Pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this, especially after seeing people say Covenant was way better (now im way more excited to play that one).

I'll get the gripes out of the way first. It's an early ps2 game and it's very obvious. While the in game models and environments are solid enough, the CG cutscenes are definitely not. Yuri especially does not resemble himself at all in these cutscenes. Luckily there's not a whole lot of them. Yuri's early characterization was not my favorite thing. They could've made him have the same vibe without being super pervy/creepy. Honestly, the only other thing I didn't enjoy much about the game was some of the dialogue sequences went on a little long.

Now with the plethora of good. Can't talk about this game without first mentioning the judgement ring. Taking combat inspiration from something like Super Mario RPG and Legend of Dragoon and turning it into this beautiful little circle. Items, equipment, and attacks were all created with the ring in mind and it all works flawlessly. Speaking of attacks, combat is a bit more than just pick an attack and don't miserably fail at using the judgement ring. Being able to pick a favorite demon for Yuri to transform into and go dummy mode on a bunch of creepy dogs is a lot of fun. I went with his fire fusions and buffed attack and popped off when I found the item that made my ring invisible but dealt double damage. Managing sanity points in the later boss fights when it's actually a danger is a lot of fun.

Going to wrap it up by saying the soundtrack is amazing, Brain Hopper whips. OST is equally eerie and beautiful and the fact that there's two composers working together in tandem like this is amazing. Characters are all fun and lovable and their interactions with each other actually get to be pretty wholesome. Game isn't really difficult but a lot of the late bosses hit the right level of difficulty. Story is serviceable and the way it connects to Koudelka is great. Play this game!

This is a game and a series that a close friend of mine has been telling me is great for years. I’ve actually even owned the first two Shadow Hearts games for years as well, but I’ve always been a little too intimidated by the mechanics to properly give them a try. But over this summer break, I resolved to finally play through the Shadow Hearts series, and that’s just what I did~. It took me about 38 hours to play through enough to get the good ending on the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

Shadow Hearts follows the story of Yuri, a young, foul-mouthed young man with the power to fuse with the souls of monsters he destroys. The year is 1913. At the directions of a mysterious voice in his head, he saves a young woman named Alice on a trian in Japanese occupied Manchuria. The powerful and dark sorcerer that he saves her from seems to let them get away purely out of whimsy, and so begins our tale. A tale that is often as dark as it is camp, and it really begins as it means to carry on in that regard x3

Coming out barely a month before Final Fantasy X, Shadow Hearts was then and is now very much a game living in the shadow (excuse the pun) of other great games on the system, but that isn’t to say that it doesn’t have excellent writing itself as well. It has an approach to myth, legend, and history that blends the three together in such a way that gives its places a delightfully uncanny presentation, and the game is delightfully creepy as often as it is just silly with how oddball its, at times incredibly joyfully anachronistic, characters can be. Given the time and location of the setting, there is a LOT that could’ve gone wrong in this game’s depictions of the places and people that appear in it, but by and large it very deftly handles its respective subject matters. The main writer of Shadow Hearts has said that a major inspiration was the original Devil Man manga, and it really shows with how painstakingly he goes out of his ways to paint villains and heroes alike in shades of grey, never settling comfortably into flatly evil archetypes. The major theme of depression and overcoming it with the help of those around you (or not doing that) is handled really well, and this is easily one of my new favorite written games on the console as a result.

The only real negative I can give about the writing is a really awful homophobic stereotype found in one of the merchant NPCs. Given the skill that the rest of the game’s subject matters are handled, it was a really uncomfortable and unfortunate pitfall of the game’s writing, and while it is just a minor character, it’s hard to overlook it when the stereotype is quite as bad as it is. It wasn’t a deal-breaker for me (and I tend to be pretty strict about that kind of stuff), but I absolutely understand it being too uncomfortable a depiction for others, as it’s really no better in the English version, by all accounts.

The mechanics of Shadow Hearts really show the nature of a company composed largely of ex-SquareSoft developers. It’s a pretty standard turn-based game RPG with two rows for your party of 3 to occupy, but with a few important and ever present gimmicks here and there. First and foremost among these is the Judgment Ring system, which is something all of the Shadow Hearts games have but none more than this. Upon selecting an attack, a quick time event of a spinning ring pops up, and you need to press the command button when the spinning dial is over the colored sections. For normal attacks, each successive press gets you another hit in your little combo, and for spells, you need to hit more and more successes for successively more powerful spells (meaning the QTE’s get tougher as the game goes on). Later Shadow Hearts games have the ability to turn off the Judgment Ring system, but that is not the case in the first game . It’s not super difficult to get a hold of (and the whole reason I thought it was so hard at first was because I’d been doing it wrong ^^; ), but it’s something that’s ever present enough for both combat and out of combat mini-games that, if you don’t like it, it’ll likely drive you crazy.

