Don't go in expecting much, and you may be surprised.
"Shadow Hearts follows the adventures of Yuri Hyuga, a Harmonixer guided by a mysterious voice in his head. He finds himself thrown into the conflicts prior to World War I where he must save the woman he loves and the world from destruction." (Wikipedia)
Reading that description makes the game sound very cliché, but it actually finds a way to push itself far from that tag making it a fairly unique experience in its own right. While the story didn't leave me in awe, make my jaw drop, or trigger any other major reaction, it did enough to keep me interested til the end. Instead of being a story that tries to get an emotional reaction out of you, this one generally focuses on making you think and surprising you with plot twists and subtle hints about whats to come down the road that make you feel accomplished if you were able to catch on to them.
Bottom line: Not astonishing, but still a good, well paced, & occasionally thought provoking tale.
Score: 8.25/10
Weighted Score: 41.25/50
Graphics
Just by looking at a few screen shots of this game you wouldn't be to sure if this was a PS2 game or just a really good looking PS1 game. Shadow Hearts makes use of pre-rendered backdrops as a lot of Playstation titles did (I.E. FFVII), and while that was a good way to make things look good for a limited system (PS1), on the PS2 it just comes off as a low budget & outdated graphics style. The character models however don't look PS1 grade. While they're not as detailed as other PS2 game characters, they're still believable & generally realistic for their time. Something I feel I need to mention is that the majority of the screen shots that can be found online make the game look worse than it actually is (the screen shots usually look pixelated).
Bottom line: Shadow Hearts' graphics are in limbo between PS1 & PS2. They're not awful, but they're outdated, even for their time.
Score: 7.5/10
Weighted Score: 11.25/15
Game play
Shadow Hearts uses a turn based battle system with a couple adjustments to the standard fare. The first difference is the use of the "Judgment Ring" which is basically a circular object with a line rotating around within it. What your supposed to do is hit the "X' button when the line goes across certain parts of the Judgment Ring, if you miss, you're turn is lost, if you hit all the areas, your character attacks, and if you hit certain very small points on the ring your character does extra damage. While doing this every single turn for the entire game sounded like it would get irritating, in hindsight it actually added an element of interactivity and chance, making things more interesting. The second difference with this battle system is the use of "Sanity Points". How this works is each character begins every battle with their own number of Sanity Points, and generally after each turn each character loses 1 Sanity Point, and if that number happens to reach 0 for a character they go berserk, and they'll either start attacking your other group members, or even healing the enemies. While this has potential to be irritating, I personally only had it occur twice throughout the entire game. As long as you end battles fast, or use items to replenish a characters Sanity Points when they're low you probably won't have to ever deal with it. While it can be argued that Sanity Points shouldn't be in the game at all, they do kind of fit the theme of the game, dark.
Aside from the battle system, the other game controls are pretty good. While getting in a save point at the right spot for it to work, or maybe opening a door or chest can be occasionally clunky, for the most part things work fine. The only gripe I really have is with the inability to switch characters in and out of the active party. You're only offered the opportunity to switch party members when you meet a certain character in a few towns (he also improves your weapons), or the game prompts you to choose a line up. While this doesn't sound too bad, there's an irritating side effect it can have, and that is lost access to very important accessories. This happened to me a few times. Once I was in a dungeon where some enemies could do an attack that could instantly kill your entire party. While I knew I had a few accessories to grant immunity to this, one of the the accessories was on a character out of the main party, and while they're not in the main party you can't adjust any of their equipment, you can't remove anything, and you can't add anything, making that dungeon more of a challenge than it needed to be.
Bottom line: Very good turn based battle system, but minimal control of party adjustments can be irritating.
Score: 9/10
Weighted Score: 22.5/25
Sound
Though Shadow Hearts does have voice acting, it is VERY rare. In fact, there are only about 5 scenes in the entire game that are voice acted, only 3 of which have CGI visuals to go along with them (the opening scene, the mid way scene, & the ending). You'd expect I'd look forward to those scenes, but I didn't, I actually wish they'd just made it all text based. Why? The voice acting was generally sub par, or in one case, just plain bad (the Sea Mother scene). Voice acting aside everything else was good, the music was actually pretty good in my opinion.
Bottom line: Voice acting is very rare, and not very good when it finally shows up. The music is pretty good though.
Score: 6/10
Weighted Score: 6/10
WEIGHTED FINAL SCORE: 81.00/100 (81.00% B- )
Other Thoughts: I didn't go into this game expecting much, I only decided to play it so I would better understand Shadow Hearts Covenant (the second in the series) since that is the true "gem" in the series based on general opinion. I'll be playing it soon, so we'll see if I have a new great RPG on my hands (fingers crossed).
*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.