If that wasn't enough to make the more cynical brush off their green-tinted glasses, then how about this: the licensed title is Shadow Hearts, a game that deals rather unflinchingly with extreme supernatural violence and suggestive themes, and it passes without any apparent censorship. Color me impressed.

Shadow Hearts is the work of Sacnoth, a small Japanese developer apparently formed by ex-Square and ex-SNK staffers. It's a labor of love, as one can tell, and as with any labor of love, there's quite a few oversights. What makes it remarkable is that it effectively uses a Victorian theme and features dialogue that is anything but stereotypical for the genre.

Sacnoth's previous RPG offering was last year's Koudelka, which could be considered a prequel of sorts to this game. Those few of you who endured Koudelka's utterly miserable combat system long enough to see that little adventure at the Nemetton Monastery through to its twisted conclusion will now get your reward: the latter half of Shadow Hearts deals directly with those events. It isn't necessary to have played Koudelka to fully understand the plot, although there are a few references that will seem a lot more contextual if you have.

Like Koudelka, Shadow Hearts is a game that concerns itself with the occult in a weirdly anachronistic Victorian-era setting. In this alternate turn-of-the-previous-century world, sorcerous disasters are apparently not uncommon, and the landscape teems with demonic figures lurking in the shadows between our world and a sort of panreligious spirit realm. Various deities and faiths are invoked with equal success, be your ritual in Latin or classic Mandarin; Shadow Hearts' amalgam setting takes a very holistic view of the occult. Anachronisms, which are sure to offend the rare few historical purists playing this game, abound: the female characters wear mini-skirts, one character employs what appears to be a cell phone, and the language is very modern urban at times. Not that it matters; since we're dealing with an "alternate Earth" here, anything goes, I suppose.

Unfortunately, Shadow Hearts also suffers from a few of the general flaws that pervaded Koudelka, although they never manifest in any truly damaging way. Shadow Hearts sports a great theme and cast created in great depth and with great interest, as many of the more amateurish RPGs are, with a game stapled in somewhat haphazardly to provide justification for its existence. In the case of Shadow Hearts, the horse is strong enough to push the cart, but only just so; fortunately, the cart itself is interesting enough that the player won't mind helping it along, cognitively-speaking.

The cast and dialogue shine, largely due to the excellent localization. The main character, one Yuri Hyuga, is a brazen thug unafraid to publically dwell on his own lust for the innocent exorcist-in-stockings Alice Elliot. Other folks you'll team up with include a self-conscious old sage with a gimlet wit, a self-proclaimed superspy with a love for both flirting and firepower, a good-natured and very bored vampire, and a psychic street urchin. The cast is unafraid to discuss sex in a fairly natural way, which comes as a bit of a shock, given the often wholesome teenaged take on romance the genre is notorious for. The villains are a truly despicable lot, cruel and sorcerous megalomaniacs ripped straight out of the pages of Clive Barker's "Weaveworld" or "The Damnation Game," or any of HP Lovecraft's various tales.

Yuri Hyuga, as the story goes, is a "Harmonixer," a man able to harness the evil in his soul and bind demons to his self, transforming into them as he so chooses. Like Vincent Valentine of FF7 fame, Yuri's major mechanic revolves around obtaining these demonic forms. However, it's also a major plot element; Yuri's struggle with the Four Masks of Evil that threaten to claim his soul is a key thread to follow within the game if you hope to obtain the best ending. Each of the other characters bring their own skills, be it in combat or magic, and there is very little room given for Final Fantasy styled character customization.

The story itself kicks off with an adrenalizing FMV of the primary villain, a dapper English gent named "Roger Bacon" (after the famous 15th century alchemist) hacking down Japanese soldiers on a train through China, as he pursues Alice Elliot for reasons as yet unknown. He's interrupted by Yuri, who escapes with Alice, which in turn sets up a long trek trough China culminating in a fiery mid-game Shanghai showdown. The latter half of the plot takes place in Europe for a change in venue, although the main plot thread drops off a bit in order to allow for several side quests. Sadly, a vital item for the good ending can only be found in the first half, and the area cannot be revisted after the halfway mark - a grievous error in game design, methinks, especially considering how innocuous and illogical the item is (a dirty magazine, needed to save the world?).

The pacing is good throughout, and rarely slows down. Interesting plot and character revelations end each distinct scenario, as expected, while ultimately raising new and relevant mysteries. There's also plenty of gore and general gothic creepiness. Not that all is perfect - there are a couple scenes that are incredibly lame (there's really no other word to describe them), such as an unpleasantly onomatopoeic retelling of a local tale by a crazy fishwife, replete with disjointed photographs that do not match the games' slick anime style. Yuck.

Graphically, the game demonstrates the very modern need to separate the technical from the aesthetic. Technically, Shadow Hearts looks like it began life as a PSOne game, replete with low-res pre-rendered backgrounds and low-poly characters. The Playstation 2 muscles the dated engine around with some nice alpha effects, high-color graphics, and an updated resolution, but the game poorly conceals its baser origins. The animation and texturing, in accordance with the PSOne's aging standards, are middling at best.

