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Shadow Hearts: From The New World
By admin | August 26, 2010
The story this time follows a new hero, Johnny Garland and he has just moved into New York City. He lost his father and sister as a child and instead of taking over his father’s business, Johnny decides to start up a detective agency. He mostly gets small jobs like finding lost cats but one day a man comes by asking you to find a man for him. Johnny of course accepts this job since he hasn’t had a real job in awhile. When he finally tracks the professor down, he gets sucked into a situation that is much bigger than himself that involves mobs, demons, and all around strange occurrences. The story is very compelling and never gets boring.
The cast of characters are very quirky this time around which is expected from a Shadow Hearts game. You have Shania and Natan, two Native Americans from the Navoy tribe who are on a quest to stop the evils of the world. There is also Frank, an old American ninja who seems to be the comic relief of the group; Mao, a cat who specializes in the form of drunken fighting; Hilda, a vampire who has major weight problems considering she changes from skinny to voluptuous based on the calories she ingests; and lastly you have Ricardo, a mariachi whose goals seem unknown at first.
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The judgement ring returns and doesn’t change much which is definitely for the better. When you perform any action in combat or try to get discounts from merchants, a ring will appear with a certain number of colored areas and you have to try and hit the ‘X’ button while the cursor is passing over it. For each piece of the pie in the ring there is a regular yellow area where you can hit anywhere and get the same result and there is also a little red area at the end which will inflict more damage if you hit it there. This little zone is called the “strike zone” and becomes easier to hit over time since you will get the timing down because the pies are always in the same spot. Over the course of the game you will find upgrades for your ring to make your zones bigger and even give you more attacks.
The magic system in the game comes in the form of constellations which you can equip on any character but Shania. These constellations all have a different number of slots where you can input magic you have attained throughout the game. Each slot also has a magic type associated with it such as healing, support, and the four different types of attack magic: Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind. There is a guy in the game that allows you to change the slots magic type, level, MP cost, and effectiveness for a price. The constellations make it so each character has a unique set of magic and even allows you to make any party member the healer or magic user which is always nice. Along with the constellations, each character has their own set of skills which can be upgraded by doing little sidequests. Having to do sidequests to upgrade their skills can be annoying but it definitely pays off after you get each characters final skill.
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There is one new improvement to this installment and that is the stock system. You fill up a meter, which increases when you deal damage or are dealt damage. When your meter is full, you can either new perform a combo with another character or perform a double attack with the character you are using. If you choose to perform a double attack, you can’t just simply attack twice, you will have to attack and use magic or just use two different forms of magic. You can actually get two bars of stock which allows you to perform a double combo which is quite devastating if you can get all the characters at this point.
The graphics once again are up to par with current standards. The character models are very well designed and each one has a very unique look to them. The enemies are also well designed but get repetitive after awhile. The environments are not quite as good as the character models because they tend to get repetitive such as the prison that looks identical in every single hall. The spell effects are very well done with flashy explosions and the framerate never stutters which you would expect from a RPG. The audio side of things fares quite well. The music is very well composed and has enough variety to never get boring. The voice overs are very well done and the sound effects are perfect.
Topics: PS2 Game | No Comments »