(Shad)ow, the (h)edge(hog)! (Shadow the Hedgehog, in review)

    Sonic the Hedgehog has always been a fun and child friendly character, encouraging kids of all of ages to have good times, but what would happen if Sonic Team suddenly decided to cater to a fanbase that they never had before... the angsty teenagers? That's exactly what happened back in 2005 with Shadow the Hedgehog. The character of Shadow the Hedgehog immediately gathered something of a fan following when he was introduced in Sonic Adventure 2, so when the team had this idea, there was little doubt who the most likely character would be. To appeal to the video game-playing kids who were used to playing Halo and other first person shooter games of the day, Shadow The Hedgehog was created to be a Sonic game for the big kids. This game has some interesting quirks about it, but it still has a lot of classic 3D Sonic elements. In this post, I really won't talk a lot about the story... not because I care about spoilers, but because this time around the story is a huge mess, which I'll get into shortly. Mostly I'll be talking about where the game went wrong, and honestly how the team bit off more than it could chew. Get your rocket shoes ready once again and get your finger on the censor button, because it's time to talk about this 2005 release.

Can anyone point out what's wrong with this picture? Trick question, the whole thing is.

The story is about... aliens?

    This story legitimately starts out with Shadow looking with angst out on the city, when suddenly a wormhole opens up and aliens come through... apparently the head of the aliens, which are called the Black Arms, know about Shadow and they want him to join their efforts to take over the world. That's pretty much all I have for you about the story, and the reason for that is that they made this a game with a morality system of sorts. Every level has three possible missions for you to do, Hero, Dark, or Neutral. Based on what mission you do, the story continues on with Shadow getting more heroic, more evil, or somewhere in between. I think one mission that sums it up pretty well is one where you're on an airship with the president of the United States. The hero mission has you escorting his flying limo thing to the end of the level, while the villain mission has you destroying it, and maybe killing him (though I can't remember, it may not go that far). The Normal mission pretty much is always just "Get to the end of the level where the Chaos Emerald is," which is fine, and honestly expected for Sonic, but it gets old after a while. I will say, I actually kind of like this idea for variety of gameplay as well as having a ton of different stories instead of just a few or one pathway for the plot to go down. I also like how the hero path will let you play alongside different sonic characters, while the dark path will just let you team up with some evil alien or something that follows you around for the level. A few times, Eggman is on the dark side, but for the most part, the aliens are the main menace here. What do the aliens want, you may ask? Oh, world domination, of course. A very original evil objective for someone to want, if you ask me! There are at least 10 endings to this game from what I can remember, which can range from Shadow becoming the real ultimate lifeform and... ascending to godhood... all the way to one ending where Shadow just gets fed up with Eggman for the last time and kills him (which is an actual ending that I got when I rented the game as a child... yay...). These endings are so nonsensical and bizarre that they were clearly not written with any kind of canon in mind. In writing this post, I briefly glanced over the Wikipedia entry on the game, and it said something to the effect of, "This game was made to be a sequel to Sonic Heroes," which I truly hope wasn't the original idea for it. Yes, this was technically the next mainline Sonic game after that one, but the tone, pacing, and speed of this game are all unlike Sonic Heroes in almost every way.

Wait... What did Shadow just say?

