Who is Yuri Hyuga?

A foul-mouthed, soft-hearted Harmonixer who carries a graveyard in his soul and hears a voice in his head.

Yuri Hyuga is the protagonist of Shadow Hearts and, with Karin, of Covenant: a young man of Japanese and Russian descent, son of the Harmonixer Jinpachiro Hyuga, who inherits the family gift of absorbing monster souls and Fusing into their forms. Director Matsuzo Machida modelled him directly on Akira Fudo of Go Nagai’s Devilman and built him against the JRPG leads of 2001: neither the androgynous norm of Japan nor the muscled norm of the West, rude, funny, and, in Machida’s word, pure. The opening film makes the thesis literal: Yuri’s arm is torn off in a train carriage, and he reattaches it without breaking stride.

The voice that guides him, unexplained for most of the first game, is Koudelka Iasant herself, reaching out from her own story fifteen years earlier: the prequel’s heroine is the sequel’s guardian voice. What Yuri wants is small and impossible, to protect Alice Elliot, the exorcist he meets on that train, and the series is the story of what that costs.

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Three games of Yuri

Shadow Hearts: the debt

To save Yuri’s sanity after he tries to fuse with a god, Alice enters the Graveyard inside his soul and takes his Malice into herself, a bargain that will claim her life unless he can defeat the spirit Atman before the end. The good and bad endings turn entirely on whether the player settles that debt.

Covenant: the curse

The sequel takes the bad ending as fact: Alice is dead, and Yuri, defending her village, is stabbed with the Holy Mistletoe, a curse that eats his memories and will end with his self. Rasputin, Sapientes Gladio, and a war are the plot; the countdown inside Yuri’s head is the story.

The choice at the end

Covenant’s final choice, and the time-twist that sends Karin back to 1887 to become, under the name Anne, Yuri’s own mother, is the series’ most debated piece of writing. Which ending the creators confirmed as canon is recorded on the endings page.

Absent, and still central

From the New World moves on to Johnny and Shania, but its world is the one Yuri’s story made: the Malice loose in it is the Malice of his war. Penny Blood’s Matthew Farrell, a detective who hates the monster forms he inherits from his father, is Yuri’s clear descendant.

Who is Yuri Hyuga?

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