Shining in the Darkness

"The Shining series humble beginnings..."

Throughout the years, Sega's Shining series has ranked itself among the highest of Sega RPGs, up there
with the likes of Phantasy Star and Panzer Dragon. The series has been no for decent characters, a good story, and stellar gameplay. The Shining series has been know to produce games which make a lasting impression on the player. This isn't one of them. Sega's great series had a rather rough start.

Shining in the Darkness tells of a far-away land called Thornwood...but it's not a very good story. :/ You assume the role of a young knight, whom which you get to name. Apparently, trouble has been brewing in Thornwood. An evil demon, Darksol, has kidnapped Princess Jessica. In addition to this, your father has mysteriously disappeared recently while taking Jessica out on a little walk like thing. So you decide to go straight into the monster-filled labryninth where Jessica is being held prisoner, and discover what happened to your father! Honestly...does this sound generic to you or what? I mean, I know it's 1991, but sheesh, Final Fantasy 4 and Chronicle of the Radia War were both released in 1991 and they had GREAT stories. If it wasn't for a particular twist later in the game, SitD story wouldn't be much better than the original Dragon Warrior.

Navigation takes place in a first person style. Personally, this is SitD's main killer flaw:I HATE first-dungeon crawlers. Prepare to get out the map, because you'll constantly be getting lost in the game's single dungeon. That brings up another fault of the game:a limited amount of areas.There's a town, a dungeon, and a castle, and while they're all filled with life and vigor, it's simply not enough. The labryninth also become increibly dull after a short while, since each floor(which are HUGE, I might add) have the same type of wall and floor tile over and over again. You'll also be seeing these tiles a whoooole lot, because you'll have to exit and retry repeatedly as you get lost over and over again.

Battles take place in a first person view ala Dragon Warrior. There's the basic rpg options, attack, run, blah blah blah. The monsters you battle show no mercy, either:the KaiserCrab early on in the game will more than likely whomp your ass the first time or two (or in my pathetic case, 30. =P ) The experience you gained is fair enough:the game doesn't give away huge amounts of gold and experience, but at the same time it doesn't make it nigh impossoble to level up. The encounter rate seems a little strange. Sometimes you can go a whole minute without running into a single fight, sometimes you get 5 fights in 5 steps. Even stranger, the more you want to find them, the less likely you are to do so. Just another reason I hate the game. To sum it up, the battle are generic and dull.

SitD had great music for a 1991 game. It fits the mood perfectly, and the tunes are atmospheric. The labryninth gives you the urge to explore and adventure in the labryninth, while the town music has a hectic theme that fits its image as a busy town. (Well, 15 people IS pretty crowded for a Genesis rpg. =P ) The thing is, there's not enough variety. There's two battle themes, two dungeon themes, a town theme, a store theme, a castle theme, and a story theme. That goes to eight songs in the game, not near enough to fill the requirements for an rpg. The sound effects are ho-hum. They're okay, but I hardly ever like sound effects anyway(except in exceptional cases like Sonic^_^ )

SitD just doesn't have enough gameplay variety in it to be an interesting game in my book. The graphics are great, as is the overused music, but the gameplay is just too dull. The game boils down to fight, explore, get lost, exit, rinse, lather, repeat. If it had a little more variety it could've been a real contender. I'd recommend you pick up its younger brother Shining games over this one. Still, if you're into dungeon-crawlers, this is the best of the bunch (not that that's saying much,) and it's a good history lesson for all of the Shining Force Fans to see the Shining series' humble beginning.

Score: 4.5(rounded up to a 5)

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/30/01, Updated 11/30/01