[PS2] Shadow Hearts: From the New World

Okay, just finished the University and i must say this game is pretty impressive, For some reason i really liked the whole New York theme than Europe theme.

Oh and for now i have no complaints bout the game, Nice and interesting story, some parts are kinda scary, battle is the same (fun) and the battle theme is pretty good.

Spoiler:

I also Love Frank the Ninja, And his Brazeeel lolol funny shit, I didnt know south america has a little japan on em.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I finally bought this yesterday and I'm really glad I did. Couldn't get the other games (I opted to just get this and Metroid Prime Hunters instead) but I'm still trying. Feels nice to finally play some new areas outside of what the demo offered, and without worrying about a lame time limit. I just finished the Grand Canyon and took a break as soon as I got to Chicago.

The Judgment Ring thing is pretty neat, I've gotten good at hitting the strike areas 100% in battle. And I like the combo system...single input makes me happier. I gotta remember to keep an eye on the SP, I've gone berserk a few times already and lost out on EXP. I'm having fun otherwise, Frank's awesome (cracked up when he grabbed that cactus...) and I like Shania, too. I keep wanting to call her "Shania Twain..." Johnny's design still irks me for some reason. His hair or his jacket...I dunno what it is. He's okay, though.

I like the setting and the humor, nice change of pace from the medieval fantasy stuff I'm used to. I like the music in the Grand Canyon as well as the regular and boss battle music. The music that plays in New York annoyed me but now it's stuck in my head, not sure if that's good or bad.

I'm probably gonna go play again soon, Just itching to get on with the storyline and figure out what in the world is going on with the redheaded dude, really.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Yeah shiana is cool, Fan service for the win.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Okay, so this game is good. It has it's share of problems, such as lame dungeons and sometime's the story just feels ugh. "Wow they aren't hear anymore." ::moves:: "Wow they aren't here either" etc..

I also don't get how people say it's too comedy-ish. The main story doesn't even have that many comedy bits after about 5 hours. The only comedy is the sidequests, which are hilarious. Mao's sidequest is pretty much the best, since the paraodied like every movie ever.

This game is still the worst in the series (excluding Koudelka) but it ends up being satisfying in the end. I just hope we'll find out what happened to Yuri in SH4.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

i need to get back to this an beat it.. but the last boss is giving me problems.. then suikoden 5 and Kh2 made me lose my attention to this game.

FELIPE NO

I'm only up to the Uyuni Salt Lake...Flats...whatever it's called. True story, looking at the box and manual art, I totally thought Hilda was like Johnny's crazy twin or something (hey, they look alike in that art :/ ). I love Hilda, though. Pa-pa-pa-pumpkins. Really enjoying the game. Love the sidequests. I replayed that opening scene in the Caribbean about a million times to see all the possible reactions of the characters. Kind of tired of the scenes with Lady...or at least I'm just tired of watching her walk silently/endlessy while Killer follows and gawks with his dopey slouch. And I wish the battle music didn't change in South America -_-

Oh, and I bought a complete copy of Koudelka on eBay for 24 bucks. Got all the disks, the manual, the case in excellent condition although a little cacked but I don't mind that at all. It just got here today, w00t. Now to buy the other games.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Having finished the game, here's my review:

Quote:

First of all, let me say that I’m a big fan of the Shadow Hearts games. I’ve searched dozens of shops to find a secondhand copy of the first game, after reading rave reviews about Covenant, and after playing it’s sequel, I have to say that it was a huge leap forward, making Covenant one of my personal favourites. Now that we finally see Shadow Hearts: From the New World, the third instalment (actually the fourth if you include Koudelka) released in the US, I find myself once again pretty excited. Now that I have finished the game, I have to say that it didn’t fulfil all the expectations I had, but it’s still an awesome game.

The story is the game’s weak point. We start out following Johnny Garland, a young detective with a mysterious past, who has been hired by the shady professor Gilbert to track down a serial killer on the loose. Happy that he finally gets a real detective job instead of finding lost kittens, he sets out, not knowing that this is only the start of a greater adventure. When he finds the serial killer, it becomes clear to him that this is not the average job. Before he knows it, weird monsters start to appear, and before his eyes a cute Indian chick transforms into a mystical creature sending the appeared monster to oblivion. For the majority of the game, you’ll be tracking down Gilbert, to find out what he knows about the monster, and a mysterious person, only known as “Lady”, who leaves a bloody trail on her quest, accompanied with a murderer “Killer”.

