Victory may have defeated JRPGs, but video games represent the one segment of pop culture that survived Ground Zero. At least for a decade or so.
Today, the corporatization of vidya has made up for lost time with a vengeance. Consider the outright disappearance of the entire video game midlist.
A game recently lent to me by a friend prompted me to reminisce about the last generation of games before Gaming Ground Zero. It’s hard to imagine now, but the PlayStation 2, the original XBox, and the GameCube were the last consoles to primarily use physical media, feature mainly offline play, and offer customers complete games at purchase.
Contrast that long-lost world with the current games-as-service paradigm.
Another casualty of Gaming Ground Zero was the the phenomenon of the Little Game that Could. These were midlist titles developed on a budget by upstart studios. As with all things in life, high quality in midlist games was never a guarantee. But the PS2 specifically hosted a number of midlist games with heart that punched above their weight.
For a textbook example of this kind of game, look no further than 2001’s horror RPG Shadow Hearts. Produced by a cadre of rogue Squaresoft exiles, this game is also noteworthy as the not-quite sequel to a PS1 game with which it only shares a setting and a couple of side characters. That setting is best described as H.P. Lovecraft meets Go Nagai. The plot resembles something closer to Laurell K. Hamilton, with a Russo-Japanese shapeshifter grudgingly agreeing to help a white witch solve her father’s murder.
Plus Bacon. Play the game to see what I mean.
Playing the game involves not just navigating a bog standard RPG menu, but correctly entering inputs according to a novel conceit called the Judgment Ring. The ring adds a timing element more common to beat-’em-ups and rhythm games. Its novelty factor loses a few style points due to a couple of junctures when especially difficult ring sequences create arbitrary story bottlenecks.
The English version’s dialogue is a bigger strike against this game. Players are subjected to entire scenes in which every character’s lines are preceded by tonally dissonant forced laughter. The game laughs at its own jokes and its tragedies with equal tone-deafness. That’s not enough to distract from the villain’s rather hackneyed scheme, whose goal I don’t have to spell out if you’ve ever played a JRPG or watched any anime.
Nevertheless, Shadow Hearts shines in several key respects. The main character manages the difficult trick of being street smart and cool when too many protagonists in the same mold come off as corny. Nor is this game afraid to play with archetypes. The feisty Chinese sage is a particularly delightful addition to the cast.
Where Shadow Hearts genuinely shines is in its music. The score is eclectic–though a bit too sparse, though leaving players wanting more is a feather in its cap–and greatly aids in setting the game’s eerie mood. Highly creative, and often shocking for the time, enemy designs cement the Lovecraftian anime atmosphere.
The creators of Shadow Hearts explicitly set out to make a game for fun, not profit. They achieved exactly that, though the end product’s less-than-stellar sales didn’t preclude a sequel. Despite a few warts, this game held my interest until the end, a task that entries in other, bigger franchises have sometimes failed to achieve.
If nothing else Shadow Hearts stands as a reminder of exactly what the game industry has lost in the past twenty years. If you can track down a copy, take it for a spin.
And check out another Lovecraft and anime-inspired horror series by an artist who puts fun first.
