Shadow Hearts 2 review
Well, I'm gonna start this off with a single statement, "Shadow Hearts 2 is one of the best rpg experinces I've partaken in my years of gaming".
There are many rpgs out there that do things right. In fact there are many rpgs that do many things extremely well. But few rpgs are able to maintain the level of quality all around. For example I consider the majority of Final Fantasy VI to be a fantastic rpg. But when you get to the 2nd half of the game, the pacing falls apart and the overall game is not living up to it's earlier self. Grandia has a near-perfect battle system, yet aside from the 1st game in the series, the rest are lacking in story. The original Shadow Hearts was a game that I felt fit into this category. It was a game with a unique and fun battle system, an interesting historical tale that hadn't really been done before, and it had great ambience. The only down point was that you'd be at the final dungeon by 16 hours in, and that the game was ridiculously easy. Shadow Hearts 2 not only fixes these issues, but improves upon every aspect (except one) of the original tenfold.
The story of Shadow Hearts 2 covers one of the biggest events in the last century, the start of World War 1. Taking place in 1915, the game takes players across real cities such as Wells, Florence, Paris; countries such as Italy, Spain, Russia; and then to even more interesting places which are best left to the imagination. The story of Shadow Hearts 2 works because of three things: The writing, the cutscene direction, and the characters. The writing for the most part is fantastic. The plot always moves at a brisk pace, there are plot twists all the time, and many of the characters in the story get a large amount of character development to keep them human rather than being cliche'd sterotypes. Despite the story being of serious nature, the writers throw in a wide variety of comedy shown through either the main party's interactions with each other, spoofs on anime, games, and Japanese culture, or even just having a little slapstick humor. Yet despite the humor the game maintains a very realistic world and character portrayal, because for the most part these people just act human so you can identify with them. The cutscene direction is not only strong, but is the backbone that holds this journey together. Make no doubt, Shadow Hearts 2 is one of the most (if not the most) story driven rpgs ever. The back of the game's cover proclaims that it has 6+ hours of fully voiced real-time cutscenes. Personally I think they took great liberties with the '+' in order to try not to scare off potential buyers. Upon finishing the game you are allowed access to a theater mode where you can watch any cutscene from the game...the final count of them in this mode is somewhere between 160-170 cutscenes, and these aren't short 15 sec scenes. The majority of them are around the length of the cutscenes in Final Fantasy X, but are shorter than those seen in Xenosaga Ep1. Back to the actual directing; I've always felt that cutscene direction can make or break a story-based 3d rpg. Star Ocean 3 for example is a very story-heavy, cutscene filled rpg. But yet the majority of the cutscenes in SO3 are the camera sitting stationary, usually pretty far from the character, and then switching to another far off camera while the polygon characters stand and talk for a while. Shadow Hearts 2 realizes that cutscene direction like that makes the characters actually feel distant from the player and can even grow tiresome during long scenes, so instead the cutscene director in SH2 decided to make every scene like he was filming a movie. The camera is usually close-up, can pan in dramatic sweeps, and is often placed in artistic angles; This makes each and every scene exciting and extremely enjoyable to watch because each of those 160+ scenes are like their own little movies. Also holding this together is the fact that the character models are just fantastic, and extremely emotive up close. Not only do they fully look around and move their body as a real person would, but the development team must have slaved on for many months because the lyp-synch is so good it's scary, you'll see every syllable being displayed with their mouth while you're hearing it. The overall effect of fantastic lip-synch, great cinematography, and an always exciting plot is one of the most enjoyable game stories I've ever been able to immerse myself in. The main cast is just perfect, each character is not only interesting, unique, and likeable, but they each (except Lucia - voiced by Kikou Inoue) get ample development in the main story and lots more if you involve yourself in their subquests which almost everyone has. There are very few rpgs where you can travel the country in the presence of a puppet-master, a pro-wrestler, a wolf, a russian princess, and others. As a last note on the story, I have to point out that this is in my opinion the best direct sequel to a game/movie/book/etc.. that I've ever seen. The way the story involves almost every story aspect and character of the original, and threads them through an entirely new but yet very much related tale is just ingenious. Players of the first game will be extremely pleased with not only the story connections, but even the little cameos that are almost meant as just a direct service for the fans.
