Shadow Hearts From the New World – PS2
Grade: Pass
(6.0)
The Shadow Hearts series, though an extremely limited series, has its good, bad and ugly characteristics. Having officially played the entire series, the storyline quality dwindles systematically per installment, but the gameplay definitely increased in options. Coming in this game with reservations from the muck that Shadow Hearts Covenant had with its annoying female lead, read: my overly emotional Yuri-Alice fangirl rant on Karin, shoddy battle system and encounter rate issues, I sort of perceived that this game would definitely be incomparable to Shadow Hearts. Oddly enough, it still isn’t, even with its better options in its battle system and customization, because it is an extremely unbalanced game. However, it definitely gets a Pass because of its gameplay, ignoring its seemingly absent storyline with a mindless, and naïve cast. From the New World, despite its somewhat contemporaneous setting, leaves a lot to be desired for the storyline.
It’s a fairly disappointing storyline. You’re operating as a detective, who takes on all forms of jobs named Johnny. One would believe that a detective had a sense of logic to their thought process. This is undoubtedly incorrect for this character. Despite the shoddy appearance of a random client who comes in, that Johnny cannot even locate with people dying, a random fusion-changing woman meeting him, and a monster creation lab in Gilbert’s office, Johnny doesn’t detect any malpractice whatsoever. . . Equally so is the extremely one-tracked totally fallible female lead Shania, who is clearly an indigenous fetishized representation of a woman by game developers clearly with this fetish, only in the story as filler to take off her clothes for absolutely no reason with Sailor Moon music in the background. It is quite unfortunate to the intelligence of the character bandwagon for them allowing her to assume to the role of leader in their group. But they’re all fairly useless anyway. Natan is a bodyguard, first and last. No characterization whatsoever. Hilda, perhaps the only character with the most character [though clearly schizophrenic] truly has no motivation to tag along with the team, but who would be motivated with its bullshit story anyway? Mao, the cat, is definitely filler and there for entertainment though the humor plops in every execution besides Meowmenator, which isn’t even Mao. Frank . . is an old confused man seeking adventure with humor unequal to his age who attempts to have the gestures and pizzaz of Christopher Walken and thoroughly fails at it. This entire, capable group follows Lady and some renknowned serial killer conveniently named Killer (who isn’t exactly scary at all) to stop them. Stop them from what? Nothing. They just want to kill Lady, because uh, Shania wants to kill Lady. But no, in the last two hours of the game, there is story! Some of it good, some of the plot twist (even if hinted) were bullshit because they seem completely irrelevant to the last two hours of the game since the characters still planned to execute their original plan. Not to mention Lady was a silent antagonist, loosely, and her characterization came from blank unimaginable stares. The ending sucked and the parallelism, what is left of it, of Lady and Killer to Alice and Yuri is distasteful considering the 5% of characterization in the game. Anyway. Bullshit. That can be ignored though, with some of its interesting side arcs like McManus or end game questing.
Best part to the game is its gameplay. Yes, that includes music, battling, character customization and dungeons. What Covenant tried to perfect with team combos is definitely more fluid in FTNW. Character execution is shorter; there is less of a lag time between moves, enemies and whatever menu’ing you end up doing. Fusions is still there, and definitely a good way to have some good skills early in the game, but definitely not on the same level of Yuri SH awesomeness. I found comboing less of a chore and more of something to limit battles to under a minute or so. There is not much grinding necessary, I’d say in the game, because the bosses definitely have patterns and if you understand that vacuuming their faces off to remove stock that’ll kill you, comboing them and understanding height combos and increased damage wins, everything is easy peasy. Unlike their lameness incorporated in-story, the characters are actually useful in battle. Who to use is debate-able, but if you just stare at stats, you’ll understand quickly who you’ll never have to use in the game, ever. This is clearly Mao and Frank. But Frank is especially useful in pit fights with requirements for high numbered combos. Either way, I found the battles to be extremely simultaneous, with a fair encounter rate that was not frustrating. Dungeons were especially short room-wise, but required some puzzles. Thankfully the puzzles aren’t elongated fetch and go like the previous installments. UMA hunts are debatable. The way battling is set up, it is extremely easy to quickly own enemies and have little frustration factors and an uncertainty of having to restart your game. The most dissatisfying aspect to it, was, of course the Judgement Ring. This isn’t because of difficulty hitting the critical areas. It is the fact that the developers were clearly uninterested in creating different patterns, so gamers are stuck with the same ring they’ve been hitting for a long time (throughout the majority of the game until you get more Ring fragments).
The music of the game is satisfactory. I can’t pick out a specific track name that stood out, but I never remember wanting to mute my game and opt for some other music. The US battle music is better than the tribal beat added once you start entering temples. Alcatraz’s music was definitely different, and in a good way. No cacophany here. The character designs were horrible, besides Johnny. It seems like the only “American” is represented tastefully. You can’t compare much to a cat, two naked Natives (WHAT ALL NATIVE AMERICANS LOOK THE SAME?), a vampire and an old, odd Ninja. . . the voice acting sort of sucked, not because of execution, but I didn’t like any of the voices the characters had. Best example of good voice acting it had was in the last 30 minutes with a rant from your favorite professor. I am not a fan of how they rendered the figures compared to other Shadow Hearts games, and the lack of clarity in-towns and whether you’ll step out of the town or not through first exploration, but all in all, it’s an all right game. Good thing it has Game Plus, though I don’t know the effects of it since I haven’t replayed it, but I don’t believe I’d re-start from scratch. The Dollhouse wasn’t even as cool and demented as in the others. Malice seemed so much toned down in this that I wouldn’t even consider it a Shadow Hearts game unless it had fusions and the Judgement Ring. But it had that. All is well.
Filed under: RPG Chatter
