Summary
: As soon as we open the door at the top of the fire escape, we hit the start of a chain of cutscenes.
: “Just shoot the motherfucker” - Sakura Natsume, The Silver Case. Man, I miss that game already.
: It’s not as obvious in screenshot form, but this guy is “I can’t stand up straight” levels of drunk.
: Honestly though, this scene reminds me a lot of Clock Tower 3. Only problem is that Johnny is way too much of a dipshit to be a magical boy.
: I feel like even Shiroyabu would’ve had this guy on the ground by now.
: He’s afraid Johnny is contagious. Also, I just want you to pay attention to how big Johnny’s hands are in this shot. Boy’s got some goddamn yaoi hands going on.
: Admittedly, if I was approached by an anime boy with freakishly large hands, I’d probably react the same way.
: And now this goes straight into Silent Hill.
: The camera cuts away and there’s some various squelchy meat grinder noises.
: Johnny loses all five of his sanity points and immediately faints.
: And now we’re back at the opening cutscene.
: This time, we’re playing as the weird Hot Topic angel lady, whose name is Thunderbird. This is a tutorial fight to teach us why the Stock system sucks.
: You’ll notice our Attack option has switched over to Hard Hit. Remember how I said enemies can get Stock as well? This how you get rid of it. Hard Hit costs half a gauge to reduce 1 enemy Stock.
: Unlike Johnny, Thunderbird has three attack areas on the Ring, and it is VERY easy to miss the first one (and thus fail your entire attack) if you don’t know it’s there.
: Now, let’s say, just hypothetically, that you forgot to make a savestate at the start of the fight and accidentally missed that attack because you weren’t aware how Thunderbird’s Ring is different. What happens?
: That’s what happens. You might ask how that’s possible given that Thunderbird has 20 SP, and the reason is that Thunderbird uses more than 1 SP a turn, the same way Yuri’s Fusions did. Fortunately, Thunderbird going Berserk is not an auto-fuck.
: Instead, she’ll start casting Dusk Proud and wins the fight by herself. Dusk Proud does Dark-element damage.
: I’d ask what the point of taking her clothes off is if they magically regenerate when she transforms back, but it’s pretty clearly some kind of racket. I mean, think about it: put on some expensive designer shit, transform, and then transform back and you have the clothing equivalent of BitTorrent.
: Well, that’s not ominous at all.
: And now, for something completely different.
: Oh look, it’s that mysterious red-haired guy from the intro cutscene.
: These two were designed to look like Yuri and Alice from the original Shadow Hearts, because From The New World, apart from being the Steel Ball Run we have at home, is also the Shadow Hearts we have at home.
: The next several seconds are flashes of red and people screaming.
: Man, where was this magic red glow that kills cops when we needed it in Eternal Punishment?
: The red-haired guy tries to run, but doesn’t get very far on account of the whole “being shot in the stomach” thing.
: If you labeled the red guy “Timrod” and the hand “Having to record Eternal Punishment”, that’d be a pretty accurate summation of that LP.
: That guy totally just lost 5% of his max HP in exchange for a useless item.
: They’ll explain the red aura thing in a minute, but for now I like to think that it’s some kind of brain exhaust from dumbfucks like Johnny trying to rationalize an unlocked door being locked.
: Speaking of useless dipshit protagonists..
: They were totally taking bets on whether he was dead or not.
: The guy is looking at me like “Yeah, you could’ve had me as the protagonist but now you’re stuck with Johnny.”
: They really were completely incapable of making Johnny resemble an actual human, and I feel like even if Nautlius/Sacnoth had access to the PS3 or PS4 they still wouldn’t have managed it.
: Anyway, welcome to the rest of the game, which will largely be Johnny perving on Shania (the native woman). This.. I think was inspired by a 1980s manga called Ghost Sweeper Mikami.
: If you haven’t read The Dark Id’s LPs of the first two Shadow Hearts games for some reason, Malice was a plot device largely constrained to the first game, where it summoned Yuri’s ghost dad to kick his ass.
: Lenny would know a thing about that given his background as a mid-boss.
: Oh, that makes sense why Johnny was glowing like that, it’s because he’s an incel. Got it.
: That would be Lenny’s former boss, a cardinal at the Vatican who also ran a secret society dedicated to.. actually, it’s not really clear what they were trying to do. Take over the world or some shit.
: Said cardinal spent half of Covenant being zapped in the balls by a Japanese spy with a ridiculously massive chin until he turned into a demon and got punched out by Yuri.
: Even though face capture wasn’t really a thing until the late PS3/PS4 era, my theory is that Johnny’s model is using a primitive form of it where they hooked up a pumpkin or a volleyball or something.
: Metal Gear!?
: That’s.. kind of a leap there.
: I think this was my exact face when I played Tatsuya’s Scenario for the first time and realized how godawful it was.
: The protagonist of Ghost Sweeper Mikami, despite being as much of a pervert as Johnny, somehow manages to be less of a bitch than he is.
: I mean, given that the guy was probably on his way to Silent Hill anyway, is anyone really going to be surprised?
: I think it’s the eyes, but Johnny looks like some kind of reptile in this shot.
: Seriously though, what the shit is with Johnny’s facial expressions? Did David Cage animate this?
: For the record, I did check to see what Shania’s name is in Japanese, and it’s the same.
: “I am Natan. I should be the main character, only the writers decided to go with the whole Mikami thing.”
: No, I did not add that in.
: As soon as I saw this, I immediately went to try and figure out how much of a pain in the ass it would be to go from Manhattan to Boston in 1929.
: In modern times, it’s about a 3 and a half hour trip, depending on where Johnny’s office/bedroom is and what traffic is like. Most of that trip is through Connecticut on Route 15 and Interstate 84.
: Throw in the fact that most cars in that era had a way lower top/average speed than modern ones, and the fact that I-84 didn’t exist in 1929 (it was built in the 1960s) and it’s probably more like 5 hours.
: On the way out of his office, Johnny runs into another one of those hobos he’s stabbed like twelve of in the past day.
: “It…? What’s ‘it’?”
: This really, really makes me wish I hadn’t used that one Neil Cicierega mashup in one of the other LPs.
: Oh, you mean heroin. No, Johnny’s too much of a bitch to be a drug dealer.
: “Huh…?! W-why would I have something like that?”
: Ah yes, the lottery sidequest, also known as the reason I won’t do this game on real hardware. This is a sidequest that goes back to the first Shadow Hearts, when a 700-year-old monk started a lottery ring in his spare time.
: “Huh? What’s this? A lottery ticket…?”
: “So what’s what you were talking about.”
: The lottery is, of course, a Judgment Ring. Landing in the red area gets you the top prize, which you can only get once. If this is anything like the older games, someone’s best equipment is locked behind winning all of these.
: I should mention that the prizes change in New Game + if you ever play that for some reason, in that the top prize changes to a Third Key. Keys were an item in the older games that let you attack multiple times provided you never miss a Judgment Ring spin. You could stack them to hilarious effect.
: We can now go to Arkham University, but we don’t want to do that just yet. There’s an item that we can only get now that we’ve gotten past the tutorial boss.
: It’s all the way back in the theater, where we met Marlow Brown shortly before he got devoured by otherworldly horrors.
: Next time, we’ll take Johnny to college.