Very LTTP: Shadow Hearts

Paltheos

Member
Short preamble: 1) There are a lot of pictures in this thread. I've tried resizing them for mobile users; if anyone's still having a problem let me know. 2) I'm avoiding overt spoilers outside of the first couple hours - anything beyond that is spoiler-tagged.

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(Very) LTTP on this one (and I'm making a new topic because the last one is almost 10 years old!). Shadow Hearts is a 2001 PS2 JRPG from the now defunct developer Sacnoth. It is, technically, a sequel to the PS1 game Koudelka, taking place in-universe 15 years later, on Earth, on the cusp of the first World War in 1913-1914, with a few recurring cast members but otherwise with light enough connections to the past title that you can just jump in blind.

Visual Design

A big part of the game's appeal is its aesthetic, both from the quality of the art and from the styles it employs, chiefly focusing on Asian mysticism and later gothic horror. For me, the piece that I like the most is the matte painting backgrounds. Shadow Hearts follows on the heels of many of the more famous PS1 RPGs that employed these types of environments. It's a style I've always liked - The realities of modern game design are often limiting in how intentional the visuals of the game world can be. That is, if you want something in an environment today, you need to 3D model it, detail it, make sure it plays nice with various graphics settings/hits frame rates/etc. The painting is just there and is exactly whatever you want it to be and works well in horror imo where aesthetic is so important to selling an atmosphere. In terms of pure power, I'd put the presentation about on par with Final Fantasy 8, but Shadow Hearts of course has its own style.

Some of the most striking images for me playing the game are both at Blue Castle, first when you enter and the screen scrolls upward in parallax over the dead forest up to the castle itself as the red moon looms over the scene (it's better than my screencap gives credit!), and second as you approach the dais in the catacombs and spy two statues of mothers on each side of a coffin - both mothers cradling children but one statue's child brutally decapitated, its blood splattered over the figure.

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Or in the first town you visit: the humble, rural, Chinese hamlet Zhongyang, where it is almost immediately obvious the village is occupied by cannibals before it turns out the place is actually a blood-soaked hellscape populated by man-eating demons.

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On that note, enemy design can be pretty cool... sometimes. Shadow Hearts features a lot of your usual fare - bats, dogs, big bugs - and palette swaps too, but it also has some designs that are out there, such as:

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Snake with one arm and a human, cyclops face.

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Below his mid-torso is probably what you think it is. It flaps up and down and yes his back faces you in combat.

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The aptly named Birdman.

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Wtf, guys?

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The description on this one is what sold me.

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Who came up with 'handstanding, naked woman with a brain-piercing stake glued to foot'?

And many more.

An element of the game that a lot of people admired too is how every item in the game has flavor text and its own hand-drawn art. And it's hidden away in the menu beyond the list and basic functional description via a button prompt.

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Seal of Aura

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Kid's Room Key

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Mantle of Shivering

Cast

You play as Yuri Hyuga, a harmonixer - He can fuse with monster souls to transform into various beasts. The game does not hold back on this regard. In the very first battle of the game, with no explanation whatsoever, you can transform into this:

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It's called the Death Emperor. Awesome.

Yuri is also a bit of a crazy person and a sexual deviant, the latter of which briefly undermined the horror atmosphere the game establishes in its intro, but once I (quickly) learned what the guy suffers through - constant nightmares, childhood trauma, and a literal voice in his head that gives him mind-splitting headaches if he doesn't follow its instructions - I cut him some slack. Plus you can't fault the guy for not having a personality.

You are joined on your journey by a magic-embued, lawful good saint who is the lynch pin of much of the plot and whom you need to protect; a do-gooder, traveling, exorcising, old man monk; a voluptuous, dubiously competent spy with future tech (for 1914); a bored vampire; and an orphan boy with ESP.

Some of these people are fat. Yuri, Alice, and Zhunzhen are all fairly central to the plot and are well-enough developed. I think the rest of these guys can be cut. Almost immediately after joining I was asking, "Why is Margarete here?" - A question that was never really answered. She does contribute, a little, early on anyway when she questions the suspiciously attractive and well-spoken fisherman willing to smuggle the gang free of charge, but that's about it. Keith is... at least straightforward about tagging along literally because he's bored. He does nothing else in the whole game outside of dialogue flavor text. Yeah, he leads you to the man you're looking for in his keep's tower (what's left of Yuri after he lost his soul to the Seraphic Radiance laid waste to Shanghai), but you don't really need him for that. Halley has some tenuous connection via his mother who becomes a McGuffin in the final act (and in some ways his existence gives a happy end for Koudelka), but you could probably cut these three. Well, at least they spice up the combat.

