 8 years old when it released and at that point I was deeply into Sonic Gems Collection. I can't even remember what my honest thoughts on Shadow were as a kid, I remember just thinking that it looked kind of weird. Then my brother bought the game and I saw him playing through the whole game with the chicken vaccum and that's when I realized this game was goofy and funny as hell lol

It's kind of crazy to see people around my age feel nostalgic for the whole grime-n-gritty era of 2000's gaming. It's only a matter of time before people in the 2030's are nostalgic for the time when Sonic had blue arms and sports tape.

 

I was 1 year old so I had no thoughts on the game at the time
However I do have a memory of my mom's ex boyfriend putting on Game Grumps' playthrough of the game on his phone for me to watch while we were waiting for food at a restaurant in 2014... I don't like that that was 10 years ago... Anyways, I remember thinking "Wow my mom would NOT be ok with me watching this" I think he put it on because I had only ever played Sonic 1 and Sonic Colours at the time and he wanted to show me how 'cool' Sonic games actually were. I recall that later I wanted to draw what I saw in MS Paint and asked my mom for permission to draw a gun (I was never that sheltered or anything, just anxious lol) and I titled it something like "Shadow's good day". So 9 year old me at least thought it was cool.

Nowadays I'm indifferent to Shadow, the gameplay's too tedious for me to commit to a full 10 ending playthrough. But I don't mind the edgy elements.

 

I can't trust my own memory, but I was 12 when it came out and still knee deep into Sonic shit, but even I thought "the fuck?" When I first saw the trailer for it.

But Shadow is one of my favorite characters, so obviously I had my Dad buy it for me... I understood the story about as well as you'd expect at 12 (that is to say, not all) so I just turned my brain off and got all of the endings.


I will say, Shadow does encourage a lot of replay value than most current Sonic games. I played it a lot to get everything.

 

Back in 2009 when I used to dig through international websites I remember specifically wanting a Japanese Gamecube and a import of the Japanese version when I was 5 because I wanted to hear the "damn" lines in Japanese and how they were changed (this was before YouTube was more prominent). I remember digging through Amazon Japan to find a way to get a japanese model but had no luck. It's important to note that I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into.
Funny how times change...

 

Because a bunch of sad angry losers who didn't even want to play the games but felt obligated to review them complained when they just did whatever they wanted instead of making Sonic 2 again and had opinions on things they didn't care about like "it's slupid that Shadow has a gun" so now Shadow can't have guns anymore

 

I think I would have been 12 years old at the time, so right in the target audience. I thought him having a gun was stupid but the game was wayyyy fucking better than Heroes and that was enough for me.

 

My first time playing Shadow the Hedgehog was in 2015, when I was 11. I never particularly cared about the "edgeness" one way or the other, that was just how the game is and I accepted it, the swearing in particular flew over my head since english is not my first language, at the time, there was no difference between Shadow saying "Damn" and Sonic saying "shoot" to me. I was just a mega Sonic fangirl at the time, so I liked the game as I did with any other Sonic game (or at least, that's what I told myself, because I only cared finished it on the neutral route and gave up on the other ones when I realized Westopolis' other missions asked you to kill EVERY SINGLE enemy on the map, which was painfully tedious)

It was when Mania was announced (roughly a year later, though it felt longer as a kid) that I reevaluated my thoughts on the whole series prior. For the next few years, I was on my "Classic Sonic fangirl, but Modern hater" phase, green-eyes were an instant no-no to me, so of course something as ridiculous as a Sonic character wielding guns and shooting weird demon-looking aliens to death was completely impossible to accept as part of the same franchise as any of the classic games.

I think that around the time the first Sonic movie released, I kind of started to enjoy Modern Sonic again, even if I'm still bothered by a lot of decisions and how the franchise distanced itself from its roots, but that's another conversation entirely. But Shadow the Hedgehog is just.... Well, the mere sight of Shadow holding a gun is absurd, this can't be a real Sonic game, but also... it's so ridiculous I think it kind of works now? I mean, I'm not in love with the idea of a Sonic character that uses firearms, but the sheer absurdity of it is so ironically enjoyable that I wouldn't be bothered depending on how it's done. I like when things are allowed to be ridiculous and insane, even if I'm laughing at them, instead of with them

 

I'm very curious why the people who agreed or liked the post saying there being a M Rated version of the game was a sure thing felt this was absolutely true, due to the environment at the time, when absolutely no one else at Sonic Team or that had worked on the game has ever even implied this to be the case? Not even script leaks or anything?

Wouldn't we have had at least ONE or two quotes we could have referred back to that synced up to what he said? I believe he did do takes with harder cursing but I still can't believe at all an M rated version of the game was ever planned.