Shadow Hearts (2001)

There’s something that I find really appealing about Shadow Hearts. I think it’s the setting. I love a kind of a period piece fantasy story. Sinners earlier in the year is kind of along that line, but also something like the Call of Cthulhu tabletop rpg always scratches that itch whenever I get to play it. Shadow Hearts takes that historical fantasy idea, and makes it JRPG as hell.

This is a series that I totally missed as a lad. But thanks to the modern miracle of…totally owning a legitimate Sony PlayStation 2, and a legally procured copy of the 2001 JRPG Shadow Hearts, I now can…

Anyway, I got interested in playing through this after watching a video on the series by Earlybird on YouTube. Then playing Clair Obscur, I started to wonder if Shadow Hearts was some inspiration for that game, since it also had a timing mechanic in the gameplay. Might be stretching it, but whatever.

The main gameplay mechanic of Shadow Hearts is the Judgement Ring, a disc with an indicator that moves around in a circle. This comes up pretty much whenever you do anything during combat like attack, cast a spell, or use an item. There can be various bright areas on the ring for you to hit in order for the effect to land, but if you’re able to get it in a tighter spot of the ring, you can get an extra effect. This is really the meat of Shadow Hearts, mechanically. There are items that can slow down the spin of the ring, or make the hit areas bigger. You can even use equippable items that can give you an extra turn, at the cost of the ring spinning twice as fast!

Now for the story. Our main character is the edgy little edgelord Yuri Hyuga, a young man who is plagued by a voice in his head that TELLS HIM TO BURN THINGS! Nah, I’m kidding. It tells him where to go, and to destroy the monsters there. That’s how Yuri encounters Alice, the deuteragonist of the story. They become embroiled in the conspiracies of various evil warlocks which threaten the entire world.

The story is pretty simple, but also a little confusing. The villain of the first arc, Dehuai, kind of comes out of nowhere, and his plan doesn’t really seem connected to the larger plot of the game. It is is interesting though, as he is attempting to destroy Japan, like the actual island nation, via a magical ritual as a show of force to the west. At this point in the game, the Japanese military was occupying Shanghai. This does lead to a very cool moment for Yuri, though. I really enjoy the mix of history, fantasy, and horror that Shadow Hearts brings. I do think it’s held back a bit by its presentation, though. There is only voice acting in the cutscenes (which are all great), and the party members outside of Yuri and Alice, I never really felt much for them. But Yuri is a great character. Able to take the powers of demons and make them his own, he’s known as a “Harmonixer” (I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be pronounced “harmonizer,” but like I said, there’s very little voice acting!), but those demons aren’t fans of this process. Eventually, their malice will destroy Yuri. This is further emphasized by that cool moment I mentioned earlier. This leads to some great stuff between Yuri and Alice, which is really the highlight of the game for me.

In all, I very much liked Shadow Hearts. It’s corny and edgy, but surprisingly fun to play with the Judgement Ring mechanic. Excited to try Shadow Hearts Covenant.

This is the 2nd Shadow Hearts that I've played. Since the internet has nothing but praise to this hidden gem on the PS2, I had high hopes for it. In the end, what I found was a game with nothing but unique mediocre experiences.

At first, I was really enjoying Shadow Hearts. It is a traditional JRPG that wears its inspirations on its sleeves and I appreciate it for this. The battle system is quite unique and keeps you on your toes. It's not perfect and it can get old pretty quick, but it kept me interested for the most part. The presentation is quite simple, but somewhat familiar, which kinda made me feel at home. There's also a nice amount of challenging and fair fights which, despite some weird unbalanced difficulty spikes during boss duels, made me constantly strategize my next moves.

The atmosphere is probably one of the best things in the game. The whole tone and story can get very dark and, at times, even creepy. Whether you're in dungeons, cities or doing sidequests, the music is unsettling and the feeling is moody. There's even a place called Dollhouse that made it feel a lot like I was playing an RPG version of the first Resident Evil. Sidequests felt a litte short (which is not exactly bad), but they were nice, expanding a bit more on characters like Keith and Margarette, while also establishing some world-building.

It's just sad that this feeling of joy didn't last very long. The battle system got dull. The enemy variety is nothing but the same 10 monsters with their color palette swapped, the music became repetitive and not at all memorable, characters just never developed and the writing is bad!

I know that the battle system is cool and all, but did EVERYTHING in the game have to revolve around the ring mechanic? Puzzles, item usage, getting discounts on shops and even reviving a fallen character. And did it have to be this punishing? That definitely did not help when it comes to variety.

Some other mechanics in the system felt unnecessary. Did we really need to keep quieting Malice? Did we really need sanity points? Did we need acunpuncture or the graveyard at all? The feeling I got from all of it was that the game's mechanics were there just to fuck with you, not to create a decent gameplay experience.

And what's up with the story? The writing starts off ok, but it get super tiresome, with some rather uninteresting plot points and "turns". I couldn't care less about half of the things that happened after we left Asia and I couldn't care about ANY character in the game.

I just cannot recommend this game. It's not bad, but it screams mediocrity and boredom.

It's nice that it brought a different type of element to a traditional genre, and it's also good that it was the beginning of a fine trilogy, but it's certainly not special.

