Well, I might as well get on with it. This post will talk about the character that supposedly helped lead the franchise to its “downfall” from his introduction in 2001’s Sonic Adventure 2, Sega’s 10th Anniversary game for Sonic the Hedgehog. The character that either you love or love to hate in the fandom.
Shadow the Hedgehog has a deeper backstory than any character in the series thus far, and this was because of his involvement in the plots of the games that he was featured in. A run of three games had him heavily involved in plot structure from the beginning: Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog. Sonic 2006 had him making up 1/3rd of the game, but we’ll leave that out of the discussion for the time being.
The story of Shadow should have easily cleared up any misconceptions we’ve had about him, but many people, non-Sonic fans included, tend to misuse his character traits and continually misrepresent his character as a whole. So I’ll recap some of the events surrounding Shadow’s creation.
More than 50 years before the beginning of Sonic Adventure 2, Professor Gerald Robotnik was working on Project Shadow for the United Federation, which presumably was intended to be used as some kind of weapon, possibly creating super soldiers or something similar. It was in essence a project that searched for a way to make beings immortal, if not invincible as well. But out of that could have come a cure for many diseases, like Neuro Immune Deficiency Syndrome or NIDS. Maria Robotnik was his granddaughter and someone afflicted with such a fatal and incurable disease; this was Gerald’s true motivation to complete Project Shadow for the government. The first product of his research was the massive and unstable Biolizard, a prototype that required a life support system and special area for continued survival. Black Doom, supreme leader of the Black Arms, happened upon Gerald’s research and offered him help in exchange for Project Shadow’s use as an instrument of destruction and the seven Chaos Emeralds (in order to use a massive Chaos Control on the Black Comet, as in Shadow the Hedgehog). Perhaps basing his design for Shadow mark 2 on some of the murals seen in the Mystic Ruins (specifically the ones prophesizing final bosses Sonic would end up fighting and defeating), the Shadow we know was born from a combination of Gerald’s original research and Black Doom’s DNA. The government learns of Project Shadow’s completion but also of Gerald’s dealings with Black Doom; they intend to take Project Shadow for themselves out of fear of attack and because of the potential of such a powerful tool. An assault on the Space Colony ARK killed all those on board who were believed to be involved with Project Shadow, including Maria. There was no reason to shoot or even shoot at Maria since she was just a little girl and already frail due to her condition; there was also the fact that she could have done nothing to help Shadow other than send him to Earth via the capsule, and that could have easily been tracked from the colony. Maria was presumably killed because of her relationship to Shadow: she already knew too much for her own good. Shadow was sent to Earth, scooped up by the Guardian Units of Nations and placed in suspended animation for the next 50 years. At some point, his memories were manipulated or scrambled, because once he awoke…
That was just a small summary of what happened up to Shadow’s first appearance in “modern” times. So let’s knock a few things out of the way.
A frequent criticism of Shadow is that he’s “emo” or too angsty for his own good. Let’s consider the following: Shadow was not given time to get over the massacre of people he knew for years and the murder of his best friend – possibly the only person he truly loved – in front of his very eyes. The fact that he was in stasis for 50 years means that he was frozen with those memories still fresh. So for all we know, Maria could have been bleeding out in front of him just five minutes earlier as he remembered it. He had no time to truly absorb or comprehend the trauma rationally. If someone that you knew and loved dearly died right in front of you, wouldn’t you feel emotionally destroyed? That’s how Shadow felt at the beginning of Adventure 2 and ever since. Maria and Gerald, along with countless people had died 50 years ago, but those 50 years were not 50 years for Shadow. He technically is so close to those events that he is very much justified in being angry and emotional about what has happened, because it really did just happen in his eyes.
