Shadow the Hedgehog (video game)

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Shadow the Hedgehog

Remove SHAD, H and HOG = OW THE EDGE

Protagonist(s):	Shadow the Hedgehog
Genre(s):	Platform Third-person shooter
Rating(s):	ESRB: E10+ PEGI: 12+ CERO: All Ages USK: 12 ACB: PG KRB: All Ages
Platform(s):	PlayStation 2 Nintendo GameCube Xbox
Release Date:	NA: November 15, 2005 EU: November 18, 2005 JP: December 15, 2005
Developer(s):	Sonic Team (Sega Studios USA)
Publisher(s):	Sega
Country:	United States Japan
Series:	Sonic the Hedgehog
Predecessor:	Sonic Rush
Successor:	Sonic the Hedgehog

"Who am I... and why can't I remember anything? And who is this Maria?"
— Shadow the Hedgehog in the first cutscene

Shadow the Hedgehog (シャドウ・ザ・ヘッジホッグ) is a 2005 first-person-shooter platform game developed by Sonic Team, under Sega Studios USA and published by Sega for the PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Xbox. Despite its title, it is the follow-up sequel to Sonic Heroes. The game was released in North America on November 15, 2005, Europe on November 18, 2005 and Japan on December 15, 2005.

Plot

The world is in peril as forces, both good and evil, make a play for the powerful Chaos Emeralds. In Shadow the Hedgehog, you can control Shadow and choose which side to fight for.

