Shining Soul

"What’s this: A,A,A,A... an X rated flick? WRONG, it’s Shining Soul."

The first “Shining” for the GBA just couldn’t have been worst, it is not even an rpg, it’s just a boring hack and slash/dungeon crawler. I hate dungeon crawlers, they remind me a lot to that crap called Diablo, well, at last this one is slightly better than Diablo.

Plot 1/10: It seems that the Dragon Lord has awakened and now you have to stop it because you are the chosen one, the only one strong enough… bah!, this plot makes me sick. Of course as this is a dungeon crawler this is the only plot you’ll find.

Graphics 7/10: Above average, but poor for a GBA game. The enemies aren’t very detailed and lack animations, and the backgrounds are a bit blurry and so-so.

Music 3/10: The music played at the character selection screen and then in the first area is quite good, but that’s all, the rest of the tunes are terribly simple and monotonous, as everything in this game. It looks it was made with a glass and a spoon. The zip of my jacket sounds better than this, but at last it is not too annoying.

Gameplay 3/10: Terrible, I haven’t seen something so horrendously monotonous, repetitive, and tedious in a long time, but well, this a dungeon crawler, all the dungeon crawlers are monotonous: just go to a dungeon, kill everything you have at sight, steal every treasure around, and return to the only town in the whole game to identify weapons and armor, store your money and useless items, sell things… and to the dungeon again.
The combats are pathetic, the enemies are constantly chasing you and it is impossible to stop one single second to try to heal or go to the menu because the game never stops, so if you enter the menu with enemies around you are probably going to die. Everything consist on smashing the A button all the time. BORING.

Each area (dungeon) is divided in levels, and all the stages look exactly the same, some think that this way you will never play the same stage again, I think that stinks.
The level up system lets you rise your weapons and own stats, like in Diablo, and like in Diablo again, depending on which character you’ve selected you’ll have to rise different stats.

Something unbelievably annoying is that piercing sound when the text is being displayed, I’ve played tons of Nes rpgs with that kind of things, but here is different, I can’t stand it, thank god there’s only one town with very few people to talk to.

What I wonder is, why it is so hard to make a dungeon crawler with a plot?, it is not impossible, I just don’t get it.

Replay Value: Well, there is replay value because you can choose from four different characters (archer, warrior, mage and beast), but I prefer watching my grandmother knit rather than playing through this nightmare again.

Not so shining right?, yep, and unless you have other two friends to play with (yes, there is multiplayer mode) do not even think about trying this thing.

””My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry.””

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/30/03, Updated 10/08/03