Shadow Hearts Covenant: Staff Retroview

[JuMeSyn]

See - 100 stories of wrestling mats spring into the sky! A gigantic cat take hard-earned money! Japan's cloning abilities circa 1915! Benevolent talking vampires in bat form! All in this game!
It's quite a show!

[DarkRPGMaster]

Glad to hear you liked it JuMe. When you wrote inaccurate history as a con, I couldn't help but start laughing.

[Panzerazelsaturn]

I actually liked the first one better, but I love this one as well. I have not yet played the 3rd as it seems it has moved much further from the original than this one did. I'm sure that I will still like it, but the atmosphere and story and dungeons of the first one made it one of my fav games ever and then they seemed to just move on to silly... I also liked Koudelka, even though it had a lot of flaws. I also love their other games, Faselei! is my favorite game on NGPC, the Dive Alert games were also pretty good, and much of the team co-developed Infinite Odyssey as well, which I liked well enough. Overall I wish the old Sacnoth was still around and was sad when Nautilus too went under

[Jitawa]

Love love love this game! It just hit all the right notes in terms of difficulty, story, gameplay, and humor for me. Always happy to read other people's impressions of it too! It was a breath of fresh air in comparison to so many other jrpgs I'd played since the SNES. It -does- improve on the first game (which was a decent story in its own right, but didn't look as good and wasn't paced as well).

It's part of a select set of PS2 RPGs I've beaten more than twice.

[Wyrdwad]

I seem to be one of the few who just doesn't much care for the Shadow Hearts games. I find the combat system kind of annoying, for one (especially in this game, where the stupid judgment ring is used for EVERYTHING -- why should I have to do timed button presses when I'm just SHOPPING, for goodness' sakes?!), and wish you could enable auto-ring without it massively gimping your power... and I also find the dungeon designs to be really, REALLY lacking. Half the dungeons in the game consist of a series of identical-looking forks in the road, and it gets REALLY old REALLY fast.

If the battle system were less about timed button presses, and the dungeons designed with a bit more thought, I might have had a better time with the game, as the characters and story really are quite excellent. But I just find that its flaws outweigh its perks -- for me, anyway.

-Tom

[hoktomaster]

I liked the fact it's one of the only series of JRPGS (of the time it came out, and maybe still now) that had a continuing of story lines.

[watcher]

I will probably get around to playing this next year, based on current backlog trends.

[Wyrdwad]

I liked the fact it's one of the only series of JRPGS (of the time it came out, and maybe still now) that had a continuing of story lines.

Actually, there are quite a few of those -- though most stayed in Japan, either partially or in full. A few that come to mind, though, are PopoloCrois, Puppet Princess of Marl Kingdom (a.k.a. Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure), The Legend of Heroes Gagharv Trilogy, The Legend of Heroes Kiseki series, Ys (though episodic, there is an overarching storyline), Zwei, Brandish, Phantasy Star (again, episodic but with an overarching storyline), Lunar, Xenosaga... heck, even Dragon Quest, to some extent.

It's less common than standalone RPGs, but not really all THAT uncommon.

Definitely cool, though. I wish more games would do this -- though I guess the downside is, if you miss one game, you're kinda screwed. PopoloCrois is a good example of that -- Sony never brought the first game over in 1996, so none of the followups came over either, until the PSP compilation... but the PSP compilation really doesn't do the series justice, since it skips over soooooo much.

-Tom

[Confessor Rahl]

Hah hah really? A con of the game is inaccurate history? Other than that little blip of silliness fantastic review. Really covers the bases.

[retrodragon]

This is my absolute favorite rpg! The interesting battle system, the amazing characters, the whole package really, makes this just a perfect game. I love this title for so many reasons, and I'm glad to see such a positive review! Watching Joachim discover his weapons around towns was worth the game all by itself. Especially when he discovers the drain pipe and rants about how it protected kittens from the rain. Haha so funny! I loved building up huge combos against bosses too. Really fun. I love games that utilize a timed-button press battle system as well, so the judgement ring was a major plus for me.

The one downside, I would agree, is the lackluster dungeon design in some locations. But they were good enough to frame the rest of this amazing title. Yuri is a great lead, and the rest of the cast is solid. I was surprised to see a wolf as a lead character, but it worked really well. And Yuri's transformations were fun to play around with. I particularly remember the final form of the flame element beast being exceptionally cool. Lots of great memories from SHC. I gotta pull this off the shelf again sometime soon. Great review!!!

[Cidolfas]

Agree wholeheartedly. This game really hit all the right notes in all the right ways. One thing I loved about it was that all the extra content consisted of exploring new places rather than requiring you to revisit old places over and over again, like nearly all current RPGs do. There's a ton of content and it's all thoughtful instead of just a way to extend gameplay time. It is definitely one of the most enjoyable games on the PS2.

[Slayer]

This was my first SH, and I loved it. Nice review.