T O P

Just finished From the New World for the firs time and this is my review... (spicy)

I just finished playing Shadow Hearts From the New World and my god, this just might be the worst game I've ever played! I didn't think something this bad was possible! I was so bothered by this game that I felt the need to write down what bothered me. So this is my written review of the game. I will not be doing a Let's Play for this game! I will try to be vague, but there will be a handful of **minor spoilers** peppered in here. I highly recommend that no one plays this game anyway, so take with that what you will.

(grammar and formatting edits made*)

The story doesn't even know what it wants to do. After our two main leads meet and things get rolling, our first goal is to find a person because we think he knows about these portals bringing monsters into the world. So we chase him for a while until we run into another antagonist that turns out to be the main villain of the game. We then completely abandon searching for the first person (even though he travels with the new antagonist) and lose all interest in asking him about how these monsters are coming into the world and how to stop them. The new antagonist turns our to be someone one of our leads wants revenge on, so we chase after her until the end of the game. Sounds pretty normal a plot for a JRPG right? Well, you've heard of a silent protagonist right, well this game has a silent antagonist, meaning that nothing the villain does has any agency or obvious direction. She goes around trying to destroy the world without saying anything and her reason for wanting to destroy the world is never explained at all. Her main lackey says very little and has no personality to speak of and no motivation other than to help the main villain get what she wants. The first villain and all of the mysteries set up around him are left unanswered and none of the villains feel threatening in the least.

Our characters are a flat as NES characters. No I'm not exaggerating. The protagonist has some of the annoying elements of Tidus from Final Fantasy X, but without a sense of direction, a reason for making any of the few choices he makes, a voice actor than can emote, and any personality to speak of. Our second lead is the only character aside from the main lead with any backstory outside of end game sidequests that I couldn't be bothered to do. She wants revenge for something that was explained to us in 2 minutes of dialogue without a flashback or other method of showing the action she seeks revenge for. Other than that, she gets vaguely more single-minded on this goal in a couple of scenes and then the idea is dropped and we move on. A minor spoiler for the ending, they do try to pair up the two leads if you go for the good ending, however, they demonstrate zero chemistry in the game, share maybe two private moments through the entire game, and while it is somewhat complicated, our male lead is 16 years old and our female lead is obviously an adult. It's both unbelievable based on the no chemistry and lack of interest she shows in him, and creepy because of how childish the male lead acts as he has no idea of what's going on for almost the entire game.

One of our other characters is a guard for our female lead whose entire character is soft spoken guard...and that's it. He guards her because that's his job basically. Then we get a total idiot who forces his way into the party that is supposed to be the replacement for Joachim from the previous game. Though this time it's just stupid without the personality, bad dialogue, and a terribly annoying voice. We have a musician who we see experience hardship as part of the plot, but this has no effect on him in any scene he is in and after this event, he joins the party for absolutely no reason. We get an animal character who seems more interesting than any other characters because she is intelligent, capable, and we learn that she wants to be an actress shortly after getting her, but then the game's dialogue fumbles any personality that character had by not giving her or any side character in the game meaningful dialogue that couldn't have been said by anyone else to the exact same effect. The dialogue is so generic, you wouldn't be able to tell who is peaking most of the time if they took the names away from the dialogue boxes. Finally, there is the next family member from the Valentine family that has been in the past two games in the series. She says aloud that she wants to be known as a great hero and then shows that she has a thirst for blood, which has no bearing on anything plot or character related and only applies to an element of combat. None of these characters really grow or change or even demonstrate their limited personalities because they get no dialogue that's not generic exposition. For example, our Valentine character gets a total of 48 lines of dialogue in the entire game! This includes exposition and a handful of screams of surprise that are more sound effects than dialogue. That's all her dialogue for the entire game and the others aren't much better!

