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Shadow Hearts: From the New World out in March

Posted on Tuesday 7th February 2006 at 14:36 by laszlow
Playstation 2
The third (fourth if you count the PS1 RPG Koudelka) game in the Shadow Hearts series, subtitled From the New World, will be released for the PS2 in the United States on March 7th of this year at a retail price of $39.99. Developer XSeed released this information some time yesterday, along with releasing an American official website for the game. The previous two games (particularly the second, Shadow Hearts: Covenant) received critical acclaim and a strong cult following due to their unusual twists on real-life settings, bizarre and entertaining characters, deep and dark storylines, and unusual and innovative gameplay mechanics.

FTNW will play similarly to Covenant and will feature Shadow Hearts' signature setting and style, but there are a number of important changes being made. First of all, this game does not appear to be a completely obvious sequel. The first two games both starred the shapeshifter Yuri Hyuga and were set in World War I-era Europe. FTNW fast-forwards approximately fifteen years and travels a few thousand miles, being set in America in 1929, starring a young New York gumshoe named Johnny Garland, and featuring Native American bounty hunters, a American ninja-wannabe, a young vampire girl, a Mexican mariachi, and fat, alcoholic talking cat as supporting cast members.

FTNW brings back the Judgement Ring system, but also adds something called the Stock system to Shadow Hearts' gameplay. Stock meters work similarly to several other passive meters in other RPGs (ie Limit Meters, Overdrive Gauges, IP Bars) in that it will build up over time (in this case building up whenever a character deals or takes damage) to be spent later for special attacks. If you build up a character's Stock meter to maximum, they accumulate one Stock (maximum 2). Characters can spend one or two Stock to perform special attacks, or even combine Stock with other characters to perform combination special attacks. This should add a new element of strategy to the already-innovative and interesting SH battle system.

I personally really enjoyed the first two SH games (especially Covenant), so I have been waitng for this information for quite some time. I am extremely excited about this game, and consider the Shadow Hearts games to be one of the best RPG series of this current generation of consoles. Any of you with a PS2 would be doing themselves a service by checking this game and its predecessors out. With From the New World, Kingdom Hearts II, Tales of Phantasia, and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion call coming out in March of this year, RPG players have a lot to look forward to next month.

Sources: RPGFan
Shadow Hearts: From the New World's official website
Posted in: Square-Enix News

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laszlow

Comments

ShotgunnovaComment 1: 2006-02-07 15:53
Shotgunnova I had normally thought that XSeed was pretty good about localizing, but since they messed up BIG TIME on Wild ARMs 4, I'm not that happy they're involved. Having said that, I've never played a Shadow Hearts game before (though I want to), so hopefully I can get a few before the seventh. Are they a series only in name?
laszlowComment 2: 2006-02-07 17:04
laszlow I can understand your frustration with XSeed, but they are just a game publisher. The Shadow Hearts series has been developed by the same team, formerly Sacnoth, formerly Nautilus, and now part of the recently created XSeed. The mistake that XSeed made regarding Wild ARMs 4 was a localization error, but it remains to be seen if they ever perform similar botchjobs in the future.

And as to Shadow Hearts being "a series only in name", that's sort of hard to say. The first two games (not counting Koudelka) were most definitely directly related, with Shadow Hearts: Covenant beginning at the previous game's "bad ending" (one of multiple endings), and it's sort of difficult to understand parts of the story of Covenant if you haven't played (or at least read a story synopsis of) the original.

From what little research I've done over the past few hours between classes, it seems that From The New World has a number of cameos from the previous two games, and Hilde, the playable vampire girl character from FTNW, is related to Joachim from Covenant. Also, Shania, a Native American girl from FTNW, is a Harmonixer like Yuri from the previous two games. FTNW is probably more of a spinoff than a sequel, but the previous two games are part of the same story.
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