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.