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.
(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.
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.
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:
Snake with one arm and a human, cyclops face.
Below his mid-torso is probably what you think it is. It flaps up and down and yes his back faces you in combat.
The aptly named Birdman.
Wtf, guys?
The description on this one is what sold me.
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.
Seal of Aura
Kid's Room Key
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:
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.
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.
===
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.
(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.
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.
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:
Snake with one arm and a human, cyclops face.
Below his mid-torso is probably what you think it is. It flaps up and down and yes his back faces you in combat.
The aptly named Birdman.
Wtf, guys?
The description on this one is what sold me.
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.
Seal of Aura
Kid's Room Key
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:
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.
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.
===
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.
