In tenth grade, my friend Albert (who today would probably be best known for his work on this) came to school with a hilarious bit of trivia. It seems he found a book in his pastor’s office that listed off pop culture icons that defied God. Most notable among the entries, it suggested we shun the Smurfs because a) Papa Smurf used magic to help his fellow smurfs instead of prayer, and b) Gargamel drew actual Satanic symbols when casting his own evil spells. While these aspersions seem about as productive as speculating on the sexual orientation of a teletubbie, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, the final instalment of my reviews on the game series, kinda, sorta, actually does this.

Legend states that King Solomon used a ring engraved with the Star of David to capture and enslave 72 demons. A book known as Goetia, The Lesser Key of Solomon, or sometimes Lemegeton, supposedly authored by Solomon himself, lists off all these demons, describes them, and shows the crests used to call them into service. Not only does Covenant base its magic system off this legend, sending the player across the world to find these demons and equip them, but when you summon them in-battle, the actual crest from the book appears on the battlefield. So just a warning, while I recommend this game, you may run the risk of actually calling monsters out of your television.

Yuri (as Amon) and Karin in homage to the box art to the original game

Now that I’ve issued my disclaimer, I can get on with describing the game…except I don’t really have much to say that differs from my articles on the original Shadow Hearts or From the New World.

The game follows Yuri Hyuga once again, continuing from the bad ending of the first game.  The Vatican sends Nikolai Conrad, who has a personal beef with Yuri for beating Albert Simon before he had the chance, to curse him.  Attacked with the “holy mistletoe” curse, Yuri loses all weapons, items, and fusion demons from the last game, as well as the ability to get any action from the game’s double-D female lead (which, not to ruin the game for you, probably works out in Yuri’s favor.)–probably the games greatest irony considering mistletoe’s reputation for inspiring sexual hedonism akin to playing Twister.  Once thusly cursed, Yuri and Company set off on a crusade to take down the secret society responsible for making the Vatican look like Dick Cheney’s personal assassination squad. Along the way he rediscovers demons and, you know, just might learn a little something about himself.

Like the original, Covenant emphasizes character development over action and plot. Unfortunately, players despise quick-time events that ask them to “press X to not die,” so I don’t think they’d readily accept “press X to introspectively examine your purpose in life after the death of your lover.” On the positive side, Nautilus did not actually include these events in the game, instead favoring flimsy excuses for geographical movement into a series of irrelevant dungeons.

Torture scenes exist in all three main series games…but only here do you get a BDSM dominatrix along with the pain.

And while the story masterfully outlines Yuri’s development, I wouldn’t go so far to say that each character adds something vital to the story.  Much like the dungeons, it feels like the guys at Nautilus sat around trying to think up caricatures to round out a battle party.  “We can’t get through the game with only two characters!” someone said. “Let’s throw in a super-hero….pro wrestling…vampire,” offered a staff writer, who probably just flipped through the nearest copy of Game Informer until he found three successful titles. Granted, when given the option of using a super-hero pro-wrestling vampire, few players will resist the call.  Shadow Hearts has always designed their characters people want to use in battle.

But hey, if you do one thing well, just do it ad nauseum, right? The game uses the alternate history genre to present a parade of cameos. Characters from the first game make appearances, including Kato, Albert Simon, Roger Bacon, Alice, Keith and Margarete–as well as historical figures like Lawrence of Arabia, the Great Gama, Gregori Rasputin…and Margarete.  Also, Kato looks more than a little bit like Bruce Campbell, so that should count for something, I think.

Summoning demons with a book, resurrected girlfriend, and chins bigger than China…coincidence?

However, the carnival of characters and the dismissive plot tend to retcon parts of the game’s universe. Apparently, Albert Simon only wanted to destroy the world in the first game because he needed more power to fight one of the major villains in this game. I’d need a good long time with the latest edition of the DSM to count the psychological disorders required to make that logic work. Apparently Yuri only needed to sit down with him and have a chat about the problems of overkill to solve the conflict in SH1.  Whether he does or not, the change in motives takes the fangs out of previously enjoyable villainy.

