Why Everyone Hates It: Normally, I start off with "by popular opinion" here, but there is no popular opinion of Koudelka. Nobody really noticed when it was released, the only press coverage I ever recall seeing about it was a handful of screens and short trailer clips which, if shown off at all, were mentioned once in passing. I have yet to meet anyone who has played it without me first pestering them to, and for that matter, I can't recall ever meeting anyone who wasn't actively in the gaming press at the time who has heard of it from a source that wasn't me. Not to get too personal here, but it's quite possible that most of what's ever been written about the game in the U.S. was by me. So in short, this is an instance of obscurity, not unfair bashing.

Legitimate Issues With the Game: Koudelka is an excessively strange experiment with the genre-blender. It's a 10-hour long RPG/Tactical RPG/Survival Horror hybrid set entirely within a single building in Wales at the turn of the century, with a lot of Lovecraftian flavor to everything. Plus there were some rather unfortunate last-minute compromises in the audio department.

Why I Like It Anyway: Koudelka is an excessively strange experiment with the genre-blender. It's a 10-hour long RPG/Tactical RPG/Survival Horror hybrid set entirely within a single building in Wales at the turn of the century, with a lot of Lovecraftian flavor to everything. This appeals to a very small niche I happen to be a part of (or perhaps the entirety of).

Apologies in advance, I'm going to be getting into a lot of tangents here, and generally breaking from my established format for this feature. I have something of a hidden agenda today, but I also have some fun historical information, so it should balance out. Koudelka is a very obscure game, which is why I'm writing about it here, but it's also the first game in a relatively popular series (although still obscure enough that I might potentially feature the rest in a future article). For some baffling reason, I am constantly running across people who vehemently oppose my assertions that this is the case. I have come close to being punched in the face over it even. Those denying that Koudelka is the first game in the Shadow Hearts series are always people who have never played it or even heard a vague description of it. The publisher of the second game meanwhile quoted me on the back of the case, and a little promotion even took place with a copy being given away to someone based on their ability to compare their knowledge of Koudelka with me. You'd think I'd have the benefit of the doubt on this one.

So, how did the first game in a relatively well received series become so thoroughly doomed to obscurity? There's an interesting story behind it, and as with most interesting stories about PlayStation RPGs, Final Fantasy 7 is somehow involved. Koudelka is very much the baby of one Hiroki Kikuta, best known as the composer of the soundtrack to Secret of Mana. When Square was making the jump from the SNES to the PlayStation and starting in on FF7, Kikuta felt, quite strongly, that RPGs, as a genre, needed to grow the heck up already, and start dealing with more experimental gameplay, more mature storytelling, plots that aren't about a dorky teenager from a small town making a bunch of friends and going off to save the world from some supervillain or monster or whatnot. He felt so strongly about this that he was eventually forced to grab a bunch of the most talented people at the company, and head off to form his own development studio with the decidedly Lovecraftian sounding name of Sacnoth. Now, for those keeping track, quite a few companies have spun off from Squaresoft by now. There's also Crave (who made Shadow Madness then resigned to port and sequel country), Monolith (Xenosaga), Brownie Brown (which was more or less reabsorbed after Magical Vacation), and most recently Mistwalker (about the only people making Japanese style RPGs for the Xbox 360). Sacnoth (now Nautilus) has the advantage of being the first to jump ship, and as such managed to sneak out with the best staff of the lot.

So, how did Kikuta go about starting his rebellion against the status quo? Arguably, by getting way too ambitious. Koudelka is a very odd beast. Outside of combat, it resembles Resident Evil more than anything. Tight camera angles, creepy atmosphere, running around a huge victorian complex having to solved the occasional puzzle to proceed, all that stuff. Rather than zombies lumbering about the place though, we establish things as an RPG with random encounters taking us to a separate screen. Rather than the standard two lines of characters facing facing off on a vague field though, all combat takes place on a small featureless grid. Like a typical tactical RPG, everyone moves, and can generally only attack targets in their immediate vicinity. In an interesting twist though, an invisible line cuts horizontally across the entire grid, separating your party from the enemy. With the exception of a particularly freaky optional boss, this line cannot be crossed, but it can be pushed forward by moving characters if nobody from the other side is there to reinforce it. This has two interesting effects. First, as many attacks push people back a space, so eventually an entire side can be forced into a single row, leaving everyone open to attack, and possibly keeping some from getting into attack range. Second, unconscious characters fail to reinforce the line, so enemies can prevent you from reviving a character if they're able to advance past their body. It keeps things interesting.