…I believe that actually dismisses a huge percentage of the complaints against Shadow, actually. His supposed angst is justified and it’s sort of hard to be emo when you’re tearing down a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge while stomping on the military at Mach 1. Well, I might be a bit biased here…
Shadow as a character doesn’t suffer from an inferiority complex; he refers to himself as the Ultimate Life frequently. He is strong, confident, arrogant to a point, ruthless, precise, intelligent, calculating, cold, blunt, and a host of other things. He has a heart, as evidenced by his memories of Maria and the entirety of White Jungle. You know, when he cut back across an island that was about to explode to save Rouge after she got herself stuck inside of Security Hall. He has an intense rivalry with Sonic, as well. Not just “spar you every once in a while for fun” but more like “get yourself ready because I’m shooting to kill” in the spirit of the age-old Goku/Vegeta dynamic from Dragon Ball. Shadow, for all intents and purposes is Sonic’s arch-rival and has been the sole one to occupy that position – not Knuckles who was tooled into opposing Sonic for all of two games (and parts of several others) before realizing what the score was. Shadow is a sort of “what-if?” version of Sonic, or the “darker Sonic” if you wanted to put it like that. Why I say he is a “what-if?” Sonic is because of how they operate and the dynamics of the relationships they hold.
Sonic has many friends and allies, while Shadow has a select few. Sonic fights selflessly (arguable if you wanted to look at it a certain way) for the sake of the planet and people he may or may not know. In other words, he puts himself on the line for the sake of many. Shadow on the other hand – and you can see this quite clearly in Sonic Adventure 2 – acts on what Maria has asked of him and what he feels is right for himself, nothing more. He puts himself on the line for his own goals and ambitions, regardless of what happens to anyone else. He is, in a word, selfish. And maybe rightly so considering what has happened to him. There has been talk about what the original story of Sonic Adventure 2 was going to be like, that there were going to be far fewer characters and that Shadow was in essence literally “Dark Sonic”; a transformation brought on by certain situations. The whole idea of the split personality was going to be one of the main points of the game. It’s possible that time constraints factored in that idea being scrapped in favor of what we got. This is something that I remember hearing frequently but I can’t really make it part of my argument since I can’t reliably source its origins. We’ll leave that as just a rumour I heard.
But Shadow returning after his supposed final farewell in Sonic Adventure 2 was planned from the start. Takashi Iizuka is the current head of Sonic Team Ltd. at the time of this post. Under Yuji Naka, then boss and considered one of the fathers of the franchise, Iizuka directed Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog while working at Sega Studio USA, Sonic Team’s American arm. At one point while Shadow the Hedgehog was approaching release, Iizuka clearly states that Shadow’s continued involvement in the series was planned very early on, around the end of Adventure 2’s development or close to it. He was not simply shoehorned into later games solely because of popularity, though to say it had nothing to do with it would be stupid on anyone’s part. It helped a lot with the reception of his character in later games. There were pretty clear signs in Shadow’s debut game that there were several questions to be answered. With most of the characters in the series we have “whats” and “whys” that are still a mystery, but they’re pretty much inconsequential. With Shadow, we have several gaping holes in the “completion” of his backstory. In the Dark Story for Adventure 2, we have Rouge talking to Shadow about the other Project Shadow, which is revealed to be the Biolizard later on. We have the problem of there being two “Shadows” as mentioned, which meant that one was a fake, both were fakes, or both were the real thing. We have the question of why Shadow was complete and the Biolizard was a failed prototype. We have the question of why G.U.N was so intent on keeping Shadow locked up since he was suck a powerful weapon. There’s the question of what the hell the Eclipse Cannon was for since it didn’t have any purpose other than destruction. It was a strange road to get there, especially going through the campiness of Sonic Heroes, but those questions and more are answered in Shadow’s self-titled game. He had the honour of being only the third character in franchise history to have a game all to himself, with Sonic and Tails being the other two. This notion that Shadow just came back with no rhyme or reason other than blind popularity and Sega trying to cash in is another gripe about him as a character, and it doesn’t have any basis. Shadow’s game and continued involvement in the series didn’t come out of “nothing”, no matter what anyone thinks.
That’s about all I have to say about Shadow for now. I think he’s a great character to work with and has an interesting personality on the whole. But of course, personal bias isn’t really what we’re here for.
Posted by Howlitzer 
Supercruise! 