Meta-God

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“Calling it God is something humans dreamed up themselves. More precisely, it's an "alien organism." Something too overwhelmingly powerful for humans to deal with is coming to this planet. I suppose if that happens, Earth and everything on it, will be wiped out.”

Roger Bacon, explaining to Yuri what God's arrival will mean for earth.

Meta-God is the final boss of Shadow Hearts portrayed as one of the Outer Gods. It is an immaculate, amoral, cosmic horror said to be mistaken for the Christian God because of it's role creating the Earth. Albert Simon summons Him with the intent of using Him as a means to purge the planet before remaking it as the perfect world.

According to Roger Bacon the creature we would call God created or rather catalyzed the creation of the planet and life on it. Roger just barely presumes to guess why Meta-God made the planet and implies that it must have been some sort of science project on his part having to do with the nature of mortal sentience and after the evolutionary designs were imposed on life at the beginning of the planet's forming Meta God left to the center of the cosmos to attend to His other affairs. Albert Simon used Roger's book, the Codex of R'lyeh, to trigger the Float, a sort of alarm system set to go off if the experiment that was the earth ever went bad and needed to be cleaned up.

Though Albert waited years to gather the proper power source to set off the Float early and spent even longer testing out the Codex of R'lyeh's sister books, the Pulse Tract and the Émigré Manuscript he does eventually succeed in his quest upon provoking Yuri and the rest of the protagonists into fighting him on the ritual site and using the energy the expend as the fuel to power it.

Once the Float is raised Meta-God begins the journey to Earth to wipe out all life of his presumably flawed experiment. Albert was apparently just waiting for God to come and leave and had no direct communication or pact with Him. Meta-God was not arriving to cleanse the planet or redeem the wicked or anything so Biblical but rather was just coming to indiscriminately destroy all life and leave. Albert's plan was to absorb the power of one of his “Angel's” Messiah, and in the wake of Meta-God's destruction of life he would remake the world as it was before God's arrival just without the bad parts most notably of these bad parts, his sworn enemy Asmodeus/Rasputin. Even after Albert's defeat Meta-God marches on to his task unimpeded. With his defeat Albert gives Yuri and his friends a sporting chance to stop Meta-God and teleports them to God's throne to combat Him when He arrives. Yuri and friends manage to defeat Meta-God, but as it is revealed in the sequel, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Meta-God was expelled not defeated and presumably just returned to His place of origin because He simply met with more trouble than he cared to deal with over what Roger clearly says must put a paltry matter for him, the Apocalypse.

Powers and Abilities:

Meta-God has a wide variety of powers including mass damage multi-target elemental energy blast moves that embody natural disasters. He is also immune to all status techniques and all his moves inflect multiple status techniques on the party including an instant death effect in addition to their high damage output. Meta-God is also one of the few non-elemental bosses in the game, which amount to having no inherent elemental weaknesses and still using elemental moves to their maximum effect. He has the power to fly and travel through space at speeds far faster than light-speed based on the distance he travels within seven days. Meta-God possesses the fire power to level planets and apparently has the capacity to create life and set evolutionary outlines for His creations at the dawn of life. He is obviously also immortal and is implied to be at-least semi-omnipotent. After reading the book on His nature and gaining their Revelations both Roger and Albert seem to have respectively gone off the deep end; This may simply be the result of Roger and Albert's stressful lives or it may mean that the true nature of Meta-God is literally mind shattering. Meta-God also has the most hit points in the game which is a very large boast even compared the the optional bosses all of which are far beyond the scoop of what the player is normally asked to deal with even at high levels.

(Many fans and hardcore RPG gamers have rated Meta-God as one of gaming’s toughest bosses despite having less HP than more than a few of the bosses in the sequel games, this due to the fact that Shadow Hearts has a damage cap of 999 per hit unlike the future games.)