Buried underneath layers of erraticness and occasionally messy storytelling, Shadow Hearts: Covenant has an underlying core of conviction and passion that extends to every facet of the game, from the sometimes cheesy but incredibly endearing dialogue and interactions between its lovable characters, to the intense gameplay backed by a fantastic soundtrack, this game simply pulls no punches and delivers one of the most charming and entertaining games I've had the pleasure of playing. As a sequel Covenant aims to carve out its own identity by foregoing the horror and heavy gothic atmospheres that its predecessors, both Koudelka and Shadow Hearts, thrived on in favour of a grander, yet more light-hearted story that continues the blend between cosmic horror and alternate history.

First and foremost, the Judgment Ring maintains itself as one of the most engaging and inventive ideas for a combat system to revolve around, and one that I had a blast using again. It acts as an anchor to the games combat, with its presence extending into almost every other mechanic the game has to offer, and the way the new features in Covenant complement the ring just works so well. Extensive ring customisation is available for each party member, altering risk and reward, a combo system is introduced that allows you to chain attacks to deal more damage at the risk of losing your characters turns and crests store a variety of spells that characters gain access to by equipping them. In addition, the grid system has been changed to now encompass the entire stage fights play out on, with positioning taking a dynamic approach as almost every attack and hit taken will shift you or your opponent's position, keeping the fights constantly moving and fast-paced. With all of these changes, every fight in the game is exciting, intense and hectic aided by the soundtrack in battles designed to evoke those same feelings, it all just comes together so well and the only thing I could wish for is the game having a higher difficulty.

In parallel to its predecessor, the story of Covenant once again takes place in the continental area of Eurasia, as you'll be tasked with navigating through many towns and cities across the story. Where Shadow Hearts began with the entities operating in its world shrouded in mystery and our cast progressing one step at a time, slowly unravelling the truths behind it all, Covenant establishes clear villains and ideals in its opening hours, and raises the stakes to otherworldly levels much faster throughout its narrative. Antagonists are better explored with stronger motivations, both Europe and Asia are given equal focus with story elements centered around their unique culture that is mixed with the overarching plot, the addition of consistent voice acting in the in-game and FMV cutscenes, that are of much greater quantity, and a more meaningful approach to the games themes really raises the story.

The continued interweaving of history with Covenants own lore and topics allows for unique What Ifs? to be proposed and explored, providing some really interesting story concepts to be executed with villains and party members that are so distinctive that you simply will not find anything like them anywhere else. Covenant also continues to explore topics that Koudelka and Shadow Hearts brought to the table, such as the pervasive unjust cruelty of the Vatican found in every corner of the story, execution, torture, lies and deceit that underpin several major events throughout the games and imperialism is also touched upon on again in a far more impactful way. Many themes from the beginning of the series are also present, such as self-sacrifice, overcoming trauma, and not stagnating by moving on from the past.

"The future I want is the one that I create for myself. Even if it costs me my own soul.”

Where I think the narrative is at its apex though is in the more personal, grounded and poignant scenes that delve into the characters, particularly Yuri and Karin, which allow for the game to put its aforementioned themes on full display. What sets the cast of Covenant apart from other games for me is how they’re able to bring together a group of characters with such rich individuality while simultaneously creating an incredibly charming group dynamic, and it was really surprising how much I ended up liking all of them. Yuri remains a standout character who embraces many of the games themes, his transition from stagnation through fixation on the past shifting towards looking to the future through the support system Karin provides is simply fantastic, and the continued use of the graveyard and usage of monsters souls for his fusion to do good juxtaposes nicely with the games cruel world. The individuality of each character extends beyond personality and into gameplay as Covenant has some of the most diverse and varied gimmicks between its characters, all of which are well thought out and make switching between party members both super worthwhile and fun, as they are all so unique to begin with.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant has no right being as good as it is, and yet it exceeds expectations and genuinely has one of the biggest leaps in both technical and visual quality I’ve ever seen from a sequel. I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of the game, the music is utterly divine (shout out to Ladder to Heaven, The 3 Karma and Deep in Coma), dungeons can range from utilizing intuitive puzzles to just being borderline mazes, various towns and cities bathe in warm colours and lighting that when intertwined with the peaceful music create such a very soothing vibe in these downtime moments… it's all just surreal even despite how messy it can get there is still so much heart in this game. Such a rewarding experience in spite of its occasional offensiveness and shortcomings, as Covenant is much more than the sum of its parts and something that will stick with me for a long time.

