Is Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows Canon? 

Hey hate to reply so late but at 4:35 you have body swap mode on in plague of shadows, how'd you do that?

@Samuel Anderson that does make a lot of sense, I hadn't even considered it since Mona was the goal of his campaign. I can see him hanging out in the town bar and telling his tale to any who would listen.

Well there is new game +

@@karlsargant3985but thats just straight up non-canonical

“And then I defeated all the order of no quarter, at once!” -Plague Knight, probably

late reply but "unreliable narrator" isn't just headcanon, it's what YCG intended. I didn't make that up for this video, my source was actual tweets from YCG that I couldn't find when making this video. I've since found them and updated the description. Here they are: twitter.com/YachtClubGames/st...​ twitter.com/YachtClubGames/st...​ twitter.com/YachtClubGames/st...​ twitter.com/YachtClubGames/st...​ twitter.com/YachtClubGames/st...

Neat

@@pikapete2719 all of those have been deleted

@@moonlightostrich3690 wtf you're right omg

This is also a possible interpretation that I find to be valid. Check other comments too, we talked about it

This is even sorta implied by the game itself, Propellor Knight specifically says "a Battle Royale then?"

@@bmombaerts yep!

@@bmombaerts Exactly

Or more like... a showdown?

T3alZ3r0 & Mag3nta F1v3 i like this better too, plague knight doesn't feel the type to lie unless Mona is involved. I do prefer the idea that plague knight fought the order though because its funnier that shovel knight arrives to see all his enemies fighting each other

@@lafayettemclaren5195 the other campaigns show that none of them are truly evil, more just selfish, and they quabble and fight a LOT, so it's not unreasonable to believe that they legitimately were just having a battle royale and shovel/plague tunnel visioned on their fights while telling the story

@@pikapete2719 yesss- btw I love King Of Cards!! What's your opinion on it??

@@iamsargentbucky9368 I think it's very good overall, I want to make a massive video discussing my thoughts on every campaign now that they're all out

@@pikapete2719 I consider Treasure Knight to be a Pirate Captain so he could be kind of evil but yes, the rest of the order are merely adventures of sorts, even King Knight. Also if Plague Knight thought the Plague of Shadows and then the Corrupt Essence at the moment of Shovel Knight's final bosses that could make the whole story work out in the end.

True, another thing is since they’re told by two different people some things may be slightly different, like how minor gameplay differences, etc etc (I mostly forgot what examples I was gonna use) but if two people told the same or similar stories based on how they felt it would be different

man just got conked out and imagined the fight up until plague knight

that's a possibile, albeit mediocre interpretation imo

yeah but its funny

@@gren4586 fax

No, it was clearly Bass who defeated all of them so hard that they don't even know what really happened

Yes

Yes

Yes

YES!!

Yas

Seriously, what the hell was that? Some kind of glitch?

Mariano Dominguez nah he was cheating so he could get some footage

ngl Propeller of Mystery sounds like a cool title

What about Shovel Knight: Flower of Flight? Because of the rose thing in King of Cards?

I need Shovel of hope xl and shovel of hope dark theme for polar and black knight

your mom is a cannon

@@pikapete2719 Cannons don't have ovaries, so they cannot have babies.

Lmao

Thats what the media wants you to think.

@@Magnus_Deus not with that attitude

It can be that new game+ is Canon to the Story.

@@karlsargant3985 I mean it could be but we see no story differences, only gameplay ones.

NG+ only exists in the context of gameplay and not story so I avoided saying that in the video but yeah it could be this too

he's using amiibo lmao

One could argue that shovel knight has to deal with black knight causing trouble and looking very similar to him but plague knight is literally a baddie and constantly being ambushed by the police

The algorithm is quite crazy, but coincidentally it gave me the views now while I had just started to get back into making videos. Got some more in the works so stay tuned!

If Shovel Of Hope is a more trusty retelling of the story, saying “and then I helped everyone to get up from there” implies that he ALSO did it to Plague Knight, meanwhile Plague Knight could say in his retelling “and then I got out of there to meet the Enchantress before that blue digger got first” which could explain why in PoS Shovel Knight is kind of a dick leaving the Order to hang around Because PK wasn’t there anymore

Except Shovel Knight never gets ahead of Plague Knight you liar. 😒

@@floatingf8783 Not true. He arrived at the Explodatorium before Plague Knight. When Plague Knight arrives, his minion warns him that there's an intruder about. Plague Knight does beat him to the boss chamber, though. lol

@@DJFlare84 plague beating shovel to the boss chamber makes sense: the explodatorium is his domain, he knows the place better than anyone else does.

