The story is the strongest aspect of Shadow Madness.   I especially liked the million year mythology created in the various books you can read which are scattered around the world.  This really shows that the authors set out to create a deep story within a living world. With such auspicious beginnings, the game unfortunately goes downhill.  While each characters has his or her own unique personality, they are all ultimately one dimensional. Beyond figuring out who was responsible for destroying their villages, they lack any other motivations.    Glaringly absent are any personal problems or quests which would have made them appear more human.  The Japanese developers are very good at introducing drama into their RPG stories.  It is sorely lacking here.

The graphics of the the game can only be described as ugly.  While the similarity to Final Fantasy VII is obvious, with the pre-rendered backgrounds and polygon characters, instead of improving on an established style, Crave only made a sloppy attempt at copying.   The game environments always appear dark.  For some reason, even in daytime, it's not that bright.  Furthermore, there is not a whole lot of detail to the environments.  The cities appear dead, with few if any movements in the background.  The biggest problem is with the actual characters.  They are always small. So small that sometimes it looks like you are moving tiny dots around a city maze.  In Final Fantasy VII this also happened, but it was balanced by numerous close-ups of your characters and they never disappeared into dots. 

In Shadow Madness the characters are never shown close-up.  This gives the feeling of all the action appearing as distant from the player, so the player is never drawn into the game world.  Battle graphics are even worse.  Enemy detail is very low. So low, in fact, that sometimes it looks like you are fighting blobs that only vaguely resemble some animal.  Again, the problem of making everything small drags down the style of the battlefield.  Spell effects are usually not more then simple lighting effects.  There are occasional summon-type spells which can be cast that are quite impressive.  However, there is little variety to these, since it seems that every summoned monster looks like its made of liquid metal.

Another problem I had was with the over-world maps.  Instead of having your characters travelling around a rich 3D landscape, you move from one flat roadmap to the next, all segregated into squares with pictures representing towns or places of interest.  It's almost as if the developers were too lazy to put any detail into the over-world travelling.  

Fortunately, the music and sound are enjoyable because they fit the current events and the environments nicely.  From city jazz tunes to desert-style nuances, the music is not bad at all.  However there aren't any tunes which are very memorable.   The music was the best aspect of the battles.

Gameplay is where this game really stinks.  The first problem was the awkward control. Attack, run, spell, or item usage is divided into four boxes controlled by the upper L1, L2, R1, R2 buttons.  While extremely difficult to get used to at first, the system does become easier with practice.  The big problem comes later when you are fighting at a fast rate and accidentally cast an expensive spell simply because your previous set command stays the same between turns.  Since enemies attack in real time, the player must move fast to execute the commands. 

Attacks come in three flavors: guarded, normal, or aggressive.  While there are advantages and disadvantages to the three attack levels,  they ultimately don't make a whole lot of difference and I ended up just using normal attack.  What really reeks is the utter lack of any challenge to the battles.  Your characters hit the enemies for 150 hit points. The enemies hit your characters for 4 hitpoints. This is the first RPG where you can go through a dungeon without healing once!  It's so bad that you can max out your characters' hit point levels to 999 by the middle of the game!   Sure, menu-driven combat is usually easy in general but at least in most RPGs, there is some strategy involved in balancing attacks with spells and item usage, especially during boss battles.  Here, there is none of that since most bosses can be defeated with a few summon spells and hits. 

Another pointless addition is the inclusion of hundreds of useless items which either have no purpose and can heal you by 1 or two hitpoints.  This would be a harmless addition if your item inventory were infinite.  However, your space is very limited, so the player always runs into situations where their packs are full and they have to go through their menus to drop useless items before picking up a better piece of armor.  Speaking of armor and weapons, in the shops there's no indication if the item bought is better than what's already equipped.  All you have to go on is price, which is an annoying disadvantage to shopping.  One nice aspect to the game's flow is that at some points, you get to split your party into several sub-quests and you can split your items among the two parties.   This does add some variety to gameplay in that you have several objectives to complete at once which you can tackle one at a time or switch between parties during each successive quest.  

Another interesting aspect lies in some of the mini-games.  An example is Stinger's lock-picking skill which comes in 4 levels of difficulty.  This game consists of following a sequence of movements of two lock picks, one controlled by the right buttons and the other by the directional keys.  The player must follow the movement sequence given on-screen to successfully open locked doors or chests.  The challenge comes from the angles shown on-screen.  You can't tell if the lock-pick is going up or right.   It can be frustrating but when you are successful it is satisfying to open the door and get the treasure.  These little additions are nice but don't really save the game at all.

I really wanted to like Shadow Madness and support the company for their valiant attempts at breaking into the Japanese-dominated market.  However, this game is so bad that its an embarrassment to the genre.  From its ugly graphics to sloppy gameplay, you can only wonder at what could have been if it was done right.  Seriously, my advice to the casual gamer is to stay away from this game and buy Lunar: Silver Star Story instead.  That game is a true example of what a great RPG should be.