Shining Soul

"It shines so bright it hurts you"

I'm a fan of action RPG genre, and when this Shining Soul game came out, I tried to find info here and there wanting to find out if this is a good game. The first info I got is that this game is a Diablo look-alike, and having played Diablo myself (Diablo 2, to be more exact) and liked its action RPG feel, I decided to try this game out. My findings?

Plot/Character: 3/10

The Dark dragon has arisen and four heroes set out to stop it. Can they do it? Well, what can I say about that kind of plot... It is classic, but the serious lack of twisted turns of events (or should I say, absence of them?) makes this game's story extremely boring... But at least, it's a kind of story which is logical...

Onto the characters. I like grey, and with that said, the characters in this game, be it friends or foe, are very disappointing. The bad guys are all evil, while the good guys? Characterless. Bah.

Gameplay: 6/10

Considering that this game is part RPG, it's just normal that it has a level up mechanism, which is, just like Diablo, dependant on the players. For example, a character can focus on weapon mastery, passive skills, and so on. Quite a good thing for people who loves variety.

The game is in most parts slow. Your character moves slowly, so do your enemies, that I want to call the exploration system a slug race... Unfortunately, as the game advances, your speed doesn't increase, while later some enemies start to move much faster than your hero, and it's bad.

At the good side again, the battle gameplay is easy to understand. You roam dungeons by dungeons, beating up enemies to death, beating the boss, and advance to the next level. Again, just like the level up system (and depending on how you level up your hero), you can beat up enemies in different ways, even each character has multiple ways of beating up the baddies.

Okay, so the battle system sounds easy, right. But since when Diablo and Roulette mix? Seriously, as you play the game, you'll notice that you need luck in one major aspect: attacking. If your luck is bad, you'll find that your attacks miss a lot, and that's not healthy. Though fortunately, there are ways to get around that, so there's still hope.

Playability: 6/10

What actually makes the game difficult is the lousy side of the gameplay. The enemies aren't anything hard to beat up, but with the fact that some enemies are faster than you, your attacks miss a lot etc. Boredom + Misfortune = Disaster.

Visual: 5/10

To sum it up: This game has a serious lack of animation and too much recolorings. Character have up to 4-frame sprites for just about anything, which is kinda bad, but to make it worse, some animations are used for so many purposes. Then the enemies. Gosh. One type of enemy can have up to 4, maybe even more color scheme, and different color scheme is treated as different level of enemy. Not enough for you? See the game yourself.

Audio: 3/10

No voice acting (there are sound effect that resemble voices though, but I highly doubt it's a real voice), lousy music and lack of sound effects. How worse can we get?

Replay Value: 7/10

Well, at least this is where the game shine well. There are four characters to choose from, and each character plays distinctively, and that's good. Still, the game is long, and that's qujite discouraging...

Overall

If this game is to be made better, lots of improvement has to be done. Otherwise, this game will only make it to the hall of fame of worst games of all time. Then again, maybe not... If you're quite a Sega fan, you can add this to your collection anyway... Your choice

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/03/04