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Good story almost completely ruined by the worst fucking backtracking I’ve ever seen in a video game.There’s absolutely nothing fun about repeatedly being set back and having to play the same story over and over again, going back through the same areas and doing the same things, and fighting the same bosses to actually progress. It’s especially not fun when that’s what most of the game consists of. Like I’ve even seen several diehard fans recommend that players just rush through the repeated routes as fast as they can, not doing any of the optional content and skipping most of the cutscenes and dialogue. That is a sign of a poorly designed game if you ask me.
Speaking of poor design choices, the game is littered with so many of them that somehow manage to needlessly pad out the game even more, several of which made me seriously consider dropping the game entirely. Route C requires you to gather all the weapons in the game (for literally no reason, might I add) in addition to it being almost the exact same story you just saw twice. This includes grinding for money (weapons are not cheap at all) and doing several mundane side quests, some of which require you to farm rare drops from enemies, or reload the same area over and over again until the weather changes. You better hope you get lucky, because there’s a chance that you’ll be killing the same enemies and/or reloading the same area over and over again for hours on end.
Also using a guide on route C is basically required if you want to get through it at a reasonable pace. The game gives you no indication at all on which side quests reward you with weapons, not to mention the side quests themselves have no markers/trackers on your map so you know where to go. Also, there’s a weapon that you need to buy from the Aerie, an area that becomes unaccessible at a later point, so you’re just out of luck if you slip up and happen to forget. And to top that all off, it’s best for you to make a separate save file in addition to the one you already have before the final dungeon to get ending D, and by extension ending E. Because if you don’t, and you save over the one file you’ve been using for most of the game… you have to play through everything, all over again, for the FOURTH TIME. The game does not tell you that, and they didn’t think to add in a chapter select like in Automata.
All of this just so you can continue with the story. I wish I was making this up, I swear.
The little bits of new cutscenes that you do get in between just do not make the rest of the repetition worth it in the slightest imo. Most of route C adds nothing, the beginning of route E adds nothing… I got so used to skipping through the same cutscenes that the game had already shown me a million times that when the time came for actual new cutscenes, I almost skipped those too on accident. And even with the added context of the story bosses, the boss fights themselves get more and more boring with every time you have to fight them again, since you’ll be massively overleveled in comparison and they’ll go down in just a couple of hits.
The game gets two stars because I still like the characters, and that soundtrack is godlike but I absolutely despise the way the story is presented, especially a shame for such a story driven game. It completely broke the immersion for me.
Speaking of poor design choices, the game is littered with so many of them that somehow manage to needlessly pad out the game even more, several of which made me seriously consider dropping the game entirely. Route C requires you to gather all the weapons in the game (for literally no reason, might I add) in addition to it being almost the exact same story you just saw twice. This includes grinding for money (weapons are not cheap at all) and doing several mundane side quests, some of which require you to farm rare drops from enemies, or reload the same area over and over again until the weather changes. You better hope you get lucky, because there’s a chance that you’ll be killing the same enemies and/or reloading the same area over and over again for hours on end.
Also using a guide on route C is basically required if you want to get through it at a reasonable pace. The game gives you no indication at all on which side quests reward you with weapons, not to mention the side quests themselves have no markers/trackers on your map so you know where to go. Also, there’s a weapon that you need to buy from the Aerie, an area that becomes unaccessible at a later point, so you’re just out of luck if you slip up and happen to forget. And to top that all off, it’s best for you to make a separate save file in addition to the one you already have before the final dungeon to get ending D, and by extension ending E. Because if you don’t, and you save over the one file you’ve been using for most of the game… you have to play through everything, all over again, for the FOURTH TIME. The game does not tell you that, and they didn’t think to add in a chapter select like in Automata.
All of this just so you can continue with the story. I wish I was making this up, I swear.
The little bits of new cutscenes that you do get in between just do not make the rest of the repetition worth it in the slightest imo. Most of route C adds nothing, the beginning of route E adds nothing… I got so used to skipping through the same cutscenes that the game had already shown me a million times that when the time came for actual new cutscenes, I almost skipped those too on accident. And even with the added context of the story bosses, the boss fights themselves get more and more boring with every time you have to fight them again, since you’ll be massively overleveled in comparison and they’ll go down in just a couple of hits.