There are a few problems with the story. The main one is that there are some troubles with the pace. You’ll spend a lot of time just going from dungeon to dungeon, with little to no story development. You travel all across the US and South America, but most of the time you’ll only go to various dungeons there. It’s only near the end that you get some answers about Johnny’s past and Lady’s goals, but by that time I had already forgotten what the mystery was exactly, and it took me a while to regain some interest. After that, you get a lot of developments in relatively little time, so it takes a while to process everything. If they had spread all this just a little bit better, it would have had a larger impact.

Another smaller problem is that the game isn’t as dark as the first Shadow Hearts, and to a lesser extent Covenant. Whereas some dungeons in the first game were pretty disturbing, and Covenant had some fucked up scenes, FTNW focuses more on the humour. Although this is a nice development, especially since the game tends to mock RPG stereotypes, I’d like to see it a bit more darker. Only one dungeon could be compared to some of the freaky places in the first game, and it was only an optional dungeon.

FTNW isn’t really a sequel to Covenant. There are some events in Covenant that have consequences for the developments in FTNW, but generally it can be considered a side story. What I do love are the various cameo’s made by some characters (your butler), or certain artefacts, and the constant references to the previous game, like a shop called “Gepetto and Cornelia” in New York. This is nice, although I personally expected more stuff, like what happened to a certain character from the first game who migrated to the States, or to see some more links between the games.

This is probably the craziest cast in the series as of yet. You have a giant cat, who uses a drunken fist style, a middle aged American ninja, a heartbroken mariachi, and a vampire chick who looks rather… kinky. Most of the character development is focused on Johnny and Shania (the Indian chick), and to a lesser extent Ricardo (the mariachi), although the other characters get some background during their sidequests. You’ll either love or hate the characters, and I personally had some difficulties with them. I accepted most of them, but I can’t stand the ninja, Frank. Maybe because his look is just a little bit too ridiculous, or because his voice actor is annoying as hell, but I just don’t like him.

Unfortunately, the villains don’t get as much development. The only one who gets some development in the end is Lady, but it’s still not sufficient, since she does not talk. How can you effectively explain ones motivations if you don’t let her say a word. All she does is walk on and on, without even a hint what she’s doing. As for Killer and Gilbert, they hardly get any development, all Gilbert does is running around a lot, and Killer just follows Lady. We don’t find out why he got his nickname, or what his past is, and the only bit of development you’ll see is his relation to Lady. I have to say that I was pretty excited since you were to have the same villain during the entire game, but I am a bit disappointed with the development.

Graphically, we have a slight upgrade of Covenant. Animation’s good, special effects in battle look cool (and the final spells actually have different animations, since they were basically the same in Covenant except for the colours). The character designs look good, although there are a few that look different in the CG movies than in the regular cutscenes, but the art itself, used for character portraits, isn’t that great. It looks rather unoriginal but it doesn’t bother me that much

One of the main things that I was looking forward to in this game were the monster designs, and they surely don’t disappoint. Covenant had some freaky designs, but there have been some awesome improvements this time, especially in the boss designs. Although they may look simple at first, as soon as they reveal their true forms when casting magic or executing special attacks, you’ll look in amazement at the originality that the designers show.

Music is next to the judgement ring system another of the series’ strong points, especially the battle themes and ICARO. I really love the main battle theme for the US in this game, it’s easily one of the best that the series has. The boss theme lacks the appeal that songs like “Astaroth” has, but the final battle theme (which will remain unnamed since it’s a spoiler) is awesome, and I had it on repeat for days. The town themes are nothing special, and unfortunately, the game lacks a strong sad theme like “Alice”, or “The Fate”. The acoustic version of ICARO, the series main theme are pretty nice, but it still can’t hold a candle to the version from the first game.