Bad Qualities

To get the hedgehog-out-of-the-room: Unlike previous games, Shadow the Hedgehog is a much more darker and more seriously game, and much like Beast Machines: Transformers, it is too dark from its original plot to the Sonic the Hedgehog series due to its depressing atmosphere, gore, and there is little to no humor.
- Unlike more proper serious games such as The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (and its 3DS version), Pokémon Black and Pokémon White (and its sequels), WarioWare: Get It Together!, the Ma rio & Lu ig i games among many others, this game seriously fails at that and it is considered to be a mixed bag. The developers originally aimed for a T rating due to its originally planned darker tone with profanity and mature themes being used.
  - However, the ESRB possibly backfired at this and ultimately gave the game an E10+ rating (the first Sonic game to do so) after many script rewrites among other things and Sega thought that the game would fit with that rating.
  - PEGI in Europe and USK in Germany also gave the game a 12+ rating despite its similarity to the T rating in North America. The ACB gave it a PG (previously a G8+) rating instead.
  - Despite this, the game's final script features 15 uses of the word "damn" and two uses of the word "hell".
  - Maria, Shadow's only friend was literally shot, making it way too intense for a E10+ rating (even in the rating's early years).
    - One of the hero endings depicts Shadow at his most angstiest, with it implied that Shadow might kill himself.
    - In both Neutral endings, Shadow kills Dr. Eggman. However, due to the Last Story, neither of those endings are canon.
    - Also, in one of the Dark endings, Shadow allegedly kills Sonic. Again, due to the Last Story, it is not canon.
The level designs also look too unoriginal and boring for a Sonic game. Examples of this are:
- Circus Park
- Central City
- Cosmic Fall
- G.U.N. Fortress
The game also suffered from minor glitches (unlike Sonic Heroes and 06).
This was the first (and sadly last) post-Dreamcast-era Sonic game to not get a PC port, releasing exclusively on consoles which Sega wasn't considering in the first place.
While Black Doom is at least an entertaining villain, he feels a bit out of place as he feels more like a Doom or Final Fantasy villain
While most of the 4Kids voice actors do good jobs as their characters, some of the 4Kids voice performance in the English version ranges from decent to mediocre. The voice acting for Rouge, Tails, Vector, and most of the human characters are very dull (Kathleen Delaney was kind of a miscast as Rouge as she sounds more like a woman in her mid 30's than a 17-year-old, Amy Palant does a really unconvincing impression of a young boy as Tails, James Carter Cathcart sounded too goofy as Vector), Charmy's was somewhat annoying, and while Jason Griffith's performance as Sonic had a similar tone to Ryan Drummond, his deliveries were bland, particularly when he says "We're on our way to the ARK".
The intro cutscene has Shadow cocking an MP5, which is not how the weapon works.
The ranking system is somewhat flawed, because of the automatic target of weapons and the Homing Attack auto-aim that will cause you miss your intended target, is very easy to kill your allies in the levels causing your ranking drop, because most Dark or Hero missions consist of defeating all enemies or other missions where you need to look for something makes you spend a lot of time exploring the levels (Especially in The Doom, Lost Impact and Central City) because there is no a radar or a map that show you where are the enemies or the objectives (in fact, at an early stage of development, Sega had the idea of putting up a radar, but it was discarded), which just makes getting an A-rank quite difficult in some levels as in Sonic Heroes, there are also quite a few enemies and obstacles in levels that they make easy for you to crash.
- Getting an A rank on every mission on every stage unlocks Expert Mode, but like Heroes' Super Hard Mode, they barely changed any of the level layouts at all, which is poor, especially considering it's just playing the game for a 11th time.
Due to improper physics implementation, this game has the same stability issues as Sonic Heroes because the same game engine, both graphic (RenderWare) and stability is used in these games, the homing attack and light dash are sometimes inconsistent (especially the Homing Attack because it can easily fail and die), moving on an incline doesn't feel so different from moving on a flat surface, Shadow reach top speed in little time due to sensitive controls and the PS2 version has the same Heroes PS2 port issues like graphical errors due to Sega not using RenderWare correctly, these versions have more bugs and a poor frame rate which falls to less than 30 frames commonly. To add insult to injury, the game uses the RenderWare engine, which is known for its great capabilities and was used in several awesome games like SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Burnout Revenge among many others.
Chaos Blast, while cool in concept, has a rather short range and doesn't deal as much damage as it should,this ability is useful in a couple of missions, but typically there usually aren't enough mooks to make it worthwhile (especially since most enemies are in different places), when there are enough enemies that would otherwise make it worthwhile, there are other enemies of the other alignment in range, which ultimately hurts your score. Plus, it can be easily spammed. As stated above, destroying the enemies you can fill easily either gauge depending on which other faction you are fighting, also this power gives you unlimited ammunition and makes your weapons more effective, which is quite easy to spam shooting at anything without any limit, besides that this skill is just a filler.
NPCs are useless. They barely help you against enemies (though certain NPCs can be controlled by a 2nd player in the GameCube and PlayStation 2 versions only), and Black Doom, Dr. Eggman, Maria, and Charmy simply follow Shadow.
The problem with the controls is the stability when running, as a result the control is quite slippery with which it is easy to lose control of Shadow and crash with the enemies, Shadow is unable to turn with agility, and it is difficult to move around the platforms with the necessary security to guarantee a good gaming experience, the control is even worse than Sonic Heroes, when turning in the opposite direction Shadow brakes, making the moments when you have to go to another direction frustrating, also Shadow's turn to the sides is delayed, this is bad, because it becomes difficult to dodge obstacles in a proper way, Sonic Heroes has problems with the controls, but at least the stability when running was better and you could move in a more natural way.
