Shadow Generations turns a tragic piece of the hedgehog's history into a moving story about grief and moving on.
2024 in Gaming This story is part of our 2024 in Gaming series. Follow along as we reflect on the year’s best titles. Updated less than 0 just now ago Table of Contents If you had told me as a kid that there would be a sequel to Shadow the Hedgehog nearly 20 years after its release, I would’ve scoffed at you.
Shadow already dealt with his past, cured his amnesia in the process, and moved forward with his life. Why put him through that ordeal again? Imagine my surprise when Sonic Team announced Sonic X Shadow Generations, a remaster of Sonic Generations with a new Shadow-focused story added to it, the day before my 30th birthday in February. The first thing I did when the collection came out was play Shadow Generations, which made sense to me given I already played the Sonic Generations years ago. After playing through the game for more than four hours — and watching the Dark Beginnings prologue anime weeks prior its release — I was surprised to find what felt like a true sequel to Shadow the Hedgehog. Recommended Videos Shadow faces the return of Black Doom, whom he thought he defeated in his eponymous game, and gains new powers that bear the name of his alien surrogate father, including Doom Spear, Doom Blast, and Doom Wing. All of these power-ups, plus his refined power of Chaos Control, help him progress through select levels ripped from the games he appeared in — from Space Colony ARK to Rail Canyon to Sunset Heights — and navigate the temporal anomaly the Time Eater sent him to. However, the Doom Powers come with some strings attached: Black Doom gave them to Shadow as a means to take control of his mind and body and either make him his servant of destruction or be reborn in him. Related Meanwhile, he spends a little more time with Maria and Professor Gerald, who showed up in White Space from a point in time before G.U.N. stormed the ARK to shut down Project Shadow. He was surprised to see Maria most of all, as he had already gotten over her death in previous games and thought he was seeing a mirage of her. Shadow then realized, after saving her from Black Arms soldiers, that his reunion with her was real — if only for a short time. Shadow seeing Maria again in the White Space, and Professor Gerald by association, was a full-circle moment for me as someone who lost a loved one to forces beyond my control at a very young age, only to confront that part of my past not even 20 years later. That brief time they spent together in Shadow Generations reminded me of the daydreams I’ve been having of seeing my late father in a spiritual realm and catching him up on my life in the years since he died of cancer. Parallels between me and Shadow Part of the reason I relate to Shadow as well as Sonic, if not more so, is because of the pain we endure from witnessing a beloved family member die before their time when we were younger. Shadow was created to cure Maria of neuro-immuno deficiency syndrome , but the two became the best of friends, even siblings. While she didn’t succumb to her illness, which was in remission from living in a low-gravity environment and being by Shadow’s side 24/7, she died at the hands of G.U.N. during their cover-up operation aboard the ARK. This sent Shadow over the edge after waking up from suspended animation 50 years later. My father, on the other hand, didn’t have the luxury of seeking lifesaving treatment at a top-tier hospital, let alone aboard a space station orbiting the Earth. If he did, it would’ve cured him of his disease and allowed him to stay on this planet past the age of 45. My parents got divorced as a result of my father’s alcoholism by the time I turned 2 years old, even though he promised to stop binge drinking after spending three nights in jail for a DWI. For most of my childhood, that meant my brother and I spending some weekends with him and his partner, Teresa, and traveling with him to some places for longer than three days with my mother’s permission. Those travels included Arizona and Daytona Beach, Florida — vacations I hold very close to my heart to this day. As we got older, my father got more involved in our lives, watching my brother play baseball on a near-daily basis and helping me with reading to get ahead in school. By then, he was already diagnosed with liver cancer, but we didn’t know the extent of his condition until my 11th birthday in 2005, when he and Teresa broke the news to us that he was going to be in the hospital for a while. That started a series of hospital visits from me and my then 13-year-old brother, with both of us trying to be brave in the face of an illness we hoped he would recover from. That August, just a week after I started 5th grade, my mother flew us to Massachusetts to see our father one last time. One month earlier, he was flown from Miami to Boston and placed in hospice care after his cancer grew too advanced for the doctors to perform a liver transplant. During our five-day visit, my aunts told me that my father didn’t have too much time left and gave me children’s books about death and the afterlife . I read all of them and coped with that