Combat

Speaking of, Shadow Hearts is a turn-based game - the style where your agility stat establishes a turn order amongst your and the enemy's teams that you can't see, but that's fine. What makes Shadow Hearts unique is the Judgment Wheel.

Whenever you initate an action in combat, the wheel appears on-screen and a green line shoots out ala a radius to the edge and sweeps around the perimeter. Depending on what particular action you take your objective on the wheel will differ a little but generally speaking your goal is to hit all the colored sections that appear. For basic attacks, you'll land hits for however many zones you hit, until you miss one in the sequence. For magic skills like the one I screencapped below, you need to hit all of the regions to fire off the spell (as you might expect, higher level skills demand more from you to cast). Areas consisting of two colors indicate crit zones - Confirms in the green region will yield normal damage while those in the itty-bitty red piece will crit. This is actually something you can get pretty good at as these are essentially rhythm games, but you always take the risk of missing the crit zones and the attack entirely because those crit slices are always at the end of the color zone.

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There are status effects in the game tailored to affecting the wheel (as does your character's AGL stat too, incidentally), making the wheel smaller, the colored portions of the wheel you're aiming for smaller, or the indicator move faster or erratically. It's a decent way to keep you on your toes.

One other part of the system mechanics that set Shadow Hearts apart is the 'SP' resource... which does not mean Skill Points. It means *SANITY POINTS*, which constantly drop in battle and, in Yuri's case, whenever he transforms, because of course fighting/becoming unholy horrors will fray at the mind and that some people are more resistant to the hideous unknown than others. SP management is something you have to be cognizant about early on but by endgame not so much. You'll generally have enough SP to get through most encounters or enough money to purchase all the SP restores you'll need. Related to that, in the second half of the game, a good chunk of the bosses are HP sponges that can outstay their welcome (forcing you to restore your SP by virtue of attrition) but they're not eggregiously tanky.

Misc note I couldn't fit anywhere else: This is a game of random encounters, but the encounter rate is mercifully low. Sometimes too low actually. I once ran from one end of a dungeon to the other during an endgame grind and got pulled into only one fight, although the rate's usually not *that* low.

Sound

Music credits are split (vmgdb link).

Most of the soundtrack (>80%) was produced by Yoshitaka Hirota who'd previously handled general sound design on old Squaresoft titles, not composition work, and he does fine imo. Brain Hopper, the main battle theme for the first half of the game, is a spooky bop. Star Shape stands out to me too, but that's just because I love strongly melodic background music and not necessarily because it's the best fit for the game.

The rest of the soundtrack is handled by the legend Yasunori Mitsuda. And we're only talking... 9 tracks total, but some of his contributions are up to the bar people expect. Tanjou is ethereal, mystical, and energetic just like you'd expect he's capable of, and Coffin Fetish is grand, sometimes contemplative, and with a creepy undercurrent.

The voicework is a point of criticism. Dubbing is inconsistent - In one attack line, Margarete could start in English and then finish in Japanese. And otherwise the performances are spotty, usually for the cheesy or hammy. Veronica Taylor is the most recognizable contemporary and even she doesn't fare perfectly. Some level of criticism can also be leveled at the game's (mostly unvoiced) script sometimes too (and the game's FMV sequences, since I'm on a tangent already - they look... kinda like Planescape: Torment's FMV actually, but I actually kinda like them myself). There are a few times I think the script could have used another editing passing but it's mostly fine.

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Overall opinion: Good time. My friend had been begging me to try this for years, and I'm pretty satisfied. Shadow Hearts is no masterpiece but it has its own style and I appreciate that. More praise has been showered on its direct sequel, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and I plan on getting to that some time this year.

Misc. note: Shadow Hearts for the longest time was notorious for being very difficult to emulate without significant slowdown and settings shenanigans, but emulation has come a long way. I didn't tinker at all in my settings, and I think in my entire playthrough I suffered <30 seconds of slowdown. Frame rate was otherwise rock solid.

Misc. note 2: I wanted to fit even more pictures of the game's environments into my post as they're quite varied beyond dark and gloomy, but I couldn't decide on others and my post is looking pretty heavy as it is.
 
One of my favorite PS2 RPGs. The sequel went full anime silly, and the third game had such a huge tonal shift that I barely consider it to be in the same series. The combat in particular here is a huge standout, and it's one that hasn't been quite replicated yet even in modern games.

