SONIC X SHADOW GENERATIONS - Dark Beginnings

Chaos Control has been whatever Sega wanted it to be so it makes sense the writers aren't sure what it definitively is. They are also very finicky about showing it, and it's pretty much been relegated to Shadow's unique power even though everyone should be able to use it with as few as one Emerald.

But even if Flynn remembered that it can teleport, having Shadow take a shuttle is a more interesting decision.

Saying it was retconned misses the mark: its just whatever fits the plot. There will certainly be a moment in the game where we'll ask "why didn't Shadow stop time" and the answer will be "don't think about it"

 

Honestly, after Sonic Frontiers' story being so infuriatingly cowardly and knee-bending, it's a breath of fresh air to see Flynn stick it to the "muh canon and lore" -nerds for once.

And yeah, I guess Abraham Tower is his name now. That should probably be pointed out better on the Wiki, and while we're at it we might as well give a comprehensive rewriting to the G.U.N. and United Federation pages too.

 

Yeah, at end of the day them needing to raid a base to get him to the Ark is more dramatic than just him warping there at the beginning. It also gives him time to fall apart a little in the shuttle while remembering Maria.

They could have changed it to them raiding the base for the yellow Chaos Emerald and him having the flashback before warping/teleporting. But I don't think the imagery would be as strong.

It would also commit on screen Shadow having that ability to go to space with a huge distance like that with one emerald that might cause issues in the future.

"Why didn't Shadow use the emerald to go to Ark in his game? Why doesn't Sonic or Shadow use Chaos Control to go to space in a future game? Etc Etc etc"

Spoiler

Though they should not get rid of the warping/teleporting ability

 

Chaos Control should be a localised singularity warping spacetime, since that's how it's depicted otherwise. Shadow uses it in Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic is able to continue tracking him, so he's not freezing time there: genuinely, watch the cutscene and Sonic is already turning to follow Shadow as he zips past.
Shadow the Hedgehog also shows the use of Chaos Control has him warping through the level, without freezing time as he goes through the level.
But it's also shown to manipulate time, with Sonic Heroes showing it freeze time for you to continue through the level, which is why I noted it wasn't freezing time as he warped in Shadow the Hedgehog: the game before it had that exact mechanic already.

It does both, but I expect another "glowing green rock with no special properties" situation with this.

 

Just to be clear, I'm not going to rag on Ian for this one, but I'm just kinda surprised he took the stance.

I didn't think about the point about warping or not warping to the ARK from Prison Island, but I think he's probably right about that. Even with 3 chaos emeralds present, I can't see it being powerful enough to transport over such a massive distance (which is something like 240,000 miles roughly). More likely he warped them to the mainland, they made it to the Space Transporter in Eggman's Base on their own, and so on, and so forth.

The absence of the space transporter in this series is interesting. Still, it seems likely that since the base got repurposed into a supply depot, Eggman relocated his rocket pad and space transporter to somewhere more convenient for him.

 

Indeed, look at Black Doom: he needed all seven Chaos Emeralds to warp the Black Comet down. Otherwise, all he needed was to have one alien go down, grab a single Chaos Emerald from somewhere, get it back up and boom, Earth is screwed. But no, he needed all seven for that, so there's some sort of limit to the thing.

 

I feel a simple fix is just...Shadow not having a chaos emerald in this short series.

Obviously he needs it because of his boss fight, but he could've simply found it in the White Space. Chaos Control just wasn't much of a necessity here.

 

I am very in favor of characters, including Shadow and Sonic, being nerfed by the narrative, because the alternative is just leaving the characters with cracked abilities by the wayside when there are stories and ways of telling stories that mostly revolve around characters that are not as powerful. And the Sonic series has usually made use of this pretty liberally, which is why I really doubt the doom powers are coming out of Shadow Gens ngl.

Shadow's chaos abilities usually present a problem with this, which is why I think they keep nerfing him with rule of requiring chaos emeralds to use his powers. In spite of his abilities being his inherent cool factor, I think they just don't want to legitimize power creep to that extent.

It's worth noting that Shadow likely had two chaos emeralds by the time he travelled to the ARK before Eggman in SA2, though; rouge provided the rest of the 6 emeralds past that point. That alone limits his ability to warp that distance by a fair amount, even if Sonic teleported a pretty far distance with a single fake emerald.

 

Didn't it show him with the yellow/orange emerald?

Chaos control seems to do multiple things with spacetime. Fast movement (e.g. Jojo Part 3) or warping. Warping over a long distance seems hard. The only real question is how he got to the Ark in SA2.

I think there's room to say that for the warping, it's valid for the sake of player understanding to represent it in multiple ways. In Shadow '05, that's fast automatic movement. Freezing time is not that different from popping in and out of some time rift that would allow for instant warping, but the player needs some easy way to mix that into the gameplay, so that looks like frozen time in Shadow Generations.

Really it's inconsistent though, but oh well.

 

They're saying they shouldn't have put it in in the first place.

 

Right. If he didn't have the emerald, they could've made it out to be that chaos control would not be powerful enough to get to the Ark, whereas in SA2 he had an emerald. Sonic using a fake emerald would also explain why his warp to the ark weakened him so much.

