Endings

All of the Shadow Hearts games have two possible endings: a "Good" ending and a "Bad" ending. We'll be discussing the ones for the first two games in this section so be warned there are major spoilers all over this page.

Shadow Hearts

The game's story doesn't diverge into the two separate endings until after Yuri rejoins the party in Europe following his attempted fusion with the Seraphic Radiance. From there the player has the choice of pursuing the good ending by completing a sidequest or ignoring it to receive the default bad ending.

Good: Yuri defeats the masks in his Graveyard and Atman's soul is sacrificed in place of Alice's, which she gave up as a replacement for Yuri's. The two basically live happily ever after and are last seen on a train to visit Alice's mother.

Bad: Alice's soul is taken from her on the train to her mother's and Yuri, we find out in Covenant, arrived in the village of Domremy to bury her with his own hands. This is also called the "True" ending because it is the one the second game continues from.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant

Like the first game, Covenant's story doesn't diverge until the very final scene. It hinge on the choice a player makes at a certain moment in the game. Unlike the first, there's quite a bit of debate about the "Good" ending. I'll throw my own two cents in there.

Bad: Yuri decides he wants to live a peaceful life. After defeating Kato at the top of the Asuka Stone Platform, the party members must pray for the time and place they most want to be. Yuri ends up in Wales, where he is last seen walking away with Roger into the field where the first game ended. He will live as the Mistletoe's curse sucks his soul away until he is a mindless shell.

Good: During the collapse of the alternate dimension in which the part fights Kato, Yuri allows himself to be impaled on a piece of rock that shoots up from the ground. His necklace shatters and we see the Yuri emerging from the Mistletoe in the Graveyad wake up to join Alice. The next time we see him, Yuri wakes up startled. From his clothes and the date, we realize it is where the first game began.

The debate comes in when it comes to deciding whether or not Yuri is dead and reliving his memories as part of his afterlife, his wish to relive his happiest moments, or if he was actually transported back in time. Personally, I'm leaning towards dead. I don't see the point in showing him being impaled if the game was suddenly going to spring a "just kidding!" on us two minutes later. We, as players, already know this is the good ending. We aren't going to be surprised if he ended up going back in time to see Alice again because we're expecting things to turn out okay. But it's pretty shocking to realize Yuri's good ending is dying to preserve his life.

Not that I don't like to imagine him getting his happy ending and being able to change the events of Shadow Hearts...