Covenant improves on mechanics developed for the original.  Players have options for customizing the judgement ring, as well as equipping an item that slows it down to a reasonable speed.  In the first game, the ring fixed the traditional RPG mechanic of finishing battles by hitting X repeatedly–by making you hit X four times as often and at very precise moments.  Covenant offers their characters a reasonable amount of MP, making magic and special techniques a valid option. The game clearly had influences–if you ran a drug test, its urine would contain more than trace amounts of Final Fantasy–but in Covenant, it developed enough of its own flair to stand on its own…which of course made it branch off into obscurity, eventually leading to the cancellation of Shadow Hearts 4 and the downfall of the series, despite attaining a quality and ease of playability that other RPGs would envy.

Yes, the dog is sidling to avoid being seen.

Covenant exists to impress. This game introduced me to the series, and still stands as its strongest game.  A rare occurrence of RPG direct sequelage, it manages to inform the player of all relevant plot points from the first game in less than three cut scenes, seemingly animated by Yuri’s own hand-drawings of the events.  These scenes also illustrate the otherwise dark, gothic game’s aloof sense of humor, although the gay-sex-between-athletes innuendo remains a reward for the fervent side quester.

And on a final note, Shadow Hearts does side quests better than any any other game I’ve played.  If you’ve ever played an RPG, you’ve probably gone through dozens of quests for ultimate weapons, magic, or skills, only to find yourself at the end of the game with literally nothing left to use them for except the final boss who at that points fights back with all the rage and fury of a plastic cup filled with pudding.  Covenant, however, offers multiple side quests for every character, most of which include full-length dungeons and bosses.  Yes, eventually you’ll run out of options and have no choice but to end the game, but by then the game feels satisfying, if not just a little too easy.

So I should probably throw this in before wrapping this up: Solomon didn’t write the book.  Unless he knew German. And worshiped Jesus…thousands of years before his birth.  But as an element of the real world–as well as all the other real-world elements in Covenant–it immerses the player into the fantasy, and it does it well.  Well enough, obviously, to get me to play an entire series over the course of two months.  Although I don’t rate games, I feel this particular game merits some sort of quantitative praise, so I will bestow upon it my highest ranking: 10 stars out of two thumbs up multiplied by 100 tomatoes.

Why play the game? Here are two big reasons.

Sorry for the delays in updating. I’ll target some shorter games over the next few weeks to make up for it. Thanks for reading!

Shadow Hearts holds the distinction of having the most kick-ass box art of all time.

Hehehe.  Let’s talk writing for a bit.  Hehehe.  Villains have made derisive laughter an art form. People love it.  I used to practice my evil laughter as a kid.  Hehehe. It even merited an Austin Powers gag. Hehehe.  Used correctly, it can create an air of menace by painting a game’s enemy as powerful and confident, a daunting task for the hero. Used incorrectly, it gives the impression that he may wander off in the middle of the battle looking for something to eat.

And sadly, Shadow Hearts leans in the direction of the latter, with villains and heroes alike floundering in the aftermath of a dentist-office gas explosion.  While I love the series, I can’t help but admit the flaws in the writing.

The first game in the Koudelka universe branded with the series’ title, Shadow Hearts introduces Yuri, the harmonixing youth with a heart of gold and a soul full of filthy, horrible monsters.  Hearing a voice in his head telling him to rescue Alice, the damsel in distress, from the Japanese Army who hold her prisoner on a train bound for Shanghai.  Finding the Japense soldiers dead, Yuri squares off against an English gentleman who goes by the name of Bacon, a moniker that, when shouted in a spirit of anger and vengeance, equates the game’s antagonist with clogged veins and heart disease.  After receiving a thorough trouncing, Yuri summons the strength to leap into the stratosphere while carrying Alice (because in video games, injuring people only makes them stronger) and the two land in the first of many episodic, horror-themed, RPG adventures.

