Dark and beautiful with a heartfelt love story and captivating story and great customization options.
I'm a big JRPG fan and I've played lots of JRPGs on my Playstation 2 and Shadow Hearts Covenant is not only one of my top 4 favorite JRPGs for the Playstation 2 it's also one of my top 5 favorite Playstation 2 games.
Shadow Hearts Covenant is quite a unique RPG indeed.To quickly explain what makes it a unique and captivating experience I'll say it's story is set during World War 1 and demons are corrupting humans and causing the war to escalate and become more brutal.The story has a love story and a romance triangle.The atmospheres for story scenes and environments are often incredible because they'll have a hazy or mellowed-out feel from the way it uses dim lighting beautifully or the way colors are used for the sky and it's combat system combines fast reaction-time and turn-based elements and Shadow Hearts Covenant has some great,diabolic-sounding music too.
As for a more in-depth review for it,I'll start off with it's story.
Like I've said,it's story is set during World War 1 and certain demons are corrupting humans/creating pacts with certain humans who have a lot of power in the world in an effort to control the world.This will cause humans who have formed alliances with demons to do despicable acts of evil and will even cause the war to escalate and brutality of the war to escalate.
The main character in the game is named Yuri who is a male who can transform into a variety of demonic forms and he's one of the good guys who is trying to use his demonic abilities to scare away invading soldiers and he lost the woman he loved named Alice in the first Shadow Hearts game.In Shadow Hearts Covenant he becomes inflicted with a curse and after certain events a busty German female officer named Karin accompanies Yuri to help him find a cure to the curse,after all he saved her life during an earlier story event.As you'd expect,the story becomes much more than about finding a cure and becomes about saving the world and a bunch of other characters will join your party and some of them are quite interesting because of their occupation(such as a puppeteer who uses his puppet doll in battle and one of the characters is a wrestler)and some of the other characters are involved in some emotional story moments that relate to them personally as well as the main story and you'll meet some interesting villains.
The story has a romance triangle since Yuri's heart still belongs to Alice and he hasn't given up being with her again but another female character has taken a liking to him too(I won't say who it is)and the story has great plot twits and can be very emotional and can be chilling from the shocking acts of evil by some of the villains.The story has some exciting,high-action moments too and will take you to numerous famous places in Europe as well as outside of Europe but I won't spoil it for you.
Other things that makes it's story great is the way it's presented,the love story-related scenes are emotional because of their delicate artistic effects and their delicate and heart felt dialogue and even from certain action scenes.As well as story scenes that have poetic narrative and are in relation to the love story or from dark but beautifully poetic story scenes accompanied by morbid-looking,dark-themed but at the same time beautiful cinematics that can send chills down my spine whilst being beautiful at the same time in a similar way to Demon's Souls story presentation does.
As for the game play,it's like most other JRPGs in the sense you'll travel to different towns/cities and you can/will need to interact with people in them and you'll level up your characters and will need to utilize various character abilities in battle.Even though each character has unique abilities they can also be equipped with abilities if they're equipped by items referred to as crests.So you can make most characters be a white mage(healer)or give them abilities to buff or do elemental damage.Yuri and another character are capable of transforming into demons,Yuri can transform into a wider variety of demons so he can gain elemental properties as well as a wide range of abilities for attacking or healing whilst the other character who can transform into a demon uses demonic forms that focus more on strength and speed.
The battle system is turn-based but the number of times you hit an enemy and how much damage you do and whether you actually hit an enemy or not or use a spell effectively or not depends on your button timing for the ring system.You can also customize the ring so you don't have to do as many button presses but it also means less chances to hit your enemy(meaning if you mess up the timing with a button press you will have less chances to damage an enemy or use a spell).It's a good risk vs reward system.The battle system also lets you decide whether you want to knock an enemy down,backwards or attack from a high angle and combining the right combination of these attacks can allow you to perform combos.I like the battle system for the game because it makes you concentrate and stops it feeling like another generic turn-based system as well as encourages you to experiment and gives you the option of trying a few risk vs reward systems.
The only thing I dislike about the game play is there is annoying obstacles in the way if you want to level grind such as areas where random enemies appear are often far from an inn forcing you to use healing magic and items to replace MP and stocking up on MP is a waste of money that could be used to buy better weapons/armor.
As for the games visuals,like I've said the atmosphere in the game is incredible and the dim use of lightning and and shades of yellow lighting and orangey sky affect and darker,evil-looking atmospheres and industrial environments all go well together but there is some charming little town environments too.The cinematics for the darker,morbid story scenes are beautiful and dark and the same time.For certain romantic scenes,the dim use of lighting and shades of yellow and the way it combines with being on a train and seeing Yuri and Alice there together is really quite something,and there is a nice haziness to these scenes to let you guess is this just a dream or a vision of something to come?
On a technical level the graphics have a decent amount of realism for a 2004 PS2 game and combine that with stunning artistic effects the game is really lovely to look at.
The music can suit the romantic moments quite well because of it's delicate piano music and there is some great,diabolical-sounding music for battles.Some of the voice acting sounds a bit silly and I would have liked it if Japanese voice acting was an option.
Overall,Shadow Hearts Covenant is a unique,special and heartfelt JRPG experience and is amongst the best RPGs released during the 6th gen and IMO is one of the best games released during the 6th gen period.