Ugh.

Shadow Hearts is giving me so many feelings.

Because the villains of both Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts II intended to “destroy” the world in order to reshape it and eliminate evil and suffering (although Kato’s plan was ridiculous: to take the world back in time by a mere hundred years, as if everything was peachy keen in the 1800s) — and, as established, the in-game universe is in fact saturated with suffering: almost all of the main characters have watched loved ones die in horrifying ways, every other person they run into meets a bloody end, the governments of the world are marching relentlessly towards war, etc. etc. etc. But still the protagonists say “No”. Because they have to believe (for whatever personal reasons) that there is something worth salvaging in this world that they’ve grown up in and love; they have to believed that everyone they know has given their life to try to preserve or improve the world did not die in vain, they have to believe that everything they’ve suffered through and everything they’ve lost was worth something. And more than that, they have to believe that the individual people who live in the world as it is, who will be killed when the world is ‘reshaped’, are worth saving — because if not then what is the point in living at all.

And of course the games have to be unrelenting Sisyphean nightmares because if the characters didn’t continue to suffer, if they ever got what they wanted, if they got a truly happy ending, then the power and the strength of this decision to keep going, to keep fighting would completely dissipate. The world has to be full of suffering to make the protagonists’ attempts to rise above it meaningful; — it has to be full of suffering to make the fact that they reject the line of reasoning presented by the villains a heroic refusal to accept the idea that some people’s lives are worth sacrificing in order to create a ‘better’ world rather than a simple acknowledgement of an obvious truth (i.e. that the world does not need reshaping).

U g h.