This game came up recently in the Clair Obscur Expedition 33 OT, because that game's QTEs for attacks and dodges is extremely reminiscent of this game's judgement ring system.
 
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Still one of my favourite RPGs of all time. Shadow Hearts 1 and 2 are both GOAT, even 3 is better than most modern JRPGs
 
Interesting. I only ever played shadow hearts 1 and 2. Barely remember them though. I did not know there was a third one and didn't know about koudelka. Hmm. I don't know. The character from the third shadow hearts looks vaguely familiar. Maybe I did play it.
 
There are a few things I remembered after I posted that I wanted to mention.

1) An incentive for combat, aside from earning XP and money, is gaining soul points. These are the primary driver for strengthening Yuri's fusions, and every enemy gives different points to each element, although sometimes elements you want can be sparse. This usually isn't an issue as the game spaces different enemies types well most of the time, but in the second half of the game it was a while before I could farm any Earth points.

2) Yuri can visit a graveyard in his mind that is effectively a place for his inner regrets and fears. This is also the place where, as a bunch of creepy talking masks there tell you, the malice of the monsters you defeat is stored and has to be broken periodically (by defeating a monster inside solo with Yuri) lest you get hunted down by the fox-masked man, who allegedly would just brutally murder you in the real world. I never got to that point in my playthrough, as the game gives you regular warnings as the malice builds closer and closer to the breaking point. It's an interesting way to break up the action, and you even get an item reward for dissipating the malice, but unfortunately the reward is usually junk, so you're not really incentivized to make the trip regularly or learn the system (an FAQ explained it to me and I was unimpressed).

3) Shadow Hearts is a game of missables/hidden shit. I have no regrets about playing with a companion walkthrough. a) An endgame quest relies on you having found an invisible pickup in the corner of the room in a one-time mid-game dungeon. And it's not hard to check either - you've been conditioned at this point to check nooks and crannies and that particular room isn't that big but you're not given any reason to believe an items's there. b) One late game dungeon asks you to check a treasure chest you've already opened - something you've never been asked to do once (although you've seen empty, open chests in a dungeon several hours prior, but they really were empty too) - and the only clue is that opening it the first time triggered a cutscene elsewhere... but you had still gotten an item from the chest already, and the cutscene had nothing to do with you collecting it either. You had no reason to check again. Like the item under (a) though, this is optional and this one is thankfully not missable. c) A key item required for the good ending requires you speaking to an NPC - thankfully one in your way. Don't know if it's missable because of dialogue changes later.

4) The Lottery game is cruel. The Shadow Hearts world is filled with members of a lottery club who will let you play a game via spinning a Judgment Wheel. You need however Lottery Tickets, which are limited in number and many of which are in invisible locations. The best prizes on the wheel are, of course, in the red spots, which are often extremely narrow and far more difficult to hit than the normal crit zone in combat. Of course, every attempt uses a lotto ticket. Many of the club members also include modifiers on their wheels - maybe the prize zones will be invisible or maybe the wheel radius will spin erratically (faster around the high prize zones). And of course, a healthy chunk of the lottery club members are permanently missable, and you can't play against the boss of the club without having played against every other member. For sure, an area that made me very glad to be playing on an emulator. One of those fuckers was in a corner of a limited time labyrinth. I don't envy anyone who reset their console to trek through the dungeon for a few more chances at the best prize. ... Oh yeah, that was the dungeon that locks away some of your abilities too. I wasn't a fan of that place. The good things I can say though is that you don't need to win all the best prizes to fight the boss - you always get something for playing, even if it's junk - and that there are extra lottery tickets. I think there are about twice as many tickets as there are club members? So you can make a couple attempts before resetting if you're dead set on the top prize... unless you're using save states like me and just cheat.

If I come across as negative about a lot of these things, I am, but not that much. I generally had a good time, even with the stuff above (walkthrough, save states ahoy). Just wanted to share more about the experience.

PS: Oh, game length too, while I'm at it. My screenshots give away the goat: I spent 36 hours, but that was 100%ing the game, including a few hours of grinding for soul points and character levels so that I could use their endgame skills and for an easier time in the solo arena.

One of my favorite PS2 RPGs. The sequel went full anime silly, and the third game had such a huge tonal shift that I barely consider it to be in the same series. The combat in particular here is a huge standout, and it's one that hasn't been quite replicated yet even in modern games.

This game came up recently in the Clair Obscur Expedition 33 OT, because that game's QTEs for attacks and dodges is extremely reminiscent of this game's judgement ring system.

