Shadow Hearts was developed by Sacnoth, a company that developed the prequel "Koudelka", and a Neo Geo game called "Faselei!" The company itself was bought out after Koudelka by a company called Aruze who took control of the Shadow Hearts series and oversaw production of the sequels. Sacnoth itself was a company that was torn apart by internal quarreling and lack of originality, given that the two factions behind Koudelka either wanted to copy Resident Evil, or copy Squaresoft. The company was renamed Nautilus after being bought out, and was later dissolved in 2007.
Shadow Hearts was released on December 12th, 2001 (Merry Christmas, demon lovers!) in America by the company Midway, a company known for producing Pac-Man, Tron, and Mortal Kombat. It received mixed reviews upon its release, some saying the game lacked any sense of originality and others saying it was the most original piece of gaming they'd ever laid hands on. It is the 2nd game in the series, following after a little known game called "Koudelka" that was released for the Playstation system, and got weak reviews and little publicity.
--Story--
Shadow Hearts takes place in an alternate reality earth, where demons and monsters are accepted as relatively commonplace affair, magic works, and no one seems to mind.
The game starts off with some snapshots of an alleyway in Rouen, France. A traveling priest was murder in a brutal and gruesome way, and his daughter was captured by the Japanese Army, and is taken to a train to China. While on the train, that same girl known as Alice Elliot is found out by her father's murderer, a man who goes by the name of Roger Bacon. Clearly not a normal human, Bacon takes a leisurely stroll through the train cars, calmly murdering everyone who dares to even get close to him, seemingly invisibly. He comes to the last guard before Alice, kills him, then starts to make his move inwards, until BAM. Our protagonist, a young Yuri Hyuga, kicks in the door of the train car making an impressive display of strength, to which Bacon seems to have little reaction. We see the cause of his invisible death come in the shape of a small baseball-sized demon who charges after Yuri, but gets caught and literally crushed in his hand. After some trade-offs of powerful display, Yuri and Bacon, who is carrying Alice, wind up on the top of the train car and have another fight. Yuri manages to wrest Alice from Bacon's grasp and jumps off from the train.
"Worth it? God, I hope so."
The story of the game is pretty strange, and not even just in its content, but in its execution. When Yuri and Alice meet, the only thing they have to go on is a strange voice in Yuri's head that gives him direction. Alice with nowhere else to go decides to follow along and try to find a place where she can get to safety. The game then takes no time at all to introduce the demons, and I say this now about the game: "Everything Is Demons." I mean that truly. The first village you come to is overrun by man-eater cat demons. Later, you meet up with the demon of a girl whose father was killed by demons. Then you're followed by a dog who turns out to be a demon who is ALSO being mind-controlled by the main antagonist of the first half of the game. The first half of the game is spent roaming around various areas of China, who is dealing with eastern demons, western demons, the Japanese, and fear of an evil mastermind. I'll tell you now, this first half of the game is very slow, and a little boring. Not a lot of interesting things happen, and the game feels like a bit of a grind due to the fact that low-level play is a touch difficult in this game.
That said, not all hope is lost. In Shadow Hearts, I saw something I have never seen before. I have never once seen a game redeem itself SO GREATLY in its second half. The story starts to really take off, the characters become interesting finally, the plot twists taste like plot twists, and the entire mood of the game is finally defined. If the game continued on like the first half, it would have made my "worst RPGs" list. As it now stands, it makes the "good fun RPGs" list.
8/10.
--Gameplay--
The game is a relatively basic turn-based JRPG. Each character has specific abilities and aptitudes, and each character corresponds to one of the 6 elements of the game: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Light, Darkness. You control the character while moving around towns or dungeons, and you have your traditional random battle encounters, where the monsters seemingly come out of frickin nowhere. You can buy items, equip weapons, upgrade said weapons, even play an ongoing lottery. There is one thing however that you need to take note of:
"Say 'hello' to your new god."
All actions, be they attacks, spells, items, lottery, or opening a friggin door are decided by the Judgement Ring. It's a basic game of timing, where a needle spins around the ring, and you have to press a button once it gets within a colored field in order to execute the action. This goes for making an attack against an enemy, casting a spell either on the enemy or yourself, using a potion, or various event rings that are needed to progress the plot. Now, I appreciate the idea and it even becomes fun once in a while because there are a lot of effects that alter the ring, by making the needle spin faster, or making the hit area smaller, but I'm not sure I like that this is what everything in the game hinges on. I'm fortunate enough to have good reactions and good timing, but for those who aren't so lucky, I can only imagine that they were turned off of this game due to the frustration of Yuri being Judged as too uncoordinated to eat a berry and gain hit points.
