Shadow Hearts: From the New World (2005)

Today it's teaming up with vampires and warlocks in Area 51, plus some classic JRPG sidequesting.

Every party member has their own multi-stage sidequest, and they're all rad so far. The priestess heroine collects statues that let her transform into different spirits in battle, all with different abilities, outfits, and animations. The detective hero has a Moriarty-esque nemesis that sends him devious puzzle boxes in the mail. The cat has her aforementioned Kung-Fu movie shoots, Natan goes cryptid hunting, and Frank the United States Ninja has a truly bizarre penchant for uprooting cacti and bus station signs from the ground and snapping them into his empty katana hilts like Lego pieces.

Every one of these quests has tons of silly cutscenes, offers excellent rewards for combat, and is pristinely paced to let you dip in and out of them before they ever have a chance to go stale. After trudging through the endless checklist nightmare of FF7 Rebirth last year, it's incredibly refreshing to play something this brisk.

Yesterday, I helped break Al Capone out of Alcatraz amidst a mounting demon invasion. And today I'm working with cat George Lucas to help my giant talking cat party member finance her drunken-master Kung Fu movie. There's a lot of goofy fun here, when the game manages to get out of its own way with all the misogyny and racism.

And again I gotta stress that this battle system seems like a JRPG all-timer so far, planning out bonkers combo moves that span your whole party is immensely satisfying.

Literally the first thing we see in this game is our magical girl protagonist doing the Ghost in the Shell jump off the Chrysler building, and then doing a classic spinny Sailor Moon transformation mid-fall. It makes a dramatic first impression, for good and for ill, and the rest of my time with FTNW has followed suit.

For every striking upside so far, there's been a matching stumble to give me pause. FTNW looks and sounds fantastic for a PS2 game, with beautiful fixed camera sets and a jazz-inflected score that feels perfect for the 1920s USA setting. Its story nails a lighthearted adventure vibe that's increasingly rare to see in RPGs. And the combat system is a novel mix of Clair Obscur's timed hits and Octopath Traveller's multi-turn attacks that predates both games and frankly eats their lunch, immediately presenting more depth and variety than they could dream of.

But the problems run just as deep. The point-of-view character is an empty, know-nothing void of charisma. The protagonist is constantly and catastrophically objectified. And the core narrative conceit, of transposing Final Fantasy 10's religious pilgrimage through Spira onto a road trip across the early 20th-century Americas, feels fundamentally flawed. Simply subbing out FF10's fantastical Yu Yevon priestess with a real-world Native American medicine woman, and replacing FF10's fantastical culture with real-world Native American communities, comes across as immensely reductive of the lives and histories of millions of actual people.

In FTNW, both the heroine's body and her entire society are othered and exoticized, packaged up neatly as theme park entertainments that exist solely to be consumed by the white male hero and the presumed white/Japanese audience. And that maybe feels irrevocably fucked up.