Shining Soul (GBA)
Sega tarnishes its long-running RPG franchise with an inferior Diablo clone.
By Zach "Freelance Weasel" Meston | Sept. 14, 2003


60
Fair
The Lowdown: A super-deformed take on Diablo, wholly devoid of strategy or audiovisual pizzazz.
Pros: The multiplayer mode is mildly entertaining.
Cons: Endless button hammering; feeble connection to previous Shining games.

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Platform:  Game Boy Advance
Game Type:  RPG / Action
Developer:  Sega
Publisher:  Atlus
ESRB: Everyone

Full Game Information
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Sega's Shining series is one of the best strategy/RPG franchises in video-game history, and many fans remain bitter that the U.S. got screwed out of the complete Shining Force III, which was a serial RPG for the ill-fated Saturn long before the idea was so much as a twinkle in the eye of Bandai's marketing department. Shining Soul, however, is the first Shining game not developed under the supervision of Hiroyuki Takahashi and Yasuhiro Taguchi, and their magic touch is desperately missed.

Shining Soul lets the vaunted series down. It's a feeble game that eschews strategy and storyline for what's among the dullest real-time combat I've encountered in twenty-something years of video gaming. Developers and publishers love to downplay the departure of key creative personnel by pointing out that modern game development is a considerable collective effort, but Shining Soul demonstrates that great entertainment requires the creative vision and artistic demands of a gifted leader -- or two. The Shining series has plunged into the abyss without Takahashi and Taguchi (who now toil on Nintendo's Golden Sun franchise).

Shining Soul takes place a year after the events of the Genesis classic Shining in the Darkness, but the storyline is completely irrelevant to the action; you can play through the entire game without reading a single sentence of dialogue and not miss a thing. Atlus has cleaned up and much improved the English translation used in the game's European release, but it's like taking a wrecked car and trying to repair it by spraying Armor All on the tires.

At the start of the game, you choose one of four character types -- warrior, wizard, archer, or ... dragon (huh?). You're then dropped into the game's sole and very small town, in which you accomplish various items of business: healing up, identifying mysterious items you've collected, buying and selling weapons and armor, having special weapons and armor constructed for you, and depositing your accumulated wealth and inventory into a bank.

Leave the town and you're off to the first of the game's eight multi-level dungeons, with a big boss at the bottom of each. You move your character around each level with the D-pad, switching between different weapons with the L button and different items with the R button. Pressing START calls up a menu from which you can manipulate your inventory, assign experience points as you level up, and tweak a few game options. In a sadistic and ill-advised design choice, the real-time action doesn't pause when you're accessing the menus; monsters continue to approach and attack while you frantically gobble healing items.

Unfortunately, literally all the monsters in Shining Soul know how to do is approach and attack. There's not the slightest hint of intelligence or variance in their behavior. Unless one of your foes is a projectile-thrower -- and even that factor rarely matters -- you can stand still and mash the A button as your enemies slowly and brainlessly march into your sword-strikes over ... and over ... and over. (You eventually earn the ability to unleash a charge attack by holding and releasing A instead of mashing it.) Real-time combat is meant to be the adrenalized counterpart to turn-based combat, but Shining Soul's slow-motion conflicts are 100% pure narcolepsy. The boss battles are the only interesting encounters in the entire game, thanks to their combined use of challenge and variety, but eight stimulating encounters don't make up for ten thousand feeble ones.

Playing through Shining Soul once opens up an expert mode of sorts, but while the monsters get harder to kill, the gameplay unfortunately remains the same, and may the gods protect us from the masochist who wants to slog through this game a second time. Even the multiplayer mode fails to liven things up much, since about all you can do is suffer through the combat together and swap certain class-specific items. The game is obviously meant to be played together with pals, but finding a crew who's interested in going through this simplistic RPG may prove more difficult than the game itself.


Hack your way through the dungeon.
Two other schizophrenic design choices make Shining Soul a game that simultaneously minimizes and maximizes its own tedium. First, monsters don't respawn when you move through each level -- an odd feature for a hack-and-slash. Second, when you die, the game returns you to town with the only penalty being the mandatory loss of your gold, and you can immediately warp back to the level where you died. Shining Soul doesn't even have the courtesy to bury its awful gameplay under flashy audiovisuals; the background graphics lack detail and movement, the two- and three-frame "animations" are pure NES, the music is mediocre, and the sound effects are few.

I have no doubt that Atlus was thrilled to acquire a game with marquee value -- even if that value has dwindled in the five years since Shining Force III -- but anyone who buys Shining Soul based on their experiences with the rest of the series will be even more disappointed than those who merely desire a decent action/RPG. Shining Soul is pure portable drudgery.

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Essential Links Reviewer System Specifications
Game Boy Advance, LabtecŪ Earbuds.

System Requirements
Game Boy Advance.


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