Koudelka

released on Dec 16, 1999
by Sacnoth

,

SNK

Koudelka is the precursor (prequel) to Sacnoth's Shadow Hearts series. Shadow Hearts takes place in the Koudelka universe and features various locales and characters from Sacnoth's debut work.


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Had the pacing and atmosphere of a survival horror, but with the mechanics of an RPG. Very fun, and the story was entertaining enough. The quality of the voice acted in-engine cutscenes were so great that I wish all of the cinematics were removed to make room for more in-engine cutscenes. They were definitely the highlight of my playthrough.

Super underrated rpg with a unique blend of survival horror and turn-based. Voice acting and mocapping are incredible for its time. Its short length, and the many different ways you can build your party, makes it great for multiple playthroughs. A big thing holding the game back though is that its battle system is incredibly slow. This wasn't a big deal for me who emulated it so I was able to speed up the battles. Still I really recommend this game and it wont waste your time as its length is about 10-12 hours.

I love to see survival horror mixed with other genres, especially RPGs. And even more I love to see it done good. Sadly, this is not the case.

This game peaked my interest a long time ago, for me being a fan of survival horror AND TRPGs. But as I played Koudelka I realized that this game has little to offer in both of it's genres.

Koudelka is a weak TRPG: you basically just spam all enemies with four spells, level ups are so frequent that you don't even need to heal between (slow and easy) battles.

Koudelka is a weak survival horror: the puzzles are easy, you don't need to manage any resources.

So the gameplay isn't that good, yeah. But what is? Koudelka is one of the creepiest and unsettling games on the PS1 all thanks to it's great atmosphere and creative monster design. I like that, it's cool.

Koudelka made me not want to play Shadow Hearts games. I don't like this "mankind is cruel" point they all try to make.

After playing through the Shadow Hearts series earlier this year, this game was an absolute must-play on my list. Being effectively Shadow Hearts 0, there was just no way I could go through all the effort of playing through the PS2 Shadow Hearts games and just ignore where the whole series started. I’ve had this game for a few weeks now, and this last weekend was the first time since I bought it where I haven’t been otherwise occupied with another longer game, so I felt it was high time I finally got to seeing the last Shadow Hearts game I hadn’t yet seen~. It took me around 14 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game and get the best ending, and I did it all on real hardware.

Koudelka takes place in a tiny Welsh town of Aberystwyth, our titular character breaks into a mysterious old monastery and comes across a near dying thief, Edward. After a rocky meet and greet between the two of them as they fight off the monster that nearly took Edward’s life, they explore further into the monastery and come across the suspiciously nice caretakers of the place and eventually a third companion, a Bishop named James. The three of them must brave the horrors of the monastery and put the things haunting there to rest, or die trying.

It’s honestly a bit hard to give much of a summary, or even an intro, to Koudelka’s story without feeling like I’m either going far too into detail or skipping over far too much. Though an RPG, Koudelka’s story almost feels more like a stage play in how the characters interact with one another, and the VA just adds so much to an already stellar script. As you venture further and further into the mansion, the larger narrative of what took place there slowly unfurls, and what you’re left with is an excellently told story of identity, tragedy, trauma, and discovery. The VA is actually as excellent as it is because, in an extremely strange move for the time, Sacnoth actually got the voice actors together on a stage and had them read their lines to one another almost as if it were an actual play. That’s why Koudelka has such long, meaty, and well-acted cutscenes that feel like they’ve been taken out of a stage play: They almost literally have been xD. It all adds up to something really excellent, and even though I had already had this game introduced to me as one with an excellent narrative, I found it absolutely lived up to the hype. Though it’s a short game as far as PS1 RPGs go (especially for a 4-disc PS1 RPG), it’s easily one of the best written games on the system, as far as I’m concerned.

