[PS2] I'm a bit late to the party, but... Shadow Hearts II is the best RPG on the PS2.

Which I never expected when I got the game. It shines in every catagory imaginable - music, graphics, voice acting, story, cool concept, battle system, and most of all, characters.

The game is set in an unusual time period for an RPG - during the start of World War I. The games starts off from the view of Karin, an officer in the German army, who is leading a squad of German soldiers to kill a demon that has been protecting a town from the German army. The demon destroys her squad, but spares Karin for whatever reason. From there, you meet up with an exorcist from the Vatican, who is actually a member of a secret society bent on taking over Europe. When you get back to the town to kill this demon, there's a nice confrontation where the exorcist and the demon talk about all sorts of stuff that neither you nor Karin understands... and it ends with the demon, who is actually the game's main character, getting cursed and fighting off the exorcist and his allies, while joining up with Karin.

From there the story really takes off. The first disc features Europe and Russia - you'll find yourself in Wales, France, England, a bit of Germany, Paris, and all sorts of other places. And Russia, of course. Despite the fact that the game takes place during WWI, the game doesn't let actual historical fact get in it's way. The actual events of WWI play absolutely no role in the story after the first 30 minutes or so. And sure, Rasputin may or may not have assassinated the Russian Romanov dynasty in real life, but I doubt he did it quite the way he tried in this game... Heh.

The second disc takes place in Japan, and it gets pretty interesting. I won't give any more details... but this game's story is absolutely fantastic.

Despite what it looks like at the beginning of the game, the game is not overpowered by an atmosphere of a gothic Europe, with demon worshipers and corrupt church officials... thank god. I was a bit worried that the game would end up like that after the first half-hour of playing, but the developers did a very good job of avoiding that particular cliche.

This game's atmosphere is a bit difficult to describe, mostly because it's full of contradictions and goes all over the place... and manages to remain coherent at the same time. The game goes through several transitions in the atmosphere department. For the first part of the game, it deals with secret societies, people making pacts with demons, wise religious sages hiding in caves, and generally has a dark, almost Da Vinci code-ish atmosphere... if the Da Vinci Code had demons and dark magic, at least. The second disc, which takes place in Japan, has an entirely different, lighter atmosphere, as you can imagine. There's a third distinct part of the game, which takes place between the two and I won't even try to describe.

And throughout it all, there is one thing that is always there: bouts of light-heartedness. The game is absolutely hilarious, and just plain crazy. For instance, the game only features one shop-keeper in the entire game, who follows you around and can be found in the wierdest places. This shopkeeper has a brother who is always with him. And both of them are flamboyantly gay. The brother will give you new dresses for one of your characters, which are elementally based, whenever you bring him a "stud card." I'll let you imagine what exactly those are. It sounds quite disturbing, actually, but the developers managed to make it hilarious.

Another example is... later in the game, there's this evil mage guy who's kinda arrogant. He's also extremely small, a midget, and he's the most wrinkled old man I've ever seen in a game. He flies around on a floating stool. Kinda funny looking. Well, at one point in the game, he pulls you into some alternate dimension, a kind of hell. You go through this really annoying, relatively difficult trek to get out of it, fighting your way past all these monsters. At the end, this guy confronts you, and starts making all these horrible threats and talking about how he's going to crush your souls, send you through unending torment, etc. While he's talking about all this, your whole party ignores him completely and has a conversation about why he's riding a flying stool, and where they might be able to get one. Going back and forth between this conversation among your party members and this guy's threats makes for quite a humorous scene.

Oh, and we mustn’t forget Roger Bacon, the thousand year old wizard/wise man who guides you and helps you through a few points in the game. He reminds me of the old scientist dude from Back to the Future more then anything else.

It is the contrast between the game’s darker, more serious plot and atmosphere and it’s humor that makes said humor really shine. A contrast like that rarely ends well – if you stuck some of this stuff in, say, FF8, I think it would just end up clashing with the serious side of the game. But SH2’s developers managed to make these two aspects of the game compliment each other, and the result is amazing.

