Shadow the Hedgehog (video game)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anticlimax Boss: Not that most bosses are tough to begin with, but there are still quite a few that are deceptively easy despite the hype behind them.
    • The fight with Black Bull in the Death Ruins is hyped up by Black Doom as a showing of his pet's true might. It isn't. Since he's a Stationary Boss who infrequently attacks you, he's easier than he was back in Lethal Highway.
    • For a machine Eggman hypes up as his most powerful creation yet, which is fought as the final boss of a few routes, the Egg Dealer is pathetic. As long as you play aggressively it never attacks. Or more accurately, it never attacks you. It'll kill itself through bad slot rolls as long as you keep up a strong offensive and make sure you don't let it run you over.
    • Diablon and Sonic are the final bosses of a few villainous routes, but aren't nearly tough enough to warrant their status. Sonic himself is basically a non-entity in the fight, often just standing around and doing nothing aside from a half-assed homing attack that lets you use him as a springboard so you can hit Diablon's weak spot. Diablon, on the other hand, takes a while to kill, but is likewise bad at killing you thanks to its slow, heavily-telegraphed attacks.
  • Awesome Music: What do you expect from something in the Sonic series?
    • For themes with lyrics we have all of the ending themes, but especially All Hail Shadow, and I Am All of Me for the main theme and final boss theme. Most of the background music also counts.
    • And for the final Ending music, we have Never Turn Back.
    • Listen closely to the song that plays when Shadows transforms into his Super form - Towards the end, the guitar riff from "Live & Learn" can be heard.
    • Not necessarily from the game, but m-flo's remake of Tripod Baby for the game is rather interesting.
  • Base Breaker: To elaborate, the base was already pretty broken over if Shadow's return in Heroes was a good thing or not. This game did nothing but add fuel to that fire thanks to its edgy presentation of Shadow as a brooding, gun-toting, foul-mouthed amnesiac who angsts about his past and purpose. Some don't mind it and think it's justified considering the circumstances or appreciate it for the Narm Charm, but many feel that this portrayal not only tainted Shadow's perception in pop culture as a whole, but it planted the seeds for the mandates that would enforce his status as an edgy loner in the "modern/meta/boost" era of games and spinoff media, causing SEGA itself to ignore his character development.
    • A more minor example would be Black Doom, the Big Bad. While he's been criticized for being a one-dimensional villain with an outlandish design (by Sonic standards), ridiculous voice, and being clumsily added to Shadow's backstory, he's got quite a few defenders who think he's a cool, if simplistic villain who at the very least works for the game he's a part of thanks to his brutality, design, and no-nonsense approach to villainy.
  • Breather Boss:
    • The Egg Breaker fought in Cryptic Castle is this, compared to the ones fought in Iron Jungle and Mad Matrix. It sticks purely to easily-dodged melee attacks, and the guns dropped by the Egg Pawns let you kill it in seconds.
    • Heavy Dog/Blue Falcon. While their ultimate attacks come out with little warning, they leave themselves open to a ton of hits, and once you break off one missile launcher from the mechs, you'll blow off the rest and scrap the machine itself in short notice.
  • Catharsis Factor: Mowing down hordes of enemy with gunfire. As controversial as the guns are, there's no denying that they work well and are satisfying to use.
  • Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: Most of the reviews on websites such as Amazon seem to mostly be complaining about the game's gratuitous swearing and perceived racial undertones rather than the game itself.
  • Complete Monster: Black Doom qualifies, as his ultimate goal was to paralyze the entire biosphere with nerve gas from the Black Comet so that his offspring could feed on the Earth's inhabitants at their leisure. He even called humans "an important energy source". So, it basically was To Serve Man and pretty much every single form of animal life on the entire planet. And he would've pulled if off, too, if Shadow didn't turn out to be immune to the nerve gas and to Black Doom's nasty Mind Control/Hannibal Lecture combo... granted, Shadow only resisted the second one with some timely assistance from the Chaotix and inspirational words from Professor Gerald and Maria, but still...
  • Creator's Pet: What the Sonic fandom sees Shadow as.
  • Demonic Spiders: The Shadow Androids fought in a few Eggman-focused levels. They're fast, relentless, fire off annoying projectiles, are hard to hit with your guns, and will often no-sell your Homing Attack. These things are a pain in the ass, to put it lightly.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Shadow, to about half the Sonic fan base.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: "Mr. Yuji Naka is okay!" In light of the failure of Balan Wonderworld and his run-ins with the law during 2022, Mr. Yuji Naka is very much not okay.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The game has quite a bit of swearing. Swearing done by 4Kids.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "Where's that damn fourth Chaos Emerald?"