Mechanically is where Koudelka is a bit more of a mess ^^;. Now I’d heard that Koudelka was something like a mechanical disaster, and I found that to be quite far from the truth. The actual systems at play here really have very little wrong with them, but there’s just so much chaff here that it can be very overwhelming at times. Koudelka is part turn-based RPG and part survival horror. On the latter, we have a game that feels a lot like we’re going through Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion or some equivalent thereof, with the whole game taking place inside one building and tons of fixed camera angles to navigate it through. It honestly is presented so much like a survival horror game that it threw me off when the game didn’t have tank controls XD. Though even while the game has no actual action combat (not even quick time events) to speak of, the puzzle solving and inventory management you’ll be doing is going to feel very familiar to anyone who’s played any of the PS1 Resident Evil games, though the puzzles themselves are very rarely all that difficult, thankfully.

On the RPG side of things, we have something that doesn’t have any great analogue, because it’s got mechanical aspects of games from Seiken Densetsu (which the director/composer/writer previously worked on) to even things like the first Persona game and SMT stuff. There’s a lot to cover, but lets start with your characters themselves. All three of your characters are actually functionally identical. They all have access to the same items, equipment, and even spells. The only differences between them come down to how you choose to level up their stats. Koudelka’s stats start her out as a good spell caster and Edward’s make him an obvious melee user, but there’s nothing saying you can’t stick it out and make Koudelka your brawler and Edward your caster. Is it sub-optimal in the early game? Absolutely. But it’s not actually mechanically going to be any better or worse, so you have a lot of wiggle room there.

All of that is down to how leveling up works. In a fashion very much like how Atlus loved designing their progression systems back in the 90’s, you get no base stat upgrades upon leveling up. Instead, you get four points to plop into any of your 8 stats that you want. Strength, vitality, and dexterity are your melee-focused stats (being physical-based power, defense/HP, and accuracy), with intelligence, piety, and mental being their magic and MP-focused counterparts. Agility is how fast you are (and more speed is more turns, very much like something like FFX would later do stuff, just with no visible progress bar), and luck is just sorta “makes you a lil’ better at everything”. It’s certainly intimidating at first, but it’s all explained in a very straightforward fashion, and the level curve is also very quick once you make it off of disc 1, so even changing your mind and grinding out a few levels to take on a boss you’re struggling with isn’t actually that big of an ask either.

But then we get to the clutter, you see. First we have the battle system, which is this weird grid-based thing that plays like an easier/better designed version of Persona 1’s awful grid stuff. Then we have the spells themselves, which you get more of as you beat more bosses. You also start with a buff spell for each of the 8 stats, and MP is going to be something of an issue regardless, at least in the early game. On top of all that, you also have your spells being able to upgrade, and they do so in a very Seiken Densetsu fashion (use them enough and they level up), and you need to use them a LOT of times to level them up.

You also have no money or shops in this game, so all weapons, accessories, and armor need to be found either in the environment or as drops off of enemies, and a very unlucky run can leave you really hurting for that stuff especially in the early game. Did I mention your weapons can break? Sure, your guns will run out of ammo, that makes sense, but all melee weapons will eventually break, so even if you’re building proficiency levels (again, very Seiken Densetsu) in one weapon, if you can’t find any more of them, you’re going to need to swap to something else. At least you’ll always have your fists, if nothing else, but the fickleness of weapons is a very big worry, particularly in the early game, with how difficult they are to acquire.

However, ALL that said, the big thing I realized is that almost none of it actually matters. Koudelka is one of many RPGs I’ve played that have a lot of systems that just ultimately don’t matter nearly as much as you might think they do at first. Heck, it isn’t even the only Shadow Hearts game to struggle with that XD. Spells leveling up? Sure, it takes a while, but all it gets you is better AOE on them, and that AOE is almost never actually useful. The only real change gained from spells leveling up is that they’re going to cost more from there on out, which is a pain, but very manageable. It’s especially manageable with just how quickly you level up most of the time, with everyone getting a level every 3 or 4 battles in most cases, and every level up comes with a free full heal. Even save points give full heals too, meaning that grinding and combat are pretty easy after the first hour or so because magic is your main source of damage, and MP is a resource very easily acquired.

