Shining Soul

"Shining Gauntlet gone wrong"

A few years back it would seem insane to imagine yourself playing a Sega game on a Nintendo console. I mean, I can still recall endless discussions with my friends about the superiority of one or the other. It was the day of the Sega Genesis vs. Super NES war. Then, Genesis owners (like me) always held dear the Shining series, which gave us some of the best games of that era. Sega still managed to release three Shining titles for the Saturn, but not even one for the Dreamcast. Since Sega stopped developing consoles, weird things have been happening... and I find myself playing a Shining game on the Gameboy Advance!

As strange as this situation is, something else has happened since the release of the last Shining game. Something bad. It was a long wait until Shining Soul was released in English, but, when it came out, playing this game quickly became an exercise in frustration for me. While most of the games in the series had been perfect examples of quality gameplay and enthralling storytelling, this game seemed to be nothing but disappointing. It’s a fact that Soul follows the steps of the weakest Shining title be-fore it, Shining Wisdom (for the Saturn), but it seems to try really hard in screwing up any interesting elements that game might have had. Ultimately, playing through the game was like meeting an old friend and realizing all the joy of being with him has faded over the years.

In the game you play the role of one of the Shining warriors. The player must choose one of four classes (warrior, wizard, archer and dragonewt) to play as and create his or her own character, but the fact is this character won’t have any effect over the story whatsoever. The mission of these warriors is to rid the world of the Dark Dragon, a baddie that has appeared before in other Shining games. To do that, the hero you choose must first defeat each of the the Dragon’s generals. That’s about it as far as story goes in Shining Soul. There’s only one village in the game, where you begin and return after every dungeon or after you have been defeated. NPC interaction is minimal. Character development doesn’t exist. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? All these elements turn Shining Soul into a pretty empty experience.

The setting of the game is more or less relative the first Shining Force’s. It takes place in a continent called Rune and some characters from that game, apart from the Dark Dragon, appear, such as Otrant, Adam and Chaos. However, the world is limited to the only village in the game and the dungeons you visit to defeat the enemy generals, so it’s all pretty limited. What’s worse, all of the concepts for dungeons and the village are absolutely obvious and without the ‘Shining feel’ that was kept throughout the other games of the series.

Shining Soul is a pretty straightforward action-RPG. You guide your character through each level of the dungeons, slaughtering enemies and collecting treasure as you go by. When you’ve killed the enemies on this level, a passage opens up and you can move on. The thing is, the next level will be exactly the same as the one before it, only probably longer and, thus more annoying. Shining Soul is one of the most repetitive games I’ve ever played, given the fact that all you do is walk around until you find enemies and then press the A button over and over until you kill the necessary enemies for you to advance. In the end of each dungeon you get to fight a boss, but not much skill or strategy is required to beat any of them.

Of course, there’s leveling up and with the gaining of each level, the character receives points to spend on the four different attributes (actually, only the wizard can increase the intelligence attribute) and points to upgrade specific abilities for each class. So, the warrior may improve his defense, the archer the chance of inflicting critical hits and the wizard each of the elemental spells. Each character also has access to different weapons and can upgrade their abilities with them as well as find/buy magic items that can give the characters many different abilities. These different abilities actually make the experience of playing the game with each character quite different from each other, but that’s not necessarily an advantage, since the game isn’t really any good.

Bizarrely enough, Shining Soul does have a limited amount of addictiveness in itself, perhaps because playing it is such a brainless activity. All you do in this game is push the A button indefinitely and that’s indeed tiring, but it still somehow manages to make you play it until the end of the game. I considered giving up on the game many times while playing it, but I always came back, attracted by some mysterious force. After I beat it, though, I only didn’t forget its existence entirely because it stains the name one of one of the greatest gaming series ever. The game actually doesn’t have much to do with the other Shining games, with the only resemblance being some elements of the setting and the famous four-windows menu.

Also going against the game is its retarded level of difficulty. The enemies you fight in the dungeons are stupid enough to stay trapped in places where you can hit them, while they can’t harm you. Also, you can use an item (a pretty common and cheap item, I might add) which will take you back to the village whenever you use it, which means you can heal, buy new items etc. and then go back to the dungeon in the exact spot you were before. If you die, you can still resume the dungeon from the same point. Only if you die during boss fights you’ll have to start the battle again. However, if you save while in the middle of a dungeon, you have to start over again when you load your file.

The visual aspect of Shining Soul isn’t nearly as bad as its gameplay and could actually be the best thing the game has to offer. All the characters have strong designs and animations and the graphics are very clear and beautiful. Different items have different designs and each character also has different colors for the player to choose from. Bosses are also pretty impressive, for the most part massive, well designed and animated. The backgrounds of the dungeons, however, don’t impress much, not because they’re particularly poor, but mostly because they are too repetitive. All the levels in each dungeon have exactly the same background, so it does get annoying towards the end of the game, when the dungeons are simply endless.

The sound, however, matches the gameplay in (lack of) quality. The sound-track for Shining Soul is one of the most repetitive and uninspired work I can recall. Why nobody among the developers noticed it or cared to change it is beyond me. Given the fact that you’ll be stuck for a very long time in each dungeon, the loops last too short and will get on your nerves real quickly. Besides, the quality of the music is just terribly poor. This is the typical game that totally justifies turning down the music is favor of some good CD.

Well, the fact is that Shining Soul is the worse Shining game I’ve ever played. Not only a shame for the series, but in itself a truly weak game. If the developers had, well, actually developed the original game concept further, maybe they could have come up with a strong, addictive game. As it is, however, we have an obvious and poor Gauntlet-inspired game with some RPG elements, almost devoid of any gameplay value and absolutely no content. But it doesn’t end here: they’re making a sequel. God save us all.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/30/04