My deeper analysis behind this based on the fight vs plague of shadows boss in this campaign, based on the perspective explanation, is that plague perceives himself as small and weak and that's why he looks smaller and wesker in his campaign, but in other campaigns he's bigger and scarier because that's how others perceive him. The plague of shadows and the corrupted essence battles represent an internal struggle imo and do not actually physically happen because that wouldn't make sense, so it makes sense that plague would fight that version of himself in that context

I agree though that ideally plague would use his boss sprite, but thaf would require a whole new game to be made rather than an alternate campaign since plague wouldn't be able to fit in SK's levels without even more modification than they already have

@@pikapete2719 That's a very good theory (:

you can find his *scary* mask in his room

@@truji2582 fax, forgot about that

That's the one time shovel does the level first; note the dialogue and the absence of chester, the previous evidence for their order of level traversal. I'm surprised i didn't mention this in the video when i made it

I also wanna know

what does the tropple king do?

yeah I know he gives you the armors but what does that have to do with bodyswap mode

u mean cypher coins? I haven't but I know you get pandemonium cloack. does that something to do with it?

really really late reply, but I was using a program called STrainer to teleport around levels and change my character in the game to capture footage more easily. The reason for the Body Swap is because this file I recorded on was originally a Shovel of Hope file... All the footage was recorded on the same file, if I remember correctly (but I could be wrong, I made this a long time ago)

this can't be explained at all it's just gameplay

Either gameplay or extra copies.

Maybe canonically plague knight didn't collect them?

I usually just go for default, everything else is usually a downgrade or sidegrade except for cluster powder, impact fuse, and spin burst, but i prefer default over that loadout anyways personally

@@pikapete2719 imagine not using sparkler and impact

@@TheKeitaNobodyAskedFor imagine wasting time buying them when the default is faster lol

...well you got a point haha

@@TheKeitaNobodyAskedFor :p

He sneaks into his campsite and steals from it while he was sleeping, it's a cutscene!

Ah thank you

@@llewellynhehir6718 So essentially, the boss fight going Plague Knight's way up until the sneak attack after seemingly beating Shovel Knight is his version of how it happened, while the campsite scene could very well be reality.

If you're referring to the armor outpost, maybe shovel knight will liberate the armor outpost from plague knight in a sequel game... Or maybe plague knight has renounced mischief all together by then as implied by the ending of PoS

agree

even if PoS isn't canon, PlagueMona is canon since hints of it appear in the other campaigns

at no point did i ever say specter of torment isn't canon, of course i know it's canon lmao what

@@pikapete2719 Yeah, but how you phrased it made me confused

@@B11-n8v how i phrased what?

@@pikapete2719 like how you were staying stuff like, it doesnt matter if Specter Knights campaign is canon or not.

@@B11-n8v it doesn't matter because it doesn't cause any timeline issues, confusion, or contradictions so it can just stay in its own perfect little unquestionably canon spot in the timeline, same with koc

The algorithm works in strange ways, no one cared about this video until like 2 days ago, and then it blew up!

super late reply but i like this idea, i'll make a vid about it eventually

Ty :)

actually an excellent question. obviously plague would lie and say he did, even if he did save them

agreed, which is why many others including I subscribe to the "battle royale" theory. you can find the discussion about that in the comments of this video

​ @Pikapete What if Shovel Knight was lying about the battle royal? I don't think the Enchantress would want to loose any members of the order. So instead of letting the knights kill the betrayer, she'd probably tell them to remind where his place is. This way attacking one after another makes more sense, since they are having fun getting revenge on PK but are not trying to actually kill him.

their relationship is hinted at in other campaigns too!

Lmaoo

i did explain it tho lol

@@pikapete2719 where in the video did you explain it? I must've missed it

the youtube algorithm does crazy things sometimes, no one cared about this video until a massive spike in views a couple days ago!

i personally see the mask difference as how plague sees himself vs. how others see him- he's a lot scarier to the outsiders

@@pikapete2719 yeah I always imagined Shovel Knight telling his story and getting to plague knights battle and being like "He was wearing a horrible bird mask the size of my arm!"

possibly, but we don't really know what essences even are so IDK

Oh hey I saw you on an Alpharad video, is the pfp a Scott Falco reference?

