I've played about 9 hours of Shadow Hearts so far. I haven't played it as much as I would have liked, but I'm happy that I've made some progress. I'm glad I decided to replay it. While the voice acting is terrible (hilarious in parts), there are a lot of good points about it.

This week, I’ll talk about the unique features of Shadow Hearts. I only touched upon them last week, so I thought I’d go into depth this time. There are no spoilers, so you don’t need to worry.

Judgement Ring

As I mentioned last week, the ‘Judgement Ring’ is an important aspect of the battle system in Shadow Hearts. When you decide to perform an action, you must hit the ‘x’ button in the correct areas as the ‘hand’ swings around. There are three areas for regular attacks, two for specials and one for items. For most actions, there’s a red area at the tip of the individual areas. If you manage to hit this, the attack or stat boost will improve in power. However, should you miss a highlighted area, the prompt stops. In the case of missing the first area, it means you won’t carry out that action at all.

You can slow the hand or increase the size of the highlighted areas with certain items. This makes life a lot easier in battles. However, they wear off after a few turns (unless you have an equipped accessory with that property). Negative effects can also be inflicted, such as increased hand speed and smaller highlighted areas. If you wish, you can use certain items to inflict them on yourself with the incentive of dealing more damage. It provides the opportunity for some good strategic play.

The judgement ring isn’t just limited to battles. In fact, some actions during the exploration part of the game require you to do a small prompt with the ring. This includes a ‘lottery’, where you have the chance to win items. You also use it to buy items at a cheaper price or sell items at a higher price (if you’re successful with the prompt).

Malice

As you defeat more and more enemies, something called ‘Malice’ builds up (displayed in pause menu). If it reaches max (red), you will soon go into battle with a character known as Fox Face (you find out who he actually is early in the story). While he can be defeated, it’s not recommended at the start of the game. Thankfully, you can run from these battles. This encounter keeps happening until you 'calm your malice'. To do this, you must fight a demon in a location known as the Graveyard (again, this is explained early on). The demon varies depending on how much malice you have built up.

Sanity Points

Aside from the usual HP and MP, Shadow Hearts also has something called SP. Unlike in some other RPGs where SP is an alternative for MP, it refers to the ‘sanity’ of the characters in this game. If anyone’s SP reaches 0, they become ‘berserk’. However, this does not mean they’ll simply attack in every turn. A ‘beserked’ ally can also use items and cast spells, which means things can get out of hand quickly if you’re not careful. Sanity is regained by using Pure Leaves and Pure Seeds. It also resets after each battle.

Fusion

Very early in the game, you discover that Yuri (the main character) is a Harmonixer; a person capable of fusing with demons. As you can imagine, this means that he can fuse into a variety of demons in battle. You initially start off with only one demon, but you can gain more as the game goes on. This is done by first defeating enemies of various elements. Once you’ve defeated enough of a certain element, you have the chance to fight a demon in the graveyard (marked by a glowing headstone). If you defeat the demon, you can use it in battle from that point on.

E1 M1 – Doom

An all-time classic. I think I was around 11 when I first played Doom (and it didn’t do me any harm...*hides bloody knife*). I remember playing the shareware demo a lot until I got the full version. There’s a lot of great tracks in the Doom games, but E1 M1 seems like the best one to mention. Seeing as the game had a metric f’ton of versions, I’ve included a nice two-part comparison video. My personal favourite is the 3DO rendition (although the actual game is apparently crap on that console). The worst? The Sega 32x version. Hands down.

Theme of Grandia (Opening Theme) – Grandia

From the moment I heard this track, I knew I was in for one heck of a game. Much like the Uncharted theme, it sets the tone nicely. It conjures up thoughts of a long journey full of happy and sad moments.

Terran 1 – Starcraft

While I never got too deep into Starcraft, I really enjoyed the music it had. It really suits the mood of the game’s setting. Very otherworldly. If I was to choose one track, I’d go with ‘Terran 1’, but I recommend checking out the other tracks. It’s great stuff.

Thanks for reading. Not sure if next week's edition will happen, but we'll see...