Shadow Hearts (2001)
2025-02-13
i'll limit myself from speaking about Koudelka (the game) too much, but i think it is an important preface here to say that, despite having only played it for the first time last year, it's one of my all-time favorites. i really, really adore absolutely everything about it (yes, even the gameplay). what i love most of all about Koudelka (the game) is the character arc of Koudelka (the character); the way she goes from being completely bitter and resentful--having been consistently abandoned and shunned since her birth, who can blame her--to understanding of the fact that she still has the capacity to do good in the world that so hates her really resonates with me. this is extremely relevant to how i feel about Shadow Hearts.
i really, really do not like Shadow Hearts. going from Koudelka to Shadow Hearts is like going from Victory Gundam to G Gundam. this is not a compliment to Shadow Hearts. you're going from one of the most thoughtful, mature, and engaging RPGs out there to pure junk food. it's depressing. it pisses me off. the worst part is that there are glimmers of real potential and extremely inspired art here, but it's all weighed down by, truly, the most offensive writing i've seen in an RPG since Atelier Iris II.
i'll just rip the band-aid off and start with the characters, because. well. it's not good. let's then start with the main character--Uru is one of the most irritating protagonists i've had the displeasure of being forced to play as. the opening cutscene is promising! he's cool and edgy, and i was genuinely really excited. but then he opens his mouth, and for the first few hours of the game, he's just constantly talking about Alice's boobs and how much he wants to feel her up while she's passed out. it's fucking creepy. he's immediately horny for Margarita, too. also, towards the end of the game there's a joke about how he jacked off and got cum all over a porno mag. great. and even once you get past that, everything that comes out of his mouth is like what a child thinks is cool. here's an example: at one point he says 俺が来たらには、いつおっ死んでもいいように、押し入れのエロ本は、ちゃんと整理しときなさい。ってな！("Tell 'im I said to get all his closet-stash porno mags in order so he'll be ready to die the minute I show up!") it's fucking cringe. i get a headache just thinking about his dialogue. what the hell were they thinking when writing this? how did we go from Koudelka to this? this isn't even a knock on "edgy" protagonists--Ryuudo from Grandia II is a personal favorite of mine--but good grief. there's a line between being edgy and being juvenile, and Uru is firmly, absolutely, undeniably in the latter camp. i can't believe people ever told me he was cool.
Alice isn't any better, either. she's simultaneously Uru's girlfriend and his mother--there's an awful lot of mommy stuff going on in this game, really--and nothing more than that. Alice is there to be the light to Uru's darkness, to help him up when he's catatonic from depression, to give him meaning, to give her life for his. and why? as previously stated, he spent several hours sexually harassing her. sure, she's cautious around him at first, but... at the end of the day, her entire character is about him. Alice has nothing else going on. she needs to get away from the litany of guys trying to kidnap her, i guess? but she needs Uru's help, which is then quickly wrapped up into his drama, and ultimately she's just a damsel for him to save. his whole role in the second game is that he has to keep saving her because she's never allowed to actually do anything even if it means her own death. Shadow Hearts is deeply, deeply misogynistic. (there's also Margarita, whose every line sounds like a horny teenager wrote it, but she doesn't even have anything else going on with her to warrant speaking of her at length.) it's just embarrassing coming from Koudelka, which has one of the best leading women of all time.
the worst part of this is that Koudelka herself, as a character in Shadow Hearts, is completely defanged and turned into a plot device in service of male characters; not just Uru, but also to Harry, her son. the weird voice Uru hears in his head? that's Koudelka guiding the plot forward. she's locked in a torture asylum and needs her twelve-year-old son and a band of morons to break her out, but actually, she goes along with the villain anyway in order to save her son's life in the short term. so you have to go save her again, and what does she do after that? nothing. why is she even in this game? i feel like i'm going insane. the way she talks isn't even like Koudelka. it's been fifteen years since the events of that game, sure, and people can change quite a bit in that period of time, but there's absolutely no trace of her former character to be found here. you could place Alice's name and portrait over Koudelka's and it would be indistinguishable. at one point the game tries to position Koudelka and Alice as being in mirroring positions--Alice as the key of light and Koudelka as the key of darkness, or whatever--which just sucks. i'm so angry. it just makes this whole thing even more misogynistic. please stop dragging down the name of a better character (and better game!) to serve this stupid, horrible, nothing plot.
speaking of the plot, i have to say, the cutscenes in this game are entirely too long for how thin it is. these characters just go on and on saying nothing of value--or even of negative value, given all the stupid, juvenile jokes--when the events of the game are extremely straightforward and absolutely do not warrant that much text. the dungeons, with the exception of the final two, are all extremely short; this makes the length of the cutscenes stand out even more, because there just isn't enough gameplay between them. compare this to something like Xenogears, which has a million hours of cutscenes, but least knows to break them up with hefty dungeons. i will give Shadow Hearts that there are a few bits of really interesting cutscene direction, though--the voiced kaidan about Lei Lei and the completely random live action musical performance are really awesome, and i wish there was more like that. unfortunately, after the plot leaves China, there's really no space given to that kind of inventive spirit because the focus is placed entirely on advancing the nothingburger end-of-the-world story instead.