- Shadow reaches the highest speed in a very short time just like in Heroes (The sensitive analog stick is one of the main causes of this), this may be good for passing the levels fast on the neutral route, but on the other routes and the slow-moving sections it is an inconvenience, stability when running is some unstable most of the time, making Shadow run too fast and the parts where you must run at high speeds will often end up in Shadow falling into a bottomless pit.
- The controls are extremely sensitive. Just a slight tilt of the analog stick is more than enough to turn your character 90 degrees.
- Still speaking of the controls, while it’s fun to play as him, Shadow feels really sloppy most of the time; His Homing Attack is more combat based which is a bit polarizing, as you're just tapping the Homing Attack button until the enemy dies. He also has some Chaos powers, while cool, are bland and can sometimes break, when running very fast the controls feel extremely sensitive and the homing attack sometimes can either hit a random target from a mile away (also when doing the Homing Attack, it can fail and you can fall into a bottomless pit, this happens especially when there is an enemy near a well), miss the one you wanted to hit or make Shadow start spinning in circles around, you move a little slowly on the rails, although the rail change is better and in most levels there are few or no rails.
The Doom, Lost Impact and Central City are the worst levels of the game and some of the worst levels of Sonic games in 3D, the layout in these levels are confusing labyrinths, making it easy to get lost or die, the elevators will end up slowing the progress down, there is a glitch in The Doom where one of the G.U.N Mechs in the final room doesn't spawn, making the process even more tedious, the missions are made tedious due to the levels layout. Also, the G.U.N Soldiers, and the Researchers are everywhere in The Doom and in Central City the bombs are spread over several places since both missions are non-linear and there are multiple paths throughout, Central City is the only stage in the game that doesn't have a Goal Ring, it wouldn't be bad, if it weren't for the fact that the level is a maze and you don't have a map and the missions are timed, also the design disorients the player, as several paths look the same, Lost Impact it's no better, as the Artificial Chaos are scattered around various parts in the level design consisting of a maze.
- Glyphic Canyon it is not a better level, although in this level it has a problem opposite to the phases designed as mazes, the error of this level is that it is very flat.
Speaking of doing the same procedure but with a difference, there are routes composed of levels that are exactly the same, for example, to get the alternative ending in the Pure Hero route in which Shadow betrays Sonic at the last minute, you must do the same procedure as the Hero route with the only difference that you must pass the Dark mission in the last level (basically, the game forces you to repeat routes at least twice).
For whatever reason, the game has a two-player deathmatch mode. Aside from being able to play as robotic versions of Shadow with guns for arms, it is a worthless and forgettable version of Sonic Heroes' death-match mode, nor is there a map that show where your opponent is.
The subtitles can be misleading such as the part where Tails says "yeah" but the subtitles say wheee.
Shadow only gets a fraction of the upgrades to its gameplay in Heroes, Shadow gets the Light Dash and the Homing Attack again, which are sometimes inconsistent, and two Chaos abilities, the Chaos Control and Chaos Blast, none of which are really that useful and only serve as fills or as an easier way to pass some sections like the Space Gadget rail section and flat sections of Gun Fortress, Shadow can get weapons, but most are something useless because of the regular self-scoring system that sometimes causes bullets divert to another enemy, Shadow also gets a melee combo when is not equipped with a weapon, which deals little damage and has a terrible attack range(it is the only one to not defeated the G.U.N. Solders in one hit), what's the point of putting a useless combo melee that doesn't complement the combat system well?
While the camera is functional in some moments and you can adjust it however you want, it has the same problems of the Heroes camera, shows an almost completely inescapable tendency to do anything but give ourselves the right perspective, it makes all the control of the game lead us to situations in which mistakes cost us the level, it's kind of awkward move it, usually ending up getting stuck on walls, there are also times where you can't adjust well enough the camera because the camera is manually set in some places, making it difficult to make some jumps because you can't see goals and the mobile platforms well, the camera is worse in Mad Matrix, the camera in this level is atrocious, limits your vision and it's almost impossible dodge the walls or change direction.
Speed, the main mechanic of Sonic games and one of the best-known features of Sonic games by the way, is almost completely absent in this game. The Sonic Adventure series presented a level design that had a good balance between speed and platform, which is complemented by shortcuts, which you could take depending on your ability, the platform did not interrupt the speed sections and Sonic Heroes included bigger phases giving the possibility to experience several alternate routes, but in this game the platform and the waiting sections ruin it, for example, Space Gadget, in this level we will automatically move on devices that change gravity, without doing anything for several seconds , you only limit yourself to briefly running on roads with a flat design and we will pass through a part with a slow pace, you can quickly pass the last section composed of a flat rail road using Chaos Control. The Dark mission has a simple objective in which we must to destroy the defense units of the ARK, however its design is boring and tedious, we will going through into several waiting sections, passing through sections of platform confused where gravity changes while we move automatically with the green switches.