    This game came out in 2005, I was either in fifth or sixth grade then, and I rented the game from Blockbuster (man, do I feel old). I read the article about it in Nintendo Power magazine and I thought it sounded really cool to be able to ride on motorcycles and hovercrafts while wielding alien guns, and it made sense for Shadow to be the main character of this darker story. Best of all, the game was going to be rated E10+, which meant I would be able to play it when it came out because I was only 11 or 12 and couldn't play T-rated games. When I rented it, however, I quickly realized that this should have been rated teen, and I'm honestly surprised at the ESRB letting it stay E10+. Every time Shadow gets hit by anything or falls off of a cliff, he yells out a bad word. It's weird to say this, but somehow the biggest disconnect with the normal Sonic games is right here. The guns and motorcycles are a really strange addition that also didn't work well, but why in the world did they feel the need for Shadow to say the S-word when he got hit by an enemy? He drops a few rings, as is the norm for Sonic games, but as a little kid, I was shocked and didn't really want to play the game anymore after a few instances of this. I was very sensitive to bad language like this as a kid, so when I got older, I assumed that this was less of a big deal to other people. This doesn't seem to be the case though, as there have been a lot of people that I've talked to about this game that all bring up the language issues as well. It's clear that this language is weird, as well as the guns with the opening cutscene where Shadow is holding a machine gun as Sonic collapses on the ground. Speaking of the guns, let's talk about the gameplay a bit.

Gameplay? No thank you!

    The Sonic series has had its fair share of rough or broken controls, over the years, but in 2005, I was young and hopeful enough after Sonic Heroes that this game's controls would be great, but they really weren't. The vehicles that had been promised, like the Motorcycle and the Hovercraft were in there, but they were slow to turn and buggy to drive, I would really only use them whenever they were absolutely necessary. The whole point of the Sonic games is to be faster than a motorcycle anyways, right? Why was it a big deal for Shadow to use one in this game? Another thing, what was the point of the guns? Shadow still had the Homing Attack from Sonic Adventure 2, which a lot of the systems in this game were still built around, so the addition of guns was just really unnecessary, and they didn't fit in with the typical Sonic move set, especially considering you couldn't really aim at anything, you just had to hold the button and hope that your machine gun happened to hit something. It made him seem more "hardcore" to have guns, I guess, but nothing will ever be as deadly as a giant hedgehog ball to the face. The camera in this game was absolutely terrible, which made certain tricks like the Triangle Jump or Wall Jump even harder than they already were in Sonic Heroes. There was one mechanic that I thought was kind of cool, I have to say, and that is your Chaos Blast/Chaos Control. These were two separate powers that tied into whether you were doing good or bad things in the level. If you took out an alien, then you'd get Hero Energy, but if you took out a human, then you would get Dark Energy. If you filled up the bar with Hero energy and pressed a certain button, then Shadow would use Chaos Control, allowing him to blast forward through the level, giving a pretty major speed boost to the character. If you filled the bar with Dark Energy, Shadow would use Chaos Blast, which would wipe out all of the enemies around him. It's a nice trade, and it depends on what objectives you're trying to complete. That's probably my favorite mechanic in this game, though there's also a fast travel system tacked onto the checkpoints in levels which help you to look around for certain objective-related items or enemies much easier than to just walk back to where you just were. These were fairly small things and did little to fix the issues of the gameplay and controls overall though.

    Shadow the Hedgehog is just a confusing time all around full of baffling inconsistencies in quality and wild changes to the Sonic formula that they thankfully didn't go back to. In the opinion of many people, this is where Sonic games began going downhill, and it's easy to see why. Shadow was next playable in the ill-fated Sonic The Hedgehog (colloquially known as Sonic '06) in his own campaign, and even though he was still able to drive vehicles, it wasn't nearly as weird and bad as his own game that was centered around him. I have to say before I go that I'm sure there were a lot of people who loved this game, and that's fine, I just am not one of those people. Maybe there was a teenager out there who un-ironically thought, "Finally! A Sonic game for me!" If that was you, I'm happy for you, but the game as a whole was a bit of a mess in my eyes, and that's really the only perspective I can speak from.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! Do you have any opinion on Shadow the Hedgehog? This game is so bizarre that I honestly have to wonder if this was another case of Sonic Team pushing out a game to meet a deadline or if they actually believed in the product that they shipped. I'm sure a lot of people have fond memories of this game, and if that's the case, I'm happy for you, it just didn't really do it for me. I hope you all have a good week and until next time, I've been your Self-Proclaimed angsty teenager. See ya next week!