(This review will focus on Shadow Generations and its differences when compared to 2011’s Sonic Generations, since my thoughts on the latter is here and Wikipedia considers the former as a video game on its own. 5 hours, 27 minutes and 46 seconds to see the credits roll on Shadow Generations according to the save file. Played on Steam Deck with Japanese text and voice-over. Chose XONE as the hardware platform just because it's closer to the Deck.)
Shadow the Hedgehog is a character bit after my time as a kid like Sonic. My first impression is er, colored by that third Sonic movie made by Paramount. Got to say, the character feels like very different in this video game. If you ask me, I would say English speakers, whether they worked those game or not, got the wrong Clint Eastwood character.
Shadow as presented in the English translation would be the titular character of Dirty Harry franchise, even though the black hedgehog is more of a cop-hater than a cop (Otherwise the Abnormal Mapping duo would not have liked him as much). But my impression of him playing in Japanese would be Billy Munny in Unforgiven: the man lost his beloved family and still looking for meaning in a lousy to him world. But enough film talk, Shadow deserves comparison with his peers among playable video game characters.
The Gordon Freeman that talks
As Sonic is having his “sweet twenty” birthday party before it hit the fan, Shadow is on Ark space station investigating something odd. The space station contains both happiness and sadness for the black hedgehog then suddenly all came back to him quite literally. Shadow gets pulled into another corner of the timeless White Space and forced to face his biological father, Black Doom again if he wants to get out.
“So, he is basically Gordon Freeman with more character” leads me to like this black hedgehog a lot. The tragedy five decades ago is basically the Black Mesa incident: military’s bloody cover up and the player character put on ice for decades. The difference here is that Shadow lost a loved one in his story while Marc Laidlaw did not tell us what Freeman lost. Maria Robitnik being a lass who would give him a chin rub or hug whenever he felt down. Suppose when the human lass is drawn with the similarly sized sauce eyes as other good guy or gal animals in the franchise, it’s not as jarring as 2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog trying to be post-eight Final Fantasy.
The game seems to be intended as the next chapter in Shadow’s life after 2005’s Shadow the Hedgehog, yet yours truly did manage to enjoy it as something stands on its own. Guess Maria out of time explaining why Shadow was named Shadow really did the trick. And the eternal theme of shitty dad is just more up my alley than playing a sad dad in video games, since I am someone who finds responsible fatherhood and video gaming to be incompatible.
The Sonic the Hedgehog that whacks
In some ways, Sonic Generations and Shadow Generations could, should and would have been sold as 2 cheaper separate pieces. While the White Space is side-scrolling in the former, it’s full 3D with camera control given to players in the latter. This leads to different key binding: Sonic interacts with things with pulling up left stick or pushing up on the d-pad, Shadow’s interactions relay on up face button.
While Sonic jump right into enemy, Shadow’s whacks require another face button. First he has to jump with down face button, some visual cue would appear above an enemy and a push of left face button would allow Shadow to get close to attack. The process is not just for combat, movement requires it as well.
There is a sense that this game is made to promote that Paramount picture “starring Kenau Reevers” and Generations-style greatest hits approach was the only way for it to come out before the film. No matter to me though, as I’ve not played anything with this black hedgehog before this Steam purchase. The “you got to clear some timed challenges before push the story ahead” thing is still here and it’s expanded. While Sonic needs to clear one such challenge per level, Shadow is tasked to clear 4 per level since there are less levels here. Of course, Shadow has to do those alone since even Rogue the Bat was in Sonic's neck of the woods. It's a plus for me who cannot tell a Cream the Rabbit from a Blaze the Cat. The White Space hub has some collecthan horseshit of its own, so I guess there is that.
I would have given the game 5 stars had the final level been less bullshit, like does Black Doom have to pull another life bar out of its ass? Combine that with Shadow’s new abilities and rotating platforms, the game just became less neat. Oh, well, at the very least, this game does not require player to experience the “death race” between Sonic and Shadow again. That horseshit took me 15 minutes in Sonic Generations.
Sonic X Shadow Generations’ packaging would seem like a 2021 Nintendo release known as Mario 3D Land. The menu of er game selection looks identical to the one between 3D Land and Bowser’s Fury. The contents inside would remind one of another 2021 Nintendo release, Metroid Dread. Even knowing that the boss fights are taken from older Sonic games, that first one just made me go “Ha, ha, ha, now that looks like something straight out of Metroid.”
For me, Shadow Generations is mostly high-octane high-speed platforming set-pieces that I enjoyed the same way SEGA’s on-rail arcade experience entertained me. The story did not get in its way, the graphic is nice for what it is. Hard to ask more out of video games.