Summary
: Alright, let’s do this. The first thing we want to do is turn on subtitles because the first five minutes or so are one giant FMV. I recorded it (and will probably re-record it) right here.
: So what you’re saying is that you’re every protagonist in an RPG. Got it.
: The doctor looked our protagonist in the eye and went “I’m afraid it’s been.. I dunno, maybe five minutes.”
: I should’ve photoshopped a meter onto these that reads “RPG PROTAGONIST” and fills until it’s going off the screen.
: Yeah, this is why I played the Kill The Past games. Really helped me get over the nightmares after all those bad games I LPed.
: Anyway, enough of that shit, here’s our opening FMV.
: Welcome to New York, which as we all know is the only city in the United States.
: This feels like I’m playing some kind of knockoff of Tekken Tag Tournament. There’s this feeling I used to get when playing games on an emulator that I’d never seen in real life where I’d feel like I was playing an elaborate bootleg, and I got a little of that here.
: And here’s our protagonist. A Rude Hero, this guy is not.
: And then this guy, who.. honestly looks a little like Agent Kato from the first two games.
: This book should be familiar to anyone who played either of the first two games. I’ll take bets now on how many children are going to be sacrificed to revive someone’s dead relative this time around.
: And then we have this lady, who looks like a KOS-MOS knockoff. The Dark Id said at one point that he’d rather eat a bullet than LP Xenosaga. I might dunk on it at some point in the future, because that game wasted like 30 hours of my life and I want it back.
: This guy’s jacket is trying real hard to be the one the guy in The Bouncer wears, but just isn’t quite there. Has a little bit of that Spookies logo vibe from Soul Hackers, though. That’s another game I really should get around to LPing someday when I can look at an SMT game and not immediately vomit.
: This shot looks more like something out of Parasite Eve than a game set in 1929. That’s when this game is set, by the way - and given the general dress of the protagonist, we’re maybe a few short months from the stock market crash that begins the Great Depression.
: Quit looking at me like that. Persona 5 deserved what I did to it.
: Oh, it’s just an Ubisoft Skylight we probably have to press E to smash through.
: The mysterious native lady undoes her bra strap, as you do while standing on the roof of a skyscraper in 1929. By the 1960s you couldn’t find a single skyscraper without a nudist on it.
: Most people would look at this and go “Okay this is a little weird”, except I played Skyrim once with this mod that was supposed to improve physics and instead made the female characters’ breasts into physics objects that could, among other things, instantly kill people with physics damage and vibrate through walls.
: Uh, what.
: This is the first shonen manga I’ve seen where someone transforms into an early 2000s scene kid.
: That’s not quite the expression I’d make if a winged elven lady dressed like she just robbed a Hot Topic crashed through my skylight, but yeah, okay.
: This is the theme that plays throughout New York. Note, by the way, that while I could upscale everything past native PS2 resolution, I won’t.
: Meet one of the handful of returning characters from the older games. Lenny was a mid-boss in a weird Vatican murder cult in Shadow Hearts: Covenant before he turned in his giant spiky shoulder pads and turned his life around.
: I’m not sure if this guy screams Jojo midboss or rejected Resident Evil midboss more.
: You know, that one.
: Oh man, we’re going to Silent Hill?
: Don’t forget the whole “being part of a murder cult” thing.
: The attempted murder? Nah, that’s not what landed him in Silent Hill. It was not paying the bail money that did it, sort of like how James Sunderland got sent there for being circumcized and for no other reason whatsoever.
: I don’t know if it’s the PS2 graphics or what, but Johnny looks goddamn uncanny when he smiles like that.
: I mean, when you put it that way, half of Big Dick’s job was talking to ghosts and listening to people monologue at him.
: Do you want Elon Musk? This is how you get Elon Musk. Stop that!
: Lenny really should just be all “Okay, I guess I’ll have to go be an independently wealthy business owner” and just take it over himself.
: Lenny, don’t make this weird. You’re making it weird.
: We have one tiny bit of gameplay before another cutscene hits, so let’s get through that and we’ll start the game in earnest next update.
: The big teal-colored circle is our first save point. I’m still going to save normally even though I’m playing on an emulator, since savestates can fuck shit up over the long term.
: There’s a Talisman of Luck in the plant, which works exactly the same way it did in the earlier games: it’s the basic revival item.
: Unfortunately, the shitty Fandom page for this game does not have a proper transparent version of the dialog portraits, probably because From The New World is kind of the black sheep of the Shadow Hearts family. Oh well.
: This is also where I found out, annoyingly enough, that the game switches resolutions for cutscenes. In cutscenes, it’s in this weird pseudo-widescreen resolution, and in the rest of the game it’s 4:3.
: “My name’s Johnny Garland, and I’m 16. I’m a private detective living in New York City. And like Lenny was saying, the truth is my father died three years ago, and I was supposed to take over running his company.”
: “But living on an inheritance doesn’t really do it for me, so I opened my own office.”
: “That accident didn’t just take my family… it also took part of my memories. There is something important I had to remember. Something significant… something that really means something to me!”
: "It might help me someday to remember. I haven’t told this to anybody… not a soul.. not even Lenny.
: Next time, on Shadow Hearts: From The New World, we’ll run into an immediate Simpsons reference that most definitely was not in the original Japanese script and then explore Times Square.