Shadow Hearts. . . extended review.
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Graphics: Nothing spectacular, DC style. They take one monster, then change his skin and all the sudden he\'s "completly different." CG scenes are few and far between, but oh-so woth it. I\'m stil marveling about the scene at the end of Part One.
Sound: FX grow repetivie, but the music is pretty good, especially in this one place where they stick in some heavy breathing, it freaks me out every time.
Characters: 6 to control, 3 at a time. They\'ve got your typical strong guy, your "white mage," "black mage," "black/white mage," weapon specialist, and that kid that uses a slingshot and has ESP.
Monsters: easy to beat if you can figure out their opposing force (water/ice, fire, dark , light, earth, air), but many of them are non-elemental, and most are hard to figure out. Variety is slim, but they make up for it by making quite unusual beasts. It\'s like a nightmare of Resident Evil or something mixed with Silent Hill. I just can\'t explain, but most beasties are quite creepy.
Story: Typical guy-meets girl, they fall in love, and save the world all at the same time. The main bad-guy changes face multiple times, keeping you guessing. It\'s a decent story, but the dialogue gets in the way.
Dialogue: A whole bunch of crappy love lines, and groping, and this gay guy that performs actupuncture, amongst ofhter things to the males of your party.
"Storybook cutscenes": every now and then there is a cut-scene to develop the story in "story book mode" kinda like a character sits everyone down and reads form a book, turnig the pages. They\'re often way too long, and you can\'t skip them.
Bosses: Either way too easy, or way too hard. Battles last form one to thirty minutes. It\'s the same pattern, attack, attack, heal, repeat as necesarry.
Battle system: Just like any RPG except you have to use a judgement wheel. Where you have a dial that turns and you have to his the X button at just the right time or the action you choese to perform won\'t happen. It\'s innovative, but stupid all the same.
Leveling up: There is only one point in the game where you are forced to use morfe than three characters (your team splits up). but by thet time that happens it doens;t matter if your second team is developed at all. Mainly you choose the main guy plus your two other favorites and level them up like mad. Three of my characters are over level 50, while the other three are around 30, where most of them started.
Malice: This is a cool idea. When you fight your malice buildss up, and if it builds up too far, these guardian masks come after you, and if you\'re below level 50 they are very likely to kill you. To keep your malice down you have to frequently visit "the graveyard" to fight a "malice monster." It never became a problem for me.
linear play. The game is pretty linear, but it\'s like previous FF\'s where yo have a map to move form point-to-point. Sometimes when I came back from a save I forgot where to go, and spent 30 or so minutes going to each place until I showed up in the right spot. The sidequests are very secritive, I had to find a walkthrough to get the best weapons/fusions, etc. A lot of the sidequests are quite obscure.
Overall, it\'s entertaining, but I\'ve found it so frustrating at times that I stopped plauying for a couple days to cool off from the repetitiveness.
