Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Until the release of Shadow Hearts II - Covenant, 2004 has been a very dry year for fantasy gamers.Not that there have ever been a really good year for the genre, Fantasy RPG games.Good fantasy of the class of the Final Fantasy series is difficult and costly to produce, and somply doesn't have the market share that other types of games command.Which is why Covenant is such a surprise.
The original Shadow Hearts was a strong, gothic game featuring Yuri and Alice as their adventures sprawled across Asia and Europe.A solid plot, interesting battle system and good art and animation made the game into a closet success.It wasn't as great as the FFX 10's and lacked the addictive play of the .hack series.But it was a game well worth playing.
Covenant, which picks up the story of Yuri after the death of Alice is an order of magnitude better.The plot, which fills two disks is full of intricate twists and turns as Yuri and a pretty German lieutenant (Karin) start a journey to find a new evil that is leading early 20th century Europe into war.These to gradually accumulate a glittering cast that includes Geppetto, his doll Cornelia, Joachim the vampire wrestler, a Russian princess, a white wolf and even more. The go from France to England and Russia and then back to Japan as well.In this huge geography the cast unearths layer after layer of evil.Each time the apparent cause is defeated another is found to be pulling the strings.
All of the characters come to life thanks to an excellent script and use of cut scene.Each gets to star, but Joachim steals the show with a genuinely funny performance. Pompous, perpetually showing of his muscles and still genuinely likeable, he has a knack for using things like frozen tuna and skyscrapers as weapons.And each time he discovers one we get a new comical cut scenes.But all of the characters have surprising wit and warmth, and each has their own panoply of accessories, special skills, and weapons.Most of the subplots of the game involve character improvement.
Art and animation are in keeping with the level of the plot.Hours of cut scenes, many remarkable settings, and a huge cast of villains and monsters keep your eyes on the scene, often desperately looking for the next magical item needed to advance the plot and clues to the next puzzle.
The fighting system uses a wheel with sensitive areas.You have to strike the areas to initiate an attack.It quickly becomes intuitive, and the player can tune the wheel to enable various feats and displays of skill.Expect your right thumb to get a serious workout.
This game comes in a very close second to the best of Final Fantasy.Certainly, if you like the one, you will like the other as well.I managed to get completely distracted by Covenant for something like 90 hours.You can finish in less, but the subplots are an important part of the game - winning is less important to me than taking the grand tour.If you've been waiting for something worth spending money on, this is it.Be warned, the dialog is a bit bawdy - definitely teen and up.
On replay -
I was surprised how well the game held up the second time through.this time I played through Shadow Hearts 1 and the through Covenant.Be warned, while the Japanese version does know that a completed first game was on the card, the US version doesn't seem to.In neither case does Covenant recognise that a player actually managed to get to the 'good' ending of SH1.Neither of these are biggies, though.On this time through I was in better control of the complex play system and managed to run a fairly logical game without a lot of backtracking.
Again I was struck by the high level of story telling, and by the amount of innuendo (and worse).This is a game that really is appealing to someone looking for a richer experience than other RPG's offer.
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Product Description:
Shadow Hearts 2: Covenant is a deep, engaging strategy role-player that continues the story of the original Shadow hearts. In this sequel, World War I has started, and a cult has used the chaos to further their own ambitions. Yuri, the hero of the first game, will explore his new powers as he fights this new evil. An engaging strategy epic where you try to survive battles against secret cults and powerful, mysterious wizards.
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