My Shadow Hearts: Covenant review was truly done as a process over time. I started with just writing down scattered ideas, and each day over the course of a little over a week I would add a bit more. The first draft was an 1800 word monstrosity that was pretty incoherent.
At its current state as a more or less finished product, it's still 1600, which is over my old regular. I used to write more around 1200, with my maximum usually being around 1500. These weren't personally enforced measurements, just habits.
My active vocabulary isn't as big as it used to be, and a lot of words don't come to me as easily anymore. Still, the review still reflects my old style to an extent, somewhat wordy and a little over-sophisticated, though I think it's still pretty clear.
Despite how in the past I usually had trouble just getting enough information for a complete review, I practically had too much stuff and even had to omit stuff. I had a paragraph that was basically GRAPHICS, though I think I kind of fit it in at first, but it was eventually axed. It also included a bit about Yuri's fusions, and I was hoping to talk about the cool high level fire and earth fusions, big suits of armor and rockbeasts with crystals jutting out of their backs respectively. In the end I never even used the word fusion in my review, deciding that it was a technical term that would need to be defined, and that demon transformation was a more accessible phrase.
I also had some things to say about music. A lot of people actually have a lot of positive things to say about Covenant's music, though not me. It's often noisy, and when it's not noisy, it's forgettable. At best it can be called experimental and does a good job of capturing feelings of insanity. While other games often put a lot of attention into their music and it adds a lot of experience, Shadow Hearts: Covenant has crappy music but the rest of the content is strong enough to stand without it. In this sense, I consider it the polar opposite of FF8, in which the great music is far more enjoyable than the entire rest of the content combined.
There may have been even more things to say, but I was trying to determine what was important and what wasn't. I wanted the writing to be at least somewhat lean, and I definitely didn't want to write a bloated review.
But now I'm going to play an even better RPG: Lunar SSSC!
| Most recent blog posts from Andrew Cretella... | |
| Feedback | |
 |
disco1960 - June 24, 2009 (11:38 PM) good work on finishing! i will have to do better to keep up. |
 |
randxian - June 25, 2009 (05:51 AM) First review in four years? Now I don't feel so bad going over two weeks without completing a new review. |
|
© 1998-2024 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors. |