Shadow Hearts Review! (PS2) The Game Collection!
1,290Happy Halloween! In this review, SuperDerek takes a look at a spooky turn-based RPG, Shadow Hearts!
Welcome back to The Game Collection! And Happy Halloween. I am SuperDerek, and this is Shadow Hearts!
Following the release of Koudelka, the development team Sacnoth was going through some hard times. Koudelka didn't sell particularly well and received some pretty mixed reviews from critics. In the aftermath, founder Kiroki Kikuta stepped down from the head of Sacnoth as parent-company SNK was in the process of going under. Aruze Entertainment stepped in and picked up the pieces of the shattered company, stitched it back together and breathed in new life. In this fashion Sacnoth rose from the dead in order to set out to do what it could not during life: To create the pure Turn-based horror RPG that they had always wanted! The team went to work on a direct follow-up to Koudelka that would be released as Shadow Hearts in 2001 for the PlayStation 2.
The story of Shadow Hearts follows Yuri, a rather rude and vulgar anti-hero type who happens to have a very special ability. He's a Harmonixer, a shape-shifter that can fuse into different monsters. As the story picks up, Yuri is being driven by a painful voice he hears in his head. It compels him to rescue an English girl, Alice Elliott, who is being pursued by an evil magician. An unlikely duo, Yuri and Alice set off to uncover the secrets behind this evil magician, dodging demented demons along the way.
Shadow Hearts plays out sort of like a mystery story, which sets our heroes off globe-trotting around the world, chasing down bad guys, clues, and information. The touch-and-go style of story-progression felt pretty quick-paced, but kind of scrambled. I felt kind of like a chicken with my head cut off, running around, going here, doing that, something happened over there, now it's time to go somewhere else. It all felt reactive, which is exactly how the gang in the game behaved. This in my opinion didn’t feel like a well-told overall story. It was kind of messy. In the moment, everything made sense. In hindsight though it feels like a scramble of confusion, making it hard to recap to myself, exactly where I've been, where I'm going, and how I got here.
Regardless of the frantic pacing, the game had an edge to it that you don't often see in RPGs of the era, a coolness factor that's hard to quantify. At the beginning of the game, Yuri is a jerk that honestly couldn't exist in his current for in today's political climate, but over the course of the game his demeanor changes subtly in a way that shows character growth, without changing his personally altogether. I like that the change was slow and subtle. Too many games try to show overt character transformations, rather than evolutions. Leave it to a Lovecraftian horror of all things to treat character growth with the most nuance. The game also features symbolism that astute players could delve into if they wanted to, but doesn't beat you over the head with it. The game takes a chance on narrative subtlety, and as a result I think it makes the lore feel deeper.
Shadow Hearts takes place in an alternate reality during the early 1900s, and spans across Shanghai, China and Europe. Because of the alternate reality setting, some liberties were taken with depictions of various real world regions. For instance, some districts of Shanghai were far more developed and urban in the game than in our version of history. However these anachronisms are only mildly distracting from time to time. For the most part, the locales were depicted believably enough. That said, most cities and towns felt a little small, spanning only a handful of screens to navigate. Because the game spans continents, it would probably be unreasonable to expect an overworld map, so instead the game uses world map with fast-travel points for inter-city travel.
Dungeon designs were more interesting and typically spanned several more screens than entire cities, and appear to be the real focus the designers worked on. These dungeons were pretty creepy, and diverse. Long winding tunnels, eastern temple interiors, European mansions, and blood-covered rural villages were among the locales explored. None of these were particularly amazing, but none of them were bad either.
Combat within Shadow Hearts plays out like most standard turn-based RPGs, but features a twist: The Ring of Judgment. This ring of judgment requires the player to enter precisely timed button-presses as indicated on a wheel. During a typical attack action, the character has a chance to hit up to three times.
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