- Digital Circuit, despite being an average to mediocre level, is poorly designed, we will go through areas of automated movement where most of the time all you have to do is move in different directions to avoid being hit by walls, there are segments where you run briefly because the walls (Two of which are very easy to dodge and the others you have to destroy them compulsorily) and enemies will interrupt the speed,there are several segments where we have to wait or slow down our velocity to continue with the action and there are two boring parts where we will have to hang onto bars for several seconds, the Dark mission is no better,the final part consists of waiting parts where we will have to go up from cube to cube and then hang from a bar until you reach the center of the program.
- Cosmic Fall is also a horrible level, the beginning of this level is to make the player wait a tedious fifty seconds without doing anything until the platforms go up to continue, the waiting parts do not happen once, they happen frequently, there is a part where you are with Vector and you must wait for the platform to rise for a minute, the rest of the level is summarized in going through slow segments of platforms.
The story is uninteresting, poorly written, inconsistent with many anticlimactic moments and plot holes.
- Certain plot elements are introduced at the start of a pathway, but depending on your actions, they can become forgotten and not get any closure, such as the G.U.N. Commander's vendetta against Shadow if you go the Neutral route.
- There is no ending where Shadow teams up with Dr. Eggman, as all but one ending involving Dr. Eggman end with him getting killed off by Shadow (as mentioned above).
- In the scene before entering Mad Matrix Shadow literally has the ability to hack a computer with a single karate punch, ruining the seriousness of the scene.
- Due to an attempt to write the script around teaching the game's mechanics to newcomers, it looks like almost every single character in the game is bound to said this.
- The story is undermined by a lack of consistency or continuity due to the fact that the level branches aren't designed in a way that always tells a single linear narrative, and most of the ten endings you have to unlock to beat the game are bad as well due to their excessive simplicity and by virtue of your actions having no lasting consequences. The fact that none of the endings matter because none of them are canon because there's a True Ending you get only by beating the other ten endings first is counterproductive to the game's choose-your-own-side gimmick, and it means that it's difficult to determine which parts of the game are canon whatsoever between the opening cutscene and the Last Story.
- Of all the characters, Cream the Rabbit and Cheese the Chao are randomly shoe-horned in Cryptic Castle (one of Shadow's levels from the Evil Playthough) for ABSOLUTELY no reason what-so-ever, not only does this game's ecstatic not fit the role for both Cream and Cheese AT ALL, but after being rescued by Shadow, they're never seen or mentioned again for the rest of the game, so it makes you wonder why Cream and Cheese are even in this game to begin with.
- The G.U.N. Commander reveals that he was aboard the ARK when he was little and Maria was like a family to him, and he blamed Shadow for her death when it was G.U.N. who killed Maria.
  - Not only that, but if he's had a personal vendetta against Shadow for a long time since, then why was Sonic arrested in Sonic Adventure 2 to begin with?
    - Granted, it could be due to the G.U.N. mistaking Sonic for Shadow or even Shadow framing Sonic, but still.
- The Moon in the game's opening looks like it's perfectly intact, when previously in Sonic Adventure 2, it was blown in half. Though, that may be excused as the damaged part of the Moon facing away from Earth.
- Another notable plot hole is that the picture of Sonic and Shadow in the President's office could only have been taken after the Earth was saved in Adventure 2, as they could have only been seen together then, but Shadow was presumed dead after that event. It could also have been taken after Heroes.
- The worst offender has to be the one in the Last Story, where after Black Doom is defeated and the Black Comet is destroyed, the President and the G.U.N. Commander admit they were wrong about Gerald Robotnik and should be happy about his legacy. Never mind the fact that Gerald himself tried to use the Space Colony ARK as a way for him commit global genocide as revenge towards G.U.N. for killing his granddaughter Maria.
Chaos Control isn't helpful if the objective was to kill or collect stuff, because if it was, then zipping past the stage is the last thing the player will want to do.
- The Chaos Control ability is supposed to be the "good" ability, obtained from killing evil characters, and it allows Shadow to skip part of a level. Problem is, because almost all of the "good" missions are based on finding stuff and not getting to the end, and because many of these things can only be found in out-of-the-way areas, Chaos Control is next to useless on the alignment it's associated with. It's only useful on neutral missions and a handful of good and dark missions that involve simply getting to the end.
- On top of that, Chaos Control attacks and destroys almost everything in Shadow's path when used, which increases his Dark score, making it counter-intuitive, despite being the Hero power.
- This glitch only works on the GameCube NTSC version and PlayStation 2 versions of the game. Once the player fills up their Blue Gauge, they have to find any Checkpoint near by and then press Template:Key press/core/Template:Key press/core and then Template:Key press/core/Template:Key press/core immediately after that. If done correctly, the player can use Chaos Control all the way to the end of the level as far as the game can let them go. This glitch almost completely breaks the difficulty of the levels and this glitch can cause the game freeze. This glitch was removed in the Xbox version and the GameCube PAL version.
The character models for the main cast were recycled from Sonic Heroes. Besides their shiny and plastic look still taking place, they noticeably clash with the overall dark atmosphere and other graphics of the game. While Sonic Team didn't bother making new models, if you compare to the CGI cutscenes for said game, you'll notice Blur Studio used different models for the CGI cutscenes; these fit a bit more to the tone of the game than the Heroes models.
While the game has eight bosses in total, all of them (with the exception of the final boss) are reused at least once in multiple stages, with little to no variation in the fights themselves, which are also rather underwhelming.