the racism, too. my god. it sears the eyes. and the ears. setting aside the issues with portraying this particular period in history without any real acknowledgement of Japanese expansion and violence (the Japanese military presence is pretty much irrelevant compared to the world-ending threats of Déhuài and later Albert), what IS here, for the Chinese characters and Chinese culture, is just stereotypical to the extreme. it's cringe. relatedly, the game often provides readings for vocabulary, and this includes readings for the names of Chinese characters... but they aren't the Chinese readings. 徳壊 is referred to as Tokukai instead of Déhuài, for example. this game clearly has a young target audience--readings are often provided for pretty basic jukugo as well--so maybe they wanted to make it more comprehensible to that younger audience, or something? but i don't know. it's just pretty frustrating when taken in context with how racist everything else in the game is. (as bad as the localization seems to be, at least it uses the proper readings for names; i guess that's one thing you can give it above the original text.)
oh, on another note about how offensive this game is, there's just randomly this major npc who's an extremely offensive gay stereotype and the male characters--particularly Uru--just call him slurs. that's cool. he's there to do acupuncture (?) to upgrade your weapons (?) and he feels up the guys (?) including the twelve-year-old child (?) who all have their sanity points rapidly empty (?) except for Keith who's pretty chill with anything. god fucking help me. i got so pissed off over the triple combo of misogyny-racism-homophobia that, even though i technically started Shadow Hearts in September, i shelved it after three hours. i only just picked it back up to finish it about a week ago because it was bugging me to still have it hanging over my head.
now that i've successfully bitched about everything i hate about Shadow Hearts, i'll change tack to talking about what i did like, because there are genuinely things that are awesome and worth praising in this game. like, the gameplay? it's pretty great! towards the start of the game, when the dungeons are really short and your resources are thin, the bosses are tuned really well. there were a couple of early-game bosses that i beat by the skin of my teeth, and it was a ton of fun. i have a soft spot for RPGs in which you have one damage dealer and the rest of the party is focused on hyperbuffing them (like, say, Blue Archive). all the way to the end of the game, Uru is your main damage dealer and most of your strategies will revolve around the other two accommodating his damage output, healing, or curing the litany of status effects enemies throw at you. on that note, it feels like most of the bosses are pretty tightly tuned around having only single target heals and buffs--you end up on the back foot pretty frequently because of how you have to balance offense and defence. this ends up making the late game bosses a bit less fun because you have access to full party heals from Alice and tons of full party buffing items.
some of the skills are really interesting, too--i liked using Keith, partially because he was the only character in the game that didn't make me cringe out of my own skin, but also because he has one skill that deals damage and cures the party's status ailments at the same time. that's really cool! i love multi-use skills like that, where you can have defensive utility and damage at the same time. more like this in RPGs, please.
the art direction in this game is fucking awesome. some of the monster designs are SO out there. why is there a lizard wearing jorts in one of the end-game optional dungeons? is that musculoskeletal Jesus with huge angel wings as an optional boss? Atman, the floating face with a bunch of eyes, is fucking sick. i think every single enemy in this game has an awesome design, really. they get increasingly otherworldly as the game goes on, which sells the apocalyptic and alien aspect of the story better than the dialogue ever does. the pre-rendered backgrounds are gorgeous. the creepy, foggy villages filled with enemies really sell the horror in Shadow Hearts, because you're never really fully safe. so much of this game's vibe and aesthetic is on point.
my absolute favorite part of Shadow Hearts, though, is the music. holy shit. it's easily one of my favorite video game soundtracks out there; it's up there with King's Field IV, Drag-on Dragoon, and Rule of Rose. a lot of why i was able to get through this game is because, just when my anger would peak, the battle theme for the second half of the game would kick in and it was like being hit with a tranquilizer. in a good way! or i'd go to the world map, hear that track, and take a nice deep breath. there's some serious magic in Shadow Hearts' soundtrack; the joint work of Hirota Yoshitaka and Mitsuda Yasunori resulted in something straight up otherworldly, and i think it's the one way in which Shadow Hearts actually measures up as a spiritual sequel to Koudelka.
to be perfectly honest, these glimmers of brilliance buried within Shadow Hearts just frustrate me even more. it means that there really was potential to make something great here, that this game is not completely without merit. if Shadow Hearts were a completely worthless piece of shit game like, say, Grandia III, i would still be angry, but i wouldn't be totally consumed by rage like i am here. i really wish that this game was as good as people told me it is, but it isn't. i don't see anyone else acknowledging these huge, glaring problems with this game. i almost feel like i'm crazy, but i saw this game with my own two eyes and played it with my own two hands and i've got 2000+ words and the constant exclamations of rage and disbelief that came from both myself and my best friend as we went through the game to prove it.