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Dom Robinson reviews
Midway 
- Price: £34.99
- Players: 1
It’s 1913 and in Shadow Hearts,you play Urm Hyuga, the son of a Japanese soldier who died in battle fifteenyears ago. You start the game on a train destined for China, where a younggirl, Alice Eliot – the daughter of an expert exorcist – needs rescuing frompowerful magician Roger Bacon who’s taken her away because he believes she’llhelp him unlock ancient secrets which can destroy the Earth.
It’s another turn-based RPG (role-playing game) and your character can morphhimself into twenty different creatures in a bid to achieve his objectives. You know thedrill – you walk into a room, baddies appear and have to be dealt with oneat a time. The difference here is that you use your Judgement Ring,which swings around a bit like taking a swipe in a computer golf game, in orderto attack your opponents, but it’s just as hit-and-miss as the implementationof any other RPG I’ve played.
The graphics are reasonable for this isometric 3D adventure (the viewpointchanges during battles only), but there’s a complete lack of anti-aliasing so,for example, as you make your way through train compartments, the diagonallines that make up the seats are jagged, jagged, jagged.
The audio is pleasing enough and the soundtrack creates the right kind ofatmosphere. Also – and I’m not taking a pop at the game when I say this, butthe soundtrack is perfect music to fall asleep to. I had a couple of hourssnooze to the strains of a repetitive piece of the ambient audio while I leftthe game on pause, because it sounds incredibly reminiscent of a track fromThe Orb‘s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld album, a piece of workI used to do exactly the same to.
To sum up though, if RPGs are your bag then you’ll get into it without too muchdifficulty.
I had a brief flirtation with the genre a few years back withFinal Fantasy VII andits sequel, but any RPG since has just relied too much on the same format, butwith a slight change in graphics and another storyline about rescuing othersset in improbable locations.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.