Shadow Hearts Review and History? I'm not sure.

[Olvelsper]

Back in the days of Final Fantasy 7, a group of Squaresoft's employees that had worked on the earlier Final Fantasies (specifically 4-6, I do believe) decided it was about time for them to part ways with the company and make their own games the way they wanted them. This was the start of the company known as Sacnoth, their then president had an idea for a horror themed game that would set them apart from the pack of RPG series, which were still using fantasy and sometimes steam/cyberpunk elements in their games.

This is essentially how Koudelka began. From my gleamings on messageboards and assorted other Sacnoth fansites, it seems the president had initally wanted to go with an action rpg type of battle system for the game, but the others within wanted to go with something safer, a tactical game type of battle system that wouldn't be as strange and bizarre to them.

They got their way, and Koudelka got that half assed bit of gameplay thrown in. Yay. Combined with the fact that the series really didn't get that much advertisement, beyond one magazine ad I distinctly remembering being in a few issues of EGM, and it was a pretty big flop.

The horror setting *did* create a cult following, though. Isn't everyday you have Cthulhu esque horror games about.

Anyway, in the aftermath, the president apparently left and they got a new one. This one wanted to take the horror elements of Koudelka, and capitalize on it by making it more mainstream, since it'd be a nifty little hook for them to get into the genre better. Thus was born Shadow Hearts.

This game took Koudelka's horror theme, and kinda...Final Fantasy'ed it. Introduced more fantastical elements in the worldset, which had expanded from a mansion in Wales, England to the whole world. We now had eastern sorcerers running around fighting off the forces from the west that were trying to colonize their lands in the year before World War I. Magic and high science abounded as our world's history was changed by these radical new elements.

And within this mess they threw our protagonist, Yuri Volte Hyuga. Gifted and damned by the dark powers of the Harmonixer bloodline, he has the power to bend the souls of the gods themselves to his will as he assumes their appearance and wields their powers, but everytime he does he runs the risk of shattering his own soul.

Considering the fact that this was to take place in a reality closer to our own, and that the hero has such a dangerous power, Sacnoth reasonably chose to turn the conventions on its ear when creating him. He's rude, he's a skirt chaser, and he's a sarcastic little bitch. At his core he's a true hero, though. . .

Now, with them having successfully made a lead that would have a chance in hell at staring down these Cthluhu-esque forces, the plot could go down the standard save the world fair. To be truthful, while this sounds exceedingly boring, it was tempered by the fact that the battle system was more polished now.

Taking your basic turn based affair where speed determined turn order, they threw in a spiffy new addition in the form of the Judgement Wheel. Everytime you wanted to do an action in battle, a little circle with colored wedges would pop up and an indicator would reasonably speed along it. If you hit the action button while the indicator spun over them, you'd succeed at the action. Hitting the edges of the colored wedges would improve on the effect of whatever you were trying to do. There were even items that slowed it down or sped it up, so it was all well and good.

The soundtrack was a treat as Yasunori Mitsuda worked on this one. To quote Jason Strohmaier from SoundtrackCentral.com:

"Shadow Hearts, as its name might imply, presents itself as one of the darkest video game soundtracks of all time, up there with Vagrant Story and ambient-horror scores like Silent Hill. Most tracks on the soundtrack have a heavy industrial rock/techno sound, with strong use of percussion and occasionally interspersed thematic material. The sound quality is some of the best yet heard in a video game, using the highest quality synths and, often, live instruments. It stands as perhaps the best example of the PS2's sound capabilities heard thus far. Most of the tracks only loop once, but few feel as if they need to be any longer."

To go further, the tracks themselves are perfectly in context. Unlike most soundtracks in games, it doesn't have a theme binding it together, rather the tracks fit the given area you are in the game. From your beginnings in China, all the music you hear is played with chinese musical instruments. I recall at one point while in a bar in Shangai, the music for it is the chinese fiddle. Considering the bar prides itself on the chinese fiddle performances of its musician, it fits excellently.