The other major mechanical gimmick is the sanity point (SP) system, which other Shadow Hearts games would also continue to use. For every turn you take, your sanity ticks down by one until it hits zero. Once it hits zero, you go berserk and you can’t control that character anymore. This means you need to keep on top of keeping people’s sanity up with healing items (whose use also requires use of the Judgement Ring), especially during longer fights and boss battles. This is especially true for Yuri, who takes far more sanity points per turn when he’s fused into a more powerful demon form. While a lot of Yuri’s fusion forms really don’t matter much (the balancing of the game means that more often than not, less than half of them end up being really necessary or useful), you basically always want him in his fusion form if you can help it because it makes him just SO much more powerful, and he also doesn’t get spells to use outside of fusion forms. This ultimately just adds more balls into the air to juggle in boss fights, and it’s one more thing to keep track of in addition to health and mana and such. It’s not a great mechanic, but it’s not an outright bad one either.

All in all, the difficulty balancing is done really well, and it keeps a very persistent air of being just hard enough to be challenging while very infrequently being something you’d feel you’d need to grind to get past. The only real “well that sucks” aspect of boss fight design is usually getting to one and realizing that it has some status effect that it’ll inflict that will make your life miserable, so you’ll need to load your save and go grab some status immunity accessories at a vendor to take care of that. Thankfully, HP, MP, and even SP replenishing items are at shops as well as these immunity items, meaning you’re only ever a little bit of money away from making a fight or particular bit of grinding eminently survivable. It’s another aspect where I certainly wish the game were balanced in such a way that you didn’t need to rely on having stuff like a bunch of SP healing items or status effect immunity accessories to progress, but the game being that way isn’t inherently a bad thing. It’s just a little annoying.

The presentation of Shadow Hearts is absolutely excellent in a way you’d really expect from a dev team made of ex-SquareSoft developers. From the way the 3D models look to the pre-rendered environments they move around on, this almost has the vibe of a super PS1 game in certain respects. The music is also excellent, and the creature and character design is awesome too. The game has a lot of really gross and creepy monster and boss design, and I don’t blame them for apparently implementing Yuri’s fusion system entirely to use more of the sick-ass monster designs they’d made. They’re great! X3

Verdict: Highly Recommended. From the writing to the presentation to the fun & engaging gameplay, Shadow Hearts is an incredibly strong RPG on a system with no shortage of them. The fact that it’s such an early RPG on the console makes that fact all the more impressive. If you’re a fan of creepy, myth-filled (think SMT-vibes) settings and turn-based RPG gameplay, Shadow Hearts is absolutely not a game to miss out on.

I was so hyped about this game! Was... because the moment I started playing it I fell asleep.
What the hell is going on in this game? Not only everything sounds very cliché but the playing is also BAD! You know Japanese games, they always like to give us trouble with all of those unnecessary fights and weird looking monsters. Not to talk about the dialogue...

The battling system is ridiculous and if you don't know anything about it just go check it out. That must be the most ridiculous battling system I've ever seen! You can't deal some attacks if you don't press on the right seal (and there's time). I can't really explain how it works here, it's only credible if people see it with their own eyes, anyway.

PS: I like to be exaggerated so don't take this one so seriously. I think it's incredible how people like this game but hey, I don't like chocolate... Isn't that incredible too?

This is the 2nd Shadow Hearts that I've played. Since the internet has nothing but praise to this hidden gem on the PS2, I had high hopes for it. In the end, what I found was a game with nothing but unique mediocre experiences.

At first, I was really enjoying Shadow Hearts. It is a traditional JRPG that wears its inspirations on its sleeves and I appreciate it for this. The battle system is quite unique and keeps you on your toes. It's not perfect and it can get old pretty quick, but it kept me interested for the most part. The presentation is quite simple, but somewhat familiar, which kinda made me feel at home. There's also a nice amount of challenging and fair fights which, despite some weird unbalanced difficulty spikes during boss duels, made me constantly strategize my next moves.

The atmosphere is probably one of the best things in the game. The whole tone and story can get very dark and, at times, even creepy. Whether you're in dungeons, cities or doing sidequests, the music is unsettling and the feeling is moody. There's even a place called Dollhouse that made it feel a lot like I was playing an RPG version of the first Resident Evil. Sidequests felt a litte short (which is not exactly bad), but they were nice, expanding a bit more on characters like Keith and Margarette, while also establishing some world-building.

It's just sad that this feeling of joy didn't last very long. The battle system got dull. The enemy variety is nothing but the same 10 monsters with their color palette swapped, the music became repetitive and not at all memorable, characters just never developed and the writing is bad!

I know that the battle system is cool and all, but did EVERYTHING in the game have to revolve around the ring mechanic? Puzzles, item usage, getting discounts on shops and even reviving a fallen character. And did it have to be this punishing? That definitely did not help when it comes to variety.

Some other mechanics in the system felt unnecessary. Did we really need to keep quieting Malice? Did we really need sanity points? Did we need acunpuncture or the graveyard at all? The feeling I got from all of it was that the game's mechanics were there just to fuck with you, not to create a decent gameplay experience.

And what's up with the story? The writing starts off ok, but it get super tiresome, with some rather uninteresting plot points and "turns". I couldn't care less about half of the things that happened after we left Asia and I couldn't care about ANY character in the game.

I just cannot recommend this game. It's not bad, but it screams mediocrity and boredom.

It's nice that it brought a different type of element to a traditional genre, and it's also good that it was the beginning of a fine trilogy, but it's certainly not special.