- Being the final boss, Devil Doom has a huge selection of attacks, all of them that are rather strong and are a little hard or even too fast to avoid:
  - Fire Breath: Devil Doom can spew out fire ether sides of his two heads, which is extremely easy to avoid, mainly due to how he only fires in one direction, but it can push you back a far.
  - Wing Block: Devil Doom will block your attacks with his wings, avoiding damage from the Chaos Spear.
  - Meteor Lasers: Devil Doom also has an attack where he will make a bunch of meteors float in the air and shoot energy lasers, and those are extremely fast and hard to avoid.
  - Luckily because Shadow is in his super form the lasers will only stun you (though some may find this attack a bit pathetic).
  - Teleportation: Devil Doom will also use Chaos Control whenever you get to close to him. Note that he always teleports at a very far distance, so you have to always boost at all costs.
  - Debris Launch: On top of that, after Devil Doom teleports, he will lift a bunch of rubble to throw at you which, while easy to avoid, can push you away.
- The bosses can be sometimes annoying, such as Egg Breaker, where Dr. Eggman always shouts "You know what they say, the more the merrier!" in one variation and "Lights out!" in another (he is reused 3 times).
- Diablon always says "Hold still, you devil!" and never shuts up, Flame Hyenard style.
- The Egg Dealer needs no introduction.
- The game repeats a problem of Sonic Heroes team battles, Bosses have an exaggerated vulnerability to weapons, so you can finish them in seconds like the battle against Black Doom and some bosses give you easy access to weapons, for example, the Egg Breaker of Iron Jungle has on the battlefield a turret in the beginning with which you can destroy the boss in less than eight seconds.
- Several bosses are limited to having simple patterns:
  - Cryptic Castle's Egg Breaker only attacks you with an expansive slingshot and tackles you sometimes.
  - The Egg Dealer, one of the final bosses, is a total disappointment. All he does is drive in circles around the stage, giving you time to press the buttons of the slot machine, you can defeat him by spamming the Homing Attack; making his boss fight way too easy to defeat him. Eggman thought it'd be a great idea, for whatever reason, to put a charging slot machine underneath his vehicle that helps his enemies defeat him! Why Eggman? What sense does this make??
  - The Black Bull of Death Ruins has a pretty bad pattern, if you stay on the ground, Black Bull only limits himself to throwing fire balls at you easy to dodge, you can finish him easily and quickly by shooting it repeatedly, the battle against him on Lethal Highway is easy if you get weapons and attack him repeatedly to get Chaos Control and thus have unlimited ammunition temporarily and finish it off.
Despite the good variety of bosses, most (if not all) of them are either bland, annoying or are too easy due to the fact the Shadow's weapons can mow down the Bosses' health with ease, additionally almost all of them get re-fought though out the story mode.
Shadow collects two of the seven Chaos Emeralds in the first stage while you collect one at a time in other stages, hinting that this game was another case of being rushed.
Shadow can drive vehicles, but nearly all of them control horribly and are useless (the jeep and motorbike go even slower than Shadow's regular speed) and in most sections you can avoid them without penalty. The only good vehicles are a high-jumping bipedal mech and a flying alien creature that is mandatory in some stages.
The mechanics of finding keys to open different doors are poorly implemented, as there are five and most keys are too difficult to look for and you should look even in places where you wouldn't believe at first distance that they were (there's a key in Death Ruins that you find it dropping into a part where there is a precipice), plus most of your rewards are vehicles that have several problems as stated above, alternative routes or weapons, and the rewards only come down to that and don't give you a useful option like returning to a level.
There are some missions that stand out from others because they are quite bad, difficult and slow, some examples include:
- Mad Matrix's dark mission involves you trying to destroy a handful of bombs placed in Eggman's cyber network; however, due to the layout of the stage, finding all of these bombs is a pain because of it poor level design and camera.It's easy get lost in the mazelike circuit that connects the towers and there are no less than 30 bombs to set off.Expect spend a lot of time on this mission.
- The ARK missions, Lost Impact and The Doom. The latter in particular because it is incredibly easy to get lost within the ARK's massive interior space, or just simply die.
- Central City is the only level in the game to not have a goal ring; instead, both missions involve you detonating/disposing of bombs. Thing is, the level design is confusing, with the Dark and Hero paths overlapping and criss-crossing, and it is easy to find yourself going around in circles and unable to find where the next bombs are. That wouldn't be so bad except both missions are timed. Still, the Dark mission is a bit more decent than the Hero mission because it has a simpler goal.
- In Cryptic Castle's Hero mission you must find Cream and Cheese, although finding Cream is easy (Cream is behind a cracked wall on the left side of a room after the second balloon ride),finding Cheese consists of stay waiting next to a wall for 20 seconds until Cheese is visible.
- The Dark mission in Sky Troops consists of pause action to shoot with turrets towards Eggman's ships crushing the shoot button,there is not much strategy, since the ships do not move compared to Lethal Highway and Iron Jungle and there are five ships, which makes this mission last considerably.
- In the Space Gadget stage, the Hero and Normal missions share the exact same objective (Reach the Goal Ring). If you want to take the Normal path, you have to wait 5 minutes for the Hero mission to be listed as failed before touching the Goal Ring.
This game barely has any impact on the Sonic The Hedgehog series as a whole, as most of its events are ignored in later Sonic games; its main contributions to the story is Shadow's relationship with G.U.N., but even so, Shadow The Hedgehog can still be skipped. You can play any of the Sonic The Hedgehog games, skipping Shadow The Hedgehog, and anything too important would not be missed.

