In the vast annals of gaming history there have been a few titles that have proven themselves as standouts--prolific titles that define genre standards. Everyone has a different list of games that helped shape their own personal definition of what makes an amazing game. For me, one of those defining games was Shadow Hearts.
This past week I began replaying the series after an extremely long time, it has been a reminder that nostalgia, while both wonderful and wistful, needs to be taken with a chip on your shoulder. Things that seemed revolutionary and ground breaking twelve years ago may not be terribly impressive when compared to more current incarnations of those same concepts.
Despite it's age (Shadow Hearts came out back in 2001!) the title has held its integrity and preserved its strengths even when compared to current RPG's. Shadow Hearts is one of those games that allows its players to fall in love with the characters, the development of personality over time is astounding and throughout Yuri's journey it's becomes easier to love him.
So many previous RPG titles have taken a similar approach to designing their protagonists as this kind of brash, arrogant character archetype but few allow them to deviate from that. Yuri is a character that started as something I was familiar with but turned into something I hadn't seen in a hero before playing Shadow Hearts all those years ago.
Part of Shadow Heart's gripping nature sits in the end of the game. Too many games seek to tie things up nice n' pretty without regard to story relevance and this has become especially true in recent times. In a way, the endings of the first and second Shadow Hearts games leave a lot to be desired. They are not happy endings and, without spoiling things, the entire picture that Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts: Covenant paints is a tragedy.
Tragic stories aren't an easy thing to work with as it's hard to allow players into a world where they see characters develop and evolve and in tandem with that growth comes suffering. In a lot of ways, the antagonist wins in both the first and second games and, for me, that's hard to accept. I want things to be different, better. I want Yuri and Alice to end up happy, to find what they are both looking for and, in a way, they do find it, but it's still almost unbearably sad.
Analyzing what makes Yuri appealing to me personally was fairly easy; First and foremost, we speak the same way. I was able to identify with Yuri immediately just by the nature of his speech. It's rough, abbreviated and funny. It allows the player immediate access to a bit of Yuri's personality as the game begins and, without an audible word, the game begins communicating to me what kind of person Yuri is.
I could keep going but...in an effort to keep individual posts short I'll break this analysis up into segments. I'll try to keep them consistent and if you're a Shadow Hearts fan be sure to drop a comment and kick up a discussion if you'd like.
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