Voice acting for most characters is pretty good, except for Frank, as mentioned above. Johnny’s voice sounds a bit too old for his age, but I got used to it quickly. The only other voice that I really don’t like is from a certain character that also was in the other games. His actor in the second game was perfect for the job, but his replacement sounds too goofy. One last thing about the voices that bothered me a bit was that Mao, the cat has a man’s voice, even though the game makes it clear that the character is female. I was a bit confused, thinking that it was a mistranslation at first, but it turns out that it was a localization mistake.

The gameplay based on the judgement ring system is back again, with some minor modifications. I won’t bother with explaining the original system, only the changes. Whenever you get hit or do damage during battle, your stock meter will fill up. When you have one stock, you’ll be able to execute a double attack, or a combo with another character. When you have the gauge filled up to the max, you can perform a double combo, meaning two actions, and link them to another character. When done right, you can execute up to 8 successive attacks, often giving you 100+ hits with tons of damage. I really liked this system, although it seems to give a slight advantage to the enemies, since their stock gauge seems to fill up faster than yours. Bosses can easily obliterate your party if you’re unlucky. This brings me to one of the main improvements; the game’s difficulty has been raised significantly. You’ll have to go all out bosses, since they will slaughter you if you don’t pay attention. The final boss managed to kill me with only ONE attack, even when I had all my stats raised. I was pretty glad with this, since the previous games lacked a decent challenge.

Where as you used Crests for magic in Covenant, this system has been replaced by the similar Stellars, scattered all over the world. It’s an okay system, although I miss the Solomon’s map in Covenant. As for characters unique skills, you still get them from doing various quests, like finding rare coins to pay actors for Mao’s movie, hunting down specific monsters for Natan, or playing ninja mini-games for Frank. Even Johnny’s detective work gives you unique skills. I was rather disappointed with Shania, since the number of fusions has been severely toned down, she only gets 4 in the entire game, and you can’t get different forms, they power up by pouring soul energy in special fetishes.

Sidequests play a major role near the end of the game, and took me 10 hours to complete. Getting characters’ special kills, completing all the stellar charts, and finding the best equipment takes a lot of time. The biggest quest is collecting Snap Cards. Johnny can takes photo’s of enemies in battle, and trade them with other collectors for other cards or special items. When you collect all of them, you get access to a new dungeon, but it’ll be a while before you reach that. What I like most about them is the humour, ranging from Frank doing a test to become a master ninja, or satisfying a certain characters need for kinky magazines, to the Sushi restaurant tournament, which strongly resembles the Man festival in the second game. If you can’t get enough gameplay out of the main game, the sidequests will surely satisfy you.

In the end, From the New World is a cool game, although a slight disappointment in comparison to the previous games. I don’t really care about that, since I still had a lot of fun during the 50 hours that I spent on the game, and if there will ever be another Shadow Hearts game, I’ll surely play it again.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Well, now that Lady finally stopped kicking my ass, I just gotta say: what's up with everyone talking about how not-"dark" or whatever the story is.

I mean, yes, the characters are weird and just fucking odd and whatever, but there's moments in the story that are just fucked the hell up. Sure, it's got plenty of cliches (like:

Spoiler:

OMG SO YEAH ONE OF MY CHARACTERS GOT INFECTED WITH THE BAD SHIT. ALSO, OMG MAIN CHARACTER HAS AMNESIA OF DARK PAST OR WHATEVER

)
but even then, some of the ways the cliches were delivered were kinda . . . messed up in my opinion. Now all I need is some fucking help trying to figure out how to open up sidequest areas apart from Natan's. I made it through the game once by myself, and managed to find a half-way decent amount of stuff (just didn't have the patience right now to get all those damn coins for Mao's shit,) so now all I can do is be annoyed at the half-complete status of most of the faqs that I've seen. Oh well, hopefully by the time I'm done with Kuon, KH2, and SotC and can come back to this, there'll be more side-quest faqs. If not, guess I'll just have to get the second ending to Fatal Frame 3. Stupid long games.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

There's a personal sidequest FAQ thread thing at GameFAQs that helped me out a lot. They don't really specify when some things can be done, or where they can be found (like enemies that drop certain coins for Mao, but that can be figured out easily on your own). But overall it's very helpful.

http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/gen...topic=26968102

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.