Not what I expected it to be.
Title: Shadow Hearts: Covenant
Genre: RPG
Platform: Playstation 2
Released: September 27, 2004
Story
"The story starts a year and a half after Shadow Hearts in the midst of World War I. The heroes are drawn into an intriguing plot involving the demons of demonolatry, the chief advisor of the tsar of Russia and a man from main character Yuri's past." (Wikipedia)
The game sports a pretty varied group of characters, with no two characters seeming to much alike thus giving you quite a bit of variety. Making a return from the original Shadow Hearts is the sometimes dark sense of humor, which depending on who you are, could be pretty hilarious, or possibly disturbing, personally I found funny moments all throughout the game. The game does have a serious story to go along with all of this, and at times it could be very interesting, by either throwing unexpected twists at you, or just being down right emotionally convincing. I did have one major problem with it though, and that was that it didn't really seem to get going until about 15-20 hours into the game (I finished the game with about 38 hours, so basically the first half of the game was pretty underwhelming to me). It's not like it made a complete 360 and became amazing after the 15-20 hour mark either, it just got quite a bit more interesting than it had been. All in all, I believe the story of the original Shadow Hearts was better.
Bottom line: Very slow to really get going (15-20 hours), but once it does its pretty good.
Score: 7.5/10
Weighted Score: 33.75/45
Graphics
Those coming off of the the first Shadow Hearts are in for a great surprise here (if you didn't look at screen shots of course), as the graphics have gotten drastically better in Covenant. While this isn't the best looking PS2 game I've seen, it still has very good looking graphics for its time. The many towns and other locations in the game all have their own look for the most part making it really feel like you're somewhere new, and not just in a rehash of where you've been before.
Bottom line: Not the best of the best on the PS2, but still very good for its time.
Score: 9/10
Weighted Score: 13.5/15
Game play
Another returning feature from the first Shadow Hearts is the Judgment Ring turn based battle system. For anyone who doesn't know the Judgment Ring is a a clock like object that appears on the screen for each turn, and you're supposed to time your hits as the hand goes around the ring and passes though certain parts of it. As you go through the game you can get items to widen these areas on the ring and even add more of them to give your characters more attacks per turn (most characters start with 2-3 attacks per turn possible on the ring). This system isn't an exact port of the battle system from the first Shadow Hearts, it actually features many significant improvements. On top of the ring modifications mentioned previously, you're actually allowed to change your party members freely this time. Other notable changes include the battle turn order being displayed on the top of the screen, and the totaling of all of your hits each turn (in the first game sometimes hits could go by so fast you couldn't tell how much you really hit the enemy for). The only complaint that I have is that the Judgment ring doesn't feel quite as responsive as the originals did. Controls outside of battle have also improved ever so slightly (there wasn't much to improve on anyway), the only notable improvement is that now the game isn't picky about you being in pretty much the direct center of the save point to save your game, you can just be touching it.
Bottom line: Very good controls & unique turn based battle system. An improvement over the original.
Score: 9.5/10
Weighted Score: 23.75/25
Sound
Unlike the first game, there is A LOT of voice acting in this one. Most of the voice actors did pretty good this time around to, though I didn't care to much for the voice actor for Yuri. He seemed to have a problem really conveying emotion at times. I know Yuri is supposed to be a "tough" character, but I believe more genuine emotion was needed in many of the scenes. Something I found really disappointing in this game was the music, there wasn't one song that really stuck out to me too much, non of it was bad though.
Bottom line: Overall good voice acting, but average music.
Score: 7.9/10
Weighted Score: 11.9/15
WEIGHTED FINAL SCORE: 82.9/100 (82.90% B- )
Other thoughts: While this was a good game in its own right, it wasn't drastically better than the original Shadow Hearts like its put out to be. In fact I scored the two fairly close, and while Covenant came out on top overall, it didn't do it by enough to justify the hype.
*Weighted Score refers to the amount of weight that each section has on the overall possible score of 100 for the game.
Instead of letting sound be exactly as important to the overall score as the story or graphics for example they all have
a different amount of importance based on how important I believe they actually are to the game as a whole.