Why Shadow the Hedgehog game is bad

Hello there   

I have just recently played the entire STH game on the Gamecube, despite my friends telling me not to...i should've listened to them -_- ugh it bored me to death, but I somehow manage to beat it. I will not understand the people who likes this game and here is why I think STH is bad.

1)The Villain: Who's bright idea was it to add in aliens? Freaking alien? Ugh Black Doom isn't really a good villain, he's not even a decent one! Also, why does he play a key role in Shadow's origin? I find it very unnecessary to add more into his backstory in my opinion. 

2)The morality element: Why even bother? Haven't we already established in Sonic Heroes that Shadow is more or less an anti-hero? Why have these inconsistent branching pathways and getting endings that are irrelevant to the entire story? 

3)Branching pathways: Once again, I just have ask why bother? Why can't we just move from point A to point B?  

4)Mission System: Holy cow it's like Team Chaotix mission gameplay but ten times worse! It is just boring and stupid, some are worse than others and the bad ones will truly make you wanna rip out your hair. Don't get me wrong, i like some verity in my games but in STH they get old really fast.   

5)Bland Stage designs: Ugh...so bland and uninteresting, but it certainly goes with the whole dark tone of the game.

6)Forgettable music: I swear, most of the stage music is pretty forgettable, the only one I got stuck in my head is Westopolis...because of playing it more than ten times

7)Story: It is a mess, truly a mess. It honestly depends on the dumb moral choices-one moment you are going neutral and the next you are alongside with Black Doom like you never betrayed him at all. I swear, this whole amnesia thing is pointless, Shadow as Black Doom's offspring is pointless, even the endings are pointless thanks to the final story segment...

8)Character models: They are ugly, very ugly. It is pretty obvious that they are ripped from Sonic Heroes...but not very shiny and smooth and the human characters are even more ugly and looks stiff as heck. 

9)Multiplayer: Is is there to say about it? It sucks and if you want to spread your suffering, you can invite a friend to have a miserable time with you. 

So what about you? Care to elaborate why you think STH is a bad game? I would like to here it  

Right. The game isn't the best thing ever. But honestly, I disagree with you so much in a lot of your points. (Some are still valid though)

The Villain. Well, first of all... Black Doom was used to create Shadow in the first place. And seeing as how Shadow lost his memory of saving the world, AND he is the ULTIMATE LIFE FORM and capable of destroying everything and becoming the ultimate tool of destruction, it makes sense that Black Doom would want to try and manipulate him onto his side, no?

Morality? Well, it's nice to have a CHOICE over what you do, y'know. Bet you didn't know that SA2 was originally going to have something like that. c: Also Shadow might be an anti-hero in the Heroes story, but look at SA2. He shapes his OWN path. He saves the planet in the end.

Branching pathways are fun to have because they give you more things to do and explore. Take a glance at some classic games. Multiple. Exits. That's a great feature because it gives something called REPLAYABILITY.

Mission system. Some of the missions are cool. Going on a rampage to kill a group of soldiers with badass Chaos Blast attacks that DESTROY EVERYTHING and all that, or aiding Sonic in taking out some Black Arms... Don't get me wrong, some missions DO make you rip your hair out. (Lost Impact, oh my god) But a lot are awesome. I mean Cosmic Fall was mindblowing because you had a choice of either getting the hell off of there or trying to stop everything. (Again)

Bland stages, huh? Does that go with the giant ships that loom above in some stages, the several level themes and clever lighting effects too? Honestly the stages are appealing enough for a game of it's setting.

Music is forgettable... I do agree with that. Though Westopolis DOES get stuck in your head and if you've ever played Lost Impact or Final Haunt, OR Black Doom's boss fight, (which you have) those songs shouldn't be too forgettable. Infact Black Bull was an awesome theme.

Storyline is NOT a mess. It's all about Shadow trying to find out who he really is. If you have amnesia you don't know what to do. It's like confusion. Changing your pathways over and over would be acceptable, trying to find the RIGHT THING and discover your own purpose in life. Black Doom would be fixed on trying to get you to work for him in the end regardless of everything. It's your CHOICE to resist his temptation or destroy everything. It's about what YOU as a player want to do.

