As a gamer, do you ever notice that some development studios tend to turn out the same substandard kind of product without ever stepping back to evaluate their handiwork before churning out a sequel? Im not talking about the debugging process or other technical things like that, but rather, game design and philosophy in general.

Shadow Hearts is the game Koudelka should have been—an earnest and intriguing RPG that mixes a historical setting with an occult influence in much the same way the Persona/Megami Tensei games have been doing for years. The end result is one of the darkest and most interesting console RPGs to come along in recent memory (the only other games that really compare are Atlus Persona titles). Sacnoth clearly learned from their errors with Koudelka, and its because of this that Shadow Hearts is so good,