SEGA and Paramount Pictures have dropped Sonic’s third live-action movie this weekend—not that I’m going to watch it, but all this talk about one of the film’s stars, Shadow the Hedgehog, had me thinking all the way back to that one black sheep entry in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
All though, on second thought, maybe “black sheep” doesn’t really work for this series. I mean just look at all those Wii entries or the Nintendo DS BioWare-developed role-playing game with the horrendous score arrangement.
Okay, wrong choice of words maybe. But ‘Shadow the Hedgehog’ is a special game, developed by SEGA USA for the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and the original XBox back when Jak wanted to “kill Praxis” and Wind Waker was booed for looking like a children’s video game. SEGA didn’t want to be left behind in gen six (or maybe getting a bit dark was every game developer’s calling back then) and so, one of Sonic’s many rivals got his own spin-off title.
I finally spent the last couple of days this week trudging through Shadow the Hedgehog. I wanted this review to be done in time for the film’s release, but I can only take rerunning the same game only so many times. Playing this game to completion will require ten playthroughs across Shadow’s admittedly solid variety of missions and levels—it’s just how it all comes together that makes the Ultimate Lifeform’s spinoff title a chore to get through.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here, so let’s just use Chaos Control and get to the meat of things.
And One by One, They Fall
Shadow the Hedgehog’s game is a stage-based, story-driven 3D high-speed platformer where players will play as the titular Shadow as he finds himself in front of a besieged Central City with no memories to call his own besides an escape with a young girl named Maria and her untimely death by gunshot. A giant, freaky looking alien by the name of Black Doom then remotely reaches out to Shadow, telling him to bring all the seven chaos emeralds to His Freakiness so that he can tell him more about his past. With nowhere else to go but up, Shadow takes his offer and skates towards a burning Central City in hopes of finding answers.
One of Shadow the Hedgehog’s selling points was branching narratives, which is based on the path that the player has chosen to take in a given stage. You see, upon first landing in Central City, Shadow has three options he can choose from:
- Help Sonic clear out the Black Creatures slash Aliens.
- Help Black Doom clear out the GUN soldiers fighting off his army.
- Run to the end of the stage and touch the series’ trademarked giant ring and complete the level.
Completing either one of these objectives will finish the level and progress the game, moving you towards a different stage based on the “choice” you’ve made. Essentially, how you complete a level changes your Story Route which is shown to you upon loading into levels and in your pause menu, and after completing six stages (with some bosses thrown in-between), you’ll run into a route’s given final boss followed by its unique ending and then credits (with different vocal tracks depending on the path you’ve chosen). And there are five routes, with the topmost of the chart being the “Dark” path and the bottommost being the “Hero” one.
What’s cool about this progression structure is that, in a way, you can build your own “path” so to speak. If you were to just jump into the game and picked the objective that you wanted to complete because it was fun or easy to do, the next stage you’d run wouldn’t be the same as the last time you ran the game. The cutscenes you’d see would change too—not necessarily their contents, mind, since those are strictly linear. But say you started helping Black Doom, had a change of heart, and wanted to help Sonic and friends: you’d run into the likes of Tails, Amy, Omega, and GUN/The President/Commander. But if you simply stuck to helping Black Doom, you’d only run into a much smaller set of characters. Bosses change, too, and you might even have to fight off the series’ mascot depending on your choice.
And outside of story, your gameplay would change up a bunch too. Objectives vary from stage to stage, with some having you clear out marked enemies, finding and activating totems, to hunting down and destroying specific targets within a specified set of time. Some stages are also timed, too, which means you’ll need to stay on your toes (and restart a bunch when things aren’t going your way). As Shadow the Hedgehog is based on ‘Sonic Heroes’ in many ways, fans of that game will be right at home here (and fans of momentum-based Sonic can continue to be happier, but I’ll touch on that in a moment).
Honestly, looking back, I never realised how ambitious of a game Shadow the Hedgehog was. Between story/stage branching, numerous voiced lines across all stages, differing stage mechanics (high-speed, objective hunting, on-rails shooting, even cars!), SEGA USA had their work cut out for them. It’s a shame that the execution wasn’t quite there in the end, sadly.
