I like how generally creepy they made the soundtrack in this game, to remind you that some unholy shit was going down. I remember a time I had a friend over and all he would play was this exact game, and when I heard the creepy girl "ooo's" during Brain Hopper–coupled with the one crow enemy with some sort of human body part attached to it–it got me a little nauseous. I don't even know why.
And just today, I learned there was a prequel game called Koudelka on the PSX. I only ever saw the final battle, but the animation in the FMV for Elaine was great.
They're ok. Koudelka is the most famous of the two, and the main game that has a "core" small fanbase.
I'm not the biggest fan myself, i consider the original Parasite Eve to be a much more accomplished horror themed RPG, nailing the blend much better, far before both these titles.
Juan Price
Please don't go mobile, please don't go mobile.
WW2 Shadow Hearts when?
Nicholas Wood
Great story and atmosphere.
Jordan Thomas
Why would it got mobile?
Owen Bell
I played From the New World for Shania.
Gabriel Thompson
I own it and really still need to play it. I hear it's really good, though it looks like it dropped the horror theme from the first.
I haven't played either though so perhaps I'll take a week and just binge them.
John Howard
Got undubbed version of Covenant and From the New World and want to try them soon. First one positively surprised me, but that dub was fucking awful and ruined some parts of the game for me. I also heard the sequels don't have that many horror-elements like the first SH and Koudelka.
Isaac Rodriguez
I've been playing through all of them, really damn enjoyable, to the point I've been working on these to try to get more anons into them. Still unfinished because my friend still hasn't gotten around to helping edit and trim them, despite me bringing it up multiple times and him saying he would.
Why did you have to make this thread on a night I have to get the fuck to bed earlier than normal to most likely take care of a sick family member in the morning? Hopefully this is still around tomorrow.
Shadow Hearts isn't owned by Sony, so they don't have a say in it the way Sony is forcing Wild Arms and Arc the Lad into mobile, like they're unworthy of seeing new entries on their systems anymore. Of course, that didn't stop Square and Capcom from doing so themselves with some select series of theirs (or, at least what square acquired access to post merger).
Isaiah Wright
(hasn't heard of this game) (wonders what it is) (thinks about asking) (sticks his snout into the thread, tippy-hoofs in) Um, e-excu- kya! (his hooves get tangled and he trips) (tears his colostomy bag on a loose nail, spills sh*t all over the thread) (squints, can't tell the difference)
reported
Jonathan Parker
Because that's the latest hit thing to do. Take a classic JRPG series that no one's been doing anything with for years, and shove it over to the mobile fanbase instead of consoles/handhelds. See Breath of Fire, Valkyrie Profile, Star Ocean (apparently SO5 did bad enough it got quickly sent to the mobile shitcan), and most recently Arc the Lad and Wild Arms. As mentioned above, Sony thankfully has no say in the matter this time, despite the series solely being on Sony systems.
The issue though? Sacnoth/Nautilus never owned the rights to the series, and have LONG been dissolved (some of the former team aided Mistwalker on Lost Odyssey) by their publisher Aruze. Aruze owns the rights, but doesn't particularly enjoy Shadow Hearts enough to have kept it going after FtnW, beyond whoring it out to Idea Factory for a baffling little tactical RPG called Chaos Wars (a crossover between Shadow Hearts, Gungrave, Blazing Souls, Spectral Souls, Growlanser, and Code of the Samurai, which is completely baffling as to why pick those). Aruze is the real question. Given their preference for making pachislot related crap over actual games (pachislot being the main thing they seem to have done according to wikipedia; I have little idea why they were into publishing Shadow Hearts in the first place, beyond "ex square-devs = Square tier sales figures"), would they be prone to whoring Shadow Hearts out for cheap mobile bucks? I want to say (and very much hope) the answer is a hard no, given how niche the series is. The devs themselves knew it too back then; when Aruze told them that SH1 was too dark for the playerbase and to make something more normal for future installments (SH being released rather close to FFX both in Japan and NA), they toned down the darkness, but made the subsequent games even more bizarre, keeping their (the devs, not Aruze's) intended audience for them niche. Shadow Hearts doesn't have Breath of Fire, Wild Arms, Valkyrie Profile's series brand popularity to more readily sell a mobile title just with the name, nor were Nautilus or Sacnoth that well know a dev team (I don't think saying they were bringing them back would help sales, and after being dissolved, I doubt the ex-Nautilus guys would come back to work for Aruze again), and Aruze certainly doesn't have the same notoriety as various bigger third-party publishers like Capcom or Namco or especially Square (and then you have Sony as a gigantic multimedia focused company), where slapping their name of anything other than pachinko would likely get them easy sales. I can only hope I'm correct, and Shadow Hearts will be allowed to remain in its slumber, rather than have its corpse dug up and being Emigre'd.