What a weird game. Shadow Hearts is a JRPG for the PS2. It came out in 2001 which locates it in the early days of the system; it catches a lot of flack (especially when compared to its contemporary FFX) but deserves to be evaluated along its own metric. So let's talk Shadow Hearts.

The Good:

- I started playing this game because I had an itch to play a JRPG that wasn't Final Fantasy (or fantasy in general) but wasn't ready to replay Xenosaga. Good news: Shadow Hearts is unlike Final Fantasy in just about every single way. There are enough genre staples to make the game familiar, but it is definitely its own game.

- The Judgment Ring is a very interesting mechanic. All your actions in battle (and some interactions in the world) succeed or fail based on your performance on the Judgment Ring - press X when the indicator is in a colored portion of the ring. It ensures that combat is active and requires your participation; it also adds an element of challenge missing from a lot of JRPG combat systems. It was obnoxious when I screwed it up, but that's on me, not the game. It grew on me. Thumbs up.

- There's enough in the combat system to not leave you out to sea, so to speak. Elemental damage is pretty straight forward (fire is weak to water, dark is weak to light, and vice versa, for example). But spell casts are also based on the Judgment Ring, so be careful with your Cure and Res spells! Also, higher level magic spells require successful completion of increasingly complicated Judgment Rings. Through these types of mechanics, the game maintains upward difficulty, and keeps combat from getting boring. Thumbs up again.

- The game takes place in a strange "alternate history" space; set in 1913, the first half of the game takes place in China, and the second half in Europe. Major world events form a backdrop against which the story takes place. The world is recognizable and while its historical accuracy is ... "kind gesture" at best, the game has a very different feel from a lot of its cohort through its choice of setting.

- It felt to be just the right length. I clocked in at around 55 hours or so, doing all the side quest content. Someone made a good decision about the amount of side quest content; it was a good opportunity to put some levels on before the end of the game, and I finished it up right around the same time I was getting tired of doing it. As for the pacing overall, despite some narrative shortcomings discussed below, I never felt like the game dragged, nor did I ever have to do a lot of level grinding. Shadow Hearts moves along at a nice trot, start to finish. (Excluding its voice-over still-frame cutscenes, of course.)

- The soundtrack is surprisingly good. It sets a tone well and is just .. interesting and different from normal RPG soundtracks. I don't really know how to describe it. It really sounds like Mitsuda and Hirota. (My critique about the disjuncture between the first half of the game and the second half, mentioned below, extends to the soundtrack - the first half of the soundtrack is far more interesting than the second, but end boss music? Pretty good.)

- There are multiple endings (and I've heard Shadow Hearts: Covenant takes the Bad Ending as canon, so I'll have to YouTube that, since I went Good Ending). There's also New Game+ mode, which gives it a little replay-ability (though I don't see myself ever replaying this game).

The Bad:

- Voice acting: pretty bad. Localization: possibly worse. I couldn't tell if this game was meant to be sort of comical or if the translation was just that bad - I'm afraid it's probably the latter. We're not talking Original FFT levels of incoherence or anything; it just makes scenes you would expect to be serious come off as silly. Furthermore, there isn't really enough character development to make the relationships between characters believable, and this is really captured in its entirety in their shared dialogue. (Really? I'm supposed to believe it when all these characters are confessing their love to one another? They haven't said one word to one another in like, ten hours.)

- Graphically, 2D backgrounds feel pretty dated, even in the early era PS2 stage. The game caught some grief for this at release, and it's not undeserved.

- I definitely liked the first half of this game better than the second. At about the halfway point, there's a major story event that pretty much divides the game into two parts, and they feel extremely disjointed from each other. Character development in the second half of the game suffers. Major arcs from the first half of the game get tied up in a pretty phoned-in manner. The second half of the game disappointed me, and I found it hard to care about anything that was happening with any of the characters. (Shadow Hearts is a sequel to a PS game, Koudelka, and that winds up actually mattering for a little while, so be ready to wikipedia it for clarity.) I think this is my biggest complaint about the game, the rupture between the first and second halves. It was so loud, for me, that I couldn't really get past it and it decreased my enjoyment of the second half of the game.

- Items seem great, but you're afraid you'll never find them again, so you never use them, and then you end the game with a ton of great items that you're glad you never used anywhere else. It's also easy to overprepare.

- Yuri, your main character, stays in the party throughout most of the game. This renders him about 20 levels higher than anyone else when it comes time to do the final dungeon. While this is a minor complaint, the neurotic gamer in me found it a little annoying.

I'm finding it hard to say a lot of BAD things about this game, though, mostly because it's just so weird. Angels, demons, gods, vampires, ghosts, [spoilers]... Enemy and dungeon design is straight out of a fever nightmare. It's creepy, it's weird, it's a little offensive (I'm looking at you, Meiyuan). It's not the pinnacle of the genre, but it's SO, SO WEIRD that I think how compelling I found its sheer weirdness overcame my complaints about it.

VERDICT:

If you like the JRPG genre, give this game a shot. It's not without flaws, but you'll spend the whole game going, "What?", with your face all screwed up and confused. And just when you think it's gotten maximally absurd...

So, so strange. Surprised me at almost every turn, for better or worse. Well done, Shadow Hearts. Well done.