A Psycho (that's what he called himself!) named Yuri, is called upon by mysterious voices to rescue a beautiful magic using Priest's daughter who is the object of desire for the Japanese Army and apparently a number of Warlock's who seek to abuse her powers and unleash the end of the World. Using the "ring" system to make combo attacks, Yuri can absorb the souls of Monsters and merge with them in battle making for a wild ride when you play as the monster. The question then becomes, Can Yuri and friends use their awesome abilities to save Alice and the world? And more importantly, is it even worth trying to save the world in this game when you could be doing something more practical like reading on the toilet? Read on!
Why it sucks: First and foremost, in this day and age we have the necessary technology to make body movements fluid and realistic. The money designing this game obviously didn't include keeping the arms from looking stupid in the budget, or someone in accounting just bought a new car. From the opening scene one can see there's something horribly wrong with the length, shape and most importantly; movement of the character's arms! Watch their faces, head and shoulder movements and even the way they move their bodies. Everything else is great if occasionally goofy looking, but the arms are just terrible! >_< Moving onto the game itself, it's biggest flaw (which more than a few games also share) is that the games moves too quickly and most of the dialogue seems to be filler for time rather than show purpose to the story, unfortunately a number of the scenes in the game are like this doing little or nothing that couldn't be expressed in one sentence. Despite the crappy dialogue, the whole game you're pulled along a narrow path of dungeon, town, dungeon town, town doubles as dungeon. It gets quite repetitive and quite fast I might add >_< Your function in the dungeon (hey... that rhymes! ^_^) is mainly to find the source of evil and that usually means boss fight, which while on the topic of bosses this game has some cheap and LAME bosses if ever I had the misfortune of fighting them. The bosses are a far more interesting fight compared to the pathetic monsters you have the constant displeasure of fighting against in the tired random battle fashion. It's only a challenge if you haven't gotten the point of the stupid ring system in which a hand spins around a dial and you have to hit X when it hits each of the highlighted portions of the dial (which if you can time it just right and hit the edge you'll get either "perfect" or "nice" which increases the effect of whatever you're doing), you do this for pretty much everything! You do this to use an item, cast a spell, attack (which is the only thing it reall makes sense for!), and all special attacks. It's kind of like Legend of Dragoon's fighting engine except... it sucks >_< The fights don't present any real challenge with or without the ring in context and unlike the battle system in LoD, this one makes no sense! In LoD you saw your character charge the enemy swinging and EVERY time the weapon was about to make contact, the squares would meet, flash and THAT was the time to press the button whether it was a combo attack or otherwise! But unlike LoD, you simply hit the 3 spots on the ring and hope for the best because in Shadow Hearts, while you're busy hitting buttons your character simply (and stupidly I might again add)stands there waiting for you to fail or succeed in the ring. This one aspect reflects the game's biggest flaw, it would've made a really cool arcade style game, but this kind of thing doesn't work for an RPG especially when you NEVER get a break from this stupid ring!!! On a final note, it has a couple of nicely done backgrounds... but even Final Fantasy 7 puts those to shame, ditto for the environments in general. You have only so much room to run around and do stuff and the stuff you can do is so pathetically limited that it keeps you plowing through the excuse the game has for a story just to get out of this hell called a game. True, that's a bit harsh, but not totally off base as I can only play this in installments of so much time (and I'll even play Lunar & Dragon Warrior for hours at a crack) and I can only play this before I get so fed up with it that I throw it aside for Starfighter, FFX or Jak & Daxter. This being the semi-sequel to Koudelka, which was no prize winner itself, but was by no means a terrible game deserved better as a sequel. I almost forgot the lame and worthless characters. Margarete in particular drives me nuts because ANY spy like her would've died minutes after signing up at spy headquarters! She's useless! She brags about BEING a spy to her allies AND her enemies!!! And she keeps referring to herself as a genius as she constantly gets almost everyone killed on regular basis and laughs it off. I'm sorry, but despite her being incredibly sexy I see no point to her being even in the game. >_< Kawashima starts out as some spoiled brathigher-up in the Japanese military, but goes on to pull a 180 as she becomes nice after finally witnessing what she's gotten herself into and begins talking like she actually cares about people other than herself. But then there's everyone else who isn't even worth mentioning save Yuri. Yuri has a messed up tortured past and has inherited his father's "harmonixer" abilities, barely surviving a horrific childhood and sadly is the only character worth having in your party. Go Psycho!
Why it rules: Whew! It actually took me time to list the pros to this and that was just sad. I mean, at one point I considered comparing this to pong, but then one word rang in my mind... "DISCOUNTS!!!". Yes, a game which finally has an amusing way of cutting a percentage off the top and the "PERFECT" thingy applies here too! With a guild card in posession one can drop the prices of items and can even raise the price of items you wish to sell! Unfortunately it also revolves around that damn ring, but in a way that one can live with. The ring system was a nice concept, but they should have at least bothered to come up with something a little less... repetitive. Neat try though. The visuals are a nice strength for this thing, even though characters and monsters have that stupid blocky thing going on giving me horrible memories of Tomb Raider. They're sharp, and quite smooth (for blocky people and creatues) which resemble a lot of the stuff one would see on the dreamcast. The choreography used for the spells and attacks actually impresses me sometimes as I truly do enjoy watching my character(s) beat down monsters in front of them laying the smack-down and every unholy beast they see ^_^ The monsters make for a very interesting collection, particularly the ones Yuri and his father can bond with. The mergances are possibly the coolest things about the game ^_^ Of course there's comic relief which doesn't help to add to ANY of the character's likeability, but when Yuri is knocked off his feet and Margarete is standing over him and he says "Whoa! Lady, I can see your..." I had to set the controller aside and laugh. Yuri's horny temptations that he doesn't seem to realize he blurts out loud make him almost likeable, not only that but he seems to realize what a waste of time this terrible dialogue is. :D While totally absurd chracter designs are the word of the day (particularly Bacon's), the women are hot ^_^ And that's ALWAYS a plus! *oink, oink*
Overall: I personally can only recommend this to someone who needs to kill time after recovering from surgery and while just bored as hell. Makes for an okay rental, but I can't recommend you keep it unless you're as bad as Tekyu and buys games just cuz' the girls are hot :) It's got great potenetial as an arcade styled RPG due to it's pulled by the nose story and gameplay, but sucks as far as your typical RPG goes. It's like the abandoned lovechild of Legend of Dragoon and FF8, but got none of FF8's good looks nor LoD's great gameplay. If you do play this and like it (or don't!), I can recommend 2 far superior games for the PSone & PS2: Legend of Dragoon & Final Fantasy (7-10). But still... the girls are hot :) *oink!*