Shadow Hearts Covenant was fun but the lack of Horror was missed.
There was some things I thought they improved on from the first Shadow Hearts (graphics, voice, music, battle system, map) but there was some things I thought they messed up on (dialog, dungeons, lack of horror) but I think the good out weights the bad on this one. Covenant was a much simpler game, easier to play, longer filled out storyline, even though the story seemed to be all over the place at times. The lack of horror just makes this game feel like a typical JRPG, which is my biggest disappointment.
If you haven't played the first game I just can't recommend anyone to jump into this one because there's a TON of backstory that is needed to understand this one. This game just wouldn't make sense to anyone if you didn't know who Alice, Yuri or Roger Bacon is, along with the million other references to the first game. If you have played the first one, then you'll enjoy this.
----------Battle System----------
Shadow Hearts Covenant is a turn-based RPG. The turns go along with who has the best speed, rather than round-based. Shadow Hearts features a Judgement Ring, exactly like the first game, where there is a field of green inside of a ring, and a dial spins around inside of it. You're goal is to hit these green marks and that counts as a hit against the enemy. At the end of each green area is a small red area, and if you hit this then your attacks increase. The Judgement Ring is much easier this time around, mostly because you can buy a Speed Reducer very early in the game for a cheap price.
Your team will have the maximum of four characters at a time. Battles are randomly generated, but the rate of these battles can be long, so you can run around for maybe 30 seconds until another pops up. Battles can be really quick too for a number of reasons (four characters + weak enemies + strong characters + quick load times).
Dungeons are really annoying because there is two forms of them. Either you'll be in a warp maze, where you need to go inside of warps until you find the right path, or just a pain in the butt maze level. Puzzles are very light in this game, maybe 1/3 of all the dungeons have any sort of puzzles in them, and they're all pretty simple. The maze levels are the most annoying because you'll be trapped in a forest or cave with the same backgrounds over and over again, with no landmarks, and about a million different splits and turns that gets your lost.
They got rid of the upgrading-your-weapons thing from the first game. So you can just buy new weapons and they're always better than the last. You can also buy 1 piece of armor and 3 pieces of accessories. So micromanaging is simpler.
Each character has their own set of skills and abilities, and their own ways of gaining them too. Yuri gets Soul Points after each battle where you can get new souls and level them up, just like the first game. Karin can find musical notes that teachers her new sword techs, Gepetto will find uh.. "Stud Cards", of nearly nude males where he can trade them to a gay dress maker to make a new dress for his doll. Blanca is a wolf that fights one-on-one battles against other wolves that powers his abilities, Joachim is a vampire / wrestler that learns new moves from his wrestling mentor, he also can transform into a bat, superhero and the invisible man.
Gaining money and experience is VERY simple in this game, to the point where I had to much money almost everytime, I never had to grind in this game at all, unlike the first one.
----------Characters / Story----------
Shadow Hearts takes place 6 months after the end of the first game and during the beginning of the first World War. Even though Karin is on the box, Yuri, from the first game is still your main character. Alice, Yuri's love interest from the first game, dies. Yuri buries her in a small Spanish town and begins to protect it from invading German solders. Karin is a hired German solider on a small mission to capture that town, but finds out she was deceived by her companion Nicolai. Nicolai is part of an underground group destined to take over the world. He first must get rid of the Godslayer Yuri, so Nicolai gets an ancient device called the Holy Miseltoe and stabs Yuri with it removing all of his past Fusions making him weakened and dying. Yuri and Karin team up and seek out to destroy this group.
I liked the plot quite a bit and it gets more involved with all the twists and turns than what I said above, but the dialog got ridiculous to the point of almost ruining the game for me. The first game was very serious and very macabre, pretty much a Horror RPG. Other than the gay acupuncturist in that game, there was nothing to goofy within, but Covenant is full of stupid goofy moments more than there is Horror moments, it's just packed full of dumb comedy bits. Granted, some are downright hilarious, but it's not what I was expecting. I play dumb comedy RPGs all the time, while Horror RPGs are small in numbers, so that's what I wanted, oh well. There's also really lame one-liners, mostly coming from Yuri. In the first game, Yuri was very quite and stern, in this one he's almost the Bart Simpson of the team. Ugh.
Despite all of the goofy crap, the story was decent enough to play all the way through, although I was starting to get burnt out of it towards the end of the game.
----------Graphics----------
I liked the graphics quite a bit, from the towns to the character models to the special attacks, nothing was cheaped out. There's a few jaggies during in-game cutscenes but otherwise nothing to annoying. There's a ton of pre-rendered cutscenes in the game, the biggest chuck is on disc 2, but they look crisp. The battle system looks great compared to the first since all the characters run around like on a Grandia or Skies of Arcadia game. The special attacks are huge and theres just a crap load of them. The dungeons layout got pretty bland after a while, and the monsters weren't nearly as creative as the first game, but overall I enjoyed the look and feel of the game.
----------Sound----------
The music is great and very rememberable, some songs are reused or redone from the first game like battle theme and stuff, but they're great songs to begin with. Theres a ton of voice work in this game, but like Grandia III, they only occur during rendered cutscenes, so the normal chats or even some important scenes don't include voice work. Overall theres more voice work than the first game, so that's a huge plus.
----------World Map----------
The map is pretty similar to the first game, it features a normal flat map of Europe, with dots connecting each area, but to the side of the map is a menu list of all the towns, so you don't even connect them and roam around in any form (like the first game) so there isn't any sense of "adventure" really. The biggest improvement is the dots sometimes feature sub-maps, so there might be towns or dungeons within these areas. The biggest improvement for the map is how non-linear it is compared to the first. You couldn't turn back at all in the first one, except for maybe a couple times, but you can backtrack as much as you like in this one.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
40:57:51
After you beat the game you get a rather short ending, followed by long credits. After the credits you get the real ending and then you can save. After all of that, you unlock "Theater mode" where you can view all the scenes in the game (151 of them) and you can start a New Game+.