I’ll spare the details of the rest of the plot because they simply don’t matter.  For a story with so many things going for it, the actual action of the story could have coalesced from the flotsam of sunken B-horror films. They don’t fit together well, but the game wants us to focus on them, even going so far as to devote major cut scenes to ghost-story backgrounds for minor bosses. At one point, Yuri and Alice stumble onto a village terrorized by a ghost who kills a new victim each night.  When the elder tells them about the ghost, she really hams it up.  Real people supposedly have died, and this monster has put Alice under the fatal curse, and this woman squeezes out onomatopoeia that would make five-year-old girls giggle.

Kinky! The second of four games, the female lead has gone up to about a B-cup. Future games will push those boundaries.

But you don’t play Shadow Hearts for the plot, you play it for the premise.  Oddly enough, the character development and relationship between Yuri and Alice carry the story.  As a harmonixer, Yuri fuses with monsters to gain strength in battle, but the demons possessing him take their toll on his soul. The battle system furthers this aspect of the story; characters have sanity points they must maintain, and every time Yuri transforms, his sanity points drop drastically. Running out of points drives characters into a berserk state where they can’t distinguish friend from foe, and it counts towards a K.O., depriving them of exp at the end of battle.

In what I consider a fascinating treatment of a hero (even an anti-hero), Yuri can’t withstand the effect this has on him.  He succumbs to insanity and destroys Shanghai.  Later, after she brought him back to his senses, Alice tries to save Yuri’s soul by offering her own to the god of death.

Er…spoilers…

Torture…mini skirts…peg leg…there’s so much going on in this scene I can’t withstand the power.

And in that aspect, one of my major beefs with the series emerges, because Alice’s fate changes depending on which ending you get, and while the player can work through some interesting challenges to get the good ending, the easy ending to achieve actually feels more satisfying.  Yuri struggles for peace in his soul during the whole game, and he owes much of that peace to his relationship with Alice.  The fact that his peace requires her death provides a darkly poetic irony to conclude the story, and also to propel him into a frustrated angst that moves him to action in the sequel.

On a technical aspect, the game doesn’t vary too much from its successors, Covenant and From the New World.  The judgement ring still stands between you and nearly every action you perform, including magic, physical attacks, items, and interacting with the non-combat environment.  While I’ve previously praised this idea (somewhat) for making the game more engaging, I sometimes feel that it doesn’t always make sense; I would think the whims of fate have very little to say in whether or not you can pick up kettle from a table.  That more often falls under the whims of degenerative neuromuscular disorders, which don’t seem to bother Yuri most of the time.

One staple of modern RPGs becomes extra annoying in this game; the three-character party.  Too many games feature multiple characters as a selling point, only to limit you to a three-member team.  Furthermore, they generally require you to stick with whatever twat they’ve decided to make protagonist (I’m looking at you, Legend of Dragoon!), which pretty much limits you to two characters.  Now, while I’d play with Yuri more often than other characters, I still enjoy all the others–in fact, Shadow Hearts has made a name for itself by introducing bizarre characters in every game, so I hate cutting anyone from the team.  Furthermore, I grew very fond of Zhuzhen, the Chinese wizard, but halfway through the game, the new characters eclipsed his power in a way that made him obsolete.  I liked the ol’ coot, and for some reason they paired up Yuri with a new old-guy friend in Covenant, so he sadly drops out of the story.  Margarete, the “alluring female spy” also intrigues me–mostly because if you google her name, pages about Mata Hari pop up.  Sadly, Mata Hari dies during World War I, so I guess they had a reason for keeping her out of the sequel.