Aesthetically, though, the game overcomes its technical limitations with some fine artistry and character designs (anachronistic as they may be). The locales are imaginatively conceived and well rendered, and the characters interact with them believably. The portrait art, done in an angular anime style, is very well done overall. The menus and interface all navigate smoothly, and there are some very nice incidental effects, such as depth-of-field blurring and various alpha tricks that add a fair amount of cinematic polish. The character and monster modeling, while low poly, are very imaginative and often downright disturbing. Some of the bosses are truly hideous, and a few creatures have a distinctly sexual bent to them. Skinned animals and demons with phallic protrusions are among the norm, much to the delight of those Barker fans out there. My personal favorites are an inverted mental patient carrying her brain impaled on a stick as a weapon, and a dog balancing itself on a hand thrust from its open mouth. I'm not sure what sort of crazy mushrooms the Sacnoth design folks were cramming their available orifices with when they came up with these doozies, but they definitely did the job, and how.

Production values in the area of music are excellent. Yasunori Mitsude of Xenogears and Chrono Cross fame lent his talents to the soundtrack, although it was apparently a somewhat minimal involvement; still, you can hear a few hints of his work, especially in the omnipresent battle theme. The music is moody but eminently listenable, and never fails to set or capture a mood or story theme accurately. It's a slick accompaniment to a globe-spanning adventure, and you'll find yourself turning the volume up (at least until the voice acting starts).

Ah, voice acting! Ever the bane of hardcore RPG gamers, a crappy set of English VAs can make a great game hellish to play. Shadow Hearts, fortunately, has very little voice acting, and what is present is oddly split between Japanese (battle cries) and English (certain FMVs/cutscenes, and Margaret's specials). The English acting is straight-up mediocre, which really means that it's bad. Mediocre voice acting fails to communicate a scene just as poorly as bad voice acting does, since successful acting is rather a binary deal: either the audience understands the emotion in a scene, or they don't, regardless of whether worse examples exist. But, like I said, the voices are sparse, and they won't make you want to rip your ears from your skull and stuff them into the bloody holes, like the voices in, say, any Megaman game.

The game itself plays out like a PSOne Final Fantasy: you navigate from plot element to plot element in a fairly linear path, traversing across well-rendered if rather small static environments, periodically engaging in random battles. Also, like a Final Fantasy, Shadow Hearts has a "System," and it's called the Judgment Ring.

The Judgment Ring at first seems like a mild play boon but ultimately becomes the crutch for the overall play mechanics, being little more than a simple timing event. As a glowing arm quickly sweeps over the ring, the player must press a button when it passes over a colored (green or red) section. Hitting all the lit areas results in a successful series of actions; missing one cancels all subsequent actions. Like the battle system in SCEA's Legend of Dragoon, this at first seems like an involving mechanic that engages the player in more action, but is ultimately revealed to be a tedious chore once the timing patterns are largely memorized. Different weapons, skills, and spells feature different patterns on the ring, but eventually the whole little subgame loses its novelty and becomes yet another series of button presses to take the place of smart and meaningful ones (which would, of course, require re-evaluating many of the staples of generic Japanese RPG design). Any time you have to repeat an identical timing event more than once or twice, it loses its value as a play mechanic, because it devolves into what it was supposed to fix: a rote exercise. Boo to that, I say. Sacnoth tried to spice this up by having tiny red slivers in the far clockwise end of certain areas which generate a "Perfect" critical strike, but it doesn't have enough impact to be compelling, and is too easy to get regardless. Also, certain enemy attacks can speed up the arm, shrink the whole Ring, or reduce the hit areas, but these aren't particularly frequent and are easily cured with the appropriate item.

Even non-battle events use the Judgment Ring, although they have a bit more variety. The Judgment Ring is invoked for discounts at shops, or for kicking down doors, or removing handles from slough gates. Admittedly, Sacnoth tried to make these different in mechanics for certain events: sometimes, you may have to move the arm into a certain region by furiously tapping a button, which is so easy as to be largely unremarkable; or the areas may be but vaguely lit, taxing your eyesight and patience moreso than your motor skills.

If you take away the Judgment Ring, you aren't left with any really compelling character development mechanics outside of Yuri's "harmonixing," which involves occasional trips to a dream realm called The Graveyard and fighting the demons ensconced therein. The demons become active when enough baddies of a certain element are killed (and for the highest rank of demon, a special stone for each element corresponding to that demon is also necessary). Yuri can also visit The Graveyard to purge himself of "Malice," which is the ill will of all the enemies he has slain. If you do not purge Malice frequently in the early game, it will become manifest as "Yuri's greatest fear" and attempt to slay him. Interesting, sure, but this sort of mechanic is only available to Yuri; your other party members acquire their limited personal skill sets through simple levelling up.

And really, that's about it. The game itself will last about 25 hours, and the well-paced and well-translated story ensures that you'll at least be engaged throughout it. But will you want to play again? I'd venture that it's not likely; there's no equivalent to FF8's Junction system to keep you experimenting with new character configurations, nor are there many sidequests to encourage further exploration. Shadow Hearts is a slick once-through experience, with a novel theme and some great moments, but in the end it's just a very good rental. Kudos to Midway for taking a risk and translating a more mature RPG in such excellent form, and a small, quiet "boo" to Sacnoth for providing great material for translation and little in the way of engaging gameplay.

OVERALL: If videogames were books (and some try quite hard to be as linear as any novel), Shadow Hearts would be an "airplane read" - an engaging, well-conceived, and ultimately shallow tale that'll consume time pleasantly but offer no real incentive to explore it further. While obtaining the "good" ending is an unnecessarily obtuse process, the plot and characters, accompanied by a top-caliber translation, make the overall experience a rollicking good time. If you're looking for fresh storyline and cast of characters, and don't mind a wimpy battle system or middling graphics, you'll find quite a bit to like with Shadow Hearts.

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