The sequel going full anime was not something I'd heard. Tbh the only reception I've heard is 'it's the better one; you'll like it even more'.

The combat is a standout. The Judgment Wheel does so much to keep things fresh. Even after so much mob combat, the dopamine hit of landing crits, especially all three for a physical strike, even if I knew the damage would be whack, still came each time.

I'm looking forward to Clair Obscur. Already bought the game but am not starting until my new PC's done (for which I have all the parts but am counting on a friend's help to actually build). From how positive the reception's been, I might shoot it up to the top of the backlog.
 
I like 1 but I really enjoyed 2/covenant.

Great RPGs for sure.

And if you like the combat system in these games MAN O MAN do I have a recommendation for you :messenger_smiling_horns:

It's Expedition 33
 
Nice writeup, great game. Speaking of which, I hope studio Wild rose's "Penny Blood" gets signed by an publisher. Wild rose is composed of mostly the same guys who worked on the Shadow hearts series.
 
I loved this series. I doubt it will get a remake. I remember the first game was on PS2 and had PS1 graphics. So that was by far the worst part of the game. But it had cool combat and interesting characters and story. The sequels were not as good as the original game, but still enjoyable.
 
Nice writeup, great game. Speaking of which, I hope studio Wild rose's "Penny Blood" gets signed by an publisher. Wild rose is composed of mostly the same guys who worked on the Shadow hearts series.

I looked into this too a few days ago. Penny Blood looks dead in the water. It's been 2+ years since the kickstarter ended, and they still haven't found a publisher. From what I've heard Armed Fantasia's faring a little better; it looks like it at least has actual development updates. Judging from how much less money backers put to Penny Blood though, I don't see it digging out of its hole.
 
Shadow Hearts is one of my favourite JRPG's, and I would dearly love a remake/remaster. The horror atmosphere made it special. There weren't any games like it at the time on the PS2 (or since then for that matter). The mature themes stood out as JRPG's tend to stay within PG-13 material.

The sequels shifted towards more standard anime-esque fare, and lost what made the first game so unique.
 
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Wow, this is a LTTP with some heart put into it. Amazing read. If i hadn't already played it this would've guaranteed sold me on it.

Well done OP. 👏
 
I looked into this too a few days ago. Penny Blood looks dead in the water. It's been 2+ years since the kickstarter ended, and they still haven't found a publisher. From what I've heard Armed Fantasia's faring a little better; it looks like it at least has actual development updates. Judging from how much less money backers put to Penny Blood though, I don't see it digging out of its hole.
Been following updates on it as well. Apparently, Machida is embroiled in some kind of lawsuit against Ben Judd regarding the Kickstarter campaign atm. That's why things are seemingly at a standstill.

Maybe its naive, but I'm holding up hope that Clair obscur may have renewed and increased its chances to find an interested publisher.
 
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I was LTTP once, too - I played Shadow Hearts back in 2013. I loved it. It felt like a more detailed, higher resolution take on the PS1 era of RPGs, which we really didn't get any more of during the PS2 generation. I liked how dark and moody the game was at times, and I enjoyed the combat system a lot. It also ran at 60fps, as I recall. That was kinda neat.

Everyone points to the sequel as the better game, but I didn't really think so. Covenant is very good, but I wasn't a huge fan of the shift away from the horror angle. Shadow Hearts 1 was so unique that I just wished there were more games out there like it, period.

I will say, though: I dunno if it's a good or a bad thing given how over the damn top it is, but the voice acting is... wow.
 
I will say, though: I dunno if it's a good or a bad thing given how over the damn top it is, but the voice acting is... wow.

First one was... amusing? Funny? I ended up liking the story though, and the second sequence later on that finishes the story I enjoyed with fewer qualifications (I was invested at that point). I like its presence in the game. For all its blemishes it seemed like the developers' way of making the pit stop (well, crash landing) in the fishing village about more than just some monster to put it down before moving on.

There's that similar sequence not long after in the bar in Shanghai where Zhunzhen sees the daughter of his friend, all grown up, playing on a stage and we're treated to low-quality, color-faded live footage (although, as always, stylized) of a performer while Zhunzen delivers a rare, voiced monologue about the cruel march of time. I liked that one too.


There are a few, other sepia-colored, voiced cutscenes throughout the game that also are not in the general FMV engine, mostly covering backstories etc., but I think those all consist of drawn, anime-style stills and aren't as impactful.
 
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