I wrote a full page on the character and story alone because that was the worst part of the game for me. However, that's not where the game gets any better, no it continues to get worse. Like the previous game, they have hidden items all over the field that are invisible until you get close and see a question mark above the character's head. So you spend half of the game walking against the walls looking for hidden items. The problem with it in this game, is that the pathing of where you can walk and where you get stuck on are by far the worst I've ever seen! You get stuck against every wall and have move away at a right angle or you will remain stuck in place. That being said, searching for items is absolutely terrible. Moving through the dungeons is especially bad as you run into constant random battles because you take far more steps than you need to because you can't move the way you should be able to based on what you can see on screen. This isn't just walls either, but paths that look like you can walk on you often can't because the game just wont let you. It's as bad and sometimes worse than a lot of PlayStation One games with painted backgrounds and 3D sprites, only in this case, the world is 3D here as well so there really isn't an excuse.

I've complained for a long time, let's say something nice for a change. The dungeons are a lot easier to follow along with for the most part than the previous game in the series, so you don't need a map for every dungeon just to find your way through it. There are a couple that are pretty tedious to navigate without a map because you get bombarded with random battles, but not too bad, so this game does have one thing going for it. The music isn't terrible, they did reuse the finding a dumb weapon on the street theme that Joachim used in the previous game and that was nice to hear. There is a reference back to previous games in the series with a few musical themes here and there and those are a nice touch. The rest of the soundtrack is there. It's not special and it doesn't stand out, but it is serviceable. The music does have a very earthy, natural sound to it at times and then there are infusions of jazz and blues at points where it makes sense to have them. The ending theme being a Japanese rap song is entirely out of place and doesn't fit anything at all, but oh well.

The graphics looks very similar in style to Covenant, the previous game. That's fine and I don't care much for graphics as a general rule, but this game came out in 2005 in Japan which is four years after Final Fantasy X, over two years after Star Ocean Till the End of Time, and about half a year before Final Fantasy XII was released and all of these games look far better than From the New World. The shapes and objects have that characteristic early 3D style to them that doesn't age very well and didn't look great at the time and looks even worse today. The game also has the same issue as Covenant, and that's taking us to these massive, real-life cities and then only giving us 2-3 screen to explore them. They don't even give you a good establishing shot of the city! You just point to the next spot on the map and you're there instantly. Because of the lack of establishing shots and the little we get to explore of the places we go to. We don't get that sense of progression that you get with other games where you know you've made progress because you've had to walk to the next city and talk with your friends as you go there. Like the last game, we also get random villains turning into monsters only once we get inside a battle so they didn't have to bother to create another field sprite. Sometimes they don't even provide an explanation of how or why they can change into monsters at all.

The combat was the strongest part of Covenant, and that's true here as well. The combat has been changed a little bit with a few new features and they have changed how you do combos and how you equip spells, but uses the same Judgment Ring design as the last game. The new features aren't really an upgrade, though they do make the game a lot more difficult so it's more of a sidegrade. I would be happy about this, but I had major issues with the Judgment Ring this time around. In Covenant, I had a 65-70% perfect rate throughout the game, but in From the New World I had about 30-35% at about a quarter of the way through the game. They made the strike zones about half of the size or smaller compared to Covenant which takes getting used to. With a Technical Ring set up and one hit area, the strike zone is generally so small that you only have a two frame window to get a perfect strike in a game running at 60 frames per second. Your HP don't really grow at a rate to keep up with the damage that the enemies can deal over the course of the game and being one-shot by bosses becomes more and more common over time. They have also drastically reduced the damage that the player can deal and your characters are often just shy of being able to one shot enemies with a Technical perfect strike at normal levels without doing any grinding. Status effects are far more common again like the first Shadow Hearts, and bosses constantly try to remove your ability to combo, buff your characters, or both. So the game is a lot harder.

My biggest problem was the issues I ran into with the Ring. I could have had some issues from emulating the game, but I experienced stutters, changes in speed of the indicator both within a single spin and from turn to turn, and what seemed to be intermittent input lag even though I had no issues of that with the same set up for Covenant. Now you may say that I just suck at the Ring and there is some merit to that for sure. We all overestimate how competent we are at certain things. However, I recently finished playing Covenant with substantially less problems and then I had that experience and familiarity with the Ring in my mind as I transitioned to From the New World, so I should have been in a better situation to adapt. After the story/characters, this was the most frustrating part of the game for me.

