>>14616289
>>14616300
Anyhow, Shadow Hearts series is a chronology, set in an alternate history earth, with Koudelka taking place in 1898, Shadow Hearts in 1913, Shadow Hearts: Covenant in 1915, and Shadow Hearts: From the New World (note: side game) in 1929. While the series builds on the lore of the earlier entries, only SH and SHC are heavily connected. As to what is going on there, the protagonist of SH1 is a being that can absorb soul energy from slain enemies, manifest the energy into demons, spirits, etc within himself, subjugate them, and fuse his soul with theirs to shapeshift in combat (which has the neat visual effect of the process being quite painful and at times being body horror). Combat in the PS2 games has three main catches: the Sanity system, fusion, and the Judgment Ring. With the former, given the nature of most of the shit the characters face, each turn consumes a sanity point, and when the character has none left, they go into an uncontrollable berserk state. Different characters have different levels of sanity depending on their prior experience with combat (for example, Yuri has a lot even at low level because he's survived as a monster slayer, whereas Alice has little experience facing the horrors from the beyond and starts with very little), and some monsters will attack sanity directly. Fusion is only done by certain characters, and consumes a large amount of sanity to perform (a single large cost in SH1, while the later games use X points per turn), but leaves those characters very versatile as they can attack with various elements, gain passive stat boosts in those forms, gain new abilities, etc. The Judgment Ring system allows the player direct input in the series' turn based combat, using hand eye coordination and target zones to attack. Some status ailments will directly fuck with the player's ability to hit said targets, and the later games add in difficulty modes based on how the ring handles, with the harder ones granting more of a bonus for hitting the zones.
Embed is the intro to Koudelka. I'd post the Japanese trailer for SH1, but for some reason I can't seem to find it anymore, and trying anything like "Shadow Hearts JP announcement" just gets me a fuck load of Kingdom Hearts shit instead of anything relevant.
Can answer more about the series a little later if need be.