impending reality by listening to the Evanescence album Fallen on my CD player outside my father’s room. When my father passed two weeks later, the weight of his death on my autistic preteen mind was such that I started taking school more seriously and becoming bitter toward other people. To put it lightly, I wasn’t coping with his permanent absence too well. It didn’t exactly help that I couldn’t attend my father’s funeral since my mom couldn’t afford another flight up to the Northeast. What helped me was the release of Shadow the Hedgehog for PlayStation 2, where I related to Shadow more than I did in Sonic Adventure 2 because it helped me put more context to his angst over losing Maria. Depending on your path in the game, Shadow only saw Maria in two flashback levels — one where he helps her take out the Artificial Chaos running amok aboard the ARK, and the other where he brings healing units to ARK researchers. He also saw her at the end of the video Professor Gerald created 50 years earlier to tell Shadow about G.U.N.’s plans to shut down the space colony. Those events helped Shadow remember who Maria was and his purpose for being created, and live his life accordingly. Dreaming in phosphorescence Shadow’s reunion with Maria in Shadow Generations started when Shadow saw her across the lake and thought his eyes were betraying him. Only after defeating the black aliens chasing after her and getting hugged after saving her did he realize what he saw was real. He spent time with her and Professor Gerald in between levels, reminiscing about their time aboard the ARK and gaining insights about his powers and Black Doom’s plans for him. My daydreams about seeing my father again more or less start out the same way, only the visual details changed over the years. Throughout my teenage years, I would daydream of entering Heaven and seeing him roaming through the clouds, all dressed in white. Now that I’m agnostic , my idea of an afterlife for my father is on a beach in either Miami Beach, Daytona Beach, or Hawaii. Those daydreams only intensified after visiting Hawaii for a Sonic Frontiers preview in 2022, as it was the last place he traveled to before he died. It goes like this: I’m standing on the beach on the Big Island of Hawai’i looking out to the moonlit Maui in the middle of the night. The starry trail of the Milky Way lights up a path for me to cross the ocean to that part of the island without falling into the water. Once I get there several hours later, just before sunrise, I see my father lounging on a beach chair by the tiki bar. Before I could get to him, enemies appear out of thin air and I have to fight them off any way I could. When the battle is over, I shout out “Daddy!” and he turns to me, so happy to see me that he hugs me. I catch him up on stuff that happened in my life since he’s been gone, including my mom marrying my stepdad, moving to another neighborhood, my brother and I graduating from college to pursue different careers — physician assistant and journalist, respectively — and my brother marrying the love of his life, who is now pregnant with his first child. I tell him how much I’ve missed him, how much it would mean to me if he could come back to us and see how much we’ve grown, only for him to say, “Cristina, I’ve already lived my life, so there’s no reason for me to go back. Your story has given me great pride knowing you have grown gracefully. I don’t want you to be sad for me any longer. I want you to be happy and live your life knowing I’ll always be in your heart.” The next thing I know, I’m back on the beach in Hawai’i, with the cold splash of reality lapping at my feet. I’m looking up at the moon and holding my father’s wish close to my chest. Much-needed closure At the end of Shadow Generations, when Maria and Professor Gerald start fading away after Black Doom is defeated, Shadow tries to figure out a way to keep them where they are using Chaos Control. Maria tells him they don’t want to be stuck in one place in time. Shadow keeps resisting, saying, “But you don’t know what’s going to happen!” Maria then brings Shadow’s face to hers and whispers, “I know I’ll see you again. And if fate draws us apart, I will always be in your heart.” Then Shadow skates away to help Sonic fight the Time Eater, shedding a teardrop as he runs to the white void. That ending scene broke me. Despite wanting to bring his family back to life, especially Maria, Shadow finally got the closure he needed after so many years. The time he spent with them in White Space passed just like my daydreams with my father. While Shadow the Hedgehog handled themes of self-discovery and coping with loss, Shadow Generations dealt with themes of confronting grief and moving on from it. My father died two-and-a-half months before Shadow’s eponymous game dropped, when I couldn’t cope as a kid. Now, the sequel has come around to help me accept that fact as an adult with a great deal of class and respect — just like my father would’ve wanted. Everything I do is in his honor, and just as Maria hopes to see Shadow again, I hope to see my father again. I hope I do enough to make it to wherever he is.
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