Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Spiritual Successors to Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts Announced for Double Kickstarter

 Video games  3 Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Aug 262022
 

I keep hoping for a new Wild Arms announcement. I keep hoping for a Shadow Hearts revival, too.

But in the absence of those two things, spiritual successors have been announced.

Yes, one for each.

WILD BUNCH Productions, founded by Wild Arms creators, has announced Armed Fantasia: To the Ends of the Wilderness, a large-scale JRPG inspired by Wild Arms.

At the same time, YUKIKAZE, founded by Shadow Hearts creators, has announced gothic horror JRPG Penny Blood, inspired by Shadow Hearts.

The two will hold a joint Kickstarter for these games, with a combined funding goal of $750,000 for PC releases. The campaign will begin on August 29.

Overviews of the two games, along with information about how the joint Kickstarter will work, are detailed here by Gematsu. An interview with the two development teams also sheds further light on them.

What stands out to me the most is that these two games are fully embracing their inspirations. Armed Fantasia looks like Wild Arms, and Penny Blood looks like Shadow Hearts.

(According to the interview, the Armed Fantasia characters being called Pathfinders is even just a different translation of the same Japanese word that was translated as Drifters in Wild Arms.)

Armed Fantasia is aiming to have a “gigantic” world map, with the aim being a world map “so big that there isn’t a word to express how big it is.” That makes me a little nervous, both because this is a crowdfunded project and because having your goal just be to have the biggest map possible doesn’t feel to me like the best priority. However, it also sounds like there’s a chance that it’ll be a traditional JRPG world map, which would make me very happy.

Moving on to Penny Blood, while it looks like a Shadow Hearts successor through and through (it’s not visible in any of the screenshots, but the interview describes a “Psycho Sigil” that sounds like the new version of the Judgement Ring), it stands out from its predecessors by involving murder investigations. According to the interview, sub-quests will feature “fingerprinting, voiceprint profiling, mental profiling such as Rorschach tests, and other pioneering methods of criminal profiling.”

One concern I had initially is that the funding goal seems low for this sort of project, but it sounds like the Kickstarter is intended to be used to demonstrate interest and get a publisher on board. With as ambitious as these games look, I hope they succeed.

So a Wild Arms spiritual successor and a Shadow Hearts spiritual successor that’s also a detective game; I haven’t been this excited for a Kickstarter in quite a while! Check out the articles I linked above to learn more about the games, and then join me in waiting for the Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood Kickstarter campaign to go live!

What are your thoughts on Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood?

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Shadow Hearts

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 312019
 

Happy Halloween!

For my longer horror game this year, I held a poll on social media to pick a game, and readers chose Shadow Hearts!

Shadow Hearts is one of those games I’d wanted to play for a long time and finally got a copy this year. It’s a turn-based JRPG set in 1913, where a young man named Yuri who can transform into monsters rescues a young woman named Alice, who is being hunted by a warlock for unknown reasons.

It has a very Gothic horror tone, with curses, vampires, demons, and similar supernatural phenomena. Without spoiling it, the story was exactly the sort of thing I love.

Click for Shadow Hearts spoilers
By the time the plot brought in the Inquisition, which secretly still existed, I was starting to feel like this story was tailor-made for me, and that was before it took a decidedly Lovecraftian turn near the end.

It’s also a spin-off/sequel to Koudelka, another game I’d like to play someday. I expected its links to Koudelka to be just a few minor references, but the connections are more important than that. Several moments left me wanting to check out Koudelka, although Shadow Hearts still stands on its own perfectly well.

I generally liked all of the main characters, even though by the end I settled in on a single group I preferred to use in battle, and the villain wasn’t as one-dimensional as he first appeared. Overall, it has a pretty good cast.

While it’s a turn-based RPG, the combat system has a twist due to the “Judgment Ring.” The Judgment Ring system requires you to hit certain indicators on a ring when it’s your turn, not just to make your attack more powerful, but to attack at all. This adds additional tension (should you try for the more powerful attack and risk missing entirely?) and makes the combat feel unique even when compared to similar systems.

Now, I messed a few things up and missed some stuff that would have made my life a lot easier. I intended to have this blog post up yesterday, except I didn’t successfully beat the final boss until about 10 minutes ago!

Since I enjoyed Shadow Hearts so much, however, maybe someday I’ll start a new game and this time take care to avoid those mistakes – and also get the good ending, since Shadow Hearts has two endings.

Shadow Hearts is an excellent horror JRPG, and I’m so happy I finally got a chance to play it. I’ll be looking forward to play its sequel sometime in the future… maybe next October?