It is Sonic Boom' tenth Anniversary today for the 3 people who care.
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Nigga what the fuck, say it ain't so
Holy attention-whore on Ians part.
I'm so happy that Ian and his army of IDW newniggers will soon disperse onto bluesky and away from Xitter.
Unfortunately he'll probably be back in like a couple of weeks, these people lack self-control
Anyways I finally got around to beating Shadow Generations, haven't 100% the game but I've opened all of the chests and got all but one of those stupid fucking screws Orbot and Cubot got for their rocket.
My new favorite act is Chaos Island Act 1, once you figure out how to use Doom Morph (which the in-game tutorial does a shit job of explaining btw), you can have a lot of fun with it, and the level makes good use of Doom Morph. Act 2 on the other hand was once again yet another forgettable level and the music was so ass that I ended up exiting out the stage after a few seconds and immediately changed it to some track from Shadow the Hedgehog (Side note: Shadow has a pretty underrated soundtrack outside of its vocal tracks. I think a lot of the melody driven songs are kind of lacking but the more atmospheric tracks are really nice and don't get the attention they deserve. Shout out to "The Doom", definitely my favorite song from all of the levels)
The Mephiles boss fight was disappointing, despite Metal Overlord being a roided up Metal Sonic and Mephiles being half of the most powerful character in Sonic history (at least to my knowledge) his boss fight was an absolute joke. Also the new voice actor they got for Mephiles sucks, he sounds too whiny and doesn't really sound menacing in the slightest.
The cutscene that links the game with Sonic Generations was kind of whatever. It was full of Ian's obsession with corny references to older games but I thought it was funny Shadow gave Sonic a fake emerald. I don't really care too much that there's no Sonic boss fight, you can just play the boss fight in Sonic Generations anyway.
I've seen a lot of people say Radical Highway is the best stage in the game. I don't think I can really agree. It may be a skill issue, but I didn't have much fun with Act 1 at all, especially without the Doom Wings. There's this section where you slide down some buildings that sucks utter cocks, and there's this one shortcut that you more or less need to get an S rank (at least without the wings) that requires you to jump off the building onto an adjacent platform which will take you to a higher building (which is already a pain to do because the controls suck), but when you get there there's like a 50 percent chance that you actually need to steer Shadow to keep him from falling off or that you don't do anything and let the dash panels do the work because if you do Shadow will fly off the building. Once you're done with that, there's a second sliding part where you have to avoid the corrupted parts of the building or whatever because you need the rings to push you over the edge for an S rank, but at the same time you have to keep to the right so you can use a grind rail to Doom Blast a nearby enemy and shave some time. I think the best run I got was an A rank that was like .1 seconds away from being an S rank, after a while I just said "FUCK IT" and moved on to Act 2. The remix for Radical Highway Act 1 is also pretty subpar, so I ended up using the original SA2 mix in this stage, which I don't think is long enough to support a 4 minute stage. I found Act 2 fun, but at the same time I also didn't really bother doing a wingless run, so I was able to enjoy the stage a bit. It was also neat that it was the only Act 2 that wasn't a 2D only stage.
Devil Doom was a pretty good boss fight and was probably my favorite boss fight in the game. The first half was a combination of the Doom Morph parts of Mephiles's fight and the Doom Surf parts of the Metal Overlord but just... better. Being able to skip a phase of the Doom Surf phase felt less finicky than doing so w/ Metal Overlord and the Doom Morph phase was more interesting and challenging than the Doom Morph part of the Mephiles fight. Then finally you move into the Neo Devil Doom part which is fairly easy, just keep moving forward, hit the bumpers when the game tells you to hit the bumpers, be sure to evade BLACKED Doom's Tail Whip, that sort of thing. I just wish the game used I Am... All of Me instead of All Hail Shadow for the final phase, but it's whatever.
So... what did I think about the game?
I'd be lying if I said that this game was no fun at all. There were a lot of great levels (Both Sunset Heights, Chaos Island Act 1, Space Colony Ark Act 1, Radical Highway Act 2), but at the same time I feel it was definitely overhyped. The majority of the act 2 stages were boring levels that would be more at home with the levels in Forces or the filler levels in Colors. The challenge acts were far more straightforward than the ones in Sonic Generations and lacked much of their creativity. The story definitely has its high points, any interaction Shadow has with Maria is a joy to watch, but at the same it feels like it has very little to do with Shadow's story outside of Black Doom being le bad guy and Maria and Gerald showing up. We know Rail Canyon is in this game not because anybody really liked the stage (if the Heroes stage was chosen based on that criteria, we would've got Grand Metropolis, Frog Forest or maybe even Egg Fleet instead), it's because it was where Shadow first encountered the Shadow Androids. So why isn't this mentioned in the game? You could easily use them for things like doppelganger race like in Sonic Generations. Perhaps have it so you have to use your chaos powers to defeat them in races? There's so many possibilities yet none of them are ever explored. If this game is about Shadow's history then where the fuck is Prison Island? You know, the island that Shadow was napping in for half a century? In reality, the only real dive into Shadow's history outside of his origins and Maria and what not is located in these gay story collectibles that open up what's essentially excerpts of Shadow's page on Sonic News Network, and I'm sure that almost no one is going to read these.
Another big point of contention I have with this game is just that there's no level from Shadow the Hedgehog. You know, the game that has his name on it? The one that goes more into his backstory than any other game? That one? Yeah, you don't get to visit a single location from that game, and do not give the "OH SPACE COLONY ARK WAS BASED ON SHADOW" because 1. Bullshit and 2. The stage clearly takes more from Final Rush/Chase than any of the ARK levels in Shadow. I get it, assets are le hard to make (even though Sonic doesn't really have or need photorealistic visuals and AI and shit exists that makes this no longer the case) but the fact they'd rather asset flip a game Shadow DOESNT EVEN appear in over trying to make something for a game where he has the biggest role of them all signifies a lack of caring. Imagine if Sonic Generations had Green Hill, Chemical Plant, City Escape, and then five levels from Sonic Unleashed. People wouldn't excuse that, right? Then why excuse this?
Other than that, what else is there to say? The game controls... fine, I hate that Shadow has a double jump (double jumps are for gay fat retards like Mario, air dashes are cooler anyway) and I feel that Shadow could be a bit slippery to move around especially in White Space where there's all of these tiny platforms you have to land on but moving Shadow around wasn't too much of a struggle. Doom Surf is an exception to this thoughever especially in 3D places like White Space. I still think Generations and Unleashed are more aesthetically pleasing and I hate that fugly jumpball and boost aura they've been obsessed with since Forces but I wouldn't say this game looks bad, you can see a lot of graphical improvements even comparing the Forces and Shadow Generations versions of Sunset Heights together. All in all I had a good time with this game but I feel that it's sorely overrated. The fact that people are happily and easily saying this surpasses Sonic Generations in quality baffles me, the game falls short of Sonic Generations in almost every category outside of story and even the story I feel is lacking. I know Sonic Generations has a nothingburger of a story but it works there because there's no need for it to have one, this game does yet at the same time never really reaches its full potential. I can't wait for some of the hype to die down and for people to realize that this game isn't the second coming of Jesus.
