so the trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 just came out and it looks amazing I am so excited to see it but what I want to do here is in light of this I want to give you guys the origins and powers of Shadow the Hedgehog so we'll cover the origin first and then we'll go into his powers and what makes him different from Sonic and one of the crazy things here when he becomes Super Shadow he becomes the most powerful character in the entirety of the Sonic Mythos so Shadow's origin was actually part of
something called project Shadow but there's three components to this there's a character called black Doom there is Gerald Robotnik who's basically the father of Dr Robotnik as you know him from the Sonic Mythos and then there's Maria and each one of these all play a very significant role in Shadows Evolution so starting with Gerald Robotnik it's the easiest way to kick this all off the idea was that he ended up working on Project Shadow which was kind of Under the Umbrella of a larger project focused on creating the ultimate life form it was largely a
government initiative which is to say they were looking to basically harness immortality and raw power and initially Gerald didn't want to be a part of it because he felt like it was too close to Playing God right it's one thing to mess around with science and technology it's another to start creating life but what ended up happening is his granddaughter Maria contracted a terminal illness and so because of the fact that the whole idea of the ultimate life form was predicated on harnessing immortality it led to Gerald basically becoming a part of the whole thing
under the hopes that he could actually harness this energy and then basically cure his granddaughter and so when he officially came on board the project this is where you see the involvement of black doom and black Doom was actually kind of a Herald for a set of events that were going to unfold 50 years later those events aren't really going to be a big part of the discussion here just because it takes place after the events of Sonic Adventures 2 which is where Shadow was originally introduced into the Sonic Mythos but black Doom is important
when it came to the creation of Shadow the reason for this was because Gerald wasn't able to basically create Shadow on his own and not even really able to create the ultimate life form on his own but black Doom was essentially an alien right from a place called the black Comet and was part of a race called the black arms the idea was that in 50 years they were going to invade Earth and all that kind of good stuff what ended up happening was because Gerald's desperation to save his granddaughter was so intense what he
ended up doing here was allying himself with black doom and then used some of DNA to create Shadow but it wasn't as though Shadow was created as the first project in fact before Shadow you had what was called biolizard the issue with biolizard was that it was just kind of like this uncontrollable being that was essentially very weak and when I say weak I simply mean that its raw power wasn't enough it required like AIDS technology different things like that but to be able to function in and of itself it simply just wasn't there and
so by and large that whole thing was discarded this is what led to the introduction of Shadow but Shadows entire DNA structure was actually built using black Doom as a framework and so because black Doom's DNA was used to create Shadow that's why we brought his character into the discussion now this is where Maria comes into play Beyond simply just being the motivation for why all this transpired in the first place and the reason why I say that is because as part of project shadow shadow himself was created on the space Colony Ark but basically
he spent his existence or early days removed from like Humanity as a whole while he was given like a heart and a soul quote unquote by Gerald under the idea that at a future point in time Shadow because of the vast amount of energy and power that he had would actually be able to defeat black doom and black arms when they showed up on Earth to basically invade it and destroy it that Maria was the kind of Lynch pin that actually humanized shadow of the Hedgehog because she's the one that started teaching him about the
world beyond the sterile labs and actually giving him a connection to humanity what ended up happening though is the government basically made the decision that Shadow was simply too dangerous and so they raided the compound and Maria was ultimately killed now Shadow was sent to Earth in this process but what this did with the death of Maria is it kind of just sent him into an unhinged state where he was just driven by tragedy and loss and sadness and that kind of stuff and so he basically just decides that the Earth has to go and
this is where I want to get a little philosophical for a second right if you guys will bear with me here because while Sonic and Shadow may look similar on the surface albe it like different color schemes and whatnot and the fact that they're super fast hedgehogs which is a statement I never thought I'd make on this channel the reality here is that Sonic is defined by his desire to fight evil because it's the right thing to do on the other hand Shadow is driven by Vengeance and honestly a search for identity if we include
