Episode Shadow - Stage 1
City - Enemy Territory
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And now, here are the stages in Episode Shadow, a side story to this game that, like the Super Sonic DLC, was supposed to be paid DLC but was made free as well. I think. I'm not as sure about the details of this one as I am about the Super Sonic DLC. In any case, Episode Shadow tells the story from Shadow the Hedgehog's perspective. (EDIT: This was supposed to be free from the start.)
His story begins one month before Eggman took over the world. (You know, the taking over that was glossed over with on-screen narration.) Apparently, Eggman has been making a mess of this city everyone else finds themselves in for no reason, so Rouge the Bat calls in on Shadow to come check it out and see what Eggman might be up to. E-123 Omega had already gone on ahead of Shadow, but it doesn't look like he did a very good job of it, considering there are still so many Badniks everywhere. Also notice that the buildings are already wrecked at this point in the timeline. Maybe the city had always been like this, before Eggman even started smashing things.
Omega, going on ahead of Shadow, cannot set aside his grudge against Dr. Eggman and starts smashing up the Badniks...which, I guess means Shadow is now free to do so too. As Shadow makes his way through the place, something starts going wrong with Omega. He reports an attack but then resumes conversation with Shadow and Rouge like nothing happened, and this confuses Shadow a great deal.
As you can see, this stage is a remixed version of Park Avenue, with the difficulty increased and a new section constructed out of basic crates and stuff. Not really much to say about this that hasn't already been said about Park Avenue or Sunset Heights, except that the location of Enemy Territory on the world map is far from both of those two stages, suggesting that either the world map was poorly thought out or this city has a lot of very similar-looking districts. And no, I don't know what Shadow was looking for here, as the stage ends before they find anything (and Omega winds up losing something too).
If you pay attention to the music here and are up on your Sonic soundtracks, you'll recognize this stage's music as a remix of Westopolis's theme from Shadow the Hedgehog (the game), though there are bits of Radical Highway from Sonic Adventure 2 thrown in too.
Omega's been in a reduced role in these stories ever since Roger Craig Smith and the others took over voicing the Sonic characters, so it was interesting to hear more of Vic Mignogna as Omega. It's a weird casting choice, but he can do it. Meanwhile, Rouge's voice has gotten higher and higher in pitch as Karen Strassmann continues to voice her (and is now higher-pitched than Lani Minella's original Rouge voice).
One last thing to point out: In contrast to the main story, the stages in Episode Shadow have some pretty tough S-Ranks, which was a real curveball for me when I went through it. I could not get anything higher than an A, and it still took me several tries to do this. As you can see at the end of this video, I barely reached the S-Rank, and I caught all of the high-scoring opportunities through this stage (though I did lose Rings once).