After Shadow Hearts 1 it was on to the sequel! Called Shadow Hearts: Covenant in English, this is a direct sequel to the previous game in the series (and specifically a sequel the bad ending of Shadow Hearts 1). Though the first game came out in 2001, the sequel ended up coming out all the way in 2004, so a lot of time had passed in the gaming world by then, and the sequel to Shadow Hearts absolutely does its best to keep up with them (with varying degrees of success). It took me about 52 hours to get through the game in Japanese on real hardware.

Picking up about six months after the bad ending of the last game, Yuri managed to save the world but failed to save the love of his life. In these opening months of World War 1, Yuri (called “God Slayer” by those familiar with his deeds from the first game) is doing his best to find purpose protecting a small central European village from the ravages of the war. However, when an officer of the Vatican and a German minor officer come to that small village on the hunt for Yuri, he’s pulled back into a larger conflict whether he likes it or not.

I have very mixed feelings on the narrative of Shadow Hearts 2. Over the course of its two discs, though I more or less had a positive impression by the ending, the main takeaway I also left with was that the developers really just had no really great idea on how to make a sequel to Shadow Hearts. Almost the entirety of the first disc (which is 20~25 hours of gameplay, mind you) is spent effectively just getting the party together with very little in the way of actually meaningful storytelling. The villains of the first disc have quite little to do with the villains of the second disc, and it makes the first disc a real chore to get through for someone like me who was expecting something more, well, something more like Shadow Hearts 1.

The second disc actually starts to feel like what you’d expect a sequel to Shadow Hearts 1 to look like, but even then, just how much wasted breath we’ve spent getting here is dragging the story down all the way. Yuri already had his character arc basically completely finished in Shadow Hearts 1’s good ending, so a lot of the better bits of Shadow Hearts 2’s writing are just going over those same plot beats (and almost always more poorly than the first game did it), and the good writing that is there is often stuck between plot aspects (often borne from the careless use of fictionalized versions of real historical figures) that needlessly confuse and complicate the themes they otherwise seem to be going for.

In yet another step of being a quite poor narrative sequel, it does some really serious ret-conning of characters and events from the previous game that, while serviceable enough utilities in its own story, wind up coming off as extremely strange and outright wrong in regards to the story it’s allegedly building upon. Being that, like the first game, this is first and foremost Yuri’s story as opposed to each character having their own arcs that build towards a larger whole, Yuri’s story being so poorly paced and muddy makes for a much weaker story as a result. None of this is helped by just how clumsy and blunt this game’s writing is compared to the first either. Now, while I’m a firm believer that you absolutely don’t need to have subtle storytelling to have good storytelling, and quite often a blunt approach is simply better, the way Shadow Hearts 2 goes about this stuff feels more born from simple incompetence than a more distinct narrative choice. The story basically looks at the camera at several points to tell you Yuri’s Whole Deal as a character, and it comes off very unnaturally and at sharp contrast with how much more cleverly the first game handled such things.

While this game is a very similar mix of darkness & campiness that the first game has, it runs into the problem that a lot of its humor (though certainly not all) just isn’t that funny, either due to distasteful subject matter or just clumsy comedy writing. On that note, the homophobic stereotypes present in Shadow Hearts 1 are also even worse here and even more present, and this game manages to get in some pretty damn distasteful racist caricatures in the mix as well. In the end, it’s a very mixed bag that, while still quite decent in its own right, really aggressively fails to fill the big shoes its predecessor left for it despite sticking its own landing decently well.

Mechanically, while we’re still a turn-based RPG based around the sanity points and Judgment Ring system introduced in the first game, there’s quite a lot more here introduced to attempt to make Shadow Hearts stand out among the very competitive RPG crowd of the mid-life PS2. The biggest changes come from spell crests and the introduction of positional combat. For spell crests, instead of characters just having a list of spells they slowly learn things from as they level up as they did in the first game, now you collect crests over the course of the game that can be equipped to characters (other than Yuri, as he’s got his fusions still which level up just like they did in the first game as you infuse souls of defeated monsters into them) that give that character the spells associated with that crest. It’s very much like Materia work in many of the Final Fantasy games of the PS1 era, but a bit clumsier. It can be quite hard to keep track of what spells you have and where, and ultimately I just sorta stopped caring because the really just isn’t hard enough most of the time to encourage you to really get to grips with the crest system.

