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God I wish I liked this game.
From the New World is the type of game that just so so so clearly needed more time to cook. After years of silence the devs have pretty much confirmed that things like the director being replaced had occurred midway through development. Hell they only had about maybe a year after Covenant to get this game out with that happening as well. So I don't wanna be super hard on the dev team for clearly trying their best.
Like for positives, the gameplay is the best in the series hands fuckin down. The stock system making it so you can't just combo shit every turn genuinely adds a nice layer of strategy to fights that you have to consider and makes getting combos hit way harder than they did in Covenant, the fact that magic is so customizable and in your hands with charts and stellars that are able to be swapped around with all of the characters just feels like such a great idea and evolution of the crests from Covenant as well.
The music fuckin slaps, absolutely the best in the series with tracks like Malice and From the New World living in my mind completely rent free.
The vibes and art direction are top notch, the content in this package is absolutely packed. It's impressive the kind of shit you could do at the time within a year and reusing assets, ideas and animations to get by the best you could. If I'd played this as a kid like I'd wanted to years and years ago now, I probably would've had more of a soft spot for this for the sheer amount of time you can invest in this very very fun to play game.
Unfortunately that just ain't how I played and experienced this though. From a narrative perspective (which I care about far more in RPG's where that's clearly the focus like it very obviously is here) it falls so so so flat. Characters come and go within this plot and don't really add much to it. The villains are so paper thin and poorly fleshed out that they spend pretty much half of this game standing around twiddling their thumbs while they wait for you. The main party consists of Shania (who should've been the Main Character like straight up it's mostly her story), Johnny (who is never given enough depth for his story to fully work) and the rest of the party which are mostly gag characters except for Ricardo who is such an explicit Desperado reference and taken so seriously and given ANYTHING within this plot that I honestly loved him along with Shania a lot.
Also just wanna say if you wanna see strangely similarish ideas explored on the Johnny side of things with characters that are more interesting and fleshed out you should seriously watch or read Blood Blockade Battlefront which I think manages to capture the spirit perfectly and I kinda wonder if Shadow Hearts was a slight inspiration on Nightow?
I wasn't expecting this game to be like even Covenant levels of solid but this is just so fuckin disappointing to me. Like past gameplay, music and art direction it just completely lets down everything else. For you that may be whatever and you may love and adore this as a gameplay first experience. But for me the stories in these games, even when flawed like the original Shadow Hearts was, were always something special.
It's a bummer that this is how things ended for the longest time. If I'd played this with no hope of Penny Blood I probably would've been extremely bummed upon finishing this. Thankfully interesting things are hopefully on the horizon but man, I wish this game and what it's going for with revenge, especially in regards to its POC subjects, had more time to breath and they had more time to flesh those ideas and concepts out. This game has its comedy but not enough to sustain this entire experience. It straight up feels like after you finish Vegas the game just comes to a complete fuckin halt in the worst ways plot wise. Shania running from dungeon to dungeon going "I'M GONNA KILL THAT WOMAN" as they constantly run from you and nothing is accomplished.
By the end I was just so exhausted. While this game has positives and I'm not gonna deny those one bit, this game is also an exhausting mess that just left me sad by the end with what it could've been.
God I wish I liked this game.
From the New World is the type of game that just so so so clearly needed more time to cook. After years of silence the devs have pretty much confirmed that things like the director being replaced had occurred midway through development. Hell they only had about maybe a year after Covenant to get this game out with that happening as well. So I don't wanna be super hard on the dev team for clearly trying their best.
Like for positives, the gameplay is the best in the series hands fuckin down. The stock system making it so you can't just combo shit every turn genuinely adds a nice layer of strategy to fights that you have to consider and makes getting combos hit way harder than they did in Covenant, the fact that magic is so customizable and in your hands with charts and stellars that are able to be swapped around with all of the characters just feels like such a great idea and evolution of the crests from Covenant as well.
The music fuckin slaps, absolutely the best in the series with tracks like Malice and From the New World living in my mind completely rent free.
The vibes and art direction are top notch, the content in this package is absolutely packed. It's impressive the kind of shit you could do at the time within a year and reusing assets, ideas and animations to get by the best you could. If I'd played this as a kid like I'd wanted to years and years ago now, I probably would've had more of a soft spot for this for the sheer amount of time you can invest in this very very fun to play game.
Unfortunately that just ain't how I played and experienced this though. From a narrative perspective (which I care about far more in RPG's where that's clearly the focus like it very obviously is here) it falls so so so flat. Characters come and go within this plot and don't really add much to it. The villains are so paper thin and poorly fleshed out that they spend pretty much half of this game standing around twiddling their thumbs while they wait for you. The main party consists of Shania (who should've been the Main Character like straight up it's mostly her story), Johnny (who is never given enough depth for his story to fully work) and the rest of the party which are mostly gag characters except for Ricardo who is such an explicit Desperado reference and taken so seriously and given ANYTHING within this plot that I honestly loved him along with Shania a lot.
Also just wanna say if you wanna see strangely similarish ideas explored on the Johnny side of things with characters that are more interesting and fleshed out you should seriously watch or read Blood Blockade Battlefront which I think manages to capture the spirit perfectly and I kinda wonder if Shadow Hearts was a slight inspiration on Nightow?
I wasn't expecting this game to be like even Covenant levels of solid but this is just so fuckin disappointing to me. Like past gameplay, music and art direction it just completely lets down everything else. For you that may be whatever and you may love and adore this as a gameplay first experience. But for me the stories in these games, even when flawed like the original Shadow Hearts was, were always something special.
It's a bummer that this is how things ended for the longest time. If I'd played this with no hope of Penny Blood I probably would've been extremely bummed upon finishing this. Thankfully interesting things are hopefully on the horizon but man, I wish this game and what it's going for with revenge, especially in regards to its POC subjects, had more time to breath and they had more time to flesh those ideas and concepts out. This game has its comedy but not enough to sustain this entire experience. It straight up feels like after you finish Vegas the game just comes to a complete fuckin halt in the worst ways plot wise. Shania running from dungeon to dungeon going "I'M GONNA KILL THAT WOMAN" as they constantly run from you and nothing is accomplished.
By the end I was just so exhausted. While this game has positives and I'm not gonna deny those one bit, this game is also an exhausting mess that just left me sad by the end with what it could've been.