Sega is gradually revealing Shadow Generationas a wider Sonic X Shadow Generations package. The latest leak contains highlights from Shadow’s most ominous outing yet.
In addition to the previously disabled Google search, Sonic X Shadow Generations Basically, it’s an enhanced remake. The main content of this package is a streamlined and beautifully remastered version of 2011’s Sonic Generations, which provided a thrilling journey through the entire history of Sonic.
The package also includes the same new bonus as Shadow – a series of levels that retell the anti-hero’s story over the years, from his debut in 2001 in Sonic Adventure (which, incidentally, is still the gold standard of 3D Sonic games) to the present day. I’ve played a preview version this year and I really enjoyed it. I’m already obsessed with this game.
That being said, I didn’t get much joy out of playing a level from 2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog. That game was… kind of interesting.
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My impression of Sonic 2006 was that it was buggy and awful. NPCs gestured like robots and made inhuman noises. Silver, the bloody hedgehog, trapped me in an endless throw loop during a boss fight, and the game soft-locked as he kept screaming “It doesn’t work!” Sonic has been involved in some of the greatest games of all time, but unlike Mario, he’s also attached his name to a number of truly infamous games. And Sonic 2006 is easily one of the worst offenders. It’s just rotten, to put it mildly. And I haven’t even started to kiss it yet.
And yet… I found something magical happening in this preview. Playing Sonic’s 2006 remake of Kingdom Valley… I missed the bad game that nearly made me smash my Xbox 360. As I raced through the levels, I was reminded of what was truly lovely about this game: the beautiful soundtrack, the art design that was a pleasing mix of realism and fantasy, and the ambition it had to deliver a truly exhilarating sense of speed and adventure.
Most importantly, it reminded me that, with more time and money, Sonic 2006 could have been a worthy Sonic Adventure 3. Oddly, that doesn’t feel like a letdown – because Shadow Generation feels like the perfect title right now, as this is the year Shadow Generation could very well become a cinematic icon.
My nostalgia kicked in, but when I spoke to the developers afterwards, they were very keen to point out that while the game was undoubtedly driven by nostalgia, it wasn’t entirely about nostalgia. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
“This is a ‘generations’ title, so the Shadow part of the whole package needed to make sure it recreated all the important, key moments in Shadow’s history. If we just recreated old things, it wouldn’t be enough,” Katsuyuki Shigihara, director of Sonic X Shadow Generations, told me.
“So we do need to say, hey, we know and acknowledge that this stage or this boss fight did exist in the past. We need to give people a sense of nostalgia and make them remember the old gameplay, but just giving players the same old stuff isn’t enough.
“We need to inject freshness into the experience. We need to make it feel fresh to the players. To do that, we need to balance some of the old things that are familiar, but also make sure we excite the players by showing them new things.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in Shadow Generation’s boss battles. Battles against Biolizard from Sonic Adventure 2 and the ostentatiously named Metal Overlord from Sonic Heroes feel vaguely similar to the originals in many ways – instead, they’re designed to dazzle players with new mechanics and a cinematic flair that’s sure to rival anything Shadow has done on the silver screen. Feel
Part of that feeling also comes from Shadow’s abilities. Shadow has done a lot of things over the years. In fact, I remember him best in Sonic 2006, because he was slower than Sonic, which meant he didn’t get the speed and world-flow death bug as often as Silver, and he didn’t have the questionable puzzle sections that Silver did. But in that game, Shadow also drove a car with a giant rocket launcher attached. Of course, in his own eponymous game, Shadow was armed with a Heckler & Koch MP5A3, a gun usually seen in the hands of soldiers, law enforcement officers, or dissidents. Of course, he doesn’t wield that gun in this more family-friendly trip into the past.
But the developers were savvy; the new abilities and cinematic moments given to Shadow are meant to evoke an overall feeling of the various things he’s done over the years, even if he won’t be picking up a Glock again.
“We needed to really ask ourselves, ‘Who is Shadow, who does Shadow need to be?’ That was really the first question, in order for it to work, to make it feel like Shadow,” producer Shun Nakamura said. “What we really came down to was: Shadow is a character who will do whatever it takes to get the job done and achieve a goal, whatever that goal is.
“He’s always been this way across all of our games, but we really made it the unifying thread for Shadow Generations. So the question is, what does he do? How does he beat the game? What are his new abilities?
“The ultimate answer was that we were going to give him these powers of destruction that would feel very Shadow-like, a little dark and cool. It’s something that only Shadow could do, and these powers would allow us to unify the whole experience of the Sonic the Hedgehog story by allowing him to complete the game and do very Shadow-like moves.”
The result is convincing. Like I said – it gave me a warm feeling for Sonic 06, which I would have told you was impossible unless you had an appreciation for some of its soundtracks. It’s the perfect epitome of nostalgia.
Sonic X: Shadow Generations will be released on October 25 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC.