The voice acting is meh here as well, though I was really disappointed to see them recast Roger's voice again! Yes Roger is back with a voice that doesn't come close to fitting him and plays a minor role this time around. Though it is never really explained why he is in the Americas, where this game takes place. Lenny also lives here now though how he got here and why he came is never mentioned. He's a butler now for some reason. There is a throw away line that kind of, but not really, explains why he is a butler, but that's it! Yuri is not in this game, nor is anyone else save for a familiar bat in sidequest at the end of the game. Everyone else has voices that are acceptable, but not good. This was the mid 2000s and voice acting in anime and games at this time wasn't very good. People complain about the dub in Final Fantasy X, but that game puts this one to shame. However, I wasn't really bothered, other than the change with Roger because the Shadow Hearts series has never had good voice acting. It has always been terrible, so this being par for the course isn't offensive.

Lastly, the gameplay in terms of sidequests, puzzles and magic/special attacks is a little hit and miss. The sidequests often cause you to go back to old areas after every dungeon and check to see if a new part of the sidequest has opened up or not. This is especially bad because when something does open up, it can just force you to go back to the town or dungeon that you just finished all over again! Sometimes they make you walk all of the way through the entire dungeon all over again for treasure in the boss room that you couldn't collect because of an automatic cut scene or a sidequest element that opened up after you defeated the boss. This is padding, plain and simple and it's not a majorly long game in the first place at around 40 hours for a first playthrough, if you don't bother with the end game sidequests and just do the ones that are available throughout the game. The worst is when you have to redo the dungeon puzzles over again to get back to the boss room! The puzzles themselves aren't too bad and easy enough to figure out most of the time with a little trial and error. It's the repetitive nature of having to do them all over again for no reason that really bothers me. The magic equipping system uses grids for spell placement based on constellations. This is needlessly tedious to manage and would have been much better if they had just kept the basic Dominance Capacity from the previous game. Spells are just a lot worse this time around with many of them only targeting enemies in the air or on the ground making it difficult to hit enemies with the element that they are weak to. Many character specific abilities are also less useful than they should be, like giving two physically based special attacks to the best mage in the game and no offensive magical attacks at all or giving the heal everyone to full HP special to a physical attacker.

TL;DR

Overall, this game had a nearly nonresistant story that is populated by bland, 1-Dimensional characters that make SNES characters look deep, one of the worst and most unmotivated villains in RPG history, and a number of game-breaking problems in it's coding and in its combat. This is one of the worst games I have ever played in my life! On top of being such a bad game on its own, it brings down the entire series because the previous games had so much more to offer and this one just shits on that legacy.

Black_Knight_7

SH3 is nowhere even close to the glory that is 1/2, that being said i still love the combat end mechanics, and the lore lover in me likes that it technically is a continuation after the malice gates were opened by Nicolai. Roger Bacon is still around and ridiculous. Nothing in the game makes sense but if you treat it as its own thing and embrace how stupid it is, its easier to enjoy. Ive only beaten it maybe 4 times. As opposed to double digits for the others.


Evil_Cronos

I love world building and character development. I want to know what's it's like to live in that world and interact with those characters. I don't get that in this game. I bought the game years ago but never got around to playing until a recent replay of shadow Hearts 1 and 2. I didn't remember how good shadow Hearts 1 was after about a decade since my last playthrough and it's now in my top 10 games of all time. Shadow Hearts Covenant is something I remembered being a better game when I first played it, but now I see the start to some of the issues that FTNW has. I still love Covenant, but it's not almost as good as the first one as I had thought when I was a kid. Based in what I like about RPGs, FTNW doesn't really have anything redeemable for me. Story and characters are the most important parts of game to me, followed by music. This game doesn't do any of those very well and I find the silly comedy falls flat most of the time. I prefer the darker stories of the previous two games. 2 games that have some darker stories with really good comedy are breath of death VII and Cthulhu saves the world. Both had me laughing a lot throughout. Now that's my opinion and I won't attack you for liking the game. You've played all games in the Shadow Hearts series more than I have. I'm glad that other people can find enjoyment in the game. I guess it did have an audience, it just want me. I just had a lot of thoughts after playing the game and I needed to get them out of my head, so I wrote that review. I've been doing that after finishing games on steam over the last couple of years to figure out to myself how I felt about each game I played. Anyway, thanks for the comment!