The game gets two stars because I still like the characters, and that soundtrack is godlike but I absolutely despise the way the story is presented, especially a shame for such a story driven game. It completely broke the immersion for me.
This review contains spoilers
There’s a lot of wackiness and humor in the game, but it’s ultimately a story that hammers home the theme of dealing with past traumas, and moving on from them while accepting yourself in the process. The difference between Yuri at the beginning of SH1 compared to Yuri at the end of this game is like night and day — he’s gone from a traumatized child of war and abandonment to an optimistic and genuine man, who openly accepts his mistakes and learns to love and live his own way in spite of it all. We see his various subtle changes and points of growth throughout the game, with the support of characters like Karin, Jeanne, Ben, Roger, and Alice especially. There’s just something really beautiful about that imo, and his ending with Alice in the game (and basically any other scene with Alice) is always a tear jerker to me. You even meet back up with Kato from the first game as the main villain and see that he deals with the same internal struggle as Yuri, which creates some interesting parallels between them. The two maintain a mutual respect for each other, but they also have two different ways of dealing with their trauma, so they accept they’ll have to fight. Kato’s motives on wanting to reset the world ended up actually making sense, and it seemed clear that things would’ve gone quite differently if he was able to make the same connections with others that Yuri did. I just ended up really loving it all and it’s still a story that resonates with me.
I feel like I should mention that I really dig a lot of the game’s comedy, as well; in a lot of ways this game seems like it’s parodying other JRPGs at several points. The party is about to fight a powerful ancient oracle at one point, and all they can focus on is the fact that it’s floating on a pillow. Or there’s one scene with Veronica where one of your party members has to get tortured, and you can pick their dialogue options as it happens, and there’s all kinds of stuff you can say. Also, as you explore different areas in the game, Joachim will occasionally find random things lying around to pick up and use as his primary weapons, akin to how you would find weapons in other RPGs. Only this time, the other characters will openly acknowledge how bizarre that actually is.
Combat is really amazing and engaging and never got old. I think I ran from just one random encounter through the entire game, but aside from that I fought them all because it was that much fun. There’s just an endless amount of customization. You can increase the hits of your judgement ring, expand the strike/hit areas to make them wider, add status effects to your physical attacks, make the ring spin slower, or make it completely invisible for extra damage. There’s even different types of judgement rings altogether, including an automatic one if you don’t want to engage with the timed button pressing at all. The magic system is equally customizable and fun to work with, especially when you expand your collection using Solomon’s key. Every character has a distinct role in battle — Joachim is a tank, Blanca and Lucia are support characters, Yuri and Kurando are all rounders, Gepetto is a mage, Karin and Anastasia are a bit more complicated but with a good magic setup, you can make anyone into anything you want. In battle itself, you can see the turn order unlike the first game, and you can execute combos, which are really satisfying to pull off and have lots of risk and reward to them.
Every one of your party members also have their own side quests devoted to them, which also provide some nice side stories and allow you to unlock new abilities/weapons for them. My favorite was Blanca’s wolf bouts, which consist of him fighting one on one with rival wolves to unlock new abilities, including one wolf who… is a parody of Terry Bogard. God I love this game.
OST absolutely SLAPS and I still listen to it on a regular basis. The battle themes are especially amazing here, like Astaroth’s theme, Hardcore to the brain, Ladder to heaven, and the 3 karma. But there’s also lots of more sweet and relaxing pieces, like Town of twilight, Karin’s theme, Village of the dog god, and old smudged map. The majority of it fits every scene/location it plays in, and there’s very rarely any forgettable music. And Getsurenka is such a beautiful ending song, I especially love its use of leitmotif. Yasunori Mitsuda returned to work on a couple of songs in this game and this turned out to be some of his finest work ever imo, I ended up feeling pretty reminiscent of Chrono Cross. Overall, of the 3 SH games (4 if we count Koudelka) this one easily had the best music.
