This week’s theme comes from the predecessor of the Shadow Hearts series, Koudelka. It was a very interesting experiment – one of the very few PlayStation games with full voice acting (there wasn’t even a subtitles option). A Square composer named Hiroki Kikuta decided he wanted to take RPGs into a brave new direction, and made Sacnoth. Koudelka was their first project, and Kikuta’s ambition really showed. It was a horror RPG – something never seen before. Still, you couldn’t make monsters that scary on PS1, and the battle system was rather lacking, despite trying to combine the approaches of turn-based and tactical RPGs…
The soundtrack was composed by Kikuta himself, and there are some pretty good songs. For this week, I chose the boss battle theme, called Incantation.
Composer: Hiroki Kikuta
Game: Koudelka
Song: Incantation
I like your posts! I am a big fan of Shadow Hearts and Koudelka… I will leave this interview here to share with you, it’s an interview to the creator of Shadow Hearts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuKiry_lT2w
Thanks a lot for your comment! I can’t watch the video yet because there’s a spoiler alert and I’ve not played the second game yet (I probably will this year). But I’m sure it’s quite interesting, and will remember to see it as soon as I beat it!