Shadow Hearts

"Heart Of Oddness"

As far as home consoles go, Square-Enix practically has the RPG genre firmly in a headlock. Their Final Fantasy series is (for better or worse) the million-selling gold standard, becoming so successful that is has led to a number of (mostly-awful) spinoff games, and a movie that caused the devoted Square fanbase to stand up in universal harmony and ask for their money back. This kind of bloated brand-milking is the price of great success (Pokemon, anyone?), and many devoted RPG fans are now desperately searching for something new, interesting, and Chocobo-free. To the surprise of many, the call was answered by Midway, a company best-known for fighting games where you can beat people to death with their own limbs. While 99% of the gaming media was hyping Final Fantasy X and its collection of idiot Blitzballers, Midway quietly dropped Shadow Hearts onto the scene, and a very strange franchise was born. Shadow Hearts is utterly bizarre, and lacks the lush production values of a big-budget Square-Enix title. If anything, though, those factors add to the game's scrappy underdog charm. Featuring an odd mish-mash of characters, sexual overtones, a unique fighting system, and wonderfully terrible voice-acting, the game is intriguing if nothing else. If you can handle middling production values and a bizarre artistic sensibility, you'll have a strangely entertaining time with Shadow Hearts.

You'll quickly get a feel for the game's unique style as you watch the introduction, which should have its own wing in the Impossibly Bad Voice-Acting Hall Of Fame. A young girl named Alice is being escorted in a train, for reasons unknown. Before you can finish giggling at the inept dialogue of the guards, they're attacked and killed by a demonic gentleman by the name of (I swear I'm not making this up) Roger Bacon. But as he moves in on Alice, a scrappy little punk named Yuri leaps into the fray and defends her honor. When all is said and done, Yuri and Alice are escaping into the countryside, with Bacon ominously grinning off in the distance. I must insist that you do NOT skip any of these scenes, or get up to grab a soda or anything. Every moment of the introduction is Unintentional Comedy gold. The bit where Yuri crushes Bacon's little pet beastie, and Bacon sadly responds "I was fond of him..." will be quoted ad nauseum by your friends for months. Trust me on this.

The overall story of Shadow Hearts feels like a bunch of odd short stories which were roughly stapled together. Your party of heros is a grab-bag of people who seem to have come together from entirely different time periods. Yuri looks and talks like one of the weird punk guys that gives you missions in the Tony Hawk games, while Alice's outfit suggests that she fell out of one of those creepy European adult movies that people try to sneak onto your computer on file-sharing networks. You've got the wise old wizard from ancient China, and then you've got a modern-era Russian spy complete with a cellular phone and hand grenades. It vaguely reminded me of the first Bill And Ted movie, where Napolean and Genghis Khan were hanging out at the mall together. Your adventure will take you to all sorts of odd locales, from a village of cannibals to a haunted fishing port. Sometimes it feels like Ye Olde Britain, sometimes you're in a futuristic laboratory. It's like talking to someone with multiple personality disorder. Again, though, this ridiculous inconsistency is both amusing and interesting. A game that is full of surprises is more fun than a predictable and sane one, right? The overall vibe seems to be going for a gloomy, Gothic-horror kind of thing, but the goofy dialogue and juvenile sex humor keep things from getting serious.

While Shadow Hearts features random combat encounters (not a favorite of mine), the play system is entertaining enough to counteract the annoyance of enemy pop-ups. While you have the usual collection of attacks, items, and spells, they all operate on the Judgement Ring system. The Judgement Ring is basically a clock of sorts, with a single hand spinning around. There will be a certain number of 'hot-spots' on the Ring, and as the hand spins around, you have to hit the X Button as it passes over each hot-spot. Should you fail, your attempt will falter, and your turn is wasted. While the timing on the Ring is usually not very difficult, brave players can attempt to get higher-quality hits by hitting the edges of the hot-spots, rather than the wider centers. If your timing is good, this is usually a worthwhile gamble. Because each spell or weapon type uses the same Ring design each time, you'll get plenty of practice, so don't give up if you get frustrated early. The Judgement Ring interface is pretty nifty, and it keeps you relatively interested and involved in the battles against weaker foes, which can drag on in other RPGs where you just mash the X Button to keep using the Attack command.

Another fun quirk in the combat system is Yuri himself, who isn't the typical kid-with-a-sword that RPG designers can't get enough of. He's a bare-fisted brawler with the gift/curse of Fusion, which allows him to transform into various monsters and use their powers. Alas, this useful function is rather draining on Yuri's sanity, and as he slays monsters, 'Malice' builds up in a special meter. If you let the Malice get out of hand, ol' Fox Face will come and kindly beat you into a pulp. (Yes, it's a guy in a fox mask. Hey, why not?) To clear his head, Yuri must leap into the graveyard in his brain (or wherever it is) and fight the Malice itself, which will take the form of a monster. Thankfully, the game doesn't go too crazy with this, and you'll only have to de-Malice yourself every once in a while.

While Shadow Hearts can occasionally drag, like most RPGs, there's always something weird around the corner to perk your spirits back up. You've got a flamboyant homosexual who seems to follow your party around so he can power up your weapons. There is absolutely no reason for the guy to be such a stereotypical flamer, other than cheap juvenile laughs. For sheer humor, though, nothing tops the story Sea Mother tells you in Dalian, about the girl who needs to kill her father to have her proper voice restored. The voice-acting is so pitiful and over-the-top that everyone within hearing range of the television will be on the floor laughing. I know that some people don't appreciate camp, but if you do, you'll LOVE this game. You can practically see the developers winking at you as you play it.

Alas, the production values can't match the inspired lunacy of the design. Graphics are okay but unimpressive, and the sheer Gothy bleakness of the backgrounds and monsters starts to wear you down after a while, even with all of the silliness. I know that black goes with everything, but after 30 hours of it, you'll be begging for a little sun. The same goes for the music, which also tends to lean on the eerie side, instead of the melodic. The combat music isn't particularly well-chosen and will get on your nerves after a while. Sound effects are fine, and as noted many times earlier, the voice-acting goes beyond plain-old awful and into the realm of brilliantly bad. Nothing is more tiring than bad voice-acting, and yet few things are funnier than REALLY bad voice-acting. Go figure.

Shadow Hearts is definitely a love-it-or-leave-it game. Some people will find it overwhelmingly bizarre and perhaps even disturbing, and go back to more traditional fare. Others will bask in its well-meaning insanity. If you think you're one of the latter and you enjoy RPGs, you should definitely hunt down a copy.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/07/06