Basically my only gripes with the game are that there’s two dungeons that sucked, Tiffauges Castle and the Battleship Mikasa. Almost every other dungeon has a puzzle that’s fun and interesting, and just worth engaging with, while not being too difficult. The two aforementioned dungeons however, had extremely confusing design and the actual puzzles don’t make much sense, so they were pretty frustrating until I just looked them up. I think an overhead map, which was only added in the 3rd game, would’ve helped a lot.
To put things simply though… I can’t even fully describe why every last thing about this game clicked with me so much, but I’ve done the best I could in this college essay I’ve written here. Shadow Hearts Covenant is a masterpiece, go play it (emulate it, don’t be an idiot like me and buy an absurdly expensive physical copy of it).
I feel like I should mention that I really dig a lot of the game’s comedy, as well; in a lot of ways this game seems like it’s parodying other JRPGs at several points. The party is about to fight a powerful ancient oracle at one point, and all they can focus on is the fact that it’s floating on a pillow. Or there’s one scene with Veronica where one of your party members has to get tortured, and you can pick their dialogue options as it happens, and there’s all kinds of stuff you can say. Also, as you explore different areas in the game, Joachim will occasionally find random things lying around to pick up and use as his primary weapons, akin to how you would find weapons in other RPGs. Only this time, the other characters will openly acknowledge how bizarre that actually is.
Combat is really amazing and engaging and never got old. I think I ran from just one random encounter through the entire game, but aside from that I fought them all because it was that much fun. There’s just an endless amount of customization. You can increase the hits of your judgement ring, expand the strike/hit areas to make them wider, add status effects to your physical attacks, make the ring spin slower, or make it completely invisible for extra damage. There’s even different types of judgement rings altogether, including an automatic one if you don’t want to engage with the timed button pressing at all. The magic system is equally customizable and fun to work with, especially when you expand your collection using Solomon’s key. Every character has a distinct role in battle — Joachim is a tank, Blanca and Lucia are support characters, Yuri and Kurando are all rounders, Gepetto is a mage, Karin and Anastasia are a bit more complicated but with a good magic setup, you can make anyone into anything you want. In battle itself, you can see the turn order unlike the first game, and you can execute combos, which are really satisfying to pull off and have lots of risk and reward to them.
Every one of your party members also have their own side quests devoted to them, which also provide some nice side stories and allow you to unlock new abilities/weapons for them. My favorite was Blanca’s wolf bouts, which consist of him fighting one on one with rival wolves to unlock new abilities, including one wolf who… is a parody of Terry Bogard. God I love this game.
OST absolutely SLAPS and I still listen to it on a regular basis. The battle themes are especially amazing here, like Astaroth’s theme, Hardcore to the brain, Ladder to heaven, and the 3 karma. But there’s also lots of more sweet and relaxing pieces, like Town of twilight, Karin’s theme, Village of the dog god, and old smudged map. The majority of it fits every scene/location it plays in, and there’s very rarely any forgettable music. And Getsurenka is such a beautiful ending song, I especially love its use of leitmotif. Yasunori Mitsuda returned to work on a couple of songs in this game and this turned out to be some of his finest work ever imo, I ended up feeling pretty reminiscent of Chrono Cross. Overall, of the 3 SH games (4 if we count Koudelka) this one easily had the best music.
Basically my only gripes with the game are that there’s two dungeons that sucked, Tiffauges Castle and the Battleship Mikasa. Almost every other dungeon has a puzzle that’s fun and interesting, and just worth engaging with, while not being too difficult. The two aforementioned dungeons however, had extremely confusing design and the actual puzzles don’t make much sense, so they were pretty frustrating until I just looked them up. I think an overhead map, which was only added in the 3rd game, would’ve helped a lot.
To put things simply though… I can’t even fully describe why every last thing about this game clicked with me so much, but I’ve done the best I could in this college essay I’ve written here. Shadow Hearts Covenant is a masterpiece, go play it (emulate it, don’t be an idiot like me and buy an absurdly expensive physical copy of it).
I still replay this game every year and find something brand new to fall in love with every time. What a masterpiece