Camden Diaz
Don't forget Zoids… man we were all pretty hype for the new Zoids game… then they announced it would be a mobile MOBA.
Angel Gray
As far as dubs go, Shadow Hearts' dub didn't strike me as being bad, aside from the Sea Mother. And even then, it's only due to voicing sound affects rather than having actual sound affects play (I kind of want to know what the Japanese version of that scene was like, whether her seiyuu voiced them as well). That's just my personal take on it though, and I'm fairly tolerant of dubs, especially older ones, provided there's some effort involved. Shadow Hearts Covenant and FtNW have much better quality dubs to be sure though, albeit moreso the former than latter (FtNW's dub isn't bad, but the voicing budget wasn't the same for hiring after the series swapped hands from established Midway to first-year-publishing XSEED). As far as bad dubs go, look no further, than Chaos Fuckin' Wars. It's highly speculated based off credits in the manual that some higher up at O3 Entertainment had his own family members voice it, who aren't versed in voice acting, and thus the audio is a trainwreck of horrendous English voicing (and the script itself is prone to piss people, especially Shadow Hearts fans off, by not doing the research on the series prior established names).
Something to mention about SH:C's voicing, though: When handling the translation of SH1, Blaustein (MGS1 translator, SH2, etc), opted to change the main character's name from "Urmnaf" to something that would sound more familiar to westerners. Putting in some research into the character's heritage, he settled on Yuri (as far as name changes in JRPGs go, that's probably one of the more reasonable ones, but that's just my opinion) as his default name, which the English script of Covenant retains. Now, the English dub for Covenant calls him by his given name, which is fine. But unless I'm mistaken (having only played the official English release), the Japanese undub audio will refer to him as "Urmnaf", or "Uru" for short, since that would sync properly with the Japanese script and naming. Just something to bear in mind; I know a lot of people found it annoying to have the Japanese audio for Tales of Hearts R calling characters by their proper names ("Shing Meteoryte") but the script calling them something completely different ("Kor Meteor"), creating dissonance in the script and audio. Though, in ToHR's case, that was more of 8-4 having next to leash and being allowed to fuck around heavily, while with the Urmnaf/Yuri deal a good question was asked, and the solution took in actual research, rather than creating a second equally baffling name (I know from doing some reading on Aselia wiki that "Kor" relates back to "Heart", but if you're not versed in the language the word is from it's lost).
Jaxon Turner
Dead series. No more games will ever be made.
Jacob Price
Might sound dumb, but how exactly do Zoids games tend to handle? Always took them to be possibly more action than RPG when I've seen then around, but I've never played them.
Probably for the best sadly. That series came out at the right time and were brought west at the right time, under (western) publishers that seemed to get that a niche series is niche, and as such much of the content is intact, barring a few niggles here and there. There is so much in those that wouldn't fly these days that if they came out now, I'd be surprised if they made it over intact, let alone even being considered for localization (the way Omega Labyrinth has petty much gone unmentioned by any sort of publisher as far as interest in bring it west goes, barring Play-Asia trying to prod some teams for a possible English release sold via PA).
Isaiah Thompson
Oh God, I almost forgot about that, that shit is, well, shit, but also gold.
Yes, SH doesn't have the absolutely worst voice-acting, but it's still irritating to so-so English voices and suddenly jap voices for the attacks and grunts. At least there wasn't that much spoken dialog. Can't rate the voice acting in the sequels though.
