I'm glad yuji naka is in jail

Quick story before going into this; a year or two ago i had a quick 3d sonic stint of SA1/2/Heroes. 1 I thought was bad but had good ideas in it. 2 was overall better but still had some wack shit, but it felt like a good step forward. Heroes was so bad i didnt even bother finishing one route.
I also have that friend everyone has, who really likes Sonic. He tells me that sonic heroes was "okay". I thought it was unplayable. And then when Shadow is mentoined, he said he thought this game was unplayable.
I had to know. I had played this game as a kid so I remembered a chunk of it, but I was a stupid child with no standards. How bad could it be.

It's pretty bad. But in unique ways!

The game's biggest gimmick is it's path system; each mission has 2-3 different ways to beat it; one of them will be just reach the end of the level but other ones will be things like kill X amount of certain type of enemies, find X collectables, ect ect. Depending on what you pick it'll decide what level you get next, making a multi pathed flowchart campaign that lasts 6 levels and a few bosses. The game has 12 different endings which are needed to unlock the true real ending. Even if you're trying to repeat as little missiosn as possible, it'll feel repetitive between just going through levels again and again. You're gonna get really good at westopolis.

Levels and missions have a large range in quality, which is strange because I can't think of a mission that I have an opinion higher then "it's okay". Most missions that are just run to the end are fine enough, while everything else is either tedious or obnoxious. Some levels use it well, where youll go on wildly different paths depending on which mission you're trying to complete, but not enough most will jsut be walking around and killing everything. Hate all the destroy thing before it leaves missions. Also shoutouts to the one mission where the hero mission is to reach the end under the time limit, but the neutral mission requires you to reach the end OVER the time limit, so if you want to go neutral route (it's a 5th mission so its actually important), you just gotta sit there next to the ring until time is over. this is the mission design we're working with here.

Of course in classic 3d sonic fashion, shadow kinda controls like shit. He accelerates into full speed almost instantly and he turns fucking wide. It doesn't help that most of the level design is not made with this character speed in mind; why does shadow blitz into absurd speed in under a second when there's so few parts of the level where you just wont run into a wall or an enemy you couldn't of know was standing there along the way.

Other gameplay mechanics are also all oddly put together. Weapons are around always but because shadow swings wide everything that isn't autoaim feels shitty, but they all do so much more damage then actually air dashing at enemies. I'm not sure why there's even vehicles in this game at all, the only one thats worth using is the one that jumps higher and that's because the segments with it you need to use it. The chaos blast/control meter is also very silly, it's often slower then just shooting things, and while chaos control is very useful for reaching the end of the level skipping to the end is often counter productive to many missions.

Also I'm sure this isn't going to surprise you but the story is Not Good! Normally this would be a thing to mentoin but the game has a pretty heavy narrative push, the idea being what paths you take decides who Shadow ends up being. An ambitious idea but it just doesn't really work; doing anything that isn't just Pure Evil/Neutral/Hero will just end up in a completely nonsense narrative with no consistency, and even the pure routes which feel more structured aren't really compelling, even in a fun campy way like SA2.

That being said if you don't know shadow's whole character arch from SA2 > StH you should look it up because it's pretty crazy. And also just never mentioned again after this game. I sorta miss when sonic had a more consistent world and the events of previous gams were relevant but all these games after SA2 got panned critically until they dropped it so it's probably not coming back.

One last thing worth discussing is the "tone". Many remember this as being really fucking edgy. And it kinda is; characters "swear", you got guns and shoot people, people say "kill", the menu select sound effect is a gunshot. However it's so funny how they dial it back; they could not fucking possibly let this game get even a T rating, I'm sure the E10 rating ate them up inside. You can shoot humans but they don't actually die; they lie on the ground very obviously Not Dead and be like Please Dont Kill Me :(, most of the guns are NERF rifle looking shit and swears never go further then "damn". The game's tone is some kid trying to be cool and edgy but he doesn't want to go too far or mom will notice and get mad at him.

STH sucks. While there's neat ideas in theory none of it really works well at all and ends with a tedious and repetitive game. But I guess I bothered to get to the end so its better than Sonic Heroes.

it was killer when shadow was like "it's like taking candy from a baby, and that's all right" on the HERO route, though.

Didn’t end up outright hating this one despite its reputation. The promos and intro cutscene make it seem like a really violent shooter but the actual game still feels like Adventure 2 and Heroes, just with guns and rejected Devil May Cry enemies. Black Doom is funny and I liked his commentary during the levels, though I'm probably in the minority on this one. Liked how he would scold me for killing his soldiers even though they would still attack me and occasionally block springs and doors. Can he not just like tell them all not to attack Shadow and the Black Arms will ignore you if Doom's Eye is your mission character? This is a nitpick that would probably fuck with the game balance but it's something I thought about.

I had more fun with this game than Sonic Heroes, though after about the fourth route I decided I had basically seen about everything this game had to offer, didn’t want this to take up too much time when I could be playing other things on the backlog, and really didn’t want to do any “kill all enemies in the level” missions when those started popping up more frequently. I think this game probably would have benefited if they did away with each final stage having hero/dark missions, slashing the amount of times you need to beat the game from 10 to 5, because only 6 levels and a few bosses was pretty digestible and I could easily run through one story path in a 1-2 hour long session.

I ended up playing the Reloaded mod for this game as well because I still wanted to play Last Story for myself. The mod features loads of quality of life changes, so if you really want to play this game for whatever reason, I would recommend using it.