Magic, occult, and the power to defeat your demons in Shadow Hearts
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The year is 1913. A shaky night train to Shanghai and a young woman asleep, her name is Alice. The newspaper by her side tells us that her father was brutally murdered in Rouen, France. A small detachment from the Imperial Japanese army is with her. A top-hatted westerner approaches the two Japanese soldiers stationed at her door and kills them with an invisible scythe demon, then kidnaps Alice. A rough-looking youth called Yuri loses his arm in an attempt to stop him; he shrugs and nonchalantly reattaches it. The top hat then invokes the Sefirot of the Jewish Kabbalah to fire off laser rays, but Alice and Yuri both narrowly escape.
That’s the tone Shadow Hearts sets. Although the game takes place in a rapidly-modernising China and a Europe on the cusp of World War 1, it is also a fantasy setting where magic and the occult are real and have a place in everyday life. Roaming the world map, the player will encounter, for example, a village of people-turned-demon cannibals, the grief-mad spirit of a drowned woman called Li-Li terrorising a harbour town, and a narcoleptic bisexual vampire (future party member) whose castle has been overrun.
Aside from more magical obstacles, other real threats are the Japanese Imperial army attempting to capture Alice. The Japanese believe that Alice, who is divinely attuned, is crucial to expanding their military in more paranormal directions. Then there is an evil taoist called Dehuai who wants to turn the planet upside-down (literally) — motivated to see the Chinese mainland wrested free from Japanese occupation. Beneath these motivations for harnessing magical might lie very real tensions and political drives, (anti-)imperialist sentiments notwithstanding. Shadow Hearts emphasises that at the end of the day, people and their politics are bigger than power. Power, Gnostic as its iterations may be, is only a tool, but it’s not just villains that can use it.
In Shadow Hearts, you play as the young and crass Yuri Volte Hyuga. Yuri is a ‘Harmonixer’, a person with the unique ability to fuse his soul with that of monsters for immense power. As a person who can harness magic all willy-nilly, this makes him a target by forces both military and magical. The first disc of the game involves eluding the Japanese army, as well as dealing with the darkness plaguing Yuri’s mind. The first scenes after the train ride make clear that he hears voices; sharp, scratching screams that command him to always navigate toward dangerous magical affairs. He is an ‘inbetweener’ caught in the interstice of the mundane and the magical and is therefore an aberration to both (Yuri is also mixed race: Russian-Japanese).
For the most part, Shadow Hearts mirrors the historical tendencies of magic and the occult by presenting it as a worldly occurence as well as a production — an activity — that is fundamentally in human hands. That is to say, its fiction (monsters, items, characters, and stories) and its mechanics (battle system, health meters, ‘sanity points’) are imbued with the occult on two distinct, both overlapping levels.
Magic is understood as an interaction between the supernatural and the mundane, which are in a state of contant flux. It gets invoked as an assistance, an invisible helping hand from beyond the aether. Magic is also a more culturally global term, applicable to a wide range of practices from divine Maya astronomy to the incense rituals of Shinto priests. ‘Occult’, by contrast, is a term generally attributed to Judeo-Christian and Islamic monotheistic and religious-scholastic traditions. It’s also forbidden magic — research and rituals used to gain access to truths (therefore power) not normally meant for human consumption. The Ars Goetia explains how to turn lead to gold, the Lesser Key of Solomon tells you all you have to know about demon summoning, and The Sword of Moses lets you replicate the miracles of biblical figures. Both magic and occult are ways to exceed the natural boundaries of people’s ability by tapping into a fount of hidden power. The real difference is that one is, well, extremely punishable by God.
Fantasy narratives and video games have abided the millennia-old basics of what magic approximates and its variety of uses. From love potions to invisibility spells, it’s all been tried before by real people, because at one point they required that particular service. The material process, the act of a ritual, can make the abstract of power real — it becomes reified. In Shadow Hearts, it’s mechanised.
Literally every single action you perform in the game, from fighting, to item use, to solving puzzles requires spinning the ‘Judgement Ring’. One of the game’s characters, Roger Bacon (yes, that one), says that “The Judgement Ring is what allows us to do the things we normally do and determine if we pull them off correctly.” A dial spins across the ring and you have to strike certain lit-up areas that represent the success of your action. Time your buttons especially well and you land boosted success. Fail to hit even one, though, and your action won’t go through. Shadow Hearts is actually an occult rhythm game.
