What was Sega thinking?
>>342950178
It's honestly a better game than SA1 and 2 if you really think about it.
>>342950178
There's clearly a Sonic market for this edgy shit.
>>342950178
I don't know but damn it was fun
There's nothing wrong with a chuuni game every once in a while
>>342950178
>Kids like Shadow.
>Kids like Guns.
>Kids like swearing.
>"What if we put those things together?"
Making a game revolving around Shadow during the height of his popularity was a sound idea.
However, no one at Sega stopped for a moment and said "hey wait maybe making a Sonic game with guns, swears, and an alien invasion is a dumb idea"
They were catering to the edgy 12 year olds who fell in love with Shadow after SA2and it was the coolest shit at the time
ALL HAIL SHADOW
>>342950178
Long story short: Sega held an online poll asking what character they'd like to see a game about. Shadow won by a pretty wide margin, so they made a Shadow The Hedgehog game.
As for why we got what we got, well, that's on Sonic Team. My guess is that they just threw together an amalgamation of what was thought to be cool at the time. Naka even wanted to make ShadowTH into a sub-series that ran concurrent to the mainline games.
That's really about it. Honestly, it could have been a lot worse, though I don't care for the addition of ayy lmaos to Shadow's origin story. It was already convoluted enough, wasn't it?
>>342951965
*what character the fans would like to see
I mean.
>>342950232
It really isn't.
Sloppy controls, ear-splitting sound design, an absolutely incoherent narrative due to the shitty choose your own path system which punishes you with the same neutral endings unless you spend hours scouring through every mission to kill all of a specific enemy instead of just getting to the end of the mission, terrible voice acting etc etc
At least it wasn't Sonic 06
>>342952472
Shadow The Hedgehog's development reduced S06's development time, apparently
SEGA doesn't think, why do you think they're in the spot they're in now? This shit has gotten to the point that
>“I’ve been talking to the employees about how we should start putting serious consideration into quality from this point on,”
Is a relatively recent quote from the CEO of SEGA games.
I remember renting this when I was the teenager and even back then I knew it was trying too hard to be edgy, It was decent gameplay-wise but man the story is pretty fanfic tier especially with >>342953106 pic related character.
>>342951865
HEROES RISE AGAINNNN
the character themes were so fucking good in shadow. i am all of me and all hail shadow...shit was fucking dope. i miss when sega went crazy and got some outside bands to do music/themes. julien-k, magna fi, bowling for soup etc. all of their songs are fantastic.
I miss the quirkiness and bizarre things that sega studio usa/sonic team usa had in their games. The voices went crazy in that extreme mode and kept saying weirder and weirder shit. Then the outside references. There was a certain charm to sonic team usa games
>>342953328
That's all on Jun Senoue, the guy goes crazy when it comes to finding singers and bands to pull in the games
I've no idea how he even thought that calling this christmas jazz singer to sing on all the Shadow themes in SA2 was a good idea, yet it fucking worked
>>342950178
Fans wanted a Shadow game, fans wanted a "Sonic with weapons" game. Sega combined the two to make a "Shadow with weapons" game.
>>342952717
False, Shadow was developed in the US while Sonic 06 was developed in Japan. What fucked over Sonic 06's development was them trying and failing to get the game on the Wii, resulting in half the team being spun off to make Secret Rings.
Decent experimental ideas but a bad execution wrapped in a laughably "mid 2000's edgy" exterior. Taking the Sonic Heroes formula and replacing the team mechanic with guns, vehicles, and a branching "morality-based" level path was at least ambitious if nothing else. I can't say Shadow was a stale game, but it all comes back to the blend of Sonic design and typical action adventure design mixing like oil and water on top of that fucking storyline and dialogue.
>>342953661
>What fucked over Sonic 06's development was them trying and failing to get the game on the Wii, resulting in half the team being spun off to make Secret Rings.
And the head of Sonic Team leaving halfway through development, AND them rushing the game for the 15th annieversary/holiday season. Sonic '06 is as close to a modern example of E.T. level development troubles as you can get.
>>342952386
I took a look at Game Grumps and Joel trying to play through this shit recently, and honestly the game would bebarely tolerableif they raised the camera to like twice its height relative to Shadow, cut the enemy counts by half, and made it absolutely, 100% clear how mission select worked right from the start instead of trying to shove obvious shit down your throat 24/7 like "If I press the A button, I'll jump!".
It'd still suck because floaty controls, shit story, being a Sonic-based game, etc. But it'd suck a lot less. SA2's controls and stage design were still 10 times better, even if that's not saying much.
>>342954105
The Gamegrumps playthrough is what made me play the game again and raised my concept from "meh" to "fuck this is actually pretty fucking fun"
That fucking playthrough is atrocious
>>342954428
Joel's is worse, somehow. Like, he gets the concepts unlike the Grumps, but he keeps dying in stupid ways and just gives up after level 3. Which made his playthrough like an hour long, not including all the times he stopped to play Sonic Sez clips.At least it was fucking hilarious.