The glue that holds all this together, and is really the best part of this game, is its characters. With the possible exception of Xenogears (I’ll have to think about that one), I truly believe that this game has the best cast of characters I’ve ever seen in an RPG. Most of you will not agree that it’s the best cast ever, since tastes differ, but there’s no denying that they are very well done. The first thing I noticed is the voice-acting, which is extremely good, right up there with some of the greats, like Baldur’s Gate II and Xenosaga. It is an extremely varied group, which really reflects the contrast between the game’s humor and seriousness. Every character that joins your party manages to be both hilarious and serious, at varying stages of the game. My favorite character is the main one, Yuri. He is a badass – forget Sephiroth, Yuri is where it’s at. He combines something like Ryu Hayabusa’s style of badassery with some of the greatest dialogue I’ve seen in an RPG. He’s extremely insolent towards your enemies, which provides many opportunities for both laughs and good characterization of himself and everyone around him. He’s kinda sarcastic, that sort of guy. Very, very well done.

Another good example is Joachim. He’s a vampire, first of all. Second, he’s trained as a pro-wrestler, and his weapons include desks, support pillars, cryogenically frozen salmon, and stone statues. Third, he fights for “justice.” Fourth, he is very naïve, innocent. Fifth, he has an extremely deep voice… except when he’s in bat form, when he has an extremely high voice. Sixth, occasionally he puts on his wrestling mask, and adopts his wrestler name: Grand Papillon. Seventh, you’ll occasionally run into his teacher, an enormously large middle-eastern guy wearing a turban, a ridiculous mustache, and sumo-wrestler style loincloth… and they’ll hit it off, have an overdramatic talk about their fight-for-justice wrestling philosophy, and then duel.

Now, step back and just think about that list of characteristics. Hilarious? Absolutely. Especially when you get Anastasia, the little girl of the group, leading him around and having him hang off of her every word through the sheer force of her slightly overbearing, confident personality.

The enemies are great, too. I won’t spoil anything, but I will say… the final enemy is a wonderful one. He is a very 3-dimensional character, and you completely understand his reasoning for what he’s doing. You see all sides of him, as ally, neutral party, old friend, and foe… and at the end, I feel sorry for and emphasize with him. At one point, I found myself thinking that maybe his choice of course would be best for the world, and that the main characters should let him go on. The game eventually got me back to thinking that he needed to be defeated, but man… it’s so rare for a game to manage something like that successfully.

Another great example of this is at one point in the game, when you’re assaulting an enemy stronghold, cutting through their soldiers like a hot knife through butter, on a mission to kill an important guy. Every scene or so in that place, the game would cut to the perspective of the enemy soldiers – the way they’re fighting for their leader, the way they’re desperately trying to hold you off, their frantic plans to arrange an evacuation while sacrificing themselves to delay you and your party. These are not nameless soldiers I’m fighting my way through here – these are characters with personalities and beliefs, which they are fighting for. They’re standing up to the invader that has come to their home and is slaughtering them – you.

I won’t go into any more detail, since I’m already long-winded enough. Suffice to say, this game’s characters are amazing, especially once you start getting to the second disc and you stop fighting so many demons in favor of more human enemies. Great voice acting, amazing dialogue, hilarious humor, sadness, successfully conveyed emotion which is presented in such a way that you have no choice but to empathize… These characters are masterpieces. Very unique character designs, too, which I definitely enjoyed.

Graphics and art-style… were good. Not nearly as amazing as the characters and whatnot, but the graphics looked nice, and I loved this game’s art style, which shines through in character and environment designs. You can always tell someone you’re supposed to talk to apart from someone who doesn’t really matter. For example, let’s look at Paris. The place is kinda subdued, darker and drab. How it was in real life at that period in time, pretty much. Everyone’s walking around in dark clothes, business suits, nothing special at all. And then you come across an important character, and they stand out like a sore thumb because, oh, maybe they’re an evil dominatrix with a whip and skimpy clothes. All of the cities and whatnot are designed true to their historical counterparts, and the same can be said of NPCs… but any important characters or places get unique designs that reflect the game’s… style. I quite enjoyed the way they did this.