Rip it Up, Tear it Down
Shadow the Hedgehog is a confused game. Not confusing nor strange, just confused. And that’s because the game is being stretched thin trying to decide whether it wants to be an objective-based game or a fast-paced platformer like other Sonic games. Some levels play great with certain objectives and others are a small nightmare that require precise planning and prayers that you aren’t blown off the stage. One stage might really favour going super-fast and completion via the normal route, but for another it might just be easier to beat up a number of Aliens/GUN troops to get the fastest time possible and/or get out of that awful level as quickly as one can. The game’s scoring system judges your handiwork based on the route you’ve chosen which does allow for some leeway in your grade, but it ultimately always prefers time to rings and hero/dark scoring.
With that being said, lemme tell you about Shadow the Hedgehog’s level design philosophy and how it doesn’t always play nicely with Shadow’s character controller. Shadow is a fast character: push the left analog stick for a short moment and he will start speeding right off the stage before you can blink. With the right boosts given via rails and the like, Shadow can go so fast you can end up finding yourself accidentally blowing past scripted events in the level which will end up killing you. Chaos abilities that Shadow has, which are denoted by the two red and blue bars on the gameplay user interface, can also be incredibly beneficial to you as they can be an even faster way to die–beating up enough Aliens, for example, will grant you Chaos Control, which blasts the player into a high-speed level skip for as long as the bar remains. The game will try to drop you onto a safe platform once the effect wears off… Except more often than not, it’ll drop you right off the stage.
It’s clear that Shadow has a need for speed, being the Ultimate Lifeform and all. And despite everything I’ve said above, how Shadow plays is not the problem. Far from it! He’ll take some getting used to, being a somewhat early-3D character and all, but Shadow plays great. No, the problems are with the stages themselves. They are essentially scattered blocks and little squares littered with frame-dropping explosions and enemies that will pop out of thin air right onto you. Shadow can be hurt by either the Black Aliens, GUN, Eggman’s bots, and anything that movies—even if you’re trying to help them. These two big issues combine to make players play Shadow the Hedgehog like they’ve just put on a pair of Heelys for the first time at the age of 30 and need to grab every ledge they can just to make it down the alley.
But don’t even get me started on the game’s camera system. Take my advice, if you play Shadow the Hedgehog, make sure you use the camera controls sparingly. Let the game move the darn thing on its own, because the minute you interfere it’s likely to lock into an awkward spot at the worst possible time. And the only way to fix it is to either move out of that specific hold on the camera the level has designated or die. Trivial jumps become a massive pain in the derriere this way, and this also affects what Shadow is able to shoot at. Yes, Shadow shoots guns. Yes, it’s pretty neat. Until you need to shoot something specific and Shadow decides not to shoot it—he will always fire at the nearest target that is lined with his body in specific angles and if the camera isn’t able to help you, you’ll waste bullets needlessly and/or get blown off the stage.
And it pains me a bit to say these things about Shadow’s stages, because they’ve a lot of cool ideas. Shadow the Hedgehog’s edgy philosophy doesn’t just apply to its dialogue and story stuff but its a central theme to its art and design structure. Westopolis, Flying Fortress, the ARK, all these places are grittier in their art and set pieces (AKA lots of things being blown up and “infighting” to a degree). It’s fun to breeze through these stages after repeated playthroughs, but the first-time around shouldn’t feel frustrating to play. And this is a problem that is compounded by those branching objective paths. Remember how I said some objectives are better on some maps than others? If you’re just trying to get the fastest time possible for a route clear, it almost always pays to stick to the Normal objective, because it’s the easiest. But if you have to hunt enemies or for totems, Bahamut be your guide. Shadow the Hedgehog has no map system and it’s incredibly easy to get lost in its levels due to repeating rooms and a lack of signposting.
The game tries to help you clear the level with your chosen objective by assigning a character that’ll explain what you have to do and warn you if you miss something, but their dialogue is often be cut off by other scripts being triggered—or worse, their explanations might not make much sense in context. In one instance, I had Espio with me in a fight against Eggman and he kept telling me to stop destroying the doctor’s bots in fear of being detected in his computer system… Despite the bald feller trying to flatten us with bombs.
Just know that any mission where you’ve got to find something or someone will result in many, many restarts.
No More Gods, No More Graves
If all this sounds like a massive pain in the butt, know that it only gets somewhat worse. To “fully” complete Shadow the Hedgehog, you’ll need to replay this game ten times by getting all ten endings on the story map. On one hand, the varied route option that you can take to your destination theoretically means that, at the very least, you don’t have to run the same five stages in a row to get to your destination. But on the other, some level objectives are hazardous to your mental health. By the last ending, I was more than done with the game with regards to progression, but thankfully I persisted and finally unlocked the “Last Story” mode.
