Shadow Hearts Review

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            Shadow Hearts

Review by JenJune 2002

When I first started Shadow Hearts, I was not impressed.  Well, that’s not entirely true. When I first started Shadow Hearts, I was floored by the beautiful, gruesome opening cutscene.  After that I was not impressed. The first real gameplay screen looked like something for the original Playstation, with a big character superimposed on an out-of-proportion, grainy background.  And all I was doing was fighting, fighting, fighting, on top of more fighting. Blech. But the fighting was easy and I continued playing, and within about half an hour I was completely hooked.

During the opening credits, the story begins to unfold. Rouen, France, 1913. A priest is killed and his daughter is missing.  China, a month later. Aboard a train full of Japanese soldiers, a dapper little European gentleman, wielding some unholy powers, kidnaps young Alice, who is clutching her Bible tightly to her chest. Alice’s Japanese army escort is no match for this man, and the soldiers all lay shattered, splattered on the train floor.  Enter Yuri, our hero. Roger Bacon, the abductor, deals Yuri what should be a mortal blow, but Yuri picks himself up and continues unharmed, chasing Bacon and his female prize onto the roof of the train for a showdown. Yuri too has powerful magic at his disposal but he has not the strength or control to defeat Bacon. Nevertheless he is able to rescue Alice and make good their escape.

Now we find ourselves on the initial gameplay screen. Alice and Yuri are lost in the Chinese countryside, and monsters are everywhere.  Alice is a nervous little thing, petulant and frightened. Her father was the priest who had been killed by Bacon only a scant month before, and now it seems all the dark forces in the world want to use her undiscovered abilities to unleash pure evil upon the earth, all to their own ends. Yuri is a rough young man, unschooled in the social graces, and he looks Alice over with a salacious glint in his eye. Suddenly he is felled from within himself and an eerie, almost unheard voice whispers, “must… protect…  girl…” A frightened Alice runs off, and you as Yuri set out to locate her, figuring somehow she is the key to quieting that voice inside your head.

Almost immediately monsters start popping up and Yuri must do battle. There was a little bit of get-used-to-the-controls battling during the game opening, but now it’s real. Yuri is weak but fortunately so are the monsters. Yuri has very limited options available to him, and he deals blows by selecting his attack and then striking three highlighted areas of the “Judgment Ring.” Where your strikes land determines the strength of your attack. There are great big yellow areas that are fairly easy to hit, and there are thin red slices where landing a strike increases your attack power enough to make these worthwhile to aim for. If you miss the strike areas altogether, you miss your turn and must meekly take blows from your enemy. If you hit the enemy but don’t finish it off, you still must stand still and take your medicine.

Amidst a slew of slaying, Yuri finds Alice and together they make their way to a series of sluice gates, take the handle from one and use it on another to dry up a stream so they may cross.  This, I’m sorry to report, is pretty representative of the puzzles in Shadow Hearts. Puzzles are few and far between, and while they do get a wee bit more complex they will never tax the average brain.

After crossing the stream, Alice and Yuri happen upon a village.  All is not right here, though, and a suspicion grows … Are these people cannibals? Well, no, not exactly—while they do like to eat humans, they themselves prove to be inhuman. No rest for the weary here, good people—you must first locate and excise the evil from this place. Here you meet your first new party member, Zhuzhen Liu, an old Chinese sage with some useful magical powers.  The demonic catpeople populating this village are no match for the three of you, and you level up with frequency and speed.

All this is but the very beginning of this rich and varied game.  How did Alice become orphaned, and why do all of the world’s bad guys want to harness her untapped powers? What of Yuri’s dead father? Was he good or evil? What of Roger Bacon? How does he fit into the grand scheme of things? Ultimately you will be unable to prevent the capture of Alice, the demise of Shanghai, the death of Yuri … or not?! The story is so compelling, so detailed, that I was forced to keep playing just to see what would happen next. I literally could not keep my hand off that controller.

At the beginning, I had said that the gameplay graphics were crappy, but that proved to be not at all true for the bulk of the game. For the most part screens are clear and smooth—there are only two or three locations out of hundreds where they look dated and pixelated, and that opening gameplay screen just happened to be one of them.