Character mo-Yep agreed.

Multiplayer is fun in some senses though it does get VERY boring after a while. It's more fun plugging in a second controller on Westopolis and taking control of Sonic. c:

But yeah, those are my viewpoints. o3o

I'm gonna partially back up Burn on some of his points, but I also agree with you on many of your own, sooo... Here, have another viewpoint on the matter!

Starting off on the villain/story, I agree that Black Doom is an entirely unneccesary iteration to the series canon. Whilst I really dig his design, did we really need aliens to be thrown into the mix here? There are so many other things that could've been adressed here - hell if they simply focused the story on whether or not Shadow was the real Shadow or a robot clone, that alone would've had enough drama and suspense to be interesting. Black Doom was just... bleh, bad idea, badly executed.

I was however a fan of the branching paths and the morality decisions. Whilst Point A to Point B is fine, sometimes it's nice to have a choice in games. The whole point of the game was an exploration of Shadow, inside and out, and where he stands on the sliding scale of villainy and heroism. By making your own choices, taking the different paths, you find out more than you possibly could about the character had you just gone a single route through the game. Yes, in the end it doesn't matter which path you took canon-wise, because that will be strictly dictated by the next game, however it does matter to looking at Shadow as a more full, well-rounded character, as opposed to just the anti-hero who stands around and says 'Maria' a lot.

The mission system... was annoying as all hell. I mean, they're fine enough near the start, they have a fair amount of leeway, and it's good for giving you various different experiences - however, it's so easy to wind up accidentally completing one mission whilst doing another, and some of the missions are repeated too much or alternatively, downright obnoxious to complete.

Stages and their music... I mostly agree with Burn there. The levels themselves are brilliantly designed and have a huge variety - running through a battle fleet, trek through a collapsing city, ancient temples, space stations, alien worlds, robotniks factories, there's a ton of material there. The music however for these stages is... largely lacklustre, and not at all memorable.
However, the music outside of the levels I'm a huge fan of - this game has some of my favourite lyrical tracks of the Sonic series. Admittedly it appeals to my personal tastes in music, what with some heavy rock and big industrial sounds in there, but still... loved those tracks.

I do think you guys are being way too harsh on the character models. I mean, I'm not sure if either of you recall, but it's been 9 years now since this game was released. At it's time, the models were fine - apart from plausibly the alien models which seemed rather incomplete. Very jagged in places and not pleasant to look at.
I also find it odd when you say the 'human models were even more ugly' when talking in comparison to Heroes which... didn't have humans in it? Seems a strange point to try and make.

Multiplayer I found... kinda fun, but lacking? It was good to screw around for 5 minutes, but lacked the levels or depth to be worth playing for more than that. Plus, this is where I found the game tended to bug the most, I dunno.

Gonna also quickly address the comment on the controls as well. I'll say that personally, though I know lots of people don't agree, I didn't find the controls that bad? I mean, no worse than any other Sonic games. The only real difference I did note was the slight slidiness to Shadow stopping and starting, but that entirely makes sense as he's wearing hover shoes. I dunno.

Well my response won't be too long due to all the variation of points brought up here, so I'll just keep them short and simple.

Music-Yes most if not all the music in Shadow is just random generic rock music that just doesn't fit the game for the most part.

Story-I feel the who Black Arms thing, it just didn't sit well with me. We established in SA2 that Shadow was created on the Ark, I thought that fact was interesting enough. It's really just my opinion, but I think the alien angle was a bit much to take.

Controls-As stated, I felt the controls weren't much worse than Heroes compared to the glide factor, but the fact you go full speed instantly when you start to move can be a little disorientating.

Gameplay-Most fans were happy to see a more mature Sonic title, and I don't care if this is Shadow's game, guns and cursing? Sonic has never been known to be edgy, and in my opinion Sonic was always marketed for kids, so this didn't sit well with me.

Missions-I did like the fact of being able to pick your path seeing as Shadow is a character who can go either way. My main gripe, which doesn't apply for all missions is most of the objectives have you back tracking, or going though the entire level again to get the goal you want.

Final Story-Why have this when you have endings that wouldn't even lead to this point? Why make the player discover all 5 different endings just to reach this point, why even let the player make his own choices if this one ending would erase the other 4?