Good Qualities

Shadow by himself is still a great Character and Protagonist of the Game and gets plenty of character development as he develops a different sense of identity and purpose in life (Being Black Doom's right hand man, being the protector of the ark, etc.) depending on the ending.
1. Sonic, Amy, Eggman, Tails, Team Chaotix, Knuckles, Rouge, E-123 Omega, And Maria are Also Well Characterized
2. Black Doom, While out of Place, is an Entertaining Villain given no Surprise he is Voiced by Sean Schemmel who is Best Known as the Voice of Goku in the Dragon Ball Franchise.
Despite its flaws, this is the only Sonic game that depends on what route the player takes in the game. This results in 326 possible routes across the game's 22 stages and 10 endings. Completing the 10 endings, unlocks the true one which would probably take too many save data blocks needed on the Xbox hard disk, and the PS2/GameCube memory cards. Because of that, it did have a good replay value despite being repetitive
This game can be enjoyable to some, especially for people who always wanted to play as Shadow.
Some notable/funny quotes such as:
- Where's that damn FOURTH Chaos Emerald?!
- You know what they say.. the more, the merrier!
- Find the computer room!
The CGI intro is fun to watch as it is well-animated by the folks at Blur Studio and somewhat blends well with the story. One of the animators, Jeff Fowler, would later direct the live-action Sonic movies.
Awesome music (for Sega standards) including:
- All of Me
- Almost Dead
- Waking Up
- The Chosen One
- All Hail Shadow
- Never Turn Back
- For the Game's Japanese Release, Sega Collaborated with Hip-Hop Group M-Flo for a Version of one of their Iconic Songs, Tripoid Baby with It's Music Video Being Reanimated to Add Shadow into the Mix. Despite this, It Doesn't Appear in the Gamer Proper.
This is notably the first Sonic game (alongside Rush, which ironically released alongside this game internationally) to use the 4Kids Entertainment talent pool that was first used in the English dub of Sonic X. Speaking of which, at least the voice acting for the other characters is good. Dr. Eggman is a highlight, voiced by Mike Pollock who remains as his voice actor even after Sonic Free Riders which introduced an entirely new voice cast. Dan Green (Knuckles), Sean Schemmel (Black Doom), and Jason Griffith (Sonic and Shadow) are also great. The Japanese voice acting is also pretty decent too.
The game was the last 6th gen-era Sonic game to use RenderWare, which used the same character models from Heroes.
The guns are fun to use as they sound very powerful, the gunplay is also good for a platformer game.
Some Bosses are Decent Like Sonic & Diablon.
The graphics look decent for 2005 standards and still looks nice to this day.
There is a romhack for the game titled "Shadow The Hedgehod: Reloaded" that is available for the Dolphin Emulator (Wii/GameCube Emulator), this romhack fixes most of the flaws the game has as well as adding unused content such as unused music, dialogues, etc.
- In addition, there are lots of other romhacks that can be installed for Dolphin to use it to run on PC such as: HD Texture Pack , Widescreen UI, Widescreen Hack Code and more.
The game as a whole is so bad it's funny.