Combat in Koudelka is also pretty darn challenging. Part of this comes from a character advancement system that allows you completely free reign over your stat growth, which comes with the peril of leaving people extremely vulnerable if you neglect certain areas. Another is the just plain vicious enemies in the game. Then of course we have that always controversial gem, breakable weapons. Breakable weapons with no visible durability indicator to boot. Normally this comes off as a cheesy way to artificially inflate difficulty, but here we're fighting off surprisingly substantial ghosts, giant cockroaches, and squamous masses of eyes tentacles and flab with rusty stovepipes, horns pulled off these monstrosities, kitchen knives, and the broken remnants of medieval antiques, constant breakage makes sense.

In addition to customizing stat growth, Koudelka has the rather interesting feature of allowing you to rename every item in the game. Want your shotgun to be called a boomstick instead? Change it. Take issue with reviving your fallen comrades by giving them some whiskey? Change that too. The only thing that you can't rename is your characters themselves, and there's a very good reason for that. Koudelka is the first console RPG ever made with 100% voice acted dialog. Enough of it for a 10 hour game to span 4 discs.

So, in the end, we have a game with full voice acting, but somewhat compromised audio quality (a shame as it otherwise features one of the best soundtracks in the medium), desperate fights against the stuff of nightmares in a tactical turn based environment, and a big budget console RPG whose major threat is only an issue for a small group of people in an isolated location. A bit rough around the edges, but definitely stepping out in a bold new direction for RPGs.

So, how was this brave game received by the public at large? Well, if you've been paying attention, terribly. All the weird experimentation scared off more or less everyone, and the game tanked horribly. It seems the RPG playing public was still quite happy with the tried and true, and wasn't ready for this sort of experimentation. This still seems to hold true really, as we may discuss if I get around to covering Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, or Persona 3.

This caused some problems within Sacnoth. Most of the staff was willing to compromise the vision for the sequels, scale back the radical new concepts and just make some vaguely horror themed games with an interesting game mechanic or two here and there, but generally stick to the standard RPG playbook, both in terms of the mechanics and the plot. The resulting games are still darn good mind you, but Kikuta himself more or less just accepted defeat and sailed off into the sunset. Quite the shame that.

Now then, from here on out we are entering Massive Spoiler Country. We're done with our Devil's Advocate feature, and everything from here out is just going to be me going into the details of the plot of Koudelka and the entire Shadow Hearts series, mainly just to shut up all these people who deny there's any connection. It's much more satisfying to simply play through the series in order and get all this for yourself.

Koudelka is about a group of 3 people each breaking into and exploring the Nemeton Monastery, and dealing with what they find inside. Over the course of the game, we eventually learn what everyone's motives are, a lot about their personalities, and the long and interesting history of the monastery itself. First we have, of course, Koudelka Iasant, the gypsy spirit medium, answering the call of a ghost who vaguely indicated some seriously bad stuff is about to go down in the area. Next we have Edward Plunkett, your basic gung-ho American tourist, breaking into ruined old buildings across the countryside of Wales in search of adventure valuables to steal. Finally, and ultimately most importantly, we have James O'Flaherty, a bishop of the catholic church with the pretense of hunting down someone who stole a valuable artifact which he plans to use to perform some strange unholy ritual, but also has some personal reasons to get involved.

The three end up exploring the monastery together, while frequently getting into arguments about religion, politics, class struggle, and basic morality. They encounter a few other interesting characters, nearly all of them homicidal, a few of which the ghosts of the very long dead. The latter in particular reveal a lot about the long and detailed history of the building, which over the centuries filled a number of different uses for different people which, to make a long story short, boil down to a very large number of people being tortured and killed for every conceivable reason over the course of several hundred years. The only pleasant note in the building's history is being home to the 13th century monk with major interests in the occult, Roger Bacon, who, surprisingly enough, is still alive. Not necessarily due to any sort of magical immortality mind you, he's just profoundly ancient and decrepit, and a rather nice and charming fellow really.