A quick rundown of the ring: the three eyes in the triangles represent ‘determination’, ‘action’, and ‘outcome’. The innermost circle lists the seven liberal arts and sciences. On the outer triangle are the words “Ignis” (Fire), “Aer” (Air) and “Aqua” (Water). The labels on the inner triangle read, “Vegetalia” (Vegetables) ,”Animalia” (Animals), “Mineralia” (Minerals), “Terra” (Earth), “Wica” (Wicca) and finally “Ada” (Hebrew for “Nobility”), the Judaic building blocks of material reality. The second ring and the bars in the third ring list the names of the zodiac signs and various planets, nodding at John Dee’s astrological occultism. The semi-circles list the names of the six principle archangels named in the Old Testament (Michael, Samuel, Zachariel, Anael, Raphael, Gabriel).
Lastly, the disc’s outer ring lists the Latin phrase “SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS” which (roughly) translates to ‘The farmer Arepo works the wheel’. This is a five-way palindrome known as the Sator Square. The Sator Square, in Occidental magic, is one of the oldest magical formulae used in grimoires. A common Christian folk belief was that palindromes granted immunity against diabolical tampering, so five times that is really good:
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
In its entirety, the Judgement Ring is a symbol cleverly employed to represent player agency as a concept and transcribe it into an occult symbology. Its patterns represent the fundamentals of heaven and earth, congregating in the centre as individual action — the circle as a geometric shape signifies totality and perfection. All this, in my opinion, is a very cute way of telling the player “you’ve got this”.
Contrasting this highly intricate representation of agency is a battle mechanic that calculates how much the character can bear to see or handle: Sanity Points. Each turn, every character’s SP decreases by one no matter what, putting each of them on a timer. When SP reaches 0, they go Berserk, making them uncontrollable and erratic until the end of battle. I mean, facing off against divine mistakes and fleshy corruptions wouldn’t be good for your psyche. Interesting to point out is that some characters (like Yuri) have naturally high SP, whereas Alice only has three to start out with. If player action is taking control of fate, the SP gauge represents exposure to trauma.
This mechanised mental composure is interesting. Especially when coupled with a second mechanic in the game: Malice. Killing monsters releases the evil inside them, which Yuri’s soul soaks up. His soul is an actual location in the game known as the ‘Graveyard’. Bridled with gravestones belonging to Yuri’s personal demons, he can visit any of these to unlock new fusion abilities by fighting them. But you’ll be visiting his mind charnel mainly to vanquish the Malice. When Malice builds, a monster appears in his mind, which has to be defeated to reset the counter. If you let it build up to its maximum, the Malice takes the shape of Fox Face, Yuri’s father. Malice is an abstract ‘evil energy’, but it manifests as personal trauma. The masks (voices) in the Graveyard remind Yuri that he’ll never be free of the memory of his father — Yuri smirks and says “then I’ll be back to beat him up.”
Central to the game’s idea of ‘evil’ is that it always a form and therefore can always be defeated. Mental or monster, the origin of evil involves a traceable link between people and their actions to the present danger. Most RPGs take a more concise or zoological approach to monsters descriptions — “This wolf is angry and hungry” or “The owlbear is an owl + bear and attacks you for some reason”. Shadow Hearts, though, explains the relation between monsters-as-supernatural creatures and the world they terrorise through the power of story and consequence.
This is the ‘Hellcat’ monster, fought early in the game. The first line of its description makes sense. It’s not great to think about, but the hate and resentment of kittens could feasibly manifest itself as a rancorous entity through magic. It shows that Shadow Hearts doesn’t take itself for granted despite its preternatural setting; the function of these descriptions are primarily concerned with making the hostile strangeness of the gamespace seem likely. They’re not scientific explanations by any means, but the storification of how magical forces might influence the mundane gives our imaginations enough of a pinch to make us go “yes that would be good enough a reason to become an angry hell-thing and I’d probably do the same thing actually”.
The disconcerting exactitude of monster origins lends itself to establishing the innate corruption to Shadow Hearts’s take on an alternate history. It is violent and cruel in ways that defies explanation, but is inexorably tied to recognisable human action, such as the Mail Man monster here.
“Ghost of a mailman who ate all the dogs in town. He despises his own form.” Reversing the ‘mailman chased by dogs’ trope results in an eerie chiasmus of the natural order. Mentioning how he “despises his own form” embodies how the metaphor of magic resides in consequence.