the whole Amnesia Arc and even before the Amnesia arc when he arrived on earth right with Maria being his only real Lynch pin he hadn't really defined himself he was really a teenager in a lot of ways right figuring out what he stood for and different things along those lines but it's the ideological differences between the two that makes them so interesting that shadow is the dark mirror to Sonic the Hedgehog that's how most people would Define his character and they would do so accurately if I'm being honest with you guys but moving away from
his origin and focusing on his arrival on Earth and Sonic Adventures 2 and a lot of the things that transpired let's talk about Powers because I feel like that's the thing that a lot of people are really interested in so again these guys are both super fast right which is what you would expect from um two hedgehogs that are basically mirrors of each other and one of them is the star of the show the big difference between Sonic and Shadow in terms of their speed is that Sonic Speed is his natural ability Shadows is actually
a result of technology that he wears what are called Air shoes that give him this incredible level of speed and they actually produce jet streams that allow him to kind of hover and then skate at super high speeds which honestly gives him a pretty Unique Edge in mobility and maneuverability but the most distin of power that shadow possesses is what's called Chaos Control because this ability allows him to actually warp time and space which gives him crazy advantages when it comes to his physical prowess because using Chaos Control he can teleport various distances and he
can even slow down time to gain an edge in any particular fight that he's in and you saw this in the trailer I would say in that scene where Knuckles goes to punch him and time slows down that's not doing slow motion for the sake of showing how awesome this moment is that's actually shadow slowing down and controlling ton and then of course you also saw him teleporting around what's interesting here is the ability to stop time and move to another location while it is a really cool Power functionally it is no different than teleportation
as far as the person that you're fighting against perceives things right one minute you're there the next minute you're over there so again it all kind of amounts to the same thing but Chaos Control is not the only thing that shadow can do he can also unleash What's called the chaos spere which is actually a technique that allows him to launch bolts of chaos energy at people and these things can paralyze they can injure which kind of goes towards the idea that shadow is more than just being able to manipulate space and time that he
also has like offensive capabilities and when you combine this with the fact that he is prodigious when it comes to being a hand-to-hand fighter well it's no wonder this guy is ridiculously overpowered in the Sonic Mythos but one of the most intriguing aspects of Shadow's abilities are what are called limiter Rings there is a caveat here as far as I'm aware the limiter rings only appear in the Sonic X anime I'm sure there are people who already knew that and were immediately taking to their keyboards but as soon as I said it was in the
anime they're like oh darn they were looking to be upset in the comments but in all seriousness right like once these limiter rings are removed it just takes Shadow's Powers off the rails it's not as powerful as he is when he's like super shadow that's a whole different level of power but he's powerful nonetheless because removing the limiter rings by definition removes the limits on his powers and they amplify his strength and speed but he can't do it for lengthy periods of time because it really just exhausts him but again that's largely confined to the
anime and as far as I'm aware it doesn't appear in any of the video games not even the Shadow video game that Sega put out there but moving into the idea of Super Shadow much like you would expect when you look at like Super Sonic Super Shadows abilities are Amplified several times over and again it's when he basically just harnesses the chaos emeralds but everything he does is Amplified immensely right he becomes quite literally the most powerful character in the entirety of the Sonic Mythos I don't know exactly how you would quantify it I'm not
aware of there being any kind of like numerical values in terms of like how his power increases exponentially it's not like when Goku goes Koken and it like amplifies his powers 10 times over or something like that it just amplifies his abilities in such a way to where he's able to pull pull off these monstrous Feats like when he defeated the entirety of the black arms race that was absolutely nuts but yeah Shadow's crazy overpowered and he's really really cool but it is important to understand that despite how it may look in the trailer Shadow
is not just an evil version of Sonic he's a lot more complex than that and anybody who is a super hardcore Shadow fan will tell you that right that the difference between him and Sonic is again more ideological than anything else that shadow is kind of an anti hero in a lot of ways he's kind of an onag again off again Ally of Sonic which sort of does his own thing if I had to make a comparison here and I know people in the Sonic Mythos are going to be pissed off I know somebody's like
don't say it don't say it I would argue Shadow is Sonic's Vegeta if I had to make a comparison here with that being said guys we're going to bring this video to an end hopefully you enjoyed it if you did drop a like let me know what you think down in the comments and I will catch you all later peace
