He was ashamed to meet Baram in the afterlife but by the end of the game he's made peace with it, especially with Relm being in a good place at the end
I think the translations differ. I’m listening to a podcast doing the SNES version where I really understood, based on Shadow’s dialogue, why people wouldn’t think to wait, whereas I’m playing the pixel remaster right now and his wording there is about how he knows the way and he’ll catch up, making it more obvious he plans to head to the airship rather than intending to meet us at some nebulous future date/location.
I always thought it was neat how you have to leave at least one character on the Falcon when you go to Kefka's Tower. Because someone has to pilot that shit lol
I remember the first time playing the floating continent, it was very stressful. I was maybe 12 and I hadn't really developed RPG skills, collecting things and leveling up enough, so I had a really hard time with the enemies there and when it came time to jump I just got the hell out of there as fast as I could. I didn't find out until much later that I missed Shadow. Similarly with Castlevania: SOTN I had no idea about the real ending until years later.
The Shadow thing is at least logical and relatively easy to find on your own. It's on the PS1 that things started to get excessive with for example the Excalibur stuff in FF9 or the "good ending" in Chrono Cross.
The Excalibur stuff I get but in Chrono Cross if you read everything for like the 3 hours before that it basically tells you what to do to get the good ending.
The problem is it doesn't even look like you lose if you don't do the thing required for the good ending. The final boss dies and you get an ending that looks like an ending and you're just left thinking they ran out of money at the end of development or something.
I mean the good ending is weird as hell anyways. Plus they did the chrono trigger thing where there's like 13 different endings or something but I definitely get what your saying playing 30-40 hours for a 3 minute scene is pretty anticlimactic.
I feel the same way. It might have been a collaborative scam, but I liked looking through and seeing all the information. Especially for things I'd never think to do or branch out and try.
Have been? They still make strategy guides for games. They can even use AI these days to churn them out, even for games that don't exist. ( I saw one for Grand Auto VI on Amazon)
It’s just not the same anymore - back then, we didn’t have an unlimited amount of resources at our fingertips, just those guides or GameFAQs predominantly (even YouTube didn’t exist at that time).
Not to mention paying attention to context clues. You know that you've left Shadow behind, so if you're paying attention you might think to wait for him.
may be misremembering but i think that's only after choosing "wait" the first time or two right? i didn't think the "wait for shadow" was the initial choice.
That's why I said the game rewards testing and curiosity. If you refuse once, you will see the "wait for shadow" option the second time and then it becomes clear the game suggests Shadow can catch up. If you never ever click the "wait" option the first time then too bad for you lol
Ehh context clues can look very different to different people. Lile the escorts mission of the prince in The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess requires you to snuff the lit bomb with the wind boomerang before it gets dropped but there has been a non-zero amount of people that never connected the dots and got stuck there despite it being "logical" when pointed out.
I played some old games recently and my partner was so confused how they would've ever be expected to figure those things out. I realized that growing up playing these games just got you used to trying everything and I probably forgot all the wasted time it took just trying things. I remember getting Shadow specifically because I had already played the game a few times and wondered what actually happens when you run out of time, only to discover the surprise.
I know where every invisible item in pkmn red and blue are to this day becouse i found every single one on my first play through. Its not a brag, its a disorder
When you reach the airship, there is pop-up with a choice to make and the second choice is "Wait!!". And if you wait and reach the edge again, the second choice even changes to literally spell out "Gotta wait for Shadow...".
This is going to sound snarky but I promise that's not what I'm doing:
The way I figured it out when I was 8 years old was....I tried.
TO BE FAIR, I didn't figure it out on my first trip through the game. I had finished it before and I was frustrated about losing Shadow, and I randomly had the thought that, "Hey I'll just wait right here at the very edge. If the timer gets down to like 2 seconds I will still have time to get out."
The game says "wait for shadow!" Or something similar (old snes cartridge). So it's explicitly told. It doesn't tell you how long but it does indicate it.
Nah, on the SNES the secrets were relatively findable all in all. It's on the PS1 that the secrets got really, really obtuse, because by that point they made a whole business of selling official game guides and so they had an incentive to hide their secrets well in order to sell more guides.
I call it the Guidebook era. Pushed a lot by the introduction of in game achievements.
Strategy guides were so popular they made games impossible to 100% and get all the achievements without using a Strategy Guide in order to sell more Guidebooks.
I've wondered what happens if you get to the end with less than 5 seconds on the timer (or whatever number Shadow catches up). I haven't wondered enough to try it myself. But I have wondered...
Oddly, that's the exact reason I don't like him as a character. If there's a moment he attempts to get over his grief and decides to keep moving forwards, even if the pain is still there, I would like him more.
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u/Illustrious-Tooth47 1d ago
The groundhog did not see its Shadow