Battles all have a certain sameness to them. Yes, there is quite the variety of monsters and, sure, your attacks and abilities increase over time, but the increase of monsters’ powers parallels yours so that the overall difficulty of the battles remains about the same throughout. There are frequent “boss” monsters, and you have to learn how to use the various items and equipment at your disposal in order to give yourself the best advantage.  Occasionally I had to die to find out how best to defend myself; you cannot change your equipment midbattle but instead must outfit your party ahead of time based on what you expect might happen.  You can, however, use items freely during fights, and these include things that will give you stronger or special attacks or heal you or what have you.

I got through the first half of the game simply by using the “Choose Strongest” option in equipping my characters with armor and weapons. Each character has one conventional weapon, one piece of armor, and three slots where you can choose items that will enhance their attacks, enhance their defense, or protect them from certain types of enemy blows such as confusion or poison.  In addition to increasing your experience points, enemies killed also bestow cash and items, and you can use this cash or sell these items to buy stronger armor and weapons, as well as healing items, from the peddlars and merchants in the various towns. As well, you will occasionally encounter the gay acupuncturist, and you can pay him to increase the power of your physical attacks or widen the hit areas on your judgment ring. However, this treatment is expensive (and uncomfortable, for the hetero male members of the party).

I wonder what a psychiatrist would make of the monster designs.  The closing credits of Shadow Hearts showed three people were responsible for conceiving these beasts, and it’s plain to me that these are some twisted individuals. Most of the monsters are made of people and/or animal parts, including thinly disguised genitalia, rearranged and combined, enlarged or shrunken, in some perverse ways, as well as grossly exaggerated here and there.

In addition to each character’s physical (hand-to-hand) attacks, each has one or more mana powers, and as the game progresses each character learns new mana skills. Using these depletes your MP, or mana points, but refills are readily available in the form of various talismans or herbs that are either found or taken from fallen foes or purchased.

In addition to mana points, you have HP (hit points) and SP (sanity points). Hit points are purely physical, and you lose some every time an enemy lands a blow. These too can be restored via inventory items. Sanity points generally deplete steadily throughout the course of a battle, and losing them all causes a party member to go berserk and attack the nearest target, be it friend or foe.  Sanity points are refillable as well.

Talk of sanity points brings me to my next topic: the graveyard.  In that early scene just after the train crash, Yuri learns about the “malice.” After Yuri has killed several monsters, he encounters a mysterious being called Foxface. Yuri fights Foxface and loses. He finds himself in an otherworldly graveyard with six headstones, one each for fire, earth, water, wind, darkness, and light. Also there are four talking, mocking masks that will ask whether you wish to quiet the malice.

Malice builds up as enemies are dispatched and their souls collect en evil masse in the afterlife. Yuri has a malice meter that changes color as the malice level increases, and he must enter the graveyard and battle the malice before the level gets too high. Battling the malice in the graveyard is easy, but if Yuri neglects his malice level, he is subject to having some unexpected extra evil show up in the midst of an ordinary monster battle, adding an undesirable and much more difficult element to the mix. Later in the game, although to my regret I did not do this, it might be advantageous to let the malice build up to the danger level and finish off these elements once and for all.

Meanwhile, as enemies are defeated, in addition to experience points, Yuri gains points in one of the six “headstone” areas, depending on the nature of the enemy defeated. When he fills up one of these headstone bars, he can return to the graveyard and choose not only to battle the malice but also the “fusion soul.” When he defeats the fusion soul, he returns to the mortal plane with the ability to change his being into this type of fusion creature. There are six available fusion souls, each with three different levels, and Yuri can equip any three at a time. Fusing with one of these souls during battle depletes Yuri’s sanity points but increases his attacks considerably, especially if he chooses a fusion soul that is in opposition to the enemy’s soul type. I found it didn’t really matter what type of fusion soul Yuri chose, except that if he used one that matched the enemy’s type his attacks were much weaker.