    • "Find the Computer Room!", which both the fanbase and SEGA launched on top of to create the sneakiest injoke of Summer of Sonic '09 - in particular, putting up confusing signs to the computer room. Of course, it's also in the placeholder for Sonic City.
    • "You know what they say: The more, the merrier!"
    • "Disgusting black creatures. Get out of my sight." "These black creatures sure mean business!" In general, the many comments that single out the aliens' skin color did not go unnoticed by the fandom.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Shadow can cross this, depending on which routes you take in the storyline.
    • On one path, Shadow puts his current total of five Chaos Emeralds into the Eclipse Cannon and uses it to completely destroy a capital city. But then, this trope is averted thanks to No Endor Holocaust.
    • On a different path, Shadow deliberately tries to kill the fleeing president, who is previously shown to be almost comically upstanding (and to have a great deal of respect for both Shadow and Sonic). Shadow fails to accomplish this as well.
      • His final chance to cross it for certain paths can count as a success. In three of the endings, he decides to kill everyone's favorite eggheaded scientist with a karate chop to the neck. In others, he'll either destroy Earth outright, or conquer it and the rest of the galaxy after going mad with power.
    • Eggman's manipulation of Shadow, where he gaslights him into thinking he's one of his Shadow Androids in an attempt to use him as a weapon is also a notably nasty act of his, and often leads to his death in many of the story's routes.
    • And of course, we have Black Doom's invasion as an ongoing crossing of the Moral Event Horizon. Not merely because he and his troops are destroying cities and killing people, but mainly because of their horrifying endgame: paralyzing every living being on the planet with nerve gas so larval Black Arms can slowly, painfully eat them alive. Very few villains in the games are as depraved as this.
  • Most Annoying Sound: "YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: THE MORE, THE MERRIER! YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: THE MORE, THE MERRIER! YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: THE MORE, THE MERRIER! YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: THE MORE, THE MERRIER! YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: THE MORE, THE MERRIER! YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: THE MORE, THE MERRIER! YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: THE MORE, THE MERRIER!" This is not, in any way, an exaggeration: Eggman spams this quote relentlessly during the Egg Breaker fight in Mad Matrix. And he never shuts up.
    • A less specific example is having characters chew you out for killing enemies on "your" side... with said enemies often forcing your hand since they'll attack you no matter what (with very few exceptions, mostly among the GUN soldiers), or are positioned in a way where you have to hit them with the Homing Attack for a boost in height. Espio's really bad about this during the aforementioned Egg Breaker fight since he'll chew you out about not wanting to be detected by Eggman... while Eggman's trying to crush you and blow you to kingdom come.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Taking too long on the Last Story allows you to hear Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy and Eggman slowly choking to death on nerve gas, still cheering you on with every last breath.
  • Ruined FOREVER: The very first thing shouted at this game when the first promotional image and trailer came out, which emphasized the gunplay. The game itself actually has less gunplay than what was implied in that trailer.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The weapons actually work better than you probably expect, but the vehicles are not so polished -- especially the motorcycle that shows up in the intro movie. The walkers work pretty well, though.
    • Additionally, no matter which path you take in a level, all the enemies will attack you, which forces you to kill them and have your assist character chew you out for it. Notable in Creepy Castle, where Eggman is the Dark assist character, but whether you choose to go with him or Amy, both of them will chew you out when you destroy Eggman's robots (even though Amy's trying to rescue Cream and Cheese, who were explicitly kidnapped by Eggman and his robots).
    • Enemy-hunting missions. While there are many "scavenger hunt" missions, most of them are bearable since the items you have to find are usually lined out on a path your ally guides you down and are easy to see. But enemies are much smaller and easier to lose in the chaos of the levels you're tearing through, and your ally is a lot less helpful with finding them. Even in the very first level, you'll often spend a good half-hour tearing your hair out while backtracking in a desperate bid to find that DAMN last enemy.
  • So Bad It's Good: Amongst the badly Broken Base, some fans think the barely PG13 violence and language, ridiculous plot, and corny dialogue make the game a camp masterpiece. It helps that unlike, say, Sonic 06 the gameplay itself is polished (annoying levels aside) so you don't feel like you're torturing yourself by playing it.
  • So Okay It's Average: The gameplay is perfectly adequate, if a bit unpolished in some areas (the main menu in particular is extremely cheap feeling). It's nowhere near as good as the Sonic Adventure duology, but it's lightyears ahead of |its direct successor...