Then we have the position-based combat. Instead of the class “your row vs. their row” combat that the first game had, now your characters will automatically move about the battle to attack different enemies as you direct them to. We even have an FFX-style turn order timer to help you take into accordance what slower or faster attacks you’ll want to use or how you’ll try to delay or advance enemy attacks and such. If your allies happen to be (or are directed to) stand close to one another, however, they can do a combo attack, where you chain their attacks together regardless of where they are on the turn timer.

However, while the combo system can let you do some interesting things with turn order, given that you need to use a turn to set them up, it usually just adds up to a lot of extra button presses (though you can put together hot keys to activate them super fast if you want to, though I never bothered) for not much actual extra effect. Like with the spells crests, the difficulty of the game just never really pushes you to bother interacting with this system outside of disrupting when enemies try to do combos, which itself doesn’t really necessitate doing combos yourself. The difficulty balancing of the whole game is honestly quite poor, being very needlessly brutal through the first handful of bosses, and then being incredibly easy all the way through the end of the game. Shadow Hearts 2 has some very ambitious changes to the Shadow Hearts formula, but like with the narrative design, the mechanical design too just ends up feeling half-baked.

Lastly, we have the presentation which is also a very mixed bag. On one hand, by its own merits, Shadow Hearts 2 looks quite good for a mid-life PS2 game. It uses all of that space between its two discs to throw together a lot of good music, really good voice work, and some really impressive looking pre-rendered cutscenes (with the one of Yuri and the airship being a personal favorite). On the other hand, as a sequel to Shadow Hearts, the presentation of this game was extremely disappointing. Shadow Hearts 1 has a very distinctive art style very evocative of the creepy, atmospheric Koudelka that it’s a sorta-sequel to. Its more realistic character models add to that atmosphere just as much as its super creepy monster design does. Shadow Hearts 2, on the other hand, really drops the ball on that front.

We’ve completely abandoned the more realistic graphical style for a far more generic looking, anime-inspired art style that feels far more interested in chasing trends than it does being more Shadow Hearts. This is doubled down on even further in a way that doesn’t even matter for if you played the previous game are not, as this game just outright includes bits of cutscenes or screenshots of certain events that happened in the last game. But as Shadow Hearts 2 has a completely different art style than the first, these come off as incredibly dissonant and strange as the player (who may’ve never played the first game) is meant to understand that that tall, lanky guy in the coat is meant to be Yuri.

One of the best examples of how unsure and self-conscious this game is can be shown in how the game so readily ruins a great original idea. There are some parts of the game where Yuri fills his new companions in on events that happened in the first game. This is portrayed in pre-rendered cutscenes of crappy drawings of events from the last game to try and get across that Yuri isn’t too great at portraying this stuff to his friends. It’s a great little touch and quite funny too. The only thing is that, I guess just in case the player is completely incapable of abstract thought, is that you have a picture-in-picture in the corner of that cutscene as it appeared in the first game, both completely ruining the stylistic choice of the crappy drawings as well as confusing the player with depictions of characters and places that look nothing remotely like how the game they’re playing looks.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I think I’d more easily give a simple “Recommended” to this game if it weren’t letting down its predecessor so aggressively. Shadow Hearts 1 is a really excellent game, but god damn does its sequel fail to live up to it in just about every way it conceivably could. Shadow Hearts 2 very frequently feels like a game very afraid to be its own thing. From the presentation to the narrative, so much of it feels absolutely terrified of not living up to the standard of either contemporary games or the original Shadow Hearts, and the whole experience suffers significantly as a result. This is absolutely a case where Shadow Hearts 2 is far from a bad game, but at the same time, it’s also a game I have a very hard time recommending as strongly as either of its sibling games.

Quite different than expected but not bad at all. The game was partly very silly and stupid in its storytelling, I had actually expected something serious/gloomy and was somewhat disappointed. The characters are very charming but sometimes also really badly written. When the game takes itself seriously, the story is really good (all the scenes between Yuri and Alice are fantastic). Gameplay is fun, the Judgement Ring is so simple and ingenious, it makes every fight exciting. The game has lots of optional content and really good music. The ending was a bit problematic story-wise....? I thought it was a bit weird, but hey, Japan I guess?^^