Phew, now that I have the story/presentation out of the way, I can write about the gameplay. Make no butts about it, the battle system in SH2 is a great one. Combining the classic idea of turn based combat with the 3d radius based combat of the Grandia series, and then adding a combo system which the only equivalent I can think of is the Tales of... series. Basic attacking is divided up into several options that allow you to knock the enemy character around the screen and get it where you want it to be. Say you have a character coming up in 2 turns (known thanks to the turn order bar that's at the top of the screen, which not only shows your current and next few turns, but shows where you will end up on the meter next turn if you do a certain attack [Ie. If you would normally have another turn right before the enemy, highlight a large special move may move your icon to behind that enemy, so you might want to be conservative and go for a smaller attack just so you can get one more chance in before the enemy]) So you know your character coming up has a special attack that goes in a rectangle shape and there is an enemy in the middle and on the side, so for your turn you choose knock-back attack and proceed to hit the side enemy into the middle allowing your other character to hit both the middle characters at once in their next attack. The combo system is also extremely useful because you get bonus damage for each hit starting on the 2nd character. The more hits, the higher the bonus damage multiplier. Say if you do a 35+ hit combo with 4 characters that does 2000 normal damage, you would probably gain about an additional 700-900 damage for executing it in a combo. This is great as it makes boss fights nice and quick if you play smart. And you will play smart, because unlike the first Shadow Hearts, the enemies in this game are not so friendly. The enemies in will line them selves up in combo positions, and pile on a character. Or they'll give you a status effect like 'reverse ring' which will make life hectic for you. But if you set your players up intelligently and form a strategy you'll often be able to beat battles without letting the enemy even attack. The game also rewards you for being efficient. Finish a battle up with no damage, perfect rings, or without letting the enemy strike and the game will add a bonus item and cash to your rewards. Each character also has their own unique fighting system. You won't be getting swordsman A, swordsman B, magic user in your party where characters can be easily switched with each other. No, all eight of the playable characters have their own skill selection that you must plan to your advantage when selecting your main party of 4 (you can setup 3 parties, A/B/C and then change them with a click of the L2 button at any time. You can also do shortcut combo settings so you never have to see a menu after the start of a combo until the last hit of the 4th person). Each character has their own way of learning new specialty skills, whether it's fighting wrestling matches, searching for books of composers, or finding certain 'odd ^^;;' cards to give to the very 'odd ^^;;' salesmen who follow you around in the game.
Even not mentioning the battle system, the rest of the gameplay is just as great. There are many dungeons in the game and they all (except for 1 early on in the game) are splendidly rendered into full 3d. Whether you're going through the hulls of a battleship, the halls of a palace, or the depths of hell, you will really enjoy the experience. The textures in the game are fantastic not only on the characters, but the locations as well. This helps both the believability and also is just good on the eyes. The dungeons puzzles start off fairly simple and easy, but gradually get harder (though no brain-busters here) and some are quite fun to work through. The dungeons are nice and short to medium size, so you never have to spend more than 30 mins and the game is not difficult to the point that you will ever have to just stand around a save point leveling. The towns look great and have lots of locales walking around them to offer you either a view of the historic events happening, or just tell you about their life.
Lastly I'll touch on the extras. The game is filled with stuff to do on the side at any point in the game, and near the end there are more sub-quests and bonus stories than you can shake a stick at. For a start the game has 'five' hidden dungeons. Each complete with their own story around them and sometimes full voiced cutscenes. Compared to most games which have a single bonus dungeon that's already some good hours after finishing the game. Then there are the usually ultimate weapon quests for the characters, there are sub-quests for obtaining the skills of all your characters, there is a map of Solomon that has you placing your various magic items onto a great map to open up their full power, there are battle arena type challange tests that force you to do things like 'win 5 battles while poisened and without using items', or 'win with a 30+ hit combo'. There really is a lot to do in the game, so even if the main story only lasts you 35-45 hours, you can expect another 10 or so added on here.
I did mention at the start that there's one area that the sequel did not surpass the original and that is in the subject of music. The original Shadow Heats took me by surprise with one of the best soundtracks I'd ever heard for an rpg. Instead of being a nice symphonic fantasy soundtrack, it used very mettalic and industrial noises to form a kinda mainstreamed version of glitch music meets techno/rock. This soundtrack was composed by Yoshitaka Hirota (in his very first debut score) and Yasunori Mitsuda (of Chrono trigger/cross XG/XS fame). Shadow Hearts 2 features these two great composers back again, this time with the help of Kenji Ito also. Let me get this out of the way: The music in Shadow Hearts 2 ranges from good to fantastic, there is no bad in the soundtrack. But I can't help comparing it to the SH1 ost which was more like 20% good, and 80% really awesome. I will say there are a few amazingly good and very crazy songs in SH2, but there are definitely less standouts than SH1. Also some of the great themes in SH1 like Roger Bacon's make a second showing in SH2.
So there it is. I had been hoping that Shadow Hearts 2 would be the fanatastic game that it's predecessor was a few steps away from being, but realistically I didn't expect it to be more than a good showing from a small developer. But the game really surprised me, it has the style, production values (even a few fantastic CG FMVS), and gameplay of the major rpg publishers, yet from what I can tell the development team was not that large and couldn't have had that much money since SH1 sold kinda mediocre in both Japan (~90k) and the US (~64k). But games like Shadow Hearts 2 give me hope that the future of rpgs and even games in general aren't just going to end up in the hands of a few big companies and their few releases a year. Shadow Hearts 2 shows that if you have a group of talented people who truly love what they are doing and work day and night (and probably back into the day ^^;
for months on end just so they can put out the best game possibly; If you have conditions like that, than even the small guys can make games that turn heads and make an impact (if not on the gaming world, than at least in the hearts of those who play them). Shadow Hearts 2 is a sum of many, many, and many fantastic parts. There is really nothing bad to say about the game, and nothing that you can even blow off as 'just good', every part of Shadow Hearts 2 is absolutely fantastic and the whole of that is one of the greatest rpg experiences I've had the pleasure of partaking in. Thank you Aruze, and I look forward to see what you can do next,
9.6/10
