The main protagonist is Johnny Garland, a teenage private detective who is searching for his forgotten past following a car accident that killed the rest of his family. He is saved from death by Shania, a Native American priestess capable of transforming into monstrous forms in battle after forming pacts with powerful spirits. The pair are joined by Natan, Shania's bounty hunter bodyguard; Frank Goldfinger, a self-proclaimed master ninja; Master Mao, an anthropomorphic cat; Ricardo Gomez, a mariachi-playing gunman; and Hildergard "Hilda" Valentine, a member of the recurring Valentine vampire clan. Johnny is hired by Gilbert to track down Marlow Brown. Upon finding him in an abandoned opera house, Brown is terrified of Johnny, and is shortly killed by a monster that appears from a portal. Johnny is saved by Shania, who was hunting the monster. Since the release of the dark energy Malice into the world during the events of Covenant, Shania and her companion Natan help keep monsters spawned from Malice in check, along with hunting for those who destroyed Shania's tribe. Johnny and Shania team up and locate Gilbert at Arkham University, who reveals his true intentions to unleash Malice upon the world before escaping. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, a wanted criminal codenamed "Killer" escapes police pursuit and is fatally injured.
During gameplay, the party explores a number of town and country areas across the Americas from a fixed-camera third-person perspective, collecting and buying items and equipment, talking to non-playable characters who act as quest givers and merchants, solving environmental puzzles, and completing both story-centered quests and side quests. The turn-based battles are triggered through both random and scripted encounters. Each player character has hit points (health), skill points (magic), and sanity points (SP). SP ordinarily decrease once per turn, and when a character runs out of SP they go berserk and cannot be controlled by the player. Each character has two basic attack types; single attacks which range from normal attacks to powerful "Hard Hit", and double attacks which allow one character to take two actions in a single turn.
Source: Wikipedia, "Shadow_Hearts:_From_The_New_World," available under the CC-BY-SA License.