Music was very good. I’m listening to it right now, actually. I had originally heard a lot of it before playing the game, and wasn’t too impressed. It just didn’t appeal to me much, because it has a very unusual style to it. But after playing the game, I love it. Interesting how that works, isn’t it? The music fits the game itself perfectly, and compliments the atmosphere they’re going for.


Surprisingly, this game is awesome from a gameplay point of view as well. The battle system has a unique feature to it, which they call the “Judgement Ring.” It’s essentially a circle, with this little line that swings around it. The circle has all these spots on it which correspond to attacks, and you have to time your button presses so that it hits these spots. Let’s say you have a character who can attack up to five times with his basic attack command. He’d have five of these spots on the circle, and you’d have to hit each of them in order as the line swings around the circle. If you hit the first two and miss the third, your character would get two of his five attacks out. On top of that, each hit spot has a very tiny little sliver of extra color, and if you hit that, you get extra damage for that attack.

I’m not sure how well I’m describing this, but it actually works very well, and there is almost no learning curve.

This allows for some cool status effects – one that will make the line move faster, slower, backwards, make the hit spots invisible, make it erratic, what have you. You can do all sorts of things to customize each character’s judgement ring, upgrading them, making them easier or harder, adding special effects, etc.

There is are lot more advanced aspects to the battle system, involving combos, sanity points, stuff like that… but I won’t really get into it. I actually made very little use of a lot of this stuff and don’t understand some of it well anyways… but the option to truly excel at, rather then merely squeak through, the battles is there.

Oh, and this game has some awesome sidequests. Lots of them, and more fun then most. It is very rare for me to even care about the end-game sidequests that get you the most powerful summons, spells, optional bosses and whatnot, but the sidequests in this game often bring about interesting story details, or are hilarious. I actually did most of them, which is practically unheard of for me. I don’t usually have the time to dedicate to sidequests, and it takes an unusual game to get me to do them. My only complaint is that all these awesome items and spells and stuff that I got made the final boss too easy, but I really brought that on myself.

I’m running out of time, so I’m going to wrap this up: Shadow Hearts: Covenant rocks my socks. Buy it.

They recently came out with Shadow Hearts III. It's not supposed to be as good, but I'll definitely be picking it up, just the same.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Ah, another Shadow Hearts fan *tear*

The second one is a really awesome game (I HEART the battle system!), but the first one has probably got to be my favorite (finally got it off Ebay, and I've been replaying it~~!). I have yet to play III, although I heard the storyline isn't as strong as the first two (which is what I look for in a game, but meh, it's Shadow Hearts!)

The only problems I have with the second one is:

Spoiler:

They had World War I as a great start into the story, but it felt as though they ignored it after the first few hours. Just my personal preference, but I'd liked if Yuri's party were more involved in the war.

I also didn't like a lot of the humor. In the first Shadow Hearts, it was a awesome blend of macabre horror with witty sarcastic humor. Shadow Hearts 2 had less horror and more humor.

SH1 Yuri was a vulgar and crude bad-ass, while SH2 Yuri,still bad-ass, felt more "toned-down." Dunno; I guess it's just my nostalgia talkin' ;__;

Karen was one of the coolest female hero, but I didn't like the time paradox between her and Yuri either.[spoiler]

Ah, damnit, now I'm in a Shadow Hearts mood. Guess I could go look at my artbook again <3

There's nowhere I can't reach.

It helps if you use spoiler tags properly...thankfully it wasnt a spoiler to me.

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

Yeah, I am playing 1 but have already bought 2 and 3 and plan to play those next. Most other rpg's pale in comparison to this series for those of us who like a little humor in our games...

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

Sh2 brought back the traditional RPG style that many such as myself felt were long lost. I myself wont go as far as to say it's the best RPG on the PS2. As far as side quests are concerned, FF8 is still the reigning champion, but SH2 had plenty good ones. Especially when it come to

Spoiler:

Dark Seraphim, Neo Amon, and the final fusion form for Kurando

.

I was speaking idiomatically.