All Hail Shadow Generations
The issue I face when I sit down to talk about Shadow Generations, the new campaign featuring everyone's favourite edgyhedgy that's packed in with the Sonic Generations re-release, is that I am struggling to come up with a credible, comprehensible way of describing. What both by brain and my heart want me to commit on black-and-white is a simple exclamation of "OH MY GOD THIS IS SO COOL" as I jump up and down on my PC chair.
That doesn't make for a particularly interesting blog post, admittedly.
The essence of the original Sonic Generations' appeal for a long-time fan isn't just how it's mechanically the best, most diamond-solid Sonic game ever released - but perhaps even more importantly, it is a genuine celebration of the series' history. Sonic Team love releasing some of their most epic, influential titles during blue blur's decade-anniversaries, but Sonic Generations was an earnest, unabashed party honouring the twenty decades of Sonic's adventures, not only by bringing back classic moments and digging out fan-pleasing deep cuts, but even reclaiming back some of the series' less triumphant moments and presenting them in a manner that immediately re-established them as landmark moments (namely everything to do with Sonic '06). There's a lot to love about it in terms of pure gameplay (re: my previous remark on it) but for a Sonic fan, the feels of it all is such a core part of what makes that game such a wonderful journey and experience.
All of that also applies to Shadow Generations, but arguably this new campaign goes even beyond that. Not only does this come after the series has added a few more triumphs in its list of honours and it uses the timey-wimey plot shenanigans as an excuse to throw Shadow in places where he originally wasn't, but the new game (and it is indeed a full game, not just a couple of hours of extra DLC content) has seemingly been made fully aware that whatever new content they release has to match the original's top tier level - and then they've decided to aim even higher. So once again I find myself playing a game where my face is drawn in a wild giddy smile like I'm an innocent youth again, absorbing the pure powerful feeling of it all and thinking, to repeat, "OH MY GOD THIS IS SO COOL" over and over again.
Shadow, as a character, has had a long and messy history in the hands of Sonic Team as he's been exposed to countless different whims and differing ideas on where to take his character after his first appearance in Sonic Adventure 2 effectively also closed off his original narrative thread. Shadow Generations is part of the Year of Shadow, the latest in Sonic Team's campaign a couple of years in the running to re-establish Shadow, and from a narrative perspective I imagine Shadow Generations is going to be the baseline example going forward on how Shadow is written. But even with those restrictions in mind he's still a lot less restricted than Sonic who, by courtesy of being the main mascot of his namesake series, has to be kept under tighter control in how he's portrayed and what kind of shenanigans he can be involved in. Shadow is already a canonically more of a direct-action kind of guy who can rip and tear into his foes with a lot more force and pazazz than Sonic, and combined with that relative freedom around what he can and can't do, it's obvious the developers, designers and writers around Shadow Generations have seized the opportunity to go nuts.
To summarise it in one word, Shadow's new campaign is a spectacle. The level design is at times downright mad in how inspired it gets, going above and beyond the nostalgia rollercoaster template of bringing back old levels as the game's narrative takes over and twists and transforms the stages with mind- and level-bending visuals and scenarios. From a gameplay perspective Shadow behaves much like Sonic but everything he does comes with tangibly more force than the more agile heroic hedgehog, in both the animations and the feedback, and this is taken to the next level in the boss fights and other more scripted sections where you can truly feel the pure power of someone who does not give a fuck what stands between him and his goal.
On the subject of the gameplay itself, it's mostly standard high quality Modern Sonic fare, ironed out to perfection. The new super powers Shadow is granted throughout the campaign are simple gameplay additions but each feels more over-the-top than the next in a very satisfying way, and his base move of being able to freeze time via his signature Chaos Control is a genuinely fun tactical trick to use - rarely enforced beyond a few tutorial areas, but often subtly encouraged for cunning players to use to their advantage. It's a whole different way of getting the same fan-titillating rush that Sonic Generations tapped into as well, with an extra layer of added bombast because of how it's all presented. Think of the genuinely badass Super Sonic moments of Sonic Frontiers but stretched across the whole gameplay.
Speaking of Frontiers (which wonderfully also gets a level dedicated to it even though it makes no sense), based on Shadow Generations adopting its "open zone" hub design, I feel like we're witnessing the codification of a new Sonic trope for the next couple of years. I'm fine with that. The hub levels used sporadically across Sonic history have always been a really memorable part of the overall experience for each title they've featured, and Frontiers expanding that into a full on open zone unto its own felt like the logical marriage of the purpose of a hub level with retaining the gameplay of the action stages in mind. Shadow's hub world is relatively small but a joy to explore, and even as you're desperately trying to locate the last little collectible piece it never gets old to traverse. Simply the act of movement and informally chaining one set of acrobatics after another in high-speed is pure joy. It just works so well that I wouldn't be surprised if the next mainline game retains this approach - it feels like an easy winner.
The level of freedom around Shadow also means they can stretch their wings with the story and writing more, leaning a little closer towards the more dramatic ends of where they can take this funny animal show: while the overarching threat here is the underwritten return of Black Doom, the heart of the plot lies in Shadow's past, exploring his personality before the trauma train left the station and reflecting on those changes since. That, I imagine, is the biggest impact this game is going to leave for the series going further: Shadow's personality and character are made deeper and more believable by simply reminding him (and, for the first time properly, showing it to the player) of those additional dimensions. There's every chance that Sonic Team is going to reboot his character again like they've done so many times before, but Shadow Generations works so hard to establish a new baseline going forward that it makes me a little bit excited to see what happens to him next (and yes I know timeline-wise this takes place during Generations but you know what I mean).
I've yet to touch the remastered and tweaked Sonic Generations (I might make a separate post on that even if it threatens to turn this blog into a Sonic fanboy post board), but even if Shadow Generations had been released as its own standalone campaign I would've been extremely happy to have paid full price for it. It's the length of a decently sized full game and comes with just as much content packed into it and the presentation is that of an entry standing proudly on its own two feet instead of just being a flashy piece of tacked-on new material to supplement a re-release. It's as much of a love letter to the series as Generations was, and it codifies and refocuses the gameplay for the franchise in alignment of where the series stands in 2024, much like the original game did in 2011. It makes me feel like teenage fanboy shouting out superlatives again.
Game of the Year innit.
Special shout-out to all the excellent promotional material we've had this year around this game - we truly have been feasting.
(one criticism I guess if you want to hold a gun over my head: I'm not a fan of Rouge's new VA and her delivery of the "whatever" line will go down in series infamy. Omega is also disappointingly unutilised. But, uh, that's all I can really think of... !)