Shining Soul

"Here comes another black sheep..."

If you feel like giving Shining Soul a try you won't do it because of a non-existent hype about it or because you love dungeon crawlers, but because it has ''Shining'' in it. Games like ''Shining in the Darkness'', ''Shining Force'' and ''Shining: The holy ark'' belong to the best of their kind and all of them still have countless fans. When ''Shining Wisdom'' was released, most of the fans were disgusted because the game was no RPG or strategy game and didn't have a lot to do with the series. It was known as the black sheep of the series.

Now that Shining Wisdom is almost forgotten, a new black sheep comes up: Shining Soul (SS). SS is actually a portable Diablo which will make the Diablo fans happy, but which has absolutely nothing to do with the original ''Shining'' series, which is too bad since a portable Shining Force would be fun indeed.

In ages long forgotten... remember the intro of Shining Force? 1000 years ago Dark Dragon terrorized everyone until a bunch of heroes banished him. In SS you'll start 1000 years before Shining Force and face the evil Dark Dragon. But first of all, you will have to create a character, which is actually a cool feature and lots of fun. There are 4 classes to choose from, 4 different ''outfits'' per class and a lot of different skills. A knight could use swords, lances or axes and feels and plays totally different depending on what you choose.

Having created your character you will be crawling through dungeons hacking and slashing monsters, collecting treasure, gaining XP and hunting down rare items. Sounds fun, but that's actually all the game consists of. Where is the plot? Where are the puzzles? Why are there no promotions? If you played the original Shining games you will always have the feeling that something is missing.
Being unable to pause the game or save your position you will have to start the current dungeon from level 1 again if you need to take a break which doesn't really make the game any better.
Fans of the series will notice a few known faces in SS, but except for Adam and Chaos they're all boss monsters from all the other games and do not make an awful lot of sense. You will fight Zeon, SF2's final boss in some kind of ''Whack a mole'' battle which doesn't feel right at all. The game wasn't made by Sonic/Camelot so I guess no one really cared about that.

If you don't expect anything just because the title contains ''Shining'' and if you don't care about the totally out of place boss monsters, the game actually is quite fun, especially in multiplayer. Having 3 buddies around you who can revive you or you can trade items with is a lot more fun than killing the same monsters over and over again all alone.

Combat is another frustrating thing about SS. Many monsters have so many hit points that it takes dozens of hits to kill them. Play this for an hour or two and you'll have a sore thumb. The further you get, the stronger your opponents will become and the longer it will take to defeat them. You'll be literally swamped by monsters you can hardly hit and all you can do is hit and run, especially when playing on ''Advanced'' mode.

No matter whether you'll like the gameplay in SS or not, it looks really good. The graphics are nicely done and you'll easily recognize the Gizmos, Rune Knights and Mishaela on the tiny screen and they look just like they did in the games they previously appeared in. Another very important thing is the bright color palette - you can actually play SS even in darker areas which makes it a lot more ''portable'' than many other GBA titles!

The sound in SS is terrible. Anyone who played Golden Sun or LOTR2 knows that the GBA has some extremely powerful hardware and is able to play some impressive sounds and music indeed, but SS sounds like a title for the classic 4Bit gameboy. It's not just the terrible sound effects or the way the music sounds, but most of all the music tracks itself which last about 10 seconds and then get repeated. And repeated again. And again. Until you finally turn it off in the options menu.

If you loved Shining Force and were disgusted about Shining Wisdom, don't buy SS. If you don't care about the Shining series and need a good diablo-style game, buy LOTR2.
If you have some friends to play with you and if you love the series so much you need to own every title, go get it.
The game is a nice dungeon hack with relatively high replay value and good multiplayer, but it will disappoint anyone setting their expectations too high.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/03, Updated 01/02/03