  • Tear Jerker: Seeing (and hearing) how depressed Shadow becomes during the Slightly Hero - Hero Ending of the game counts as this. It's heavily implied that he commits suicide out of shame for his creation and actions, with Vector trying and failing to talk him out of it.
    • While a lot of the game is narmy to the nth degree, this is averted with a vengeance during the scene showing Maria's last moments. No out-of-place swearing, no silly dialogue, just a sad farewell between a dying little girl and her heartbroken hedgehog companion. Jason Griffith's voice acting really sells it.
  • That One Boss: Depending on who you fight it with, the Egg Breaker is this. Fighting it with Espio is especially bad, because it's backed up by tons of Egg Pawns armed with rocket launchers that synergize annoyingly well with its clusters of spike balls, meaning that you're assaulted with tons of projectiles that either deal annoying splash damage or travel in a weird trajectory. While less annoying since you can kill it in seconds by exploiting the turrets laying around, fighting it with Omega can also be annoying since this Egg Breaker is backed up by Shadow Androids that can destroy them. And if they destroy your turrets, the battle goes from easy to nightmarish in a hurry.
  • That One Level: Cosmic Fall is a MAJOR pain in the ass because of the numerous tricky jumps over rotating platforms, and you'll have to fight with the awkward camera throughout the entire level; good luck beating this level on hard mode! Thankfully, this is a level where Chaos Control is actually helpful since both the evil and neutral routes simply require you to get to the goal and don't require you to go on an enemy-killing scavenger hunt.
    • The Doom is annoying to complete the hero mission (Maria's) for, since getting all the health packs requires a lot of time and backtracking, although it's not so much difficult as it is tedious (instead of doing that, you can just use the Heal Cannon to heal them). That is not the case for the villain (Black Doom) mission, where you have to hunt down and kill just about every GUN agent in the level. There's over 50. Happy hunting!
    • Speaking of enemy hunting, Maria's mission in Lost Impact is pure hell. You've got to hunt down and kill every single Artificial Chaos lurking in the maze-like confines of the ARK, with there being 35 in total. Given how big and bulky they are you'd think they'd stick out like a sore thumb, but they're surprisingly good at hiding from you. And to add insult to injury, many parts of this stage require you to ride on a slooooooow railgun platform that eats through your time score, even when you're moving "fast."
    • Central City is a horrifying mix of Cosmic Fall and The Doom/Lost Impact, with a ruined city flavor for good measure. Like with The Doom and Lost Impact, you're tasked with either destroying several large bombs (for Black Doom) or destroying many small ones (for Knuckles) which are spread out and hid fairly well through an obnoxious maze of a level. Think that's frustrating yet? Well we haven't addressed the trait that makes it like Cosmic Fall: there's a time limit. And unlike Cosmic Fall's which is a non-issue, it's a very strict time limit that is most definitely going to screw you over a few times before you memorize the level's layout and bomb locations. And there's no Neutral route that requires you to find a goal ring: if the path you're on takes you to this level, you'll have to find at least one group of hard-to-find bombs to progress.
  • Too Soon: It's detailed on the page, but let's just say that certain goals (like bombing a city and trying to assassinate the President of the United Federation) were a bit controversial in late 2005.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Not present in the game itself, but a common joke among detractors and fans alike is that a lot of characters are weirdly obsessed with pointing out the skin color of the Black Arms, or "Black Creatures" as they're often called. The fact that they're often fighting white soldiers in a few ruined cityscapes definitely doesn't help. But again, it's usually pointed out in jest, and very few read anything genuinely racist into it.
  • Vindicated by History: After the release of Sonic '06, many people looked at this game in a better light. Is it narmy, tonally-confused, and half-heartedly edgy? Of course it is. But it is a fairly stable and playable game, and it had many interesting concepts (branching paths, story that adapts to your actions, the much-maligned gunplay) working for it. It also helps that while Shadow's Wangst is at its worst here, it's also the game where he develops past it and into the well-received Stoic Badass no longer weighed down by emotional baggage that he is in '06.
  • Wangst: This is the game that inadvertently set Shadow's characterization among the fanbase as this. Ironically, it's also the one where he actually gets over it.
  • What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: Big time.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In one ending, specifically the slightly heroic path's hero ending, Shadow will regain his memories after defeating Black Doom, and says in a remorse-filled tone that he was good at nothing more than destruction, and he was better off not being created, despite Vector's attempts at telling him otherwise, indicating that one of his paths would end in this trope.
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