Even if the game doesn't carry "Final Fantasy" tag, it still can be one or even the best console rpg worldwide.
The time is World War I (quite rare timeline for rpgs, huh?), and in some beautiful CG soldiers attack seemingly a sleeping village barging into its church, yet the village is not as peaceful as it looks, as the black seemingly bad demon slaughters the soldiers, only leaving the woman alive. Later bad black demon turns out to be the main character for the story (+1 point for originality already). Simply told after just clicking the "new game" on the menu screen you get dragged into a long epic tale, which consists of demons, all kind of cults, even some science-fiction details, like cloning people or summoning a fully technical metallic fortress into the skies. The heroes party also consists of a bunch of great characters, like an old retired puppeteer who lost his daughter in somekind of accident or a pro wrestler vampire who uses random objects as his weapons (mailbox, frozen tuna, statue), it's rare when there is absolutely no annoying characters in the whole game, but Shadow Hearts: Covenant somehow managed to bring this out. The plot is so involving that I played this game for 6 days, more or less 10 hours a day until I beat it, thankfully I was on vacation that week ^^;.
Considering the game was out at the years of 2004 graphics were... nice. Not astounding, or very impressive, but nice. I rarely care for the graphics in the game, as long as the characters look real enough for me to take them seriously and the art together with camera angles are satisfying - I'm happy. Yet it still leaves something to be desired, I mean, Final Fantasy X was released in 2001, did it really managed to bring out full Playstation 2 potential?
Sound is a little bit disappointing, simply told there are only few catchy tunes in the whole game, particularly four - grand papylon, battle music in japan, the tune which plays in "bell tolls" fmv and the one playing in the ending movie. It's quite strange as the first Shadow Hearts had a wide variety of catchy and enjoyable tunes, it just proves that time doesn't help to improve the music.
The gameplay is pretty good, combos and judgment ring really makes you feel tense during combat, you wont be sleeping on your couch like in Final Fantasy games, just hitting "X" repeatedly. On the other hand even with the challenge of judgment ring the game's difficulty is a peace of cake. It's so easy that it's not even funny. It seems though as developers were aware of the game being pretty easy for intermediate players, and they thought of awarding them for being good with the ring (atleast 65% perfects) with an item - extreme. It makes the fights even easier, yet a LOT faster. After I have gotten extreme all the fights were finished in 1st or 2nd turn, and I thanked god for it. As I can't stand wasting a lot of time fighting easy fights, I just rushed the game to see more and more of the marvelous story. Seriously, if you want a challenging game, which would make you think and plan a lot of battles ahead, it's not for you at the moment, yet if you like to spend your days watching a top-notch story, which no Hollywood junk can compete with, then it's your game, as it's mine.