There is no indicator of enemy soul type—you can tell after the fact by what types of “headstones” get leveled up, and you generally encounter each type of ordinary monster numerous times. A particular one of your party members will learn a mana power that will reveal the enemy’s defining characteristic, but she must waste one of her attack turns to use this. It didn’t matter much to me since I rarely used the fusion attacks on ordinary enemies, reserving this power instead for the boss fights, at least early in the game. Later on, bored with the neverending battling, I just wanted to open up the proverbial can of whoop ass and had plenty of MP and SP to use these fusion souls to send the baddies into kingdom come with one blow.

After some experience, you can also determine the enemy’s characteristic from the types of attacks it uses and equip your fusion soul appropriately.  You cannot exchange your three fusion souls midbattle; you must again guess ahead of time and choose the ones you think you might need. You can, though, change from one to another of the three equipped fusion souls in the middle of a conflict as long as you don’t mind wasting a turn and you have enough sanity points to spend on this costly maneuver.

Certain of the boss enemies deal mortal attacks that are impossible to defend against until you are defeated once and learn what type of item to equip. For instance, one megabad guy, Wugui, packs an “instant death” wallop. There is no way to know this until your party gets wiped out in one fell swoop and you curse a blue streak, and then you must restore from a previous save and equip the items beforehand to protect yourself against this particular attack.

Throughout the game, if you learn how to equip yourself properly and you have plenty of restorative items, boss battles are simply a matter of patience. They can last a very long time, from half an hour for the biggest bosses up to well over an hour for the final battle, but as long as you keep yourself healthy and at the same time get your chops in, you can last forever and ultimately prevail. I only died four or five times over the course of the entire game, and all of those deaths were as a result of not defending myself against a particularly deadly enemy attack because I didn’t know what it would be until I experienced it for myself.

Save points are plentiful; only twice can I recall having to fight two bosses one on top of another with no saving in between.  One of these times, though, was the endgame battle, and I thought I was done for. Luckily for me, I was pretty well prepared because that was the battle that took over an hour and I would’ve hated to start that one over again.

“Why all this talk of battling and the battle system,” I hear you ask. “Is that all there is?” Well, the short answer is “yes,” at least as far as gameplay is concerned.  There are several very simple puzzles scattered about in the various landscapes, but these are few and far between. The enthralling story and captivating music are what propelled me ever forward.

The music is absolutely worthy of mention. It serves very well to set the mood of each of the various areas. Sometimes it is light and airy, other times ponderous and somber, and in turn it gets your heart racing when attack is imminent or lets you know it’s time to relax in the not-so-dangerous areas. This music was played by real musicians on real instruments, running the gamut from wind instruments to violins, cellos to guitars, classical chamber music to postmodern rock. The battle music is an exception, though; while high-quality, I’d swear the ending “tada” flourish was the same exact one used for battle scenes in Anachronox.  Plus this music is the same for nearly every battle.

There is very little voice acting; most of the dialogue occurs in the form of onscreen text. The voice actors employed did a fine job, mostly narrating tales of bygone days in cutscenes.

The story weaves together the history of two continents across half a millennium, incorporating elements of Christianity in general, Catholicism in specific, actual historical events, ancient Chinese legends and superstitions, and tons of magic and evil straight from the mind of the designers—and all this with nary a mention of Egypt or Atlantis. The main characters are fleshed out with complete personalities, and part of what kept me so engrossed in Shadow Hearts was that I cared about how they would fare. There are plenty of plot twists and surprises around every corner and yet the story doesn’t ever get lost within itself; it just keeps building and branching and finally comes together at the very end.

I feel as if I have barely scratched the surface when it comes to describing this game adequately. I could easily go on for another six pages, but I’ll leave the rest for the player to discover.

I loved almost everything about Shadow Hearts: the characters, the story, the music, even the battles (except there were too many of them!) once I got into the groove. And I am a diehard point-and-click adventure gamer. Shadow Hearts offers the kind of satisfying gaming experience that is simply not present in very many recent adventure releases. I’m sure it doesn’t break any new ground in terms of console-style RPGs, but these types of games are unfamiliar territory to me … and I like them! Shadow Hearts is in turn tragic and comic, deeply philosophical and completely fluffy, and overall a great gaming experience that I was sorry to see come to an end. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Sacnoth/Aruze Corp.  Publisher: Midway Games Release Date: December 2001

Available for: PlayStation 2

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      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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