First of many appearances by the judgement ring

The game has math issues as well. The bonus for hitting the judgement ring in the strike zone adds only a small boost to attacks, noticeable only at mid-game levels and not effective until end-game levels.  Every enemy has one of six different elemental affiliations, but using opposing-element attacks has all the effect as mounting a spatula to the end of a bayonet. Support spells grant similar half-hearted measures, akin to increasing your defensive capabilities with a fine, state-of-the-art sheet of newsprint, or increasing your speed by thinking about a Roadrunner cartoon you saw as a kid. Halfway through the game I realized I could take off all stat-increasing equipment and replace them with accessories that grant status immunity and still suffer no noticeable loss in power or defense.

The unwelcome house-guests of the soul take inspiration (mostly) from the suits of a tarot card deck.

Fortunately, the game knows it failed miserably, as evident by the fact that the sequels fix all of the complaints I just raised here.  Elements and status attacks have a noticeable impact in Covenant and FTNW, equipment offers helpful bonuses, and parties consist of four members.  Furthermore, the game recognizes that just because characters don’t enter battle, they also don’t vanish entirely, and the subsequent games let you switch out the main characters when you don’t feel like using them.  I always thought the convention of peek-a-boo style party forming didn’t make sense.  At one point during Shadow Hearts, in his quest for the ultimate weapon, one of my characters had to fight his brother one-on-one.  Unfortunately, little bro KO-ed my fighter, and even though five other playable characters witnessed this event and still had full control of their senses and perfect health, I found myself staring down the business end of a Game Over screen.

Maybe it wouldn’t bother me as much if I hadn’t saved over an hour earlier…

Sorry for the infrequent posting, but school demands more attention. I’ve been on a Shadow Hearts kick lately, so expect a review of Covenant next. Afterwards, Anne wants me to play The Last Story for Wii, and I’d like to go to a Sega or SNES RPG, so that should be interesting. Don’t touch that dial.

Playing video games regularly for over twenty years, I’ve absorbed them into my identity, and constructed an elaborate vision of the afterlife based on them.  Once I die, I’ll unlock the New Game + option and restart my life from birth with all the possessions and experience from my first life.  Using this advantage, I can explore the world in more detail and test out the alternatives to decisions I made the first time through.  Eventually, by discovering every available potential story line, I’ll unlock the “Good Ending.”

Think Buddhism, but without the discipline or commitment.

Still, this scenario relies heavily on the assumption that the “Bad Ending” comes more easily and that I actually desire the “Good Ending.”  Unfortunately, the Shadow Hearts series routinely flouts this concept, rewarding players for overcoming enticing challenges with good endings written with the appeal of an off-Broadway musical version of Twilight.  So I have to decide between extending my stay in a game with a colorfully dark atmosphere and impossibly well-conceived side quests or walking away from a deep contemplation of malice and monstrosity in the human soul with a positive, bubbly, can-do attitude toward the world.

Let me rewind, though, and start from the beginning–of the third game.  Shadow Hearts: From the New World rounds out the trilogy of games about a man with demons fused into his heart searching for love, acceptance and purpose in a Europe and Asia torn apart by the malice preceding World War I by creating an epilogue starring none of the same characters, demons, or setting as the first two games and taking place well over a decade after they ended.  But in spite of the awkward continuity break, the game actually turned out pretty good.

Quack, quack, quack!

Nautilus has played with combining the irreverent with the dark, and by this game they managed to construct a world of Lovecraftian horrors that will leave you rolling in the aisles.  You play as Johnny Garland, sixteen-year-old boy detective and the least interesting character in the entire Shadow Hearts series.  As the game opens, the creepy Professor Gilbert, on sabbatical from his quest to become the kingpin gangster in Gotham City, hires Johnny to track down a missing person.  Unfortunately, his career in investigation comes to a dramatic end when a monster materializes and eats the guy he’s tracking.  But to prove the adage that every time God shuts a door, he opens a peep show, Shania, an Aryan Native American with breasts the size of all three pair owned by protagonists of the two previous Shadow Hearts games and Koudelka put together.