Robert Gomez
I've been meaning to start Koudelka for a while but forgot about it, I think i'll start it when I finish work today. I was going to finish Legend of Dragoon first but it's turned into enough of a slog that I could do with something else for a while.
Levi Parker
This is that tactical RPG with puppets and shit, right?
Kevin Ross
I agree, the inconsistency of the audio is the real issue for SH1. I mean, sure, characters are from different areas and would naturally have different languages they'd primarily speak but some things do ultimately have to get simplified for shit to work for the game's own logic (such as not having multiple types of currency to get exchanged when you enter a new country or area; all the PS2 games just simply it as [Cash]). As such, all the characters knowing a particular language to speak makes sense in the logic of the game, though perhaps not following real life. So, why have anyone (other than maybe Zhuzhen, with his taoist chants) revert to a language other than English during combat? They don't do that during the few voiced scenes.
Covenant, for the most part, got much better about both the choice in English voice actors (and as far as recurring characters go, there weren't that many actually voiced scenes in SH1 for the dissonance to feel as big as, say, the dub voice changes in ToS and ToS2), keeps the spoken languages consistent in and out of combat (though the series never reached Tales-tier combat banter, just start/end of fight stuff), and has better English voicing direction as well.
Tactical? Not really, though Koudelka does have light tactical elements in the form of positioning, movement, and weapons with durability and breaking. Covenant and FtNW also have movement and positioning that you can't entirely control, as well as a pseudo physics system for how an attack affects an enemy or character's position or above-ground height, which you can and should learn to use.
Old man Gepetto does have his puppet Cornelia though, and you get new dresses (and thus elements and spells) by finding gay porn for his faggot tailor, Pierre. Worth noting that Yuri finds Pierre and his faggot brother Gerard to be disgusting degenerates. Old comic related.
Logan Butler
Dead series 2 was the only good game Sacnoth was a good company though that's it
Adam Brooks
Admittedly it was probably the best all around, but I've found all of them really enjoyable, admittedly in rather different ways.
Henry James
Also, you want more "so shit it's still shit, but also hilarious" English voicing, look into Arc Rise Fantasia for the Wii. A 2010 localization had no right to sound that bad, shoestring audio budget or not. Unless you enjoy horrendously delivered lines, there is no reason to play that without the Japanese dub, which had to be patched in by fans for pirating/emulation as it didn't have native dual audio.
Noah Roberts
3 was horrible, 2 was crude, I'll admit 1 is playable but it was so cheap and crude.
Lincoln Hill
1 was crude*
Aiden Sullivan
Oh, no, I was thinking of Vandal Hearts. My apologies, and away I go.
Christopher Allen
I'll agree that Shadow Hearts: From the New World has a different vibe (by the way, it's confirmed that FtNW was never SHIII, but rather a side game; Aruze shitcanned the team, likely for making subpar selling games compared to the money pachislot raked in, and repeatedly flipping them and "just make a more normal JRPG" the bird, before they could actually make the true SHIII they wanted to) that leaves it rather hit or miss, with the darker elements showing up much less frequently, but mechanically it's the most solid, featuring the things Covenant added with some tweaks, and with Stock to try to balance out how strong combos could get in Covenant. I really would have liked to have seen that system reused in the Shadow Hearts III they had intended to make.
Also, for anyone that's finished with the series (due to possible spoilers), a pair of the former devs did an interview a while back with some Italian group, which has since seen the questions and responses translated (and dubbed) into English as well.
You should still play Shadow Hearts if you like JRPGs and haven't yet. It's a very solid, if strange, one.
Take a look in the infographics above if you want some tips or advice. Koudelka is really not for everyone, but if you know something about what you're doing it's not bad. Definitely a game you're playing for the atmosphere and setting, the world of which Shadow Hearts would expand upon. The English dub's also surprisingly good for a PS1 JRPG, and the game is actually English only audio in Japan as well.
Cooper Martin
I'll look into it.