"Oh god, finally! Forget the bird demon, Papa Homie needs a sandwich!"
Everyone has their own set of skills and focuses too, but the most interesting has to be Yuri. Yuri is what is known in the world as a "Harmonixer," which is a person who is able to collect and contain the souls of demons, and assume their shape for a period of time, gaining their powers. A large part of the plot hinges on this. As a harmonixer, Yuri's mind is plagued by a lot of darkness, and his brain has formed a sort of graveyard where all of the souls rest, as well as where the malice of his slain enemies is collected. Throughout the game, You must take breaks from the main plot in order to release the malice of your enemies. Otherwise, the malice becomes too great and you are assaulted by a being more powerful than you could imagine.
All in all, the game's got a lot going for it in the gameplay department. With the exception of the Judgement Ring which may become a little cumbersome for those with less accurate timing. Other than that, everything works out well and the game's difficulty stays relatively balanced for the rest of the game. Definite kudos there.
9/10.
--Audio--
The sound is pretty good in this game. The music suffers a bit in the same way that the plot progression does. It's possible that I just don't care for far-eastern musical themes, but the music in the first half of the game is relatively weak, but becomes incredibly good once you break into the second half. The music was composed by Yoshitaka Hirota and Yasunori Mitsuda. Yasunori Mitsuda is no newbie to the craft, with such titles as Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Legaia 2 under his belt. Hirota is a much lesser known name, having worked on titles like Faselei!, Sonic Shuffle, and Glory of Heracles. To be honest, with a giant like Mitsuda involved with the soundtrack, I expected something much much better. The first battle theme was very boring and even gets to the point of annoying after a while. I've always felt like a battle theme is something that needs to be amazing, because you're going to be hearing it a lot. The battle theme in part two makes up for it, but not entirely. That said, the ending theme to the game is amazing, and immediately went on my iPod.
Then there's the voice acting. Oh, the voice acting. Now, given that the game was released in 2001, Voice Acting in a Video Game was still a relatively new concept. It certainly wasn't being taken awfully seriously at the time. That said, there ARE a couple of decent talents here, but only a couple. A lot of it feels like the director had the Actor do a cold reading, but was recording and didn't tell them. The emotional seems come off as emotionless, and something almost unforgivable, the voices get drowned out by the action at times. There are scenes where I still have no friggin clue what Bacon was saying. For any of you who have already played the game (which is probably everyone except me), all I have to say is this: "SHLOOOP. SHLOOOP. SPLAT." There's also the unfortunate fact that a lot of the battle speech was left untranslated. This is most apparent in Alice and another character later on named Zhuzhen.
" 私もあなたのためにこれを翻訳する怠惰なよ！"
Overall, decent music, halfway decent voice acting.
7/10.
--Visuals--
You may look at some of these pictures posted and think that the characters look like resin dolls, or well-shaped plastic. This cannot really be denied, but keep in mind: for 2001, this was some extremely impressive work. Especially when you consider the standards of some of the other games back then. (Summoner? Are you kidding me?) So actually, I was very impressed. I was especially impressed early in the game. In the first hour or two, I had thought that the entire game was going to be in dark tones, tons of red and black, durr hurr so evil, and what not. I was happy when I got to Shanghai and entered a bright, sunny, bustling city. Now the game manages not to completely kill the mood with this. Remember, everything is demons. Shanghai is no exception. It's kind of nice too, when you expect your sunny happy town to be a safe zone, then BAM. Abominations. The visual effects are pretty nice in combat, you can tell they had a lot of good ideas and really wanted to see them given justice. The visuals team for the game really cared for what they were doing.
"What's that? You wanted to sleep tonight? Whoospie-doodle!"
The light drawback here is that a lot of the coloring is TOO detailed for the engine they were working with. As such, a lot of detail gets lost, and for someone with as bad a vision as mine, that's kind of hard to handle. That said, the cutscenes are definitely a bowl full of eye candy. It's only a shame that there weren't more of them.
9/10.
--Overall--
I went into the game with pretty meh expectations. Any time there's a game whose biggest draw is "omg demons rawr", I just feel entirely apathetic to it. That said, I'm extremely glad that I picked this one up and played through it. It's a much better game than I was expected, and I'd definitely recommend it. On the downside, it is a little bit short, but there's some extra content you can do to kinda fill out the space. On the topic of that extra content, Shadow Hearts did bonus dungeons and things like that incredibly well. It added some non-essential stuff to the plot and the characters, gave a bit of a challenge, and also rewarded you really well.
It won't make it into my top 5, or even my top 10, but it's definitely a title worth checking out.
Total = 33/40 = B.
