Title: Shadow Hearts
Company: Midway
Genre: RPG
Platform: Playstation 2
Release Date: 12/11/2001

Synopsis: On a night train in the middle of 1914 China, a young woman by the name of Alice Elliot is being taken to Japan by the Japanese military. After an unfortunate incident that left her father for dead, Alice hopes part ways with the murderer. But as fate would have it, the man who killed her father is still after her as he makes his move on the train. Will a good samaritan act by the young Yuri Hyuga be enough to stop the menace?

The Highlights
Story: Intriguing, but sluggish.
Graphics: Uninspired.
Style: Great art and atmosphere.
Sound: Horrid voice acting.

Shadow Hearts was one of those games that I happened to see and wondered if it would be worth playing or not. So while paying no mind to the reviews of friends and magazines, I took it upon myself to see if this was any good. The end result of my efforts had me glad to have played through an interesting story but wish I had happened to see a game of more promising appeal two weeks before.

While pleasing at first with a nice presentation of the setting and art style, sluggish pacing of the plot drag the quality of the game down. Unfortunately, graphics are not up to par with some of the other games of the time. The backgrounds are plain and the 3-D character models are poorly designed. The game does not try to wow you with special effects, either (with the exception of a few key cinemas in the game).

The diverse soundtrack complements the different atmospheres of the game. The voice-acting sucked. I couldn’t help but shake my head and wonder “What were they thinking?” while listening to some of the voices of the characters. I would be watching a serious cinema while all riled up by the story, but end up cringing when hearing some of the voice-acting involved in the event. Sacnoth could have done better by just having text for dialogue or keeping the Japanese vocals with subtitles on the American version.

But Shadow Hearts is not all bad as it presents a story good enough to capture the hearts of a decent number of dedicated fans. The art style of the characters and atmosphere is nice from all angles, too. I didn’t think the mixing of humor and horror would work as well as it had, where I enjoyed some laughs along with a little suspense.

There are plenty of other games on the market to spend your time and money on. The only reason why I would recommend playing this is to better understand the plot of Shadow Hearts: Covenant, the sequel, as the two games are tied pretty closely together.

The Rating: 5

Reviewed by: Blazer