Reception

The game received mixed or average and generally unfavorable reviews on all three versions regarding the criticism of level design, weapons, and plot.

Steve Thompson of Nintendo Power gave the GameCube version an 8/10.

Critics derided the game's unwelcome sense of maturity for a Sonic game, especially the addition of guns and other weapons.

Players strongly disliked the overly repetitive nature of the game which becomes tedious quickly.

This game is also known for being one of SomecallmeJohnny's most hated video games when reviewing the game, Johnny said: "Oh my God, what kind of bullshit-stupid-asinine-redundant method of padding out the game is that?!!" when talking about having to play the game 10 times to unlock the final story, citing it to be worse than Sonic Heroes, which required collecting 7 Chaos Emeralds and beating all of the teams' stories.

The game was considered to have started the downfall of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and was later followed up by Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis, Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), and Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.

However, the game was a commercial success for Sega and sold 2.06 million copies in general from its launch year to Q2 2006.

Trivia

This was the longest page related to the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise on the Crappy Games Wiki, and also the second longest page on this wiki after the page about Hello Neighbor.
The game has 3 unused tracks. “All of me” wasn’t even going to the main theme, it was actually going to be “Who I am”.
The Dark Ending theme "Almost Dead" by Powerman 5000 is actually a licensed song which it appeared in Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, making Shadow The Hedgehog is the only game in the entire series featuring a licensed song.
- Also, it explains why "Almost Dead" is not appearing in the game's soundtrack digitally.
The game spawned the "Find the computer room!" and "Where's that DAMN fourth Chaos Emerald?!" memes, as well as "OW THE EDGE".
Due to the mildly violent nature of the game, the ESRB rating was, for some time, in question. The official ESRB website originally rated the game as T, but the GameSpot rating was listed as E-10+. The T rating was seemingly further evidenced, however, by the fact that, at trade shows where Sega showed off the game, they asked only those 13 and older to play the game. The Early versions of the game had mild swearing, even though the game used mildly offensive words like "damn" and "hell". For the english version of the game, Sega censored the human's blood, changed the colour of the alien's blood from red to green, edited out the word "Piss" and replaced it by "tick" instead, and censored the scene where a soldier shoots Maria. Regardless, ESRB gave the game a E-10+ rating instead, making it unanimous. Despite the popular belief, the Japanese version of the game is not uncensored.
This was the first game in the franchise where Jason Griffith voices Sonic and Shadow, along with an entirely new voice cast from the Sonic X 4Kids cast, which was used till 2010, with the last game being Sonic and Sega: All-Stars Racing with the exception of Mike Pollock as Doctor Eggman.
The cover shows Shadow holding a gun even though it never happens in the game.
The game has 10 alternate endings and 326 possible ways to complete it.
As revealed by Takashi Iizuka at Sonic Boom 2013, Shadow the Hedgehog is the last game released to be part of the Dreamcast Era, while Sonic Advance 3 was the last game of the Dreamcast Era chronologically. Sonic Rush starts off the Modern Era.
According to head of Sonic Team, Takashi Iizuka, Shadow was originally intended to have remained dead following the events of Sonic Adventure 2. In Q&A at Summer of Sonic 2011 he stated: "As you know in the story, Shadow was meant to appear in that single title. But because of the reaction of the fans, we decided to bring him back in Sonic Heroes and eventually you saw him in his own title."
In the cutscene where Shadow appears in Iron Jungle, Sonic says "We're on our way to the ARK, so I guess that means we're going too!". This was the result of a mistranslation from the Japanese script to the English. The line should read "They're (the Black Arms) on their way to the ARK, so I guess that means we're going too!"
Big the Cat was the only playable character from Sonic Heroes to not return in this game.
In one cutscene, Sonic says "Welcome to the next level!", which was the Sega Genesis slogan.
While fighting Devil Doom for nine minutes, Dr. Eggman will tell Shadow that he is not a robot, and that during the events of Sonic Adventure 2, after he was not dead his robot saved him during the ending.

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Shadow the Hedgehog (video game)

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Shadow the Hedgehog (video game)

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