Probably the best example of the game’s approach to monsters is the Seraphim. In Christian angelology, a seraph is the highest-ranking angel in heaven (only the fifth-highest in Judaic rankings). In Shadow Hearts, it is a sex demon guised as an angel. Medieval Europe, especially the west of it, lived in a relation of negative faith to the divine: “we must not sin”. It is a doctrine of rejection, one that informs the dispositions of the faithful by telling them what not to do. This approach to faith informs life with a fear of punishment, always having to be wary of sinful elements. The supertition that the devil walks among us, or that if we masturbate God will throw hands, marks European Christian folklore with a deep pathologic fear. Shadow Hearts, in turn, presents a horror based on the combined logical extremes of these two ideas of fear and virtue: a demonic predator presenting itself as the holiest thing. Apophatic theology makes for scary monsters.
The frameworks of these monsterful stories mirror how real folklore operates: through windows of metaphor and morality, but with a specific geographic tuning. Chinese Taoist and Buddhist philosophy center around balance, equilibrium, and corruption; the stories told in the first disc of Shadow Hearts (China) are about man-made impurity and cleansing the defiled shrines of the gods of the four winds. The monsters in the second disc (Europe) reflect the incomprehensibility of European occult and the god-fearing faith of Christianity: angels and mail ghosts, representing what happens when mankind goes too far.
If monsters embody the threat caused by human evil and moral impetuousness, then the items in Shadow Hearts tell the story of mystical strength and harmony with magic. Many RPGs state the effects of healing items as matter-of-fact. Potion: Restores 50 HP; Ether: restores 50 MP, etc. Other games put more effort in addressing and dressing up the fiction, explaining the effects using intra-fictional language à la traditional fantasy writing like Dark Souls. Since Shadow Hearts is more-or-less set in the real world, it can’t fall back on the invention of fictional history and magical rules. Instead, ceremony and rituals based in actual mysticism are the source of why, for example, a healing item heals.
Let’s take the game’s most basic healing items: Thera Leaf and Thera Root. The Thera Leaf is described as: “long used for its medicinal properties, this herb blooms only once each year.”The Thera Root description reads: “Gathered from the Thera Leaf plant five years after the blossoms appear. Each plant has only one precious root. It dramatically restores physical strength.” It’s established that there is a time-related element to its blossoms, which alludes to some sort of special property. Correlating a measurable (empiric) process to the medicinal function fulfills the same explanatory role as would any scientific approach. Before the scientific revolution, mystical breakdowns like these performed the same role of explanation, of plausibility. This is why things like ‘alchemy’ and ‘chemistry’ at one point referred to the same thing!
The Holy Mother Bust, for some reason, cures Confusion. Confusion has the exact same effects as Berserk, but they are still separate status effects. Berserk is the result of loss of sanity; Confusion, then, is caused by something other than continued exposure to horrific sights. From what the bust tells us, we can only guess it is something that requires a loving memory in order to be cured. We don’t know the sculptor’s reason for being locked up, only that he, stripped of working tools and the inspiration of the outside, continued doing what he does best. Out of habit, out of soothing, out of staving off the madness of isolation, he carved his mother’s face and it brought him solace. Maybe through this transference, thankfully, it gives the player solace, too.
Magic, then and now, offers an alternative to the coldheartedness of reality — it’s a transaction of power where the magician can feel in control. This isn’t without power relations: the access to and application of magic are in themselves gendered and raced. Healer women in 17th century Europe were branded witches, subjugated through forced illiteracy or even killed, because patriarchy feared their wrath and their knowledge of medicine. In the Caribbean and the American South, slavers swatted out African tribal religions and prohibited the enchained from owning Bibles, because they feared that they would find common ground and organise. Both groups went ahead with it anyway; heterodox forms of magic and their variform cultural productions by women and people of colour are proof of defiance and resistance throughout history. (For more information on this specific topic, I suggest checking out Owen Davies’s Grimoires: A History of Magic Books).
Magic, at its very basis, is an agency. Something you can do. The trauma of oppression tends to be much more complicated and overbearing to a point where it might seem hopeless. But writing down rituals, spells, incantations — these things that you can do — are stories with an ending and a purpose. They are written solutions to feelings of powerlessness and despair. Shadow Hearts makes this literal — use magic to defeat your demons — but the metaphor remains. Magic is an elegant, spectacular reminder that resistance has many forms, has many applications, and that there is always something you can do, to create the tiniest rebellion. Resistance begins at retaining hope, after all.
