Shadow Hearts: From the New World Review By Jonathan Mills Apr 11, 2006 - 12:12:00 AM

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Shadow Hearts: From the New World is the 3rd entry into this Traditional Japanese RPG Series. The 4th game developed by Aruze, which is comprised of ex Square employes. Let's see how it stacks up.

The Shadow Hearts series is one of my personal favorites, and a special thanks must be givin to newcomer XSEED game's who localized and published it in the States after the original publisher Midway, pulled out.

This series continues to take place in the early 1900's, a period that is rarely depicted in games. While the last 2 games focused on the east, this game focuses on the west, that being North and South America. Their is no overworld, so you'll travel from place to place via an onscreen map. Gamplay is traditional here, you'll find yourself leveling up, traveling from town to town, talking to people, battling, advancing the story, rinse and repeat. Thankfully though, this series has always had a few innovative quarks that spice things up, thankfully, this continues in this installment.

I never get to deep into stories with my reviews, and I wont budge here, the story is the most important part of any game and you should fully discover that yourself. I will say that as with previous installments, this game continues with the very strange and unique style fans of the series have grown to love. All of the characters are lovable with one exception (this explained in the negatives) all having their own strange, unique personalities that helps add to the atmosphere and fun of the game.

The battle system is fantastic as is to be expected, using the same judgment ring system established in the previous games. For those uninclined, the judgment ring system is used throughout the game to execute characters actions, such as determining the effectiveness of attacks or spells. The judgment ring is a spherical ring with a rotating bar that spins and must be stopped, their are areas on the ring that indicate different levels of effectiveness, after hitting these areas, the command is carried out. The Judgement ring is used in battles, shops and many other situations.

The graphics are great, but I don't believe their are good as Shadow Hearts: 2 (it's been a while since I played that though) and the Music, done by Yoshitaka Hirota is fantastic, evoking similar feelings I had playing the first 2 games. XSEED also did a fantastic localizing the game, both in the text translation and the voice acting.

Their is one glairing negative that I mentioned above. Every character is unique, every character has something interesting about them that is lovable...except the very character that needs it the most, the main one. The last 2 games stared Yuri, Yuri was a somewhat normal guy, but he was cool, you could easily identify with him, but this new guy (Jhonny) is as plain as they get, it got to the point where I actually started to hate him. The main character should represent the person playing a game, it should be someone who you can identify with, someone you like. Well, how is one suppose to identify with someone so normal, so unengaging. This plainness is multiplied even more by how cool everyone else is. I think Aruze kind of dropped the ball on this.

In conclusion, the new Shadow Hearts game lives up to the expectations fans have made for it, and while I personally don't think it's as good as Shadow Hearts 2, it's certainly worth playing by both fans of the series and fans of console RPG's.

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