Shadow of Destiny Review! (PS2) - The Game Collection.
Shadow of Memories is a true hidden gem. Welcome back to The Game Collection! I am SuperDerek and this is Shadow of Destiny! Shadow of Destiny is not an RPG. It’s not exactly rare, or expensive, or beautiful, but stick around anyway because Shadow of Destiny is an experience that I suspect many RPG fans might enjoy anyway.
Shadow of Destiny, also known as “Shadow of Memories” outside of North America, is a relatively obscure adventure game written and directed by Junko Kawano. If that name sounds familiar it’s because she was involved in the development of Suikoden I, II, IV, Tactics, and V.
The game was originally released by Konami in early 2001 for the PlayStation 2. In PAL territories it was ported over to Xbox, and worldwide for PC in late 2002. The game even received a port to the PlayStation Portable in early 2010, but Europe didn’t end up getting the PSP release.
For the purpose of this review, I played the original PS2 release. In Shadow of Destiny, you play as Eike, a young man who dies during the opening credits. Stabbed in the back by an unknown assailant. Upon gaining consciousness in a space between life and death, he is greeted by a mysterious voice.
Eike is granted life renewed and sent back in time a half hour or so, with a time-travel device and a mission: “Try not to die.” Back when I first got a PlayStation 2 around launch, I remember this game being one of the first ones I rented. I remember thinking that the dude on the cover looked pretty cool.
I took the game home and popped it in and really had a great time! Over time my memory of the game became a shadow of its former self, but I was able to get some interesting endings that stayed with me all this time. And now I wanted to see how the game stood up today? The game plays out as a sort of puzzle mystery thriller where you talk to NPCs to gather information, use items to solve puzzles, and struggle against the flow of destiny that seems intent on your expiration.
Failing to do so will result in Eike’s untimely demise and having to restart the chapter using the knowledge you gained from previous attempts. Sometimes thwarting these attempts of your life will send you back in time by a half hour, or sometimes by a few centuries.
You could think of this sort of like playing out like the movies Groundhog Day and Back to the Future mashed up into one with a murder mystery thrown into the mix for good measure. The story of Shadow of Destiny is overall kind of an interesting and winding one.
There are a bunch of different endings in the game and to really get an understanding of all of the events and different branches of choices you make, you’ll definitely want to play through the game at least a handful of times. In fact, to unlock the two extra endings, you’ll have to collect each of the 6 main endings.
Time travel has a way of making continuity fuzzy, and Shadow of Destiny has a way of making that abundantly clear. I suspect that there might be some paradoxes and contradictions within the game, but it’s all sort of muddled just enough to keep me from pinpointing anything specific, which is probably intentional.
Overall though I found myself still enjoying the premise of affecting the world around you by making changes to the past. That whole trying to avoid fate thing reminds me a lot of Re: Zero, but with a lot less blood and gore on display, and of course without the psychological implications of being murdered dozens of times appearing to take much of a toll on our hero.
Being able to see the town change as it evolves over hundreds of years is also super neat, and the way that was represented throughout the game was super neat as well! I think that the overall story was fun, as long as you don’t try to think too hard about the aforementioned paradoxes.
I do feel like none of the resolutions at the end of the game felt especially satisfying, but they all made sense for the most part once you understand what’s really going on. Eike as a character is a pretty affable guy, which is kind of important since it increases the mystery about why anyone would want to kill this guy in the first place.
His voice-actor conveyed that pretty well all in all. In fact, the end-to-end voice-acting within Shadow of Destiny is pretty dang impressive! Well, I mean, the fact that it has end-to-end voice acting is impressive. The acting itself though is pretty comically bad at times.
It suffers from one of the classic blunders of having everybody record their lines in a vacuum. Meaning, I don’t think that any of these actors were given any context for the line they were delivering, making some conversations sound completely disconnected from one another, even if the words they say make sense.
I’d even be inclined to say that at some points, it’s so bad it actually becomes great. The music in Shadow of Destiny is kind of tough to describe. It takes a backseat for the vast majority of the game and is included mainly to drum up suspense. Which it does pretty well.
But most likely none of the tracks are going to get stuck in your mind. So, I’d just have to say that the music is serviceable. So it’s normally at about this point when I’d start talking about battle mechanics and combat and such but seeing as this game isn’t an RPG, there’s no combat to speak of.
Death and murder in this game take place during cut-scenes with which you have no interaction. There’s no quick time events, there’s no turn-based mechanics, no weapons or armor, nothing. The game instead plays sort of like Shenmue 1, but without the fighting mechanics.
If you’re curious about my thoughts on Shenmue you can find that review here. It’s an old review, but it checks out. It plays pretty much like any other PS2 RPG, just without any of the battling. Like, you know when you get to a town in an RPG and there’s some non-combat oriented side-quest you have to do? Maybe a puzzle to solve? That’s basically what this game is in a nutshell.
And I kind of dig it! There is a small town you can explore in various eras, people to talk to, items to acquire, and using some items near certain people or places will cause some people to react or trigger cut-scenes. Aside from the whole being murdered thing, it’s a pretty low-intensity, low-stakes game.
Not a bad way to unwind after a more intense game. Visually, Shadow of Destiny is about the most PS2-looking game you can get, if you know what I mean. It’s got enough polygons to round out shapes well enough, but low resolution textures that everything sort of looks too smooth.
And also a low enough resolution that the whole thing still looks just a bit jagged. In fact, would you believe it that this game actually runs natively at 240p for the most part? It’s just the menus that increase the resolution to 480i. This little fact here actually made capturing footage for the review a bit of a hassle, some modern TVs will likely handle this resolution change mid-game poorly, sort of like if you’ve heard about the Chrono Cross problem.
Normally you could just play the game on PlayStation 3 as I’ve been showing here, but there are some compatibility problems that prevent the game from even loading after the beginning of chapter 4, so unfortunately, not even that will save you in this case.
Because of that, I might recommend you seek out the game on Xbox, PSP, or PC instead. Unfortunately it’s not on either Steam or GoG though. Alternatively, Junko Kawano would go on to make a spiritual successor to this game, Time Hollow, for the Nintendo DS in 2008, which also uses time travel mechanics.
Shadow of Destiny isn’t an epic story, it’s not rare or expensive, it’s not gorgeous, it’s not even an RPG. But something about it made me want to play this for ages now. In fact, this game has been on my list of games to review ever since I started my channel in 2014.
It’s a super short play you can knock out in a day or two, and it commands a low price at just about $15 or so. I haven’t ever heard of many other people talking about this game, but I think it’s deserving of at least a little more recognition. It’s a pretty average game overall, but I liked it.
