Remember when you were a kid and you had a lot of angst and you went through this edgy period that you now cringe at as an adult?
Shadow The Hedgehog is the ill-conceived pseudo sequel to Sonic Heroes and Adventure 2, as well as one of the last games Yuji Naka worked on before leaving Sonic Team and Sega.
Before we go any further, I’d like to posit that by ill-conceived I don’t mean that it was a bad idea to make the game, just that the concept was under-developed, much like Shadow’s character. A spin-off game based off a then-popular character could have been a booster shot that sparked new life and interest in the franchise. And Shadow was the ideal candidate. But alas, instead, we now live in the timeline where Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic ’06 were released just one year apart.
To start at the top, progression through the narrative of the game is needlessly complex for how simple it really is. Shadow, who still doesn’t have his memories back, sees an invasion attempt happening and from there he goes on a quest to learn about his own past. After some soul searching, Shadow comes to a conclusion about who he is and what he feels his role in the world is.
And to the game’s credit, I actually like the mechanical structuring of morality. Rather than being a text prompt, you have to actively help people to be good, serve Black Doom in order to be evil or kind of just run past everything. The actual act of being good or bad usually boils down to annoying quests where you have to collect or destroy X amount of things for Y character, but I like the idea more than the implementation.
And yeah, you are going to have the most fun running past everything because the core issue that lies in the heart of Shadow The Hedgehog is that it’s kind of just a mediocre Sonic game with little pieces of Devil May Cry combat attached. Shadow has the Venom problem where he exists not as a character foil to the hero, but as a shadow-self, a dark doppelganger, a personified version of the path not taken. In gameplay, that amounts to Shadow being a texture swap with a bad attitude. Whereas a game based on Tails might include more flight based platforming puzzles and a game based on Knuckles would deal more with gliding, Shadow kind of boils down to being more of an aesthetic choice. But unlike in Adventure 2, Shadow’s moveset here is so weak. Hand to hand combat is so tacked on that if you tug on it too hard, it will fall off. The spindash is an actual joke. The homing attack at least works alright, but it’s not quite the powerhouse that some weapons are.
Shadow’s chaos powers are woefully under-utilized. Filling either the hero or dark bar gives you the ability to either use Chaos Control or Chaos Blast, but neither are more useful than just the passive bonus of having unlimited ammo with your currently equipped weapon. Furthermore, Chaos Control, which you build up doing “heroic” things actually fundamentally clashes with the collectathon structure of Hero missions, as you whiz by all of the objectives. Chaos Blast is kind of just a screen nuke, but it doesn’t do as much damage as the flashy visuals would suggest. Like, Sonic Heroes managed to make the ability halfway useful, here it just feels like a gimped version of the team attack.
The music is… Actually enjoyable, in a cheesy Nu Metal kind of way. Almost Dead is actually a banger, in a way that only try-hard 2000s Rob Zombie sound-alikes can be. The music probably gets closer to that Devil May Cry aesthetic the game is trying to chase.
And what’s kind of baffling is that there already is a version of this game that works; It’s called Ratchet and Clank. And although Ratchet and Clank is a lot slower, it executes the hybrid of third person shooting and platforming much more eloquently. This was the game Shadow The Hedgehog should probably have tried to imitate.
Final thoughts; this is not a game one plays with a completionist mindset, unless you really like Westopolis, because getting all the endings means playing Westopolis 10 times. The game is also trying way too hard, I mean, just listen to these menu sound effects. I remember having some fun with the multiplayer, but it’s entirely skippable.
And my last point is this; The middle of the road ending which you get from going off and doing your own thing while the plot happens at you is perhaps the only ending that has any real narrative stakes to it. You get to the end and Shadow concludes that he is an android, built to replace the Shadow that died in Adventure 2. He doesn’t remember anything because he physically never experienced those things. And this would have been kind of a great move to pull and I kind of wish this was the canon ending. See, as an Android, there’s a lot more room for Shadow and Omega to do some buddy cop stuff if they were both Eggman’s creations who kind of hate their creator. There’d be room for Shadow to have a narrative arc in future games where he tries to find his place in the world as the lookalike of the martyred Shadow in Adventure 2. Shadow would actually have a reason to explore intense rage as a being not really programmed with a lot of empathy, while trying to live up to the legacy of the original Shadow could be a motivation for Shadow to actually develop that empathy. And the on and off again rivalry between Shadow and Sonic would have extra dramatic stakes as Shadow now not only wants to prove that he’s better than Sonic, but it’s also a battle to prove that he isn’t just a shadow of Shadow the hedgehog.
The canon ending has Shadow discover he’s part alien and re-learning the lessons he already learned in Heroes and Adventure 2, and if that part alien thing comes out of left field and seems tacked on and pointless, don’t worry, because Sega all but forgets it ever happened.
All Hail Shadow, indeed.
