Sega has designated 2024 as the Year of Shadow, celebrating Sonic the Hedgehog’s rival through games like Sonic X Shadow Generations, a starring role in the third live-action film, and an animated mini-series delving into the character’s past. At Anime Expo 2024, Sega held a panel with Sonic Team studio head Takashi Iizuka, Shadow and Maria Robotnik voice actors Kirk Thornton and Stephanie Sheh, and Studio Giggex directors Alan Wan, Kevin Molina-Ortiz, and Christopher Luc to discuss the character’s past, present, and future, and show a glimpse of the animated mini-series Sonic X Shadow Generations: Dark Beginnings. While we only saw about 90 seconds, fans are already incredibly stoked about what was shown and are feeling more confident in Sega’s direction for Shadow than they’ve been in over a decade.
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The panel took place at the Los Angeles-based convention on Saturday, July 6, and was about an hour long. The presentation walked through Shadow’s history since his debut in 2001’s Sonic Adventure 2 (though it weirdly glossed over the series’ notorious low point, Sonic ‘06, which did not go unnoticed by fans), discussed how the antihero Spawn served as an early inspiration for the character, and interestingly enough, had Thornton saying he’s learned more about Shadow in the past year than he had in the previous 14 years he’s spent playing the hedgehog.
“I’m seeing different sides of Shadow,” Thornton said. “But as far as [Sonic X Shadow Generations] goes, the cool, unflappable side [of him], there’s always been something underneath it and finally we’re starting to pull out all those things and figure out what is driving that cool, what’s driving that unflappable, what’s brewing under the service. So that’s what we’ve been getting with this game. The team has decided to let a little bit of that emotion out at times. So it was a lot of fun doing this game because playing down and then being able to erupt and let some of that emotion out that’s been brewing underneath all this time.”
Thornton took over the role of Shadow in 2010, which was long after the character’s major roles in Sonic Adventure 2, Heroes, his self-titled game, and Sonic ‘06, all of which had him as a major player in the story and lore. In nearly 20 years since, Shadow has been largely relegated to a side character almost exclusively portrayed as an edgelord, with much of that complex backstory ignored. So it makes some sense that Thornton is getting the bigger picture now with Sonic X Shadow Generations, which Iizuka says is meant to reintroduce the character by revisiting his past ahead of the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie premiering on December 20.
Hearing that Thornton is getting a better understanding of the character after all this time is exciting because that gives fans hope that Shadow may once again be the antihero fans fell in love with, rather than the Flanderized caricature he’s been for more than a decade. If that testimony wasn’t enough, the clip the team showed of the Dark Beginnings animated miniseries sparked a lot of confidence in Shadow the Hedgehog’s future. The 90-second snippet shows what seems to be Emerl, a robot who debuted in Sonic Battle, attacking the space station Shadow and Maria lived on. We’ll have to wait for the series to launch later this year before we get more context, but the animation is pretty incredible, and the dialogue and cinematography are dripping with angsty melodrama. Shadow’s interaction with Maria in the clip has been especially resonant with fans, as it manages to marry his brooding demeanor with the heartfelt core that has been missing from the character for some time. The folks from Studio Giggex say the series was inspired by legendary anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, and will draw heavily from the established Shadow lore.
Though it was barely over a minute, the preview and panel were enough to get fans pumped up for the future of a character who has largely been done dirty for over a decade.
Sonic X Shadow Generations is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One on October 25. The Dark Beginnings animated series will be released online, but those who pre-order the game on PlayStation consoles will get extended versions of the series, as well as deleted scenes.
Pre-order Sonic X Shadow Generations: Amazon | Best Buy | Humble Bundle
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