Shadow Hearts: From the New World

"Good, but as good as what came before."

After the ambitious excellence that was SH1, and the near-perfection of SH: Covenant, I was really looking forward to From the New World, both because and in spite of the fact that they were leaving the previous characters and storyline behind and going on to something new.

And I still admire them for not dredging up Yuri & Gang for a third adventure, when they got a perfectly good send-off at the end of the last game, but the new cast and plot is ultimately the reason that SH: FTNW falls short, and there's really nothing the game itself could do to fix that.

The battle system is excellent. It's been refined over the last two games to the point where other turn-based RPGs are absolutely boring rubbish without the Judgement Ring.

Game length was about on par with the other SH games: about 55 hours. I had no problem with that. The sidequests were there, and didn't have a lot of the frustration factor from Covenant.

Graphics were a bit better than Covenant, but not much. Sadly FTNW doesn't have any "Wow!" cutscenes such as Covenant's Amon fighting Rasputin on the blimp, or Kato opening up the final dungeon. FTNW's cutscenes, although pretty, were just kind of ... there.

Which is really the problem here. We spent two fantastic games with the uber-cool Yuri and Alice, but the third gives us a whiny 16-year-old boy detective and Indian Princess Shania, who may be the sexiest character in gaming ever, but was amazingly bland for all but 5 seconds of one of the game's two endings.

All your other characters are more or less imitations of previous SH characters. We even get one who goes around and finds new weapons out of stuff in the background, just like Covenant's Joachim. And all that makes me do is wish I were playing a proper SH3 game.

The plot seems very random and scattered, and is never very interesting. I swear, you could take the cutscenes that progress the plot, scramble them around, and players would never know the difference.

I really did want to love this game, and the localization by newcomer XSeed Games was fantastic, but the characters and plot was just so generic, and the villain we were supposed to be frightened over was so weak (Literally, one hit, and she was down), that it just doesn't compare to the previous SH games. Hopefully, they'll think outside the box a bit more for the next SH game, and give us something other than a watered-down rehash.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/05/06