Keith Valentine

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Keith Valentine is one of the playable characters in the video game Shadow Hearts. He is the second-to-last character to join the player's party (Halley being the last), and is notable for being a vampire. He uses rapiers and sabers in battle to attack and cast spells, and his magic class/element is earth.

Although Keith's exact age is unknown, the game estimates it as over 400 years old. The party first meets him at Blue Castle in Bistriz (a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, where Dracula's castle was supposedly set). It is revealed that he is the lord of the castle and the surrounding land, though he is not cruel as many of the local villagers imagine him to be. The party in Shadow Hearts come to him investigating a mysterious dark energy. He asks them to help him get rid of a horrific creature in the castle tower who awoke him of his eternal dream in his coffin under the castle.

Upon discovering the creature is in fact Yuri, driven half-insane by the events involving the Seraphic Radiance, Keith aids Alice in restoring him to his normal self and then joins the party, looking for "excitement" in his normally dull life. He finds it aplenty with the party.

Keith appears in three forms in the game series; his normal "human" self (Shadow Hearts), as a silver bat (Shadow Hearts 2 and "From the new world") and "invisible" (only in a cutscene in Blue Castle in Shadow Hearts). He inflicts the second-highest amount of damage in the game, after Yuri Hyuga. He, as same as all the vampires from all the Shadow Hearts, seems to doesn't have some of the conventional vampiral weaknesses, like being affected by sunlight, crosses, and garlic. But he drinks blood from the monsters only and has other habilities, like being invisible, turning into a bat, eternal life and an awesome sobrenatural speed. In his own words "It looks like human books tell stupid things about vampires. We are like humans, good and bad people, but we are thoughests".

[edit] Special Moves

Special moves for Keith are called Rituals, indicated to be vampiric rituals passed down throughout his family. His movelist:

• Drain Touch - Health points are drained from a target into Keith.
• Blood Sucker - Similar to Drain Touch, but with multiple targets.
• Hecatoncheire - An attack that deals earth-based damage.
• Apsaras - Deals heavy water-based damage to enemies and cures all party stat ailments.
• Larva - Deals heavy earth-based damage and inflicts Poison, Paralysis, and Silence on enemies.
• Gift - Keith's most powerful and expensive move, he deals heavy dark-damage to all enemies, as well as Instant Death on occasions. It is the third-most powerful move in the game after Alice Elliot's Advent attack and Yuri's For the Children.

[edit] Trivia

• Keith is voiced by the same actor who voices James on Pokémon. However, he only has one non-text speaking part in the entire game, a monologue on his relationship with the party after he obtains his ultimate weapon.
• Keith also makes cameos in Shadow Hearts: Covenant and Shadow Hearts: From the New World as head of the Lottery Commission. He is the only character other than Roger Bacon to appear in all three games.
• Keith is the middle child of the Valentines; his older brother is Joachim, and his younger sister is Hilda. He also appears to have a grandfather, a black bat, still around, as shown in From the New World.
• In Shadow Hearts Keith's character is defined as a bored aristocrat with the added problem of being immortal in a mostly dead region with few subjects. He himself admonishes Zhuzhen and corrects the game's predespositions on vampires, claiming that if he DID partake of human blood, his ancestors would likely rise from their graves and torment him endlessly.
• He voices no trouble with the usual vampiric myths, especially sunlight.