Cutting to the chase, the person James is looking for stole your standard necronomicon-esque book, the Emigre Manuscript, which he plans to use to bring a girl back from the dead who both were in love with (and whose ghost summoned Koudelka, naturally). The ritual requires an awful lot of horrible things to be done in the area before it can be performed which the monastery more than has covered already. Unfortunately, as is often the case with these things, while it does bring her body back to life, it's as a horrific soulless abomination, which particularly due to its non-threatening appearance is honestly downright disturbing, and naturally serves as our final boss. Interestingly enough, of the three possible endings for the game, the best (and canonical) isn't obtained by defeating the nasty zombie, but to lose to it, giving James a chance to make a nice emotionally satisfying sacrifice and go down with the ship. Edward and Koudelka wander off to presumably get married and have a kid or two, and Roger gets working on rebuilding something to live in since zombie-girl's revival and ensuing rampage more or less completely destroyed the entire monastery. Skipping ahead 15 years or so, we have the groundwork laid for the next game.

Shadow Hearts starts off by introducing us to a very amusing fellow named Yuri. For the last few years, he's been roaming around asia with a mysterious voice in his head telling him where to go. The agenda of this voice more or less seems to be to make Yuri a bit of a demon slayer of sorts, as it's constantly leading him to strange and evil locations, where he proceeds to slay all sorts of hideous monsters with his bare hands. Odd way to spend one's time, but he enjoys it, and after a while the weirdness of it all apparently rubbed off on him some, leaving him a totally fearless snarky badass with the ability to confront his literal inner demons and turn himself into monsters here and there. So begins a much more standard RPG, with a party of characters travelling around half the world dealing with various monsters of the week, and eventually getting a chance to bring down a proper Lovecraftian elder god.

Eventually, Yuri and friends end up travelling to Wales, picking up a new party member in the form of a 14-year old kid whose mother is some sort of mystic wanting to meet them, and eventually we come to the big reveal. The voice in Yuri's head belongs to the boy's mother, Koudelka, who's getting a little old for adventuring around herself, and has more or less been using Yuri to continue the work of dealing with people using old books of magic to bring things into the world that they really shouldn't. A fair deal of time is spent in the ruins of the monastery, Roger Bacon is still around to provide a good deal of exposition and comic relief, and really, just about every plot point from Koudelka is brought up once more. The same evil book even ends up as the McGuffin again from that point out. Now, at this point, anyone continuing to maintain any sort of notion that we are not discussing a sequel to Koudelka is completely delusional, and really just needs to go seek psychiatric care.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is next in the series, and really one of the best examples I can name of a nice, solid, fun, very traditional RPG, which is somewhat sad really considering the series origins, but a good game is a good game. The story is really all over the map, and large chunks of it are completely independent little side stories in the world we've established here. Basically, the game serves to A- give us a chance to spend more time with Yuri, who really is just a wonderfully entertaining character, B- capitalize on the fact that Rasputin, as historical figures go, is really just plain perfect to use as a major villain in an RPG, and of course C- bring us even more attempts at bringing back dead girlfriends using the Emigre Manuscript, the Nemeton ruins, and good ol' Roger Bacon. We also more or less entirely shed any real pretext of horror pretty early on, degenerating into offbeat comedy involving superhero vampires, gay tailors, and an optional sidequest involving a hundred floor tower of wrestling rings. Believe it or not, it's a smooth transition and the results are quite amusing.

Then most recently we have Shadow Hearts: From the New World. It sheds a lot of continuity baggage, switching focus to the western hemisphere and a mostly new cast of characters, so that people like me can introduce people to the series without forcing them to play the brutally hard first two games first. About the only things that really carry through are, of course, the essential plot elements from Koudelka, the manuscript, and Roger Bacon. Plus the nicely refined mechanics from Covenant and a bunch of running gags.

All in all, a very enjoyable series, with steadily dropping horror and experimentation, and steadily rising humor and accessibility.

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