Shadow’s story is interesting if not played out a little disjointed. His agency is determined by you and the game will try to compensate for any paths you branch into that aren’t of the same story route. Say you want to help Black Doom and run the top-most route up until you get to the stage where Amy asks you to find Cream. Sure, you just shot up a bunch of GUN troops, but only psychopaths would leave Cream alone in a damp, dark castle. So, you save her and the cutscenes that follow after won’t be the same than if you simply pursued dark missions. But these choices don’t always line up with cutscenes—even if I went against Amy’s wish to rescue Cream, she’d still join me in the boss fight that comes after. A lot of scenes feel disjointed like this, especially the stage where an objective is to destroy the President’s escape chopper. I blew the thing up, yet the cutscene that played after was the same cutscene that plays if I played into Black Doom’s hand. You can probably chalk this one up to either great asset reuse or post-9/11 concerns, but the lack of reaction to blowing up the President’s chopper was quite lame.
Every route you take “defines” Shadow as a character and gets you closer to the truth of Shadow’s upbringing and what happened to the ARK 50 years ago and the young girl Shadow promised to protect. As an amnesiac, he’ll either serve Black Doom, defend the world from the Black Creatures, or take the Chaos Emeralds for himself. Compared to the Sonics that came before, this game is definitely “edgier” as you’ll hear Shadow and Co. casually drop “damn” and “hell”, making the lives of some helicopter mothers just a bit more frustrating. “Realistic” looking guns are used and though it’s not explicitly stated, people presumably die during the Black Arms invasion. It does feel a little odd to see the ‘Sonic X’ English cast put on more airs in their manner-of-speaking (thank goodness they didn’t go ahead with the f-bombs), but the cast really does a great job with the script no matter how serious (or goofy) it gets.
Something to note: going straight for the Hero and Dark endings is much less fulfilling than going for the Normal routes. You’ll learn far more things about Shadow’s past in-between and, personally speaking, I actually found one of the Normal endings to be far more edgier than outright glassing Central City with the ARK’s primary cannon. The game might be nearly 20 years old, but I won’t spoil anything—but it does involve Shadow telling someone he’s going to send them straight “to hell”.
Once all routes are cleared, we get one final stage and a boss that opens up as an option on the main menu: the Last Story. This is more or less the true ending of the game where Shadow takes on the big bad in a final showdown that’s actually really fun. The final stage is timed and requires you to shoot as many bad guys as possible to keep up your Chaos Control metre to blast through the level as soon as possible. The final fight too, is pretty great as the player becomes Super Shadow and we get to pit ourselves against the final boss in an open area where all we’re concerned about it blasting it with Chaos Spears and trying to collect rings to keep ourselves in the air. Camera problems do rear their head here once more as ring collecting requires precise angling so Shadow can actually shoot the things that hold ’em, but a few tries, and you’ll save the day while a Sonic classic: Crush 40’s “Never Turn Back”.
Shadow’s story is played out much better here and even if the recently released ‘SONIC X SHADOW Generations‘ game does play better, the story and cutscenes there don’t hold a candle to how cool Shadow the Hedgehog is. In the end, assumptions made by some characters turn out to be untrue, amends are made, and for Shadow, he learns to “Never Look Back”.
Long Rough Road, But I’m Finally Here
Shadow the Hedgehog is a clumsy game. Some lessons from Sonic Heroes were learned, but with one step forward comes two steps back with regards to gameplay mechanics and this game’s story branching system. For what it’s worth, once you’ve unlocked everything and have gotten used to Shadow’s quirks, subsequent playthrough can be fun! Mostly, because there’s just no saving some level objectives (Maria and the Articifial Chaos say hello). The cutscenes are cool, especially the few that are done by Blur Studio (Halo 5: Guardians, Sonic UNLEASHED) and the music is sublime—great stage themes and some of the best vocal tracks in the series like Julien-K’s “Waking Up” and POWERMAN 5000’s “Almost Dead”.
At times I thought about dropping this and getting back to my review for ‘DRAGON QUEST III HD’, but there was this drive within me to complete this game. Like a lot of experimental titles back in the early 3D generations of gaming, you’ll never see something like Shadow the Hedgehog ever again, with its gritty look and stock gunshot menu sound effects—this game really was of its kind, and sometimes I miss that in gaming. ∎
