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	Best Price! - Shadow Hearts: From the New World (PS2)   Set in 1930's America, just after the era of The Great Depression, 'Shadow Hearts: From the new world' follows our young hero - Johnny Garland.	£9.80	Amazon.co.uk

Shadow Hearts: From The New World Reviews

Reviews from Amazon.co.uk

Still very good.

I was a bit apprehensive about this one as I had heard some dissapointing things said about it,ultimately it's not as polished or deep as Covenant but it's still a very good rpg.
Yes,Yuri's gone but I found Johnny Garland a decent enough 'replacement',likewise Shania for Karin.the graphics are slightly less polished than Covenant but since the game almost never came out that'a small price to pay.If anything the Judgement Ring is even easier to use this time and the 'Double/Combo'attacks are a welcome addition,The main story is very good although a teeny bit shorter than last time but it has just as many sidequests,some of which I didn't/couldn't do.
Saying that it still clocked in at over 60 hrs by the time I'd finished and I'd gladly start it again,in fact I have.

First Shadow Hearts Expierience? Go ahead...

...otherwise...avoid it like the plague!

I have LOVED the Shadow Hearts games (and to a lesser extent, Koudelka, the 1st in the entire series) since I bought the 2nd game, Covenant, off Amazon a while ago. I then went back and got Koudelka and the Shadow Hearts and was amazed at the brilliant gameplay and ease of control (apart from Koudelka which was pretty useless in the controls department!)
But then this came out...I was SOOO excited, you couldn't possibly understand how excited I mean...I even pre-ordered it and played it straight away!

I love the judgement ring system, thankfully thats still there...it has a half decent story, and best of all, they still have fusions...

Sadly though, those 3 good points all have their pitfalls...The way they've brought another ring soul (now called a ring spirit...why the name change guys!?) was good, and who it is was quite a good idea, I liked it...but its just so hard to find all the items you need to that you rarely get an upgrade for your ring making the ring slightly pointless...the story, sure its good, but honestly, from the word go you can tell exactly whats going to happen! I know, its hard to write a story like that and NOT give away the ending, but you could wait til halfway through at least! And the Fusions...they get really boring as Shania, cool as Tomahwaks are, is weak as hell, and you NEED to fuse her to make it worth your while using her...Also, to get a fusion, you have to make a "spirit contract", which is basically the same as the way Yuri got his souls...by beating them to a pulp...Sadly, there are only a few of these available in the game (you get an extra one from a sidequest thats pretty hard).

If you've played the other 2 games, you're in for a major letdown, as it has a lack of cool guys with funky weapons...and a really crap voice for Roger instead of the old one...

If only they had stopped at Covenant...or brought Yuri back somehow...things would be alright *sigh* maybe someday people will learn...

A step backwards

Despite being a massive fan of Shadow Hearts 1 and 2, 3 turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Gone are the well-received cast from the previous games, something entirely expected but nonetheless disheartening as their replacements are not even on the same level.

You play Johnny Garland, a young boy in New York playing detective, who takes on a case that leads him into more trouble than he was banking on. The usual themes, of the forces of malice, bizarre characters coming together, and an around-the-world quest come quickly into play. The harmonixer this time around is Shania, who transforms into numerous godly creatures much like Yuri and Kurando.

After a fairly good beginning sequence in an atmospherically creepy abandoned theatre, the game loses steam and increasingly fails to impress, with plot, graphics and characters all pretty much bog-standard and lacking the charm of the previous games. The graphics seems rushed and unrefined, and despite a few pretty areas they are largely uninspiring. The environments are equally disappointing; non-combat areas are often unrealistically tiny and limited, while the combat areas themselves are all very similar, tedious and unimaginative. The dungeon puzzles of the previous games are no longer a challenge, but a frustrating impediment to your progress.

One of the series' continued strengths is the soundtrack, utterly unlike any other RPG I've played and mixed this time with some great tribal beats to reflect the Native American themes in the game. The voice acting is pretty good and does the job.

Since they're prominent in the reviews so far and certainly present in the game, I'll briefly cover the technical issues. I played it at 60hz and despite no crashing, the graphics were constantly leaping and twitching all over the place in battle. They are very glitchy, and so distracting at first I wondered if I'd got a dud copy. In the end, though, the issues are endurable, but they only lend weight to the rushed, unpolished feel of the game in general.

The story and characters themselves are also generally a let-down. Where the game tries to be serious it is failed by its silly and weak concepts, and where it tries to reinforce the trademark SH humour, it comes across as trying too hard. The staple 'bizarre' characters, like Hilda the fat vampire and Mao the giant cat, again just feel like someone trying too hard to be weird and fun, with little payoff. The one exception is Frank, the BrazEElian ninja. Quite possibly the most guffaw-worthy, hilarious and entertaining character in any RPG to date, and almost a selling point for this game in and of himself.

The main character, Johnny, feels too weak to carry the story until much later in the game, and besides her utterly unattractive personality, Shania is only in the game to get naked ~every time~ she transforms, be it in FMV, battle or a cutscene. As a woman playing the game I frankly got sick of the sight of her rather early on and was entirely put off using the fusion system at all, but besides a few key plot points you can probably manage without it. She's strong enough in her regular form and the battles are not exactly difficult - the difficulty level in general is really lax.