Oh yeah...one last note. The titles of a lot of these themes are...bizarre, to say the least. "Beltconveyor for Killers", "Coffin Fetish", "Callback from Jesus" and perhaps strangest of all, "Sicking Fucking."

Now, for the localization, I'm going to have to say that its strictly middling all the way through. With the exception of Yuri's own dialogue, which comes off perfectly in character, with him wooing over women's panties and acting like a jackass towards his enemies, the rest of the script's translation is a bit on the dry side. To be sure, all the characters have their own quirks in style and speech that makes itself apparent once in a while, but the average line is just...delivered.

A few typos show up every once in a few hours, leaning more towards every three/four hours, and there's an excess in ellipsis. I believe there must've been a wholesale genocide on these poor darlings, since their corpses are liberally scattered all over the place during dramatic scenes. The same can be said of question marks and exclaimation points. It gets a touch annoying, but it isn't all too bad, I suppose.

Now, we come upon voice acting. Um...no? The voice acting in the first major scene in the game was horrendously bad on the part of Alice and Margerete. I've heard from Shadow Hearts Convenant's main dude in charge of localization was that it was because they were pressed for time and that Midway didn't have enough funds allocated for them back then, which is understandable since later on in the game it comes off much better in tone and accent. Alice, who comes from Britain, sounds British! And emotive! And not squeaky! While Margerete sounds just like the alluring woman she's supposed to be.

FMVs and graphics for this game really look to have been designed more for PS1 era, with how the regular game's background is a pre-rendered background all the time. Nothing wrong with it, considering it was done beautifully, without a glitch or anything wrong to be seen. I heard that Shadow Hearts was originally going to be slated for PS1 whenever this comes up, but it was so late in the PS1's life cycle that they moved it up to PS2. FMVs are good. They're technically good, and get everything done right. The character models look unique and keep the style of their in game counterparts. They seem a smidge on the side of chunky, though.

The plot is divided in two chapters, the first being played on mainland China as Yuri and his friends try to escape the machinations of a patriotic chinese mage by the name of Dehuai. Having set his eyes on one Alice Elliot, this taoist plans to use her in a ritual to destroy all who would try to take over his beloved Shanghai. Unfortunately, he is trumped time and again by Yuri, who has been commanded by an otherworldly voice to protect Alice from all who dare abuse the secret power that lies dormant within her.

The basic core of this plot sounds like a snore fest in theory, but in practice all the characters are given enough of a dynamic personality that they carry the plot during this half of the game. This chapter plays off as more of a ghost story as Yuri, Alice, and others face off against the forces without and within as Dehuai sics the elementals and spirits of the land on them, waking things that shouldn't be in his quest to secure Alice. Unfortunately in all this madness, the darkness lurking within Yuri's own heart begins to stir and uncurl in response to the Malice that Dehuai invokes and commands with his taoist magicks.

I heartily recommend this game to anyone who tries it out. This game shared the same awful fate as Koudelka, unfortunately. On top of it all, it was released near the time of Final Fantasy X, so you can tell what that did to any sales it had...

Next time I'll fling up a review here on Shadow Hearts' sequel. Till then, have a good one.

[Anastasia]

Heh.

In short, I agree. Shadow Hearts is quite good, even if the jury is still out on SH2. It's a shame that it came out neck and neck with FFX(The best FF title since 6/7ish by far, to no fault of SH), as it's a game that could compete with that title if it was given the chance. It's somewhat of what happened to Wild Arms 1 and Final Fantasy 7, with the latter sinking the former rather severely.

While the game does falter in the Europe arc, suffering from a lack of the tight storytelling of the Asia arc, it's still good stuff.

[Olvelsper]

If you're a fledgling (sp) company releasing games like these, publicity is what makes or breaks you. They unfortunately have gotten the short end of the stick time and again because of those poor PR and advertisement. Couple that with the fact that they just *had* to release it in direct competition with a major company like Square, and the outcome doesn't look pretty.

It's only through a miracle that Sacnoth/Nautlis' parent company didn't pull the plug after both Koudelka and Shadow Hearts poor sales.