One of the long-running, most egregious gaps in my Sonic the Hedgehog knowledge has been the fact that I've never played Shadow the Hedgehog. I can't even remember why I skipped on it back in my Gamecube-adoring, Sonic-obsessed days (probably just didn't have the loose cash and I prioritised something else) but the game's reputation has built up and up over the years as one of the most infamous entries in the series' history - though, of course, I generally find that most people have a very distorted view of the said history so wanting to experience it by myself has been in the cards for a while. So after I finished my revisit to Sonic Heroes and with my Gamecube emulator still loaded, this was the logical next step. That's right, I started this before the Year of Shadow properly kicked off which makes me hip and cool before everyone else decides revisit and re-evaluate this game.

It's undeniable that Shadow the Hedgehog is a ludicrous game, with all its gun-toting cartoon hedgehog imagery, "this is like taking candy from a baby, which is FINE BY ME" (actual quote) level badassery and the fact that some of its endings literally conclude with an indication of planet-wide genocide. It's also undeniable that it's a mess of a game. The tone can shift so abruptly from the ridiculous OTT cartoon evil to something genuinely moving at the drop of a hat, it's clear that the development team isn't quite sure where they're really meant to be heading from a gameplay perspective or they simply weren't used to handling gunplay in a platformer, and above all the plot is an eldritch kudzu fever nightmare: part the reason this game exists to begin with was that it served as an attempt to somehow wrap up the half-developed plotline around Shadow's resurrection from Heroes (tl;dr summary - he died, came back with amnesia and vague hints of what happend but no resolution) so that he could become a regular character going forward, and they decide to do so by introducing a multi-thread diverging plotline that in itself asks as many questions as it barely bothers to answer. In a way it's almost auteur-like - it's an experience with a Vision and Ambition but sort of throws absolutely everything on the wall to figure out how to realise its goals. You have to almost admire it.

But... it's also not a bad game. Now I'm fully aware that isn't even as hot of a take as I might have once thought, as now that the initial comedy value around the game's release has cooled down and fans have come back to it years later outside its original context, it's not uncommon to hear people say it's not actually a terrible game - a google search of the game now brings up more "you can't believe it but this game is actually half decent" thinkpieces than anything arguing the opposite. Granted, Shadow the Hedgehog is never going to top anyone's Sonic game tier lists and even I in all my "Forces is actually good, guys" level of objective correctness cannot shower Shadow with too much praise. It's a mess for the reasons stated above and it's also a bit clunky - but no more clunky than your average mascot platformer from the early 2000s. There's less emphasis on speed in its platforming and more focus on the gameplay is based on ranged attacks, and that just makes it a standard 3D platformer with no particularly bad flaws and just all your usual aged clunkiness that comes with the territory. In its release date it would have just been one of the crowd in that respect, today it's one of those games where the jankiness is easy to forgive because there's something charmingly dated in it even if you do miss more modern quality of life things like proper lock-on targeting. It isn't a million miles away from the likes of the first few Ratchet & Clanks, just less competently pulled off because it doesn't feel like the dev team is quite in their element. Gameplay-wise, it's decently enjoyable and like inferred, it's an era of gaming/genre I have a fond spot for and so I get a good amount of kicks from it on that basis alone.

(also, those initially ridiculous realistic military guns make sense in context, given those weapons reside right next to alien beam rifles and weird Eggman tech and it's just a matter of which of the shootybangs you pick up while all the factions around you are battling. Even the military faction eventually starts dropping miniguns that are three times the length of Shadow himself, which are hilarious to use)

But what I do love is the rather experimental (for early 2000s platformers, anyway) progression system, where your in-level decisions affect which story beats you go through and more concretely which level you play next. Each playthrough can go completely differently and the game has ten basic endings to go for depending on the levels played and choices made, before you get to experience the true ending (this game is Sonic franchise's entry to the much beloved "it's all a dream except X" trope that every long-running series eventually runs into). Even now there's something wonderfully novel to it and I am genuinely hooked in going through the different routes, playing through the different levels and varying the way I complete the levels I already know. There's just enough variation to keep things interesting and while tonally you can make any run a complete mess if you keep going wildly between the rough morality alignments of the game, the overall way the final levels can escalate in wholly different ways is really rather fun. It's once again the Sonic series throwing in Something Completely Different into the overall style and progression built on top of the series' stalwart mechanics, and it's one of the reasons I love Sonic games so much. The soundtrack, too, is once again stellar and I feel like given the game's overall black sheep reputation, it's almost like a hidden gem in the series' history - "Lost Impact" is already well on its way to be included in all my Sonic playlists, and out of the vocal themes "Waking Up slaps so much that I've had an mp3 of it for over a literal decade before I even played the game.

So, count this among the countless other similar text explosions that have already been written about this game and which undoubtedly will increase in frequency as The Year of Shadow ticks further along. The much-maligned Shadow the Hedgehog is in fact a perfectly pleasant 7/10 experience, a game that almost gets completely buried under its aesthetics and promotional tricks, but underneath it all you can find a cautiously ambitious and intriguingly flawed platformer with a surprising amount of neat little facets to it. I'm also just really happy to have finally scratched the itch and played it myself, and while I still haven't completed all the endings I've been having enough fun with the game that I want to keep going, and so I think that's going to be running on the side for a while. Watch me become a full Shadow simp by the end of 2024.

I'll admit that Nights isn't my favorite game out there that I've played. That being said, its design philosophy screams "Sonic Team". There's something wonderfully dreamlike about the way all the areas and characters are designed. The sound design is excellent, making your actions feel satisfying to chain together in an arcadey manner. Tailor-made for an analog stick, the controls and animations coalesce in a way that actually feels like you're elegantly flying through these stages without a care in the world.

Gameplay's deceptively simple. You fly along a 2D track that runs through a 3D space ("2.5D", if you will). Your goal is to collect 20 orbs, smash open the nightmare capsule, and make it back to the gazebo starting point before the 120 second time limit is up for that lap. The track you travel along changes every lap. You'll fly through rings, fly in a loop to gather objects within said loop, encounter a handful of stage-specific gimmicks, the works. Where the magic of NiGHTS comes into play is learning the layout of a stage, chaining all of your actions together, and doing it efficiently enough to obtain a high score.

One thing I can knock against NiGHTS is that it teaches you jack shit, and expects you to learn a lot from trial and error. The biggest offender in particular is the bosses, which you face off against after the fourth lap of every stage. It can be decently frustrating to run out of time during a boss after finally making it through the stage. The other thing I dislike is how zoomed in the camera is. The game looks pretty great for a 3D Saturn game, but I often found myself zooming past rings or right into obstacles as they suddenly came onscreen.

The game requires you to get at least a "C" rank on a character's respective stages in order to see their ending, and I didn't mind that at all. In fact, I respect it. Trial and error aside, the bar isn't set too high, and the scoring system is sound and satsifying. If I could give any advice, break open the nightmare capsule as soon as possible, but don't return to the gazebo and officially "complete" the lap. Pass above it, and keep going around the same lap as many times as you can in order to get more points. Just don't let the timer hit zero, your run's basically fucked when that happens. The other tip I have is to not worry if you haven't quite met your score requirement by the time you reach the boss; if you know how to beat them fast, your score will be multiplied depending on how much time you have left over, doubling it at max bonus. That A rank may still be within reach!

All in all, NiGHTS is a really great and unique title, and a proud showcase of Sonic Team's passion and creativity. I wrote this review at 4 AM, so I don't really have a big witty quip to end this review on. I'm gonna go to bed and meet the Nightopians now.