Tyler Carter
It sucks
Luke Wright
No it doesn't
Wyatt Perry
your opinion is shit but you are free to stay with your opinion.
Shadow hearts 3 is different but not that much. The Horro theme is still there but the overall setting, designe and assets are way more colorfull. it's not the best from the other 3 games but still ok and very well build into the shadow hearts world. Maybe the nummber 3 is displaced and the game should be mor eseen as spin off or sidestory to the univers, maybe they should have call it "shadow hearts; detectiv storys" but in the end it doesnt matter.
Lincoln Clark
Basically, you have to look into it from the Japanese names. Koudelka is Koudelka, and Shadow Hearts is Shadow Hearts (calling it "Koudelka 2" wouldn't have worked as she's not the protagonist anymore and Koudelka was received rather poorly by critics worldwide). While Shadow Hearts: Covenant is much more prone to be called such here in the west, I wager that was more for marketing purposes (SH1 not selling well at all prior due to releasing too close to FFX; not having the II in the title might have made people more prone to look into it on the asumption it was standalone) and both ingame in the west, and in Japan, it's outright called "Shadow Hearts II" instead. Shadow Hearts: From the New World though is not "Shadow Hearts III" in Japan; it carried the same name worldwide both ingame and marketing, and is ultimately a side game (of the "so what's going on on the other side of this world" variety compared to the rest).
Supposedly (and going off some official art only released to that Italian team that did the interview here and unfortunately has been watermarked with their logo), Shadow Hearts III, if had been allowed to happen, would have been a prequel (that being the only way I see this making any sense in the timeline) starring Jinpachiro and his brother-in-law Kiheita. Given that we know what ultimately became of both (though for Kiheita, not the "how"; Saki doesn't exactly elaborate on what happened to her husband), I can imagine it would have taken the combat nuances of FtNW, but perhaps had more of a return toward the vibe of Covenant or the original Shadow Hearts. Ultimately though, it never happened and likely never will unless the former devs can get the rights Aruze has been just sitting on for roughly a decade. I do have to wonder, however, if the Japanese playerbase was as split on FtNW as western fans are (considering that with SH1, the developers said that reception was good, but Japanese players found the game to be too dark and scary, with too strange of monsters, for a JRPG, hence Aruze trying to tell Sacnoth to cut that shit out).
Dominic Bell
what is any grindy asian orpg on wc3?
Justin Clark
This game is absolutely fucking brutal:
However, in spite of being frustrated and mad at my failures initially, the game has taught me to clench my anus and learn to deal with the consequences of my tactical choices, it has taught me to actually THINK with my fucking head before doing something instead of relying on blind trial and error and save/load and I have to admit, that this type of gameplay is much exciting and immersive, since I've started to actually care for my units.
So, after playing this, I have to come Holla Forums to ask you niggers one question: why aren't you playing games on ironman?
Henry Bailey
STORIES
Ryder Collins
As long as you've paid for them, whore
Jackson Cooper
I am guessing that the spam is back, considering how the latest posts have little to nothing to do with this series.
Luke Robinson
The balholder will chunk you with his slow moving white lasers Keep your distance and whoop his rude head
Hunter Morris
Yuo, spambot is back.
Evan Ross
bui here
please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3
What happened with 6 is still sad. Even if the devs didn't try and build off the idea of Dragon Quarter (my favorite entry in the franchise) I still don't think Breath of Fire deserved to be shunted off to mobile hell.
Samuel Bell
Same. Capcom basically iced it for a decade or more (did they even give the series much in the way of nods in Capcom vs Whatever games? Because I suspect that to them "One Ryu is enough" was likely the case), and then only pulled it out of the freezer like leftovers when they wanted to make some mobile shit.
Worst part is that I still haven't heard much on how BoF6 has been received in Japan, but either way, the series has entered a catch 22 situation, and I doubt they'll be making anything fans of the prior games would really want either way it turned out. Part of why I'm also worried about those other classic-JRPG-soon-to-be-mobile-trash series.
Carson Perez
just popping in to say shadow hearts covenant is the best fucking RPG ever made.