Seriously…I’d play it just for this guy.

Now you may remember me praising Samus Aran for contributing her femininity to a story that doesn’t ask for or need her gender in the least.  Considering my stance there, I’d come off as incredibly hypocritical and misogynistic if I confessed to favoring Shania because I enjoyed watching her.  Well, yeah, she has the anatomical proportionals a Barbie Doll and kind of gives off the vibe that no one can focus a story around a Native American unless their standing ovation happens in the players’ pants, but to that I say one thing: Frank Goldfinger.  Very shortly after Shania joins your party, you encounter the middle-aged Frank hiding behind a cloth sheet as three monsters pound the snot out of him.  When he emerges bragging about how neither Johnny nor the monsters ever saw him, he claims to have studied the Brazilian Ninja Arts in order to protect the United States.  At that point, the game’s message rings through like an air raid siren in a library; don’t interpret anything seriously.  The irreverent, nonsensical characters count among the games strongest features.  If you partake in a certain side quest, you even realize that each one supposedly embodies one of the seven deadly sins, a very interesting bit of symbolism until you realize that Gilligan’s Island actually pulled it off much better.

Yeah, it LOOKS easy…

Like previous instalments of the series, combat revolves around the Judgement Ring, a spinning dial that asks the player to activate it at very specific points in order to determine the success and effectiveness of attacks and spells.  While many RPGs suffer from excessively repetitive combat that often forces you to just hit “X” over and over until the battles end, the Judgement Ring offers a more engaging system that asks you to hit “X” more often and at very specific times than those games.  Oddly enough, it works. It encourages players to aim for minuscule strike zones to buff up their power, which increases the chances of missing altogether and screwing up the attack.  For a mechanic intended to represent the unpredictable whims of fate, it creates a sense of control over the battle that few other games can rival.

In addition to the characters and the combat system, the game design and atmosphere make the game worth playing.  I enjoy the works of H.P. Lovecraft, but holy hackney Batman, his stories sound like he threw the Oxford English Dictionary into a garbage disposal and dumped it onto a page covered in glue.  So what I really mean when I say I enjoy Lovecraft is that I enjoy Shadow Hearts and appreciate his influence on them.  Nautilus painted a dark world with vibrant colors.  The unorthodox monster design offers something more grotesque than the standard vampire, werewolf, zombie, or other human- and animal-based design.  I’d pay $50 for a Shadow Hearts 4 just for the artwork.

Well, mostly non-humanoid

Like the monsters, the game itself gives us something refreshingly unorthodox.  Most RPG developers work within the fantasy genre, with sci-fi as their backup.  The real-world, alternate-history setting of this series, and I understand the New World setting for all I mock it.  It didn’t make sense at the end of Covenant to continue with Yuri’s story, while the Americas provide an untapped source of history and landmarks to work with.  It provides enough background to qualify for the series; the judgement ring, lottery games, a wacky vampire from the Valentine family, Roger Bacon and his porn addiction, and the emigre manuscript.  While the plot doesn’t wow me with complexity, they use events and ideas from previous games to prevent the story from falling into formula.  The plot of From the New World springs primarily from Nikolai Conrad’s release of Malice in Covenant, along with the running theme that no one has ever successfully resurrected the dead using the emigre manuscript.

While many found it a weak follow-up to the games starring Yuri Hyuga, and the game itself didn’t make enough money to ensure continuation of the series, the game doesn’t disappoint.  This forgotten/hidden gem perfects the judgement ring combat system and adds an entertaining complexity to the magic system and combo attacks.  Also, I bought the soundtrack for this game (and for Covenant) because it created such a perfect mood.  Bottom line: don’t play From the New World expecting a strong story or a familiar protagonist (although enough characters make cameos to keep it entertaining); play the game because Nautilus perfected their art and won’t likely make any more instalments of a great, atmospheric series. And breasts. Large, but not quite comically large breasts.