You mean bird up? That’s terminal montage

@@rega2391 I mean the Kulu Ya Ku thing, but also yeah I still don't know what terminal montage is

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-U3EFYEMj1zU.html

@@rega2391 I'm traumatized... Thank you sir

I address the specifics in other comments, tl;dr cheating

@@pikapete2719 Wow, didn't expect such a fast response, thanks.

If that was the case then why would the boss rush(in shovel Knight’s view) go in a random order?

@@loganandreassen2821 Well, the boss rush also goes in a random order in PoS. The only canon order doesn't need very much of things, except that it end up with Plague Knight, so it would be at the bottom of the line.

you drain his health bar but when he gets back up yeah he gains back 1 hp, nice little detail

theanimalman44 of course

Wait, what?

Who tf is that

yeah thankfully that game doesn't interfere with anything!

?

thanks :)

save modification to gather footage faster resulted in some wacky stuff- i left the wacky stuff in to be a fun easter egg and bait comments

I haven't played the game in a while but I believe it's implied that one of them fights reize before the other if you look at the dialogue but I don't remember which

yep, it's also hinted at in other games

@@pikapete2719 Specter of Torment. (/ω＼)

Fight king knight in SoT again but this time actually pay attention to the dialogue

Pikapete oh why was I dumb enough to skip all the dialogue

False, the order in the boss rush is random with the exception of polar knight always being in the first three (so that you don't die to instadeath spikes late into the boss rush)

Pikapete Whoops, I didn’t realize that the order was random, thanks for clearing that up

@@pikapete2719 i didn't realize the order wasn't random, glad they did that with polar knight

@@penguindragon0155 i completely forgot about this fun fact since it's a 4 year old comment so this is news to me now too LOL

Lmao new headcanon, plague knight just gaslit shovel knight into thinking he won

@@pikapete2719 I dont remember how their fight actually ended. I remember you defeat Shovel Knight and then he suddenly defeats you. But I like to imagine that Plague Knight just tricked Shovel Knight and pretended to be defeated while stealing his essence. I mean he is like mad scientist and he looks like that type of character that plays villian role for a hero but actually has his own plans on situation.

PK gets Shovel Knight's essence in a cutscene after their fight. He can lose the fight and still steal it at night same as usual

Pikapete but how does the essence come out of Shovel if he didn’t get beaten?

@@thebiolibrary5572 there's no rule that states that's how essences work at all

the games got a ton of different color cheat codes that affect nothing gameplay wise but give you a different skin, many speedrunners use them for funsies

If I’m reading your comment right, he could have dropped off mona at the tower, then ran off to help shovel and shield knight (because he leaves mona and plague before they destroy the tower, possibly long before if he brings mona pre-PoS fight, can’t remember the exact order of things). That or again, unreliable narration (although how that works with mona being there is beyond me)

Honestly I think if they’d made a campaign set after the main games that would have been cool. If they ever return to the original SK for whatever reason to make another campaign, I think doing something for treasure or polar knight could be cool. Polar seemingly has the most unknown backstory elements that are hinted at across the game, while treasure knight would just be a cool character to play imo. A campaign about hunting across a continent for bounties would be a nice diversion from the other campaigns, almost like the opposite of how SoT’s levels were given to the player (more open-ended access to levels and more open levels themselves would work with the bounty hunter theme, and having to fight your bounty in whatever area you found them could be super interesting)

we all misremember things when recounting tales

will be making a koc vid soon so stay tuned

(Minor King of Cards spoiler, for if u haven't beaten the game yet) (this is just a theory btw) short answer: King of Cards is basically the Plague of Shadow for Specter of torment. Long answer: it's basically the same as Plague of Shadows cuz: it's plays in the past while Specter Knight is trying to find the members of the order of no quarter and just like Shovel knight, Specter knight has some of the items he uses in combat which he only uses in Specter of Torment. There are some minor issues with this theory tho, such as: how could Specter knight fight King knight if he isn't a official king yet and even if King knight beats the Enchantress and still join her (cuz Specter of Torment doesn't really have a map so Specter knight is free to go to any place first before King knight) it will still make no sense that he has to fight King knight again.

Pancake Pikachu In specter of torment to me it feels like king knight got too big for his breaches is getting taught a lesson by specter knight

@@pancakeknight613 yeah this is just wrong, they don't take place at the same time, koc is purely before specter knight

@@jimbob4171 this is big fax, read the pre-fight dialogue. King is already with the Enchantress in SoT

He just moves.

damn i hope so they're too cute