8 Video Game Spin-Offs That Broke EVERYTHING
5. Shadow The Hedgehog
The Sonic Adventure games really took a sharp turn into giving Sonic and friends more epic stories. Adventure 2 is perhaps the pinnacle of the series’ writing, especially in regards to being dark and brooding, whether you enjoy that out of your anthropomorphic hedgehog series or think it’s totally stupid.
The game introduced the mysterious Shadow the Hedgehog, an edgy version of Sonic designed to appeal to teenagers. He goes through an entire arc of working alongside Eggman for a miscommunicated goal and then sacrifices himself at game’s end. However, with the character being so popular he was inexplicably brought back for the next few games.
Infamously, Shadow got to helm his own title in 2005: one with jeeps, guns and curse words. The selling point was answers to Shadow’s mysterious life but it immediately didn’t bother to answer how he survived falling to Earth at the end of Sonic Adventure 2. Furthermore, the real truth to his origin is only hidden away after beating the game ten times and watching it’s very incongruous endings.
In the “true ending”, it’s revealed that Shadow was created using alien DNA.
Knowing this now, how can we ever look at Sonic’s rival the same again? He’s a literal alien-hedgehog hybrid. Surely he should be constantly on the run from the FBI - not competing in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games every year.