00:00Dark Beginnings
00:01Ever waste our time lingering on Logos too long for no reason,
00:05the story seems to just show Shadow trying to escape with Maria again,
00:09but then it pleasantly surprises me because she wanted to show him some lights.
00:13She shows him the Northern Lights and faints,
00:16and because Ian Flynn localized this,
00:20he's allowed to put his bullshit headcanon in that the low gravity of the Ark
00:24somehow keeps Maria's disease in remission,
00:27which the writer of his first game disagrees with.
00:33It's also confusing since she fainted, so it's not in remission.
00:38He angst is because he's supposed to be the cure to all diseases,
00:42but now he doesn't know what his place is.
00:45So it's that retcon bullshit from the manga put in here.
00:49Again, everybody assumed that he was able to cure all diseases,
00:54but it just took too long for them to develop a cure based on him.
01:01Not that someone smart enough to make Shadow was a failure in that regard.
01:06Then it turns out Emerald's gone berserk,
01:09and Maria has to convince Shadow to go save his creator from him
01:14instead of him going right away.
01:17There is no indication he was like this in his past.
01:21But he's also stupid,
01:23because he should have known right away that he would get in trouble with Maria
01:28if he didn't go save him.
01:31He fights Emerald uncreatively.
01:34It's cool to look at,
01:36and then it's over.
01:37He gets confused because Gunn's showing up more quickly than he'd expect,
01:42and it seems to enter a dream sequence because of weird stuff happening,
01:46like him seeing Gerald already trapped in chains and trying to run towards him.
01:50This all achieves the intended effect of trying to make you feel the same way he does,
01:55but we already know he's upset about Maria dying,
01:58so it's a waste of time.
02:01He comes to the conclusion that Black Doom gave him that hallucination,
02:05since he could do that in his own game.
02:07And the series finally acknowledges that the moon is half-blown up from his first game.
02:13Then why did it look non-blown up before this?
02:17So I've got irrefutable proof that this isn't canon.
02:22Because there's no explanation for why we saw the non-blown up side in the previous games,
02:29but not in this one all of a sudden.
02:33And Maria insists that he does have a heart.
02:35Where's it coming from that he wasn't even a good person before Maria died?
02:40This is a blatant retcon because we didn't have any indication Maria was delusional about him,
02:46and that's why she was friends with him.
02:48That's not the intuitive assumption.
02:50That's really uncharitable.
02:52And it just takes away from his character because we always assumed he was only evil because Maria died.
03:00So we had an excuse.
03:03Eventually, Rouge fights some robots to help Shadow at a supply depot.
03:08Shadow does something cool-looking to cause some destruction,
03:11and Rouge annoys me with her voice and insists that he has to go to Sonic's birthday party for no
03:16reason,
03:16because she's a bad friend, apparently.
03:19Shadow grabbing a missile was cool, but I don't know why Gunn is going after him.
03:24What he's trying to do here is get a spacecraft to go to the Ark.
03:29But they know it's him.
03:31They know that he's supposed to be working for Gunn.
03:35So why wouldn't they just let him do what he wants?
03:38Or at least ask him what he's doing here?
03:42They would get in trouble.
03:45The story is some more non-plot progression that at least is cool-looking.
03:49Shadow ends up falling surrounded by missiles and saves the guy in the helicopter and the missiles hit it,
03:54and Omega complains that he wanted to destroy it,
03:57which gives him the most character out of anyone here,
04:00and suddenly establishes that he's got no regard for human life either.
04:05Eventually, the commander of Gunn tells the forces to stand down, and it instantly works.
04:12It sure is convenient that he immediately had faith in Shadow to be here for the right reason,
04:20but not everybody around him.
04:23Everybody else decided to try to kill their greatest asset,
04:28but the guy who had no trust in him and wanted to kill him in his own game
04:34immediately has total faith in him.
04:38It's a good thing that he wasn't in the bathroom at the time.
04:41Rouge brings him info and gets winded up for helping in the destruction of millions of Gunn assets,
04:47but gets told she helped Shadow save the world because of that.
04:52Somehow he doesn't ask for details,
04:55or ask why she didn't just ask permission for Shadow to get a spacecraft to go to the Ark,
05:03and instead gets distracted by the memory of the last time Shadow had to save the world,
05:08and tells her that she could have talked him out of trying to destroy the world.
05:12Somehow he's under the impression that he would have listened to her.
05:16The song is completely out of place when they're talking.
05:19It only actually belongs when Shadow starts remembering Maria,
05:23and that was a great part of the story.
05:26That actually achieved the emotional impact it was going for.
05:30But the only thing new about these flashbacks is Maria putting a blanket over him
05:34after he fell asleep in an unusual spot for no reason.
05:39And because it was for no reason,
05:41it's obvious that this only happens because of meta-logic,
05:45that we've got to see Maria being nice to him,
05:47and it's the most cliche, lazy thing to depict a loved one of his is doing for him.
05:51The fact that this is all I saw was also disappointing.
05:56At least in a hurt comfort fanfiction about them,
06:00you would actually know why this happened.
06:04The story may be accessible from one of the games,
06:07but it's not like you see it as cutscenes you get from going through the story mode of a game.
06:11It's not the story of a game.
06:15It's just some extra thing.
06:17Archie Sonic comics aren't something you can experience as the story of a game,
06:21and that's why they're called not canon.
06:24So by the exact same logic, this isn't canon either.
06:29It makes no sense to apply the standard inconsistently.
06:34What I mean by canon is that it's extremely unlikely that anything from this
06:38is going to be referenced again canonically,
06:41so even in the unlikely chance that it did take place in the same universe as the games,
06:46it's functionally going to be like it never happened.
06:51This story by Ian Flynn,
06:52with a bunch of plot holes in it,
06:56has some kind of cool-looking action scenes to stare at,
06:59so it was okay to go through instead of boring,
07:02but it hardly told us anything more about Shadow's past,
07:06and was too vague about what Rouge's goal was even about,
07:09which made it hard for me to care about it.
07:12It explained what Rouge's goal was in a blinker-you'll-miss-it moment
07:16with one sentence about it being at a place full of robots
07:20to learn stuff for gun that we never learn about.
07:23Well, Shadow came here to get a spacecraft to get to the Ark
07:26to see if the Black Arms returned.
07:29Somehow he thinks all of the Black Arms returned,
07:32even though he had them all blasted to death by a laser,
07:36and not just the one Black Arm who could teleport.
07:40And then Rouge and Omega wanted to raid a gun base,
07:44even though they worked for them,
07:46because they wanted to do that to get Shadow to the Ark.
07:50They didn't need to do that.
07:52They could have just asked the commander for permission.
07:55To be fair, they're anti-heroes, so I guess that's why.
08:00Or they were too stupid to consider that they could just ask for permission.
08:05So Rouge initiates the launch to get Shadow to space,
08:08and the commander prevents Shadow's spacecraft from getting destroyed,
08:11even though he didn't have any way of knowing that Shadow was in it,
08:15and had a good reason.
08:17The reason I took so long to watch this was because I already knew Shadow's past,
08:22and didn't think it would tell me enough that I was new about it.
08:25And I was right.
08:27The only part that was great was the part that cheated
08:30to have the most likely chance of getting us emotional
08:32by playing a song while showing Maria put a blanket over him.
08:36If they didn't have that song,
08:38we wouldn't have cared about the one single moment of her having good times with him,
08:43because said flashbacks have her plenty of times already.
08:46The actual plot was also disappointing.
08:50I was expecting it to be more interesting.
08:52It was too lazy to tell us what the intel Rouge gathered even was.
08:58And all took place in boring locations.
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