Things start off with a newspaper article about a man getting brutally murdered. You then cut to a girl riding on a train in Manchuria. Okay…. When this well-dressed gentleman walks down the aisles, killing all of the soldiers he meets, with pretty good amounts of blood, you definitely get the feeling that this story is going to be a little darker than your standard RPG fair. And, all in all, you’d be right. Shadow Hearts is rated “M” for a reason, and it’s not the sexy pantyshots. The game sets out to be a horror RPG, and it really does nearly as good a job as you can do with that concept. It gets legitimately creepy at times, and the story doesn’t shy away from grisly scenes. Otherwise, there’s not too much that’s terribly exciting about this plot, except possibly that there are two endings. There’s the bad ending, which is the default (and canonical ending). There’s also the good ending, where you have to defeat a couple optional bosses. For the most part, you travel around the snazzy alternate history Europe and Asia busting ghosts and destroying demons, trying to figure out what the people chasing Alice really want. Most segments play out like a particular ghost story, and that’s not so bad. You’ve got locales like a ghost village in China, a haunted bathroom, and an insane asylum. Yeah, you heard me, haunted bathroom. The game definitely has its own, ah, interesting sense of humor. Gives it a little bit more personality, so it’s not a bad thing.
The characters are pretty good. Yuri’s an amusing anti-hero, who manages to be tormented and sardonic without either element undermining the other. Alice manages to avoid being just another dumb healer chick, narrowly, by actually doing useful stuff and being overall pretty practical. I mean, she doesn’t just mope when around when she hits a bump around halfway through the adventure, she actually goes out and exorcises ghosts. The others are okay, with Zhuzhen (this game’s crazy old person) and Margarete Zelle (actual historical figure) keeping up the humorous banter quotient and Keith having a surprisingly blasé approach to life. The game’s antagonist does a good job of making himself despicable, enhanced by his maintaining the appearance of civility throughout.
The combat in Shadow Hearts is obviously meant to be pretty original, and to some degree it succeeds at this goal. Every action you take requires you to use the “Judgement Ring.” Basically, a cursors sweeps once around a circle with various zones marked off on it. You have to press the X button when the cursor is in one of the marked zones, called hit areas to execute the action. This system allows there to be two types of status effects in the game. Character status effects, which are similar to those in most RPGs, and ring status effects, which affect the way the ring works. For example, some effects increase the speed at which the cursor rotates, or make the ring smaller and harder to see. The other mechanic in the battle system is the Sanity Points system. Every character starts each battle with maximum SP, and loses one each turn. When the run out, they go berserk, attacking the enemies and allies randomly until the battle’s over. While this might not sound altogether bad, they also don’t receive experience from the battle if they end it while berserk. It doesn’t come up too much in random encounters, but SP can make boss battles rather difficult. In the end, it’s a nicely blended action and turn-based battle system. You get all the time in the world to choose your attacks, but you still have to pay attention when you get around to executing your actions.
Well, there’s an interesting dilemma to replayability. You have two different endings, and a new game + sort of feature. On the other hand, there’s not much that you can do differently for a lot of the game. You only barely have enough party members to choose a party in the first half of the game, and it’s not like you can customize character development too much. You can play around with accessories to some degree, but that’s only an option a bit later in the game. I guess this game’s replay value is something on the order of “at least 1.5 times to make sure you get both endings, probably two times just to make sure you get everything.” Believe me, you are going to miss things your first time through the game unless you are consulting a walkthrough pretty seriously.
I said this game feels the most complete of those that came before the FF. I guess that means that the story for this game was exactly what it was meant to be, the battle system was appropriately balanced and fleshed out, there were sufficient sidequests, and the capabilities of the Playstation 2 were adequately probed. Shadow Hearts did not, in other words, feel like a game that was rushed through certain stages of development before the creators were entirely satisfied with the results. So, that doesn’t mean that it’s a great game. Don’t get me wrong, Shadow Hearts is a very good game. It gets about 8.3. Not quite excellent, but very close. You might notice I rate it more highly than all the other early PS2 RPGs last month. It simply is a well-written, properly tested, and overall swell game. Even though the game came out just before FFX, it didn’t feel like it was being shot out to capture the market before the bomb hit. It seemed more like that’s when it happened to be finished. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to how Wild Arms was to FFVII.
Quick Tip: When you start getting lottery tickets, talk to everyone and try to find all 15 lottery members. There are six in Asia, and ten in Europe. Not only can you get some awesome items, but if you miss even one you miss out on an excellent item.
Fun Fact: Margarete is based loosely on the real historical Margarete Gertrude Zelle, who was accused and executed in France for being a German spy during World War I.
If you enjoyed this game, you might be interested in one of these other games. Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a direct sequel to Shadow Hearts. While it’s a little less on the horror end of things, it has a much better design for character customization and the combat system in general is more sophisticated. Not to mention that you get a special benefit if you have a completed Shadow Hearts save file. The Legend of Dragoon has a similar timing element to its battles, and a bit of similar playing around with accessories that you can do. Parasite Eve and Parasite Eve II are also horror-based RPG that aren’t too bad, though they’re both moderately short games.
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