All in all, Shadow was a mediocre game in my opinion. It had huge flaws in it, and overall I just think this decision by Sonic Team was a mistake.

I think the issue with saying that they shouldn't've had the Final Story when it decanonises other endings is that, in a way, it's something they HAD to do. I mean, at some point along in the series, they'd either have to address one route as canon or simply kill the character of Shadow off immediately after the game and never acknowledge him again.
It's like in fighting games for instance - every character will have their own routes and ending, but they can't ALL be canon. Not EVERY character can have won the 'tournament' or whatever it is, that doesn't make sense, so in the next game they have to pick and choose from the best endings.
In this case, most of the paths through the game are an exploration of the character, however the final story is the 'true' story, the one which identifies who Shadow really is rather than the hopping around vague guessing of the other endings. It brings the story together, and allows them to move forward with Shadow as a character in future, rather than having to have him forget everything again for the next game because they don't know the routes that every player took.
Or alternatively the Sonic series turns into Mass Effect. Either way.

UnbreakableBond wrote:Sonic has never been known to be edgy, and in my opinion Sonic was always marketed for kids, so this didn't sit well with me.

NO. NO NONONONONO. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!


Sonic games are MEANT to have a dark kind of story. Look at Sonic 1, 2, 3, Adventure, Adventure 2, Heroes... SURE the voiced games had cheesy lines in but seriously? You don't see Sonic running around in a giant donut land for no reason. Sonic games for kids is the LAST thing I want to see. I swear to god it's becoming so kiddy-like and pathetically easy I'm losing hope for the franchise. Shadow The Hedgehog, fair enough, the guns were a bit odd, but the cursing? What, you mean the word "damn"? That's no-where near as bad as what COULD'VE been added. At least there wasn't any explicit content like GTA games have. Seriously.

Sonic is MADE to have a serious storyline. Sonic is SUPPOSED to look cool where he is. He's NOT Mario. He's SONIC THE HEDGEHOG. He's the cool, blue, speed demon. Not a fat italian plumber chasing after a princess.

Shadow is always portrayed as too badass, but people like that. The mystery. (For some reason, I dunno myself.)

But yeah. Unserious, kiddy storylines get you stories like Sonic Colors and Lost World. They don't make any sense, have no relevance and/or just have no point. "What's that, you're enslaving an entire race of aliens? Let's moonwalk and move like we're in a disney animation!"
...No. I give up with SEGA. :I

TO come back to the argument of Sonic being edgy.

Sonic was designed to be a counter to the Mario franchise and thus they decided they wanted something more 'cool' and thus created the ANTI-hero (Yes that was how he was labeled back in the days)

Long story short, Sonic was always meant to be edgy. c:

Shadow however.... all I will say about Shadow can be summed up in 1 image

I wonder if SEGA was going for that image with Shadow, or did it just get misinterpreted down the line somewhere?

I honestly love STH. The gun aspect was an interesting Idea in my opinion. The music is good in my opinion, and the graphics aren't that bad. AND ATLEST WE HAD GRIFFITH INSTEAD OF THORTON.

Honestly, the story was pretty bad. But the game was very fun to play, and to me, I play video games for entertainment value. If I wanted a good story I would have just watched a movie instead of play a game. And for people who whine about the guns, you do know you don't HAVE to use them, right? It's completely optional for you to pick them up or not.

Thank you, dear sir/mam.

I am different because usually I like to look at all of the points and aspects for games like this, but not Shadow the hedgehog.

It's mostly because I got it when I was young and really liked it. I do see all the bad points and agree but I will still play the game. It's just fun.

Gave this game a shot a while back... It had its moments, but I was mostly less than impressed. On paper it was a interesting concept, but it was executed terribly. I thought the whole "story-path" system was cool, but it failed to make sense at times. An example would be when I completed a mission fighting against the Black Arms, only for the next level to start with Shadow and the Alien leader just palling around together on some floating temples, as if I didn't just gun down hordes of his troops...   
The thing that irked me the most was the controls. I found myself shooting a lot of unintended targets thanks to the clumsy way the guns were implemented. I really think the game could've been a lot of fun if it had gotten a little more development love.