![]() Unfortunately, none of these hinted-at politics fully surface in the end. While most reviewers of Shadow Complex seem to have either missed or ignored this small detail (most people seem to think that The Restoration wants to nuke San Fran, for some reason) I took it to mean pretty obviously that The Restoration is some group of left-wing extremists, for whom the full cooperation of left-wing American cities (such as San Fran) is a foregone conclusion. The soldier goes on to explain how the rest of the country will probably have to be conquered by force, but that they first want to be seen as liberators and win some popular support. The first step apparently involves "liberating" San Fransisco and New York, which one soldier says makes sense because those are two big cities "with governments that will want to hop on board as soon as we surface". It is between two enemy soldiers talking about "The Restoration", which is what they call their secret plan to take over America. The only real evidence of it is fairly subtle, based on a few lines of dialogue you overhear at one point. This is something that our Western obsessions with poly-counts and dynamic lighting get in the way of frequently, and it's one of the main things that, I think, separates Shadow Complex culturally from other Metroid-clones.Īs for the story, I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed that the right-wing ideology I was bracing myself for didn't come off as strongly as I'd hoped. Leave it to the Japanese, I guess, to understand the value of iconic visual design and how it supports gameplay as a user feedback system. All the recent 2D Castlevanias, for example, have very clear environmental differences between map sectors. This is something nearly every other Metroid-inspired game does better than Shadow Complex. Shadow Complex's more "realistic" visual aesthetic may look cool and more 'next-gen' than the 2D games that inspired it, but the net result is geographic distinction eventually stretches into incoherent mush. I never had this problem in Metroid, which always manage to separate each chunk of the game world with nicely distinct visual styles. I had to constantly check my map in Shadow Complex, since often that was the only way to tell where the hell I was. Yet as the game gets faster the carefully nuanced nature of each screen becomes easily ignored, causing most environments to leave the same gray/brown impression. As I mentioned in my previous blog post Shadow Complex's environments seem mostly designed to be taken in slowly, with lots of localized detail. The way Shadow Complex gradually morphs from a tentative, tactical exploration game to a run-and-gun shooter is interesting, though it betrays the fact that its visuals are not ideally designed for either style. And although the gun-based combat is still at its core very un- Metroid-like, the super-powered-ness of your character eventually causes it to blur past as well. By the end you're zipping around the 'shadow complex' like a super-bouncy rubber ball, spraying bullets in all directions and punching people into oblivion with your bionic fist. Running on water, triple-jumping-you name it. While it begins like Out of This World or Flashback in terms of exploration and combat, it steadily becomes more like Metroid as your character becomes powered-up with various sci-fi gadgets. The game is, in the end, more similar to Metroid than I first thought. I enjoyed it a fair amount, though it does get samey after a while. I finally finished Shadow Complex, getting 100% of the map and items.
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