Ultimately, while I don't regret playing Shadow Hearts 3, it is annoyingly average, and the series' strengths are not very prominent in this one. I give it 3 stars because it wasn't ~bad~, but neither was it very memorable.

Improved Game Play

I played this game through at 60hrz no problem. Not so much as a glitch. If this is holding you back from buying the title, don't let it.

This entire game was absolutely hilarious. Sure it's not as dark as its predecessors, but it has the same tongue-in-cheek humour, mixed in with the purely silly. Every character is unique, each with their own side-missions and special abilities that need to be earned. The judgement ring now affects most everything you do and makes Shadow Hearts stand out from other RPGS.

What I enjoyed most was the variety in this game. If you didn't feel like smashing your way through a dungeon or solving a puzzle, then there are dozens of other mini-quests to be enjoying instead.

If you've played any Shadow Hearts games, you'll enjoy this one. If you haven't, get it and enjoy a new kind of RPG experience.

It's not happening this time around

I've been a huge fan of the Shadow Hearts series, but "From the New World" is the weakest so far. I might be a little biased as I played it immediately after finishing Final Fantasy 12 and it just can't compare to that, but even so I remember having a far better time playing the first game and the sequel, "Covenant". The story of Yuri and Alice really made the first game memorable, and the second was almost as good, with Karin making a very sympathetic female lead. This time, however, I am not warming to any of them.

The story this time is a brand new one. A 16 year old called Johnny Garland has his own detective agency in New York (like all 16 year olds do), and one day a chance visit from a stranger begins a missing person hunt that leads to uncovering an evil force that threatens to wipe out the entire world. Along the way he gathers a team of new friends and so the stage is set for a typical RPG. Now, Shadow Hearts is famous for having off the wall characters and this time is no exception. I thought having the puppet master Gepetto and Princess Anastasia as part of your team in Covenant was whacky enough, but this time around you'll be joined by a giant drunken Kung-Fu cat, a kittenish female Vampire and a comedy Ninja. The trouble is that I'm having a harder time becoming attached to them in this game because they just don't seem to be original creations. Frank the Ninja is a direct copy of Joacim, with his weapon upgrades from found objects, and Hilda the childish and annoying vampire changes form between being fat, skinny or a bat in the same way that Keith and Joacim did. Shania the indian squaw can shape-shift into elemental fusion monsters like Yuri did, and characters learn new moves and spells by finding documents or manuscripts like Karin did. As this is supposed to be a completely new game, I found this amount of repetition in the characters to be very disappointing.

Another thing is that in this day and age, there is no excuse for the playable environments to be so small. New York is represented by four "boroughs", most with just one street and no visitable buildings. Go the wrong way or step off the kerb and you drift back to the world map, showing you how tiny each location is. There's no moveable camera and the scantest populations of NPCs to talk to in each place. The dungeons are little better, relegated to just a few rooms or stages, with no more than about three varieties of enemy in each. You can do each dungeon level and boss in a single sitting and it sometimes seems like the game is whizzing by. The game still plays with "alternative" versions of real places, but it doesn't impress much this time around, with Alcatraz prison and the Roswell UFO site being very lack-lustre.

There are some new ideas, but they are not all good. The stellar chart magic system is terribly clumsy and you have to navigate endless permutations of screens and options to set each character up with decent spells. Plus the stellar charts themselves have to be modified at shops to hold the better magic spells, which makes it even more of a bother. One good thing is that each character has unique abilities, which means that they are not endlessly interchangeable like in some RPGs (even in Final Fantasy 12 you could have built up all the characters in exactly the same way), and this gives some variety.

The best thing about the series, though, is still it's trademark Judgement Ring system, and if you enjoyed the first two games for this reason you will be well served here. The battles have even become more complicated with the introduction of the "Stock" guage, which acts like a meter that fills up when you give or receive damage. This can then be used to unleash devastating linked attacks once filled. Managing Stock is crucial to a good battle, and I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the Combo mechanism, with great results for those who have good reflexes (missing the correct symbol button and breaking a good combo is frustrating but fair, because if you want that 4 chain Combo magic you have to work for it!).

My overall impression is that "From The New World" has been created to ride on the glory of the games before it by simply copying them. It's nowhere near as impressive as "Covenant", and all it's ideas are second hand. It's also trying too hard to be funny. There's scarcely a serious moment in here, or anything approaching the depth or the adult orientated themes that the series did so well in the past. It's all now just a giant cartoon, and while Kung-Fu cats and fat vampires are funny for a while, they don't draw you into the story at all. There is scarcely any plot to speak of as it is, the whole game is just a chase from start to finish, following the villains all around the world. The fun in the game lies with the battles and becoming an expert using the Judgement Ring. Battles are complex and even random encounters need some forethought, especially as there are bonuses available for very good performances (perfect ring turns, enemies killed without having a single turn, etc), so there is a lot to enjoy. Boss battles can be long, but at the same time, the game never gets particularly difficult, and levelling up sems to happen very rapidly so you can easily make a powerhouse team to face almost anything. Sidequests are good - there are seperate side stories for each character which is a nice aspect, and something of a tradition now in the series. It's a shame that these good aspects are not complementing a more impressive basic game, because as it stands, the Judgemant Ring and the good "extras" are the only thing lifting a very short and mediocre RPG plot and characters into being a passable game.