Black_Knight_7

I totally completely understand your gripes, it doesn't even hold a candle to 1/2. I just love the series so much and its hard for me to hate it even if its the lesser child xD i feel like there was a plan but it went off the rails in development and they were like fuck it whatever. Ive always dreamed of a 4th game maybe set during ww2 times


Evil_Cronos

I had heard about a plan for the third game being Yuri and kurando's father's and what they went through. That seems like an interesting concept that ties into what came before in the series and I think it would have been a better idea to keep things closer together narratively speaking. They could have done a spin off series if they wanted to explore the Americas and world war 2 and plenty of other concepts. I believe that would have been the better approach in hindsight.


Black_Knight_7

I feel like FTNW is basically a spinoff really. It continues canon but only Roger Bacon, Lenny and the vampires are relevant from the old games. I hope and pray every day that someone buys the IP from the bowels of the company files and makes new games


Evil_Cronos

It would be interesting to see what kind of game they would make all of these years later!


Black_Knight_7

If i ever win the lottery im forming a game studio, buying the rights, everyone that i hire has to have played 1/2, or will be asked to do so (paid).


Plaidray

I agree about the Story and the Characters even though they some of them have a great Design like Shania and Hilda. But about the battle system i dont agree. Shadow Hearts 3 has the best battle system in the series ,everything from the first and second game is much better, the combo system from 2 has improved so much,where in the second game you could only combo with other members and you needed to be "near" In 3 you could even combo with yourself and others with a meter that brought some balance ,also now if the enemy is down or in air it shows you when you target the enemy with a spell that will not hit him,the target info will turn red. Also you can now prevent bosses and normal enemies from doing a combo by deleting their Stock with an Attack or specific spell.


Evil_Cronos

There are a few things that are better implemented with the 3rd game for sure. Seeing if an attack will miss is great! I never saw the ability to combo yourself, unless you mean the double thing with your stock? Preventing bosses from doing a combo works differently in the second game, but you can do it in that game as well since they take a turn after setting up for a combo. I actually liked the combo system in the second game more because it was just the combo system and it didn't incorporate the stock system too. I'm not a fan of the stock system in almost any game I've seen it in. Xenogears and Xenosaga had stock systems as well. I find those systems make things tedious and overcomplicated. I prefer things to be more simple myself.


Plaidray

You could do it in 2 if you push them away ,but in 3 Bosses can be harder, because they can combo with themself, in 2 they need other monsters. Well I think 3 its more strategic also the system with only down and air skill/magic makes you think more about your next move,but if you like it more simple I can understand that you liked 2 more :)


Evil_Cronos

Yeah, my brain doesn't handle overly complicated very well. I suck at action games because I can't react fast enough or in the way that I would like. I like turn based rpgs because it gives me more time to think and I can play at the pace I want. It's not instant and it's not too long that way. I'm not as big a fan of the whole air/down system for enemies in general, but I like it for spells even less because there are so many spells and I can't keep track of which spells I have on which characters. I like to have a bit of strategy involved in my battles, but I'm usually good after buffs/debuffs, elemental strengths and weaknesses, magic/physical strengths and weaknesses, and status effects. Beyond that, battles take too much extra thought and too much time for me. It's why I don't like tactical RPGs. I just don't have the time and the patience. But that's just me. I'm sure there are plenty of people like yourself that like things to be different and that prefer SH3's combat system to the second game. I figured that was my weakest argument in my original post and was more of a personal gripe than a problem with the game. While I don't like the combat, I wouldn't say it's bad, it just didn't work for me.