The position system? It’s ultimately pretty inconsequential beyond using one of your melee people to body block the enemy from getting too close to your back line, but even then, magic and guns (things many enemies have too) have no range limit, so it just makes sense to have everyone have good magic and physical defense all the time anyhow. The buffing spells are also very numerous, sure, but the game is ultimately just not balanced in a way that encourages you to use them at all. I finished the entire game never using them once, and I reckon you’d only really have to if you were trying to kill the optional super boss the hard way. Koudelka overall is just a quite easy RPG after the first hour or so (making it a little SMT-like, in that way), and so a lot of the systems that could be game breaking or experience ruining with their reliance on RNG or grinding are just actually not problems, at the end of the day.

Honestly, the biggest criticism I can give of Koudelka’s RPG systems are that they’re quite so easy that they feel a little boring at times, and loading times also take long enough (though far from the longest on the system) that grinding can take a while should you choose to do any. Well, all that as well as the final boss itself being quite a step up in challenge from most other fights in the game (in another very SMT-like move), so it may be worth looking up how to snag secret weapons like the Gargoyle Killer like I did if you wanna make your time with it a bit easier x3

The aesthetics and presentation of the game are absolutely phenomenal, at least for the time. As mentioned earlier, the voice acting is all excellent as well as being all in English even in the Japanese version I played. I got one little bug with audio cutting out during one of them (sadly TwT), but that is thankfully something that does not appear to be present in the international releases at all. The music is very groovy and great too, and it really makes battles and exploration feel just as intense and fun as they should do. The visual design is also very good, with our main characters being very distinct and well designed (if a bit weirdly overly horny in the case of Koudelka herself ^^;), and the monster design is very diverse and delightfully creepy (as Shadow Hearts 1 would continue to be after it). There are many in-game cutscenes but also a handful of pre-rendered CGI cutscenes too, and I imagine those combined are the reason for why such a short game manages to take up four discs of space XD. Regardless of their data size, however, they still look very good, with the monsters that show up in them being particularly good looking and wonderfully uncanny in their designs.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. I do want to open this summary by saying that if you’re someone who really loves mechanically deep RPGs first and foremost and story is very secondary to you, you’ll probably have a rougher time with Koudelka than I did. That said, the mechanics themselves may be messy, but they still made a game that felt just challenging enough as I went through it to still be something I enjoyed doing. The writing is also something I cannot praise enough, which is something you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of if you’ve read this far XD. Koudelka may be an odd ball of a game, but it’s regardless an absolutely exceptional one. If you’re a fan of games with strong themes and good character writing, then Koudelka is absolutely not one to miss out on. It’s got a little bit of retro clunkiness to it here and there, but it is more than worth looking past to reach the rest of just how well put together this adventure is. As far as I’m concerned, Koudelka is easily one of the best RPGs, if not one of the best games full stop, on the PS1.

Another hidden gem that many people probably don't have on their radar. Really good combination of horror and JRPG with a surprisingly good German voice over, which is pretty impressive for a PS1 game! The atmosphere was really dark, the music was sometimes monotonous, sometimes phenomenally good and the story was great... It's the predecessor to Shadow Hearts and I think I actually like Koudelka a bit better.

I'm madly in love with this game. The acting bounces from powerful to complete cheese like a radio drama, the aesthetic choices set such a unique and consistent tone, the characters are unlikable blowhards who grow a fair amount, and the CG cutscenes are out of this world.

The missing half a star is almost entirely due to the odd mechanical decisions i.e. slow combat, unspoken secrets being required to beat the game, the difficult to parse save mechanics. These quirks will chase a lot of players away, and I can't even blame them, but if you can look past them, the mystery, literary obsession, and well-written dialog within this RPG are beautifully suffocating for the perfectly short run time.