Author: Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  Don’t have a good turkey day music, but I will break the electric trend and go with a relaxing piano solo.  Here’s Inugami Village(better translated, Village of the Dog God), composed by Yasunori Mitsuda.  It’s from the JRPG, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, which has a strange retelling of World War I with demons and monsters.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant starts where its prequel left off: the former game’s hero, Yuri Hyuga, stays within the town of Domremy, defending it from German invaders.  Unfortunately for Yuri, an Inquistor from the Vatican (Nicolas Conrad) breaks through his defense, and worse, curses him to an incredibly weak state.  It turns out the so-called Inquistor is actually a sorcerous from an evil clan, Sapientes Gladio.  Before the sorcerer finishes him, though, Karin Koenig and the villagers saves Yuri.  Once they’ve both gathered some strength, they devise a plan to get their revenge back on Nicloas.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a turn-based, random encounter JRPG.  The player can have up to 3 characters in its party, placed on a 3-by-3 grid.  The farther away the character is placed from the enemies, the less likely they’re going to get hurt at a cost of diminishing their attack power.  To spice up the old formula, Shadow Hearts adds a Sanity Meter per character.  If it reaches 0, the player loses control of that character.  Lastly, most attacks and magics uses the Judgement Ring, a spinning dial where one must stop its spinning needle to a colored area to execute damage.  The smaller the area, typically the better the attack.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant was released on the PS2 in 2004.