Game Review: Shadow Hearts: From the New World

Written 02.05.2010 - Uploaded 02.05.2010

A quick recap for those unfamiliar with the series: Shadow Hearts, while not the most unique RPG series, definitely has a certain personality of its own. From the viewpoint of game play, the series is rather traditional with a few twists. The most distinct feature in the series is the judgement ring, which is used for performing actions in battles (and in some minigames). The ring has hit sectors, and a spinning hand. The player's task is to time button presses to the hit sectors in order to succeed in actions. What makes it interesting is the critical hit sectors, that are usually much thinner than normal hit sectors, so that skillful players can get more (usually damage) out of their actions. Another recurring aspect in the game is a certain sense of humor, which is present both in character design and ingame dialog. The first two parts in the series were part of the same story line, but From the New World is an independent story line of its own. You can just pick it up and play without any knowledge of the previous parts. Good thing, considering that the first two games are kind of rare these days.

From the New World takes place in America (whereas the first two games involved Europe and parts of Asia), and much like its predecessors, introduces a rather interesting plot and of course a cast of seven characters, with various degrees of weirdness. The game's main character is Johnny, a somewhat ordinary wannabe detective. He is pretty far removed from the coolness of Yuri (the protagonist in previous games), but his character does develop a bit (although definitely not enough). Shania could be considered another main character, and she is the group's harmonixer (Yuri was a harmonixer as well), a person who fuses with demons (or in Shania's case, spirits) to gain their power, and in battle are able to transform into more powerful forms. Shania is an Indian girl, and then there's her protector Natan, a warrior who uses a pistol-based martial arts style (yup, you read that right). Ricardo is still somewhat normal, although he uses his acoustic guitar as a weapon. The rest of the cast on the other hand are all weird as is fitting to the series. What can you say about a guy probably in his sixties who's a Brazilian ninja (!) and uses stuff like cacti and mail poles as his weapons. How about a large cat who knows drunken kung-fu, or a vampire girl who transforms into different forms depending on her calorie level. Yes, this is Shadow Hearts for you.

The story evolves around malice - energy that's the condensed form of all the negative feelings of people - which is causing trouble (lots of malice was released to the world during a certain event in Shadow Hearts: Covenant). Part of the trouble is a powerful being simply called Lady. Sadly it tuns out that Shadow Hearts: From the New World turns out to be an important lesson in what exactly is wrong with some of modern RPGs. While stories in games are usually frowned upon, they are an integral part of RPGs. The plot in this particular game is in fact quite good, and it starts out strong. But then it does the most terrible mistake I can think of: it introduces N number of things the party needs to get to, so what basically happens is that the party is running through various kinds of ancient ruins while there are next to no twists in the plot until almost the end of the game, when finally the player learns what's the driving force behind everything. The game's structure seriously hinders plot and character development. Maybe I've been spoiled by the latest two installments of the Persona series, but this won't do. At all. I'm quite certain that amount of dialog has gone significantly down from Covenant, because there's also a lot less humorous conversations.

It is indeed then fortunate for the game that its game play is best in the series so far. The battle system has been refined from the previous game somewhat, and the changes make for a better game. It's been a while since I played this game, but basically it now has a character specific special bar, which you can use to alter the turn order and perform double actions. It puts some more dynamics into the battles, which is a good thing, and makes the already quite entertaining battle system even more so. Sadly the game does not put up much of a fight, although it definitely feels a little more difficult than Covenant, which I played through with practically no game overs at all. Still, while the game is rarely very challenging, its entertaining to challenge yourself by trying to get a high percentage of perfect ring successes and batter enemies with insane combo damage. It's all great fun, so the gameplay doesn't get dull at any point unlike certain games I can think of (Final Fantasy XII, I'm looking at you). Being able to hit ring perfect with Mind's Eye (makes your hit sectors invisible, but doubles damage) is always satisfying, as is wiping out bosses from full health with one perfectly planned and carried out combo.

Side quests in the series are usually more than just bashing through a few extra dungeons, and often involve either some puzzles or minigames. So it is in this game, and going through all the things you can adds something like ten hours to the total play time, bringing it around fifty hours - a pretty usual lenght for games of its genre. Some of the sidequests contain quite hilarious ideas, especially Momonga arts, which is something I really cannot explain in words, so maybe you should just see for yourself. The dungeons in the main game feel a bit longer though than they did in Covenant, so probably they've been trying to make up for lost game play hours from reducing dialog by putting in more running and fighting. Again, not something I'm very hot for. Still I mostly enjoyed my time when I played through this game, but it's still the worst game in the series, and falls into the category of okay RPGs, something that you rely on when you just need that RPG fix but all the really good ones have been played through and through.