But nope.

 

I'm all in for taking these characters seriously again, and this has been a delightful comeback

 

Quick thoughts on the whole series
+This was a good 'intro to shadow' that put most of it's focus on things fans wouldn't have seen already so it never felt like treading old ground. Wouldn't mind this approach for reintroducing other lore like silver's lost future or the echidna.
+The action in this series is IMMACULATE and my favorite thing about it. So glad more Sonic projects are coming out that use these character designs for what they're actually built for instead of being purely dialogue driven. Love it.
+The animation as a whole is getting across the confusion and pain in Shadow's trauma extremely well. It's not just action scenes they're flexing on.
+ They hit a nice note with Shadow's characterization here where he comes off brooding and abrasive without going so far as to be dull or not compelling.
+ Rouge is a lot of fun here and I think it makes her moral ambiguity more clear for the fans that could never wrap her head around it. Omega is also great. Nice to see team dark back in action in a way that serves all three of them well.
+Hats off to Ian for portraying Shadow's relationship with gun as adversarial finally. He SAYS there's no bad blood but you can see the twinkle in his eye. He did it the hard way because he got a kick out of it.
+I made a request a couple of weeks ago for more Maria scenes and I'm glad to see it getting dropped in my lap like this.
+ Every lore morsel and connecting thread here is delicious. There's been a lot of browbeating around going overboard with references but I think this series shows that leveraging the past can enhance the present as long as it's not surface level, from tying Shadow's past back into the main storyline to fun things like the moon being gone or the emerl fight. Should be a permanent series fixture if only because it's a hard ass visual.

My favorite Sonic animation, full stop. I can't wait to see if the game carries this momentum home.

Minor nitpicks here. There's a lot of text but keep in mind I loved this on the whole.
-Im not fully sold on any of the new actors here, but this is definitely Kirk's best effort for the character. I think he's a cut above Jason for sure but I still lean toward Humphrey as my favorite. Everyone else was hit or miss though
The screechy, nasally tone for Maria was a hard miss on what was otherwise great scenes.
-Omega needed more than one joke. Even two would have been enough since he's probably not even on screen for more than 2 minutes.
-Rouge headed straight to Sonic's birthday party after this...isn't UNlike her, but she probably should have gave sonic a heads up or something. Maybe that's what the rewrites are for.
The models can look a little rough salt a standstill. Def not as easy on the eyes as the knuckles short from a few years back but I think the strong cinematography and choreography more than make up for the shortcomings here.

 

If Chaos Control is a warping technique without limits, Shadow won’t have to play a single level in SA2 or Shadow (2005), just warp to the end of the level, or end of the game, simple as, see the issue here?

 

I have to say, after the overlong Pontac/Graff era, it's so refreshing to see the series stop being ashamed of itself and finally embrace itself. It's almost surreal to see modern Sonic games reference their universe's lore and history in non-meta, non-self-deprecating ways.

I don't agree that SA2 solved the mystery. The game gave conflicting evidence that supported both possibilities.

Yes, Shadow remembering Maria's real wish implies he's the "real" Shadow. But Gerald stating he finished the Ultimate Lifeform after being captured by GUN implies the opposite; that he worked on a new Shadow/ULF for GUN after the original was jettisoned out of the ARK.

 

The alternative is chaos control stopping time long enough for Shadow and Rouge to make it off of (and out of) Prison Island by foot, which trivializes the levels in the exact same way, if we follow these apparent rules. The level designers knew ShTH's warp wasn't that great for gameplay implementation, as well, and set it to only be showcased via warp trails in Shadow Gens.

Shadow is gathering the emeralds all throughout ShTH, by any narrative right he should be busted out the wazoo in terms of chaos stamina near the end. But that's not how it works, because that's not how gameplay justification works

 

I think the thing I'm most impressed about with these shorts is that they somehow managed to make Shadow's entire story from previous games somewhat cohesive.

Like the alien shit was always slapdash, but using it to add to Shadow's angst about his creation AND giving him an inferiority complex over his inability to cure Maria? *chefs kiss*


They did a pretty good job of marrying Shadow's characterization from his initial games and his modern incarnations; he's still a dick to people but he's hiding a lot pain in there that he doesn't show to anyone, not even his closest friends.

I can see why people still don't fw Shadow, but this does a pretty good job making you understand him.

 

I honestly love the artstyle of the scenes themselves. Like, the character models wok pretty well, but everything else feels like all that official Sonic art that's come out recently, there's a lot of similar flat shading and so on that's really appealing.

 

So the next hurdle: can they make Sonic himself this interesting next? I would argue that among the main cast, Sonic is one of the least complex. "What you see is what you get. Just a guy that loves adventure."

—unless the idea really is that Sonic was the ultimate life form who landed on Earth and Shadow's memories were altered, whereas Sonic's were lost. That's going a bit far though.

 

^ Which is fine. Not every character needs to be complex and conflicted. Some work just fine by being simply fun, entertaining and/or likable enough.

In fact, some of the most beloved and iconic characters never had any character development, nor did they need it. Many fans see Sonic as the kind of character whose charisma and outlook inspire and change others, rather than himself changing.