Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019
* indicates a repeat
1-50
51. Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando (PS2)
52. Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal (PS2)
53. Nier: Automata (PS4)
54. Ratchet: Deadlocked (PS2)
55. Itadaki Street Special (PS2)
56. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (PCE)
57. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
58. Crash Bandicoot (PS1)
59. Nazo Puyo: Aruru No Ruu~ (Game Gear)
60. Jumping Flash! (PS1)
61. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (PS1)
62. Crash Team Racing (PS1)
63. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (PS1)
64. Super Mario Galaxy (Switch)
65. Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time (PS3)
66. Battle Stadium D.O.N. (GC) *
67. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii) *
68. Dracula Densetsu II (GB)
69. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) *
70. Super Mario's Picross (SFC)
71. Castlevania (Famicom)
72. Castlevania (MSX)
73. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES)
74. Castlevania: The Adventure (GB)
75. Castlevania III (Famicom)
76. Super Castlevania IV (SFC) *
77. Castlevania: Bloodlines (MD)
78. Kid Dracula (Famicom)
79. Sonic Adventure (DC)
80. Drakengard (PS2)
81. Pole's Big Adventure (WiiWare)
82. Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PC)
83. Mario's Picross (GB)
84. Sonic Heroes (GC)
85. Drakengard 2 (PS2)
86. NeverDead (PS3)
87. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (PS3)
88. Gain Ground (Genesis)
89. Bonanza Bros. (Genesis)
90. Golden Axe Warrior (Master System)
91. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis)
92. Shadow the Hedgehog (PS2)
Like Sonic Heroes, this was another game I rented as a kid but never finished all the way through, and it seemed like another perfect fit for both this month's theme of returning to games you failed to finish before, as well as the 3D Sonic kick I've been on recently. I ended going with the PS2 edition, basically only because this version of the game goes for 700 yen in Japan, while the GameCube version goes for more like 4000 yen ^^; (and you don't even wanna know about the original Xbox version XD). I played through the first of the routes on stream and was a bit lukewarm on the game, but as I stayed with it it really grew on me, and I came out of it really respecting a lot more of what the game is trying to do than I anticipated I would going into it. The game doesn't keep a play timer, so I'm not sure exactly how long it took me to beat, but given that I finished it over the course of like a day and a half, I reckon it took me around 17-20 hours to get all the endings in.
Shadow the Hedgehog is more or less the second game (or third, depending on how you view the story in Sonic Heroes) that Sonic Team USA made that was dedicated mainly to the telling the story of Shadow the Hedgehog. Sometime after the events of Sonic Heroes, Shadow is standing outside Westopolis, brooding over why he has no memories of his past. Suddenly, a massive portal opens up in the sky and black and red aliens start pouring out of it. A massive alien calling itself Black Doom appears next to Shadow and tells him that the "promised time" has come, and that he must bring him the seven chaos emeralds. Thinking that this mission will give him the answers to his past that he seeks, Shadow heads off to fulfill this mysterious quest.
The game has a branching series of levels where you can generally pick to do either the "good" mission, the "bad" mission, or the "neutral" mission in each stage. Then at the end of each route, you can only pick a good or bad mission to pick what final boss you'll fight. There's no true alignment system, as it just determines what stage you'll go to next, and honestly some of the routes make HUGE leaps of logic with absolutely no explanation of why Shadow suddenly is where he is. Quite frequently more minor things like "I just helped Robotnik but now I'm fighting him as a boss and he somehow didn't even know I was here?" are not uncommon in certain routes. Certain paths make a lot more sense than others (especially if you don't hop between good and bad missions), but that branching mission system definitely makes the story suffer as a whole. There's also a "library" feature in the game, where you can see what routes you've taken and rewatch the cutscenes in order, and while it's a neat feature, they clearly didn't expect you to actually go through all 300+ possible routes in the game to just unlock all those strings of text.
Horribly panned at the time of its release for being overly dark and edgy for a Sonic game (which to a point I agree with), I genuinely respect what Shadow the Hedgehog is going for with its storytelling. Shadow's main quest is trying to figure out his history as a means of seeking the answer of why he exists. Along the more logically connected story routes, you have three general possible stories: Shadow goes with the good guys and realizes he was meant to be a defender of humanity, Shadow chases Robotnik and realizes he's just a clone of the real Shadow who died at the end of SA2, and Shadow goes with Black Doom's plan and realizes that Humans aren't worth saving and need to be destroyed/conquered.
To me, the main theme of the game is really about how the authority figures around you determine a LOT of how you see yourself and the world around you. You can only be as "good" or "evil" as the environment you're put into, and while a lot of that can be up to your choice, a lot of it also isn't. Shadow's ultimate realization in the true ending (which you get as an option to play when you've seen all 10 other endings) is that while he is certainly responsible for his sins in the past, it's up to him to decide what he does in the future, and that his history does not need to define who he will be in the future. A lot like Sonic Adventure 2, I think this story may not be high art, but it's got a lot of heart and I respect it for that. It may be a bit broody and angsty on the surface (especially the game's intro, omg), but I don't think they're just blowing hot air with the story they're trying to tell and actually manage to make a meaningful point with it at the end of the day if you give it a chance.
Mechanically, this game is far more in the vein of Sonic Adventure 2 than it is Sonic Heroes (thank heck), but more based around Shadow's stages in that game. You have the aforementioned mission system (which I'll get to in a bit), vehicle sections, but most infamously you have the main new gameplay mechanic which is the addition of guns and melee weapons that you can pick up and use to fight enemies with. The weapons do feel like a bit of an afterthought in terms of the larger level design and boss design, but they do make dealing with many enemies a lot more efficient than your standard jumping homing attack, and getting new beefy guns to heck up aliens or military soldiers with is always good fun. While the camera is a bit wonky from time to time in certain stages, it's generally about as good as SA2's camera was (that being "acceptable" in quality XD). One of this game's strongest bits of design is its bosses, and it easily has some of the best bosses in a 3D Sonic game of this generation as well as the best true final boss of those as well.
One final note on the combat is that it adds probably one of my favorite innovation in one of these 3D Sonic games: it changes how rings work. You no longer lose ALL your rings when you get hit, but a maximum of 10 at once. Now they're more like a health pool rather than a one-hit shield between you and death, and it makes the game flow a lot better. Especially for a game with wider levels more about ranged fighting, I think it's an ingenious innovation for the classic formula.
The level design is something of a mixed bag when paired alongside the level design. Going for neutral missions, which usually just involve getting to the end of the stage, I think the game is pretty strong in how it builds its levels. The levels have a lot of combat bits intermixed with running fast, and they're good fun to blaze through as quick as you can (especially through replays) just like the Sonic and Shadow levels are in SA2. The missions, on the other hand, are much more of a mixed bag of quality. It doesn't really feel like they had great ideas for the missions themselves, so much as they really liked the idea OF missions, and a lot of the missions are either finding hidden objects in a level or killing most/all of a certain faction of enemy. Those aren't usually too hard, but it can be really frustrating when you're using the warp-point checkpoints to hunt through an entire stage for the one enemy/item you missed. It can be fun to try and speed run those as well once you've done them once or twice, but a couple stages (the Central City bombing mission in particular) just have really awful, maze-like missions that drag on forever and just aren't fun. The missions are neutral in quality more than they're bad, but I feel the emphasis on them harms the game as a whole. I honestly also think that they either added more stages or rearranged them at some point in development to give you more mission options, and that's the main reason that the story feels so often disjointed in many routes.
Now, the big elephant in the room here is the 10+1 endings. If you wanna finish the game's true ending, you've gotta see all 10 endings, which involves doing the good and evil missions each of the five final stages (with the game having 22 main stages and and other 1 for the final true ending). While this IS a lot of level repetition, it's also fairly in line with how prior 3D Sonic games have approached their level design in terms of asset reuse. Sonic Heroes and especially Sonic Adventure 1 use this exact same sort of "the same level but a bit different) approach to their game design, and I think Shadow does it the best out of any of the three of them. A lot of the different missions minorly or majorly affect how you'll play through that stage (not unlike how different characters handled different stages in Sonic Adventure 1), and taking different routes to play as many unique missions as I could was a fun element to going for those ten endings. I personally think that having no alignment choices on the final missions so you only had five routes to play through would've been a much better design choice, but I don't think that what we got is unforgivable, and I found it fun trying for the different missions in a stage and trying to improve on your letter grade rankings for ones I had to repeat wholesale.
The presentation is pretty solid on the whole. The characters and graphics look as good as Sonic ever had on that generation, looking more polished like they did in Sonic Heroes but not nearly so cheap looking (at least most of the time), and the pre-rendered CGI cutscenes look great too. The music is also quite good again, having some really nice remixes of SA2 tracks and some really banging new vocal tracks. It's good enough I've seriously considered hunting down a physical version of the soundtrack XD. The game has some difficulty with its visual language from time to time (leading to some more maze-like levels or seeming dead-ends), but the NPC dialogue (whose repetition at times can get quite annoying) often points you in the direction of what to do so you never have to outright look up how to progress when it's in fact something really simple.
In regards to the Japanese PS2 version I played, I have a few final comments. DO NOT play the PS2 version of this game or any other multi-platform Sonic game, because it is easily the worst versions of these games to play (as was so common for games of that generation). The game is capped at 30 FPS but still manages to chug in somewhat more crowded areas, and while it thankfully never seriously affects the gameplay, it's still really jarring and unpleasant to look at. The Japanese version of the game, on the other hand, is really nice. I had really wondered for previous Sonic Team USA games if they'd been written in English or Japanese first, but this game really confirmed for me that they're written in Japanese first. I had the Japanese audio but English subtitles (mostly for the convenience of viewers of my stream, but also for me), and the English translation is very often awkward in its syntax and overly simple in how it erases nuance in the original Japanese. It's not unforgivable or "so bad it's good" in English (any more than Sonic usually is, anyhow XD), but I definitely think the Japanese script communicates the story better, and I'm glad I played with it.
Verdict: Recommended. When I first decided to play this game again, I didn't think there was any way I would give it more than a hesitantly recommended rating here, but as I played more missions, fought more bosses, and saw more of the story, it grew on me more and more. At this point, I'd even say it's outright better than Sonic Adventure 1. This game was certainly a product of its time: "linearity" was a four letter word in games criticism, people were OBSESSED with "replayability", and media in general was trending towards more edgy and serious stories. That said, I think it was really unfairly panned given how lauded the comparatively terribly Sonic Heroes was a couple years before. If you like 3D Sonic games (or really just the two Sonic Adventure games), I think it's absolutely a mistake to sleep on Shadow the Hedgehog if more gameplay like that is what you're after. It makes plenty of mistakes, sure, but its overall polish and quality should not be ignored for people who like 3D Sonic, and this is easily among the better 3D Sonic games in my book. It won't be one of my all-time favorite games or anything, but this will definitely go down as one of my favorite surprise enjoyments of the year.
