It’s my favourite RPG now. The story is so good, the characters, especially Yuri, are awesome. The soundtrack kicks ass, and the battles are so much fun thanks to the judgement ring.
I do advise though, that you play the first one before Covenant. The graphics are pretty bad, and gameplay isn’t as solid as Covenant, but the story, and characters, once again are awesome.
Both games center on Yuri Hyuga, a half-japanese, half-russian child. He grew up without parents, and lived a lonely life. Yuri is unusual. He is able to fuse with the souls of monsters he defeated. He’s afraid of the ability, he thinks the monster will consume him. One day, a mysterious voice told him to look for the Key of Light. A woman named Alice. And a warlock named Roger Bacon (yes, bacon) is after her. His goal is to destroy the world.
While it doesn’t sound deep, it is. The 2 main characters go through tremendous development in both games. Yuri and Alice in SH1, Yuri and Karin in SH2.
Oh, and the game is set in an alternate world of ours, 1915, just the beginning of World War 1.
The first is pretty short, I beat it after the day I got it. Then again, I played for 20 hours straight.
So, long story short, get the Shadow Hearts series!
Both. Then I accidently deleted my saves (got everything possible in the good save, except for fully upgrading all weapons and getting the highest rank). Doh.
I prefer the bad ending myself. The good one is kinda cheesy.
Have you seen the trailers for SH3? The cast this time is pretty weird. Some hot native girl that has to get naked in order to fuse, a south american ninja (who’s named Frank Goldfinger), a fat cat that uses drunken boxing, and a mexican who’s guitar serves as multiple weapons.
The new main male character looks more feminine than Alice.
Jesus, thanks for reminding me of that shit. Really. Just when I got the image out of my head. Anyway, I can see Nightblade here didn’t do the man festival sidequest. Go do eeet! Go do eeeeeet!
Yes, the Man Festival is . . . an experience. >.>; It wouldn’t have been so bad, but Anastacia was right there with them! @_@
I felt, kinda, that Covenant lost the plot a little towards the end. For example, a lot of the stuff with Kato seemed a bit silly, and his sudden change of sides felt unnatural, just for the sake of an end boss. More nastiness from Nicolai/Asmodeus would have been better.
The female cast didn’t really vary enough to keep me interested in their stories, either. Karin didn’t really seem to have any particularly strong elements of personality - sometimes she was meek, sometimes she was fiery, there didn’t seem to be much consistency in her behaviour. And Lucia was just annoying - from her image and bio, I expected some kind of husky, passionate Italian fortune-telling diva - and all we got was an utter ditz who didn’t have much significance past disk 1 9_9;
Yuri, despite the over-abundance of ‘Bite meeee!’ in his script, was worked in well, though. The scene where they try to resurrect Alice was pretty touching - nice to see a main male character sob his poor heart out XD AND for Karin not to leap in and replace Alice! fist pumping
But overall, I heavily enjoyed the game, even if I preferred the story of Shadow Hearts. The new battle system was great fun and didn’t feel like just a rip off of FF’s anymore - and all the customisation was excellent. The soundtrack had some great tracks, much like the first one; I’m dead impressed with whoever the composer for the SH series is. Roll on SH3, I say (though I’d love to get my hands on Koudelka between now and then, just out of curiosity).
What is Koudelka’s relationship to Shadow Hearts (I was playing the first SH last winter…just killed some kind of demon dog at an air field, I think…this thread wants me to start it up again.)?
