Why is Shadow Hearts: Covenant the beloved one?

Because it fixed the first game’s faults, kept its soul, and trusted comedy to carry the horror further.

Covenant (Japan, as Shadow Hearts II, 19 February 2004; North America 27 September 2004) is the rare sequel that outsells its cult original by an order of magnitude: around 240,000 copies in Japan and North America, against the first game’s poor launch. It opens six months after Shadow Hearts’ bad ending, with Alice dead, Yuri drinking in her graveside village of Domrémy, and a German lieutenant, Karin Koenig, ordered to arrest the demon reported there. The war is now the First World War itself, the villain a Rasputin wired into a god, and the tone, deliberately, warmer: Machida’s team had heard from players that the first game was too dark, and answered with a wrestling vampire, a wolf in the party, and jokes that land, without surrendering the grief at the story’s centre.

Critics noticed at the time and have not stopped. Covenant holds a Metascore of 85 from 49 reviews, took IGN’s RPG Vault PS2 Game of the Year for 2004 and RPGamer’s staff vote for Best Overall RPG of 2004, and keeps its place on later all-time JRPG lists.

WHAT IT DOES BETTER

The sequel’s four upgrades

A battle system becomes a team sport

Four fighters instead of three, chainable combos that reward planning across the whole party, Crest magic any character can equip, and a Judgement Ring you can tune to your own hands. The full account is on the Judgement Ring page.

Scale: two DVDs, forty hours

Where the first game was one disc and a tight road, Covenant sprawls across Europe, Russia and Japan on two DVDs. Midway knew what it had: the North American pre-order campaign gave away the first game free, an almost unheard-of bonus that seeded the sequel’s audience with the original’s story.

A localisation with a name on it

Jeremy Blaustein, a Konami veteran, handled the English text and remembered Covenant as one of his favourite projects. The first game’s Western text had been famously rough; the sequel’s reads like the script it was.

An ending people still argue about

Covenant closes Yuri’s story with a choice, a curse, and a time-twist that recontextualises the entire series, including who Karin really is to him. It is laid out, with the first game’s endings, on the endings page. Spoilers live there, not here.

Why is Shadow Hearts: Covenant the